Most mornings, I sit down to build things my body would rather I didn’t.
I open my laptop, step into the clean logic of code, and bring with me a nervous system that hasn't followed clean rules since my stroke. Somewhere between the component I'm trying to finish, the pain I can't reason with, and the quiet call to follow Jesus faithfully, I've begun to understand that calling is not discovered apart from our limitations. It's often shaped within them. This is the intersection where I now live: code, suffering, purpose, and the stubborn hope that even ordinary work can become an act of faithfulness.
When Every Problem Had a Solution
Before my stroke changed the conditions of my life, code had already taught me to look for structure. Every problem seemed to contain some hidden logic, some path through the confusion if I could remain patient enough to find it. With enough persistence, I could open doors that once felt closed and discover new ways to contribute something meaningful.
I enjoy taking an idea, even one that begins as a mess, and giving it structure. I find purpose in this process, turning scattered thoughts into something clear, intentional, and useful.
That process fits the way I naturally think. I break larger problems into smaller pieces, look for patterns, and ask what each piece is really meant to accomplish. Much of development, for me, comes down to one question: What is this trying to do, and is there a clearer way to do it?
Good work should reduce friction. The code should make sense to the next developer, the interface should make sense to the person using it, and every part should have a reason for being there beyond, Well, somebody added this in 2019 and now we're all afraid to delete it.
That kind of work feels meaningful to me.
Most of it won't last forever, of course. Websites get redesigned. Frameworks are replaced. Code I was once extremely proud of eventually gets removed by someone who has absolutely no appreciation for what I went through.
And that's okay.
The permanence of the work isn't what gives it value.
Good craftsmanship serves people while the work exists.
For a long time, development reinforced something I already believed about life: if you understand a problem well enough and work at it long enough, you can usually fix it.
My body would eventually teach me that not every problem works that way.
When the System Stops Behaving Predictably
In June 2021, what I thought was a stress headache became something much more serious.
My left arm went numb.
My left leg gave out.
And within moments, I was on the floor.
I was having a stroke.
I survived the stroke, but it left me with an intractable neurological pain condition1 that never shuts off. There is no cure, no treatment that relieves it, and no medication that makes it less severe. The pain is simply there, constant and invisible.
When I wake up.
When I'm working.
When I'm playing with my kids.
When I'm trying to sleep.
In the middle of conversations nobody else knows are taking place alongside pain.
It has become part of the background of ordinary life, except backgrounds are generally expected to stay in the background.
This one is rather insistent.
In development, an error usually leaves a trail. Pain is less courteous.
That has been one of the hardest parts for me.
I am wired to solve things.
If something isn't working, I want to understand why. I want to isolate the problem, test possibilities, find the cause, and fix it.
I can't debug this.
There isn't an elegant refactor waiting for me. No Stack Overflow answer from twelve years ago with 847 upvotes and one comment saying, "This saved my life."
This is just something I can't fix.
And learning to live faithfully with that has changed me more than fixing it probably ever could.
I still build things. I still work. I still make plans and get excited about ideas.
But I've had to stop measuring every day against the person I was before the stroke.
I've had to learn that perseverance doesn't always look heroic.
Sometimes it looks like sitting at a desk and doing the next meaningful thing while your nervous system loudly files an objection.
Sometimes perseverance is simply refusing to let difficult circumstances decide what still matters.
And somewhere along the way, all of this forced me to confront a question I would have preferred to keep buried beneath a very productive to-do list:
** If productivity isn't the measure of a meaningful life, then what is? **
The Productivity Trap
I like feeling useful. Probably a little more than is healthy.
Give me a checklist and my brain starts shoveling fuel into the idea engine, which is usually how three items somehow become five. Apparently I’ve developed a mild enthusiasm for creating extra work for myself. Maybe there’s a cleaner approach. Maybe it could use a little more polish. Maybe there’s an opportunity to do something more creative. Once I see that extra inch of potential, I have a surprisingly difficult time leaving it alone.
And just like that, the three-item checklist has become five because apparently “done” and “done, but nicer” occupy different parts of my brain.
There's something deeply satisfying about building something, solving something, finishing something, and dragging it triumphantly into the Done column like it's been personally defeated.
Preferably while watching the number of remaining tasks decrease in real time, which is somehow even more satisfying after I'm the one who increased it.
I'm very well-adjusted.
But pain exposed something underneath that drive.
For me, productivity wasn't always just about doing good work.
Sometimes it was evidence.
Evidence that I was useful.
Evidence that I was moving forward.
Evidence that I was making proper use of my life.
And when circumstances dramatically reduced what I could accomplish, I had to confront the uncomfortable possibility that I'd allowed productivity to answer a question it was never meant to answer: What am I worth?
I still believe in discipline.
I still care about doing excellent work.
I don't think the cure for worshiping productivity is becoming deeply committed to accomplishing nothing and calling it personal growth.
But accomplishment is a terrible place to build an identity.
There will always be another task.
Another change request.
Another goal.
Another imaginary version of yourself who apparently wakes up at 5 A.M., exercises every day, finishes every project, reads eighty books a year, has perfectly obedient children, and remembers to drink the appropriate amount of water.
I don't trust that guy, by the way!
My faith gives me something sturdier. My worth isn't something I earn by being useful enough. I belong to Christ before I've accomplished anything that day.
I'm still learning to live as though I believe that.
A productive life can accomplish a lot. A faithful life knows why it's accomplishing it.
What Faithful Work Looks Like
If development is part of my calling, then following Jesus should affect more than why I work. It should shape how I work.
For me, that means caring about things people may never notice.
A client probably won't inspect the component architecture beneath their website.
A user has never contacted me to say: Jeff, the semantic HTML on this page has profoundly changed me.
(Yet.)
But those things matter.
Clean code matters because another developer may inherit it.
Accessibility matters because the person using what I build might experience the world differently than I do.
Performance matters because their time matters.
Clear design matters because forcing someone to decipher an interface is a peculiar way of serving them.
The hidden parts matter because integrity isn't supposed to disappear when nobody is watching.
Good craftsmanship has integrity all the way through, even where no one is looking.
But this is where I have to confess something. There's a very thin line between craftsmanship and obsessively adjusting something nobody else would notice if their life depended on it.
This website is, admittedly, a slightly embarrassing case study in that tension. It took me years to finish because “thoughtful and well-made” had a fun way of turning into “maybe I should redesign this one more time.”
I wish that sentence were less true.
I'm still learning that excellence has a stopping point, and sometimes faithfulness means just shipping the thing.
Following the Call Without Arriving
For a long time, I assumed that eventually I would arrive.
Not consciously, maybe.
But I would arrive at the version of myself who'd figured it out. The systems would be built, the loose ends accounted for, the work polished and scalable, my basement presumably finished, and somehow I would finally feel complete enough to say, There. Now I am who I was supposed to become.
But the finish line kept moving.
Then the stroke happened.
And pain made the whole idea harder to maintain. There are few things better at exposing your illusion of control than waking up every morning with something you can't control.
For a while, that felt like loss. In many ways, it still does. I wouldn't choose this pain.
I don't believe suffering becomes good just because something good eventually grows through it. And I don't want to wrap what happened to me in a tidy Christian bow and pretend everything makes sense now.
Because it doesn't.
Some days are hard. Some losses still feel like losses.
I am not grateful that I had a stroke.
But I am grateful for what God has formed in me through a life I would not have chosen for myself.
Those are different things. Pain has made me more patient with battles I can't see. It's made me more careful with the time and energy I've been given. It's forced me to reconsider what strength looks like.
And, perhaps most importantly, it has slowly dismantled the idea that I need to become some perfect version of myself before my life can matter.
Following Jesus has become much more ordinary to me than that.
It's the next honest decision. The next opportunity to serve someone. The next thing I've been given to build, love, learn from, or endure.
It's apologizing when I'm wrong. It's loving my family well. It's doing careful work even when nobody knows how much effort it took. It's trusting God when I can't see what He's doing.
My calling isn't waiting for me at the end of a perfectedly optimized life.
It's here. In this one. What I'm Building Here. That's a big part of why this website exists. I wanted a place where the different parts of my life didn't have to pretend they were unrelated.
Code belongs here. Faith belongs here. Pain belongs here. So do design, things I'm learning, work I'm proud of, questions I haven't answered yet, and opinions about front-end development that are occasionally more passionate than the situation warrants.
I'm not writing because I've arrived somewhere worth teaching from.
The opposite, actually.
I'm writing while I'm still learning. That feels important to me. Maybe something I discover helps another developer solve a problem. Maybe something I build becomes useful. Maybe something I've learned through faith, failure, pain, perseverance, or spending an objectively unreasonable amount of time thinking about website architecture helps somebody see something differently.
I don't need this site to prove anything about me. I just want what I've been given to become useful to somebody else.
That feels like a much better reason to build.
Where Code and Calling Meet
I still care deeply about doing good work.
I want cleaner systems. Clearer ideas. Better interfaces. Thoughtful architecture.
And I'm still personally invested in AI leaving me something to do.
I still catch myself imagining that future version of life where everything finally clicks into place.
Where the pain somehow makes sense.
Where the work is finished.
Where I've become the person God intended me to be.
But I don't think He's waiting for me there.
I think He's been here the whole time.
In the work. In the pain. In my family. In the ordinary days. In the things I can build and the things I can't fix.
I build for the web because making complicated things clearer, more useful, and more humane is one way I know how to serve people.
I live with pain that changes the shape of that work, but not its purpose.
And I follow Jesus because neither my accomplishments nor my suffering gets the final word on who I am.
My calling is found somewhere in the middle of all three.
Maybe I'll never arrive in the way I once imagined.
I'm beginning to think I was never supposed to.
Maybe the point isn't reaching some perfected version of my life.
Maybe it's being faithful with this one, to build what's worth building, to love the people God has placed around me, and to keep becoming who He's shaping me to be.
And to trust Him with everything I can't possibly fix, optimize, predict, or control, which, as it turns out, is quite a bit more than I'd prefer.
But tomorrow, God willing, I get another day to practice.
And I think I'm finally learning that the practice was the calling all along.
Footnotes
-
Central Pain Syndrome (CPS), more specifically Central Post-Stroke Pain (CPSP), is a chronic neuropathic pain condition caused by damage to the brain's sensory pathways during a stroke. The pain can be persistent or continuous and may include burning, aching, stabbing, or extreme sensitivity to touch or temperature. A large systematic review and meta-analysis estimated that CPSP develops in about 11% of stroke survivors, or roughly 1 in 9, though rates vary depending on the location of the stroke and can be much higher when the thalamus (🙋♂️) or medulla is affected.