I didn’t expect it to start with memes.
Not with theology.
Not with philosophy.
Not with Scripture.
But with the simplest, most disposable form of meaning humans have ever generated:
the meme.
At first, it was just a passing curiosity
a wondering about how a culture built on impermanence
became our default mode of expression.
Why did so many people choose the quickest,
lightest form of communication to say what mattered?
Why did I?
The deeper I looked, the more I recognized something unsettlingly familiar.
Memes weren’t about humor.
They were about distance — a way to say something without truly saying it,
to feel something without really feeling it,
to connect without ever being held.
A meme is frictionless.
It’s fast.
It circulates without intimacy.
It offers recognition without relationship
communication without the weight of being known.
And that’s when I realized:
Meme culture wasn’t the problem.
It was the symptom.
A symptom of a world drifting from its center.
A symptom of people who had forgotten how to speak plainly,
how to feel fully,
how to be present without performing.
Because when sharing a meme becomes easier than sharing yourself,
something in the soul has already begun to slip.
That’s when the old question returned — not from Shakespeare,
but from my own life:
“To be, or not to be?”
There were seasons where I lived like a meme.
Fast. Clever. Performative.
Easy to consume, easy to share, easy to miss.
A personality without presence.
Activity without intimacy.
Communication without being known.
In trying to understand how memes became our cultural language,
I accidentally stumbled into a study of my own drift.
And the more I explored, the more something softened
a recognition, a grief, a remembering:
Where did being go?
Where did presence go?
Where did intimacy go?
Beneath those questions, the oldest one of all:
“If I am still here… how shall I live now?”
That question carried me back
past meme culture, past distraction, past performance
into the deeper ground where my life once broke open.
Back to the rupture I survived.
Back to the moment drift nearly became disappearance.
Back to the grace that revived me.
Back to the Christ of proximity who breathed me into being again.
And suddenly I saw it clearly:
Meme culture didn’t draw me away.
It drew me home.
Because by contrasting the thinness of meme with the depth of being,
I remembered what leadership — and life — actually need now:
Not speed.
Not noise.
Not cleverness.
Not performance.
But presence.
The daily, sacred decision
to be. Always.
That’s what led me to write Be: Always.
Not a strategy.
Not a theory.
But a return.
A return to meaning.
A return to center.
A return to intimacy.
A return to being.
And somehow — strangely, beautifully —
it started with a meme.