A year later, in March 2020, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Beth was furloughed to ten hours a week as Coordinator of Elementary Religious Education at our parish, with an additional 10% pay cut of the original forty hour weekly pay then deducted before any pay was received. After the initial shock of her ten-year position being all-but-eliminated, we evaluated the global response of the Catholic Church and realized that Mother Church had been caught flat-footed from a technology and modern evangelization standpoint. As we learned from contacts across the United States, Beth’s case was not only common, but apparently the norm for Faith Formation professionals across the Universal Church.

We quickly understood that most parishes, because they live hand-to-mouth off Sunday collections, cannot during this time of pandemic afford to sustain cradle-to-grave Faith Formation programs and the RCIA, RCIA Adapted for Children, Confirmation, and First Communion processes, or even Bible studies coordinated by the church office. They just are not collecting enough cash to pay people for their work, especially when so many regular donors are tightening their belts due to their own employment uncertainty. When this will change for unprepared parishes is anybody’s guess, but the going conventional wisdom is “a long time from now, if ever.”

While considering this devastating circumstance, we knew we had the combined experience of more than fifty years in catechetical and family ministry, and had countless original programs, talks, seminars, written and other media material, and the certifications and education to help our beloved Catholic Church while lifting up the whole of the Body of Christ – the people – who, at such a desperate, lonely, and scary time, needed the community and consolation of the Church who, by financial necessity, had essentially shut her doors to all for everything, except for the few parishes that could manage, to varied degrees of success, a live Mass on facebook. We, Beth and Kristofer, had for decades been prepared by God for this moment. With the reality of being unemployed for an indeterminate period staring at us, He nudged us that final push over the ledge and we took the leap of faith to launch what He had been encouraging us to pursue for several years.

We knew at Holy Owned and Operated that all we needed was an online welcome mat to let people know there was help and support. So, we built this web site in record time and decided to open it while still building it and adding new material to it several times a week, as we converted our material to web-accessible information and support. We knew that if schools and companies were adapting how they served their constituents, then we could do the same. In fact, the pandemic forced families into learning these new technologies and ways of learning and sharing and producing and the schools and companies were enduring the burden and expense of teaching millions how to use and implement them, so we did not have to spend money we did not have and time we could not spare helping folks tackle that learning curve. We saw people learning how to use Zoom, for instance, so we did not have to teach them how or even teach them what it is, let alone convince them it is useful.

Every day is a new set of challenges for Holy Owned and Operated as we navigate uncharted waters of mistakes, creating and discarding systems, and doing our best to feed our family. But those will become manageable and less distracting as people use our service and some choose to donate, and others choose to become paid subscribers.

We are NOT afraid or uncertain. Those are tools of the Devil, and he has no place in our Faith or the life of our family. Fear comes from a lack of Faith, and that Theological Virtue runs rampant through our veins. We know that we are doing what God wants us to do right now.

We know, without doubt, that as long as we are being who we are supposed to be as God has called us in our vocations to be – Man and Woman, Husband and Wife, Dad and Mom – and are doing all that He needs us to do through those vocations, He will provide for us the means to support that which He has decreed.

God does not deny that which He has ordained. He has ordained that Holy Owned and Operated support and affirm YOU where you are in your Catholic Faith and help you grow in that Faith so that you, your family, and the Church that God himself started will be strong, faithful, and universal. That will not be denied.

Please know that you are in our prayers specifically if we know you through our ministerial work or other relationships, and that we are praying for you if we haven’t met yet, either. We humbly ask for your prayers and blessings, too.

We are the Co-Founders of Holy Owned and Operated, and are currently working with several volunteers to sign on as catechists for our expected growth . If you are interested in this volunteer work, please use our contact page to drop us a note and we’ll be in touch.

Life began anew for me that day. I left university a month later with over 160 credit hours, eight years, and no degree, though 11 more hours would qualify me for a tripe degree in English, History, and Speech Communications. Much of that education was due to me seeking the Truth, and once the Truth set me free, God instructed me to leave school and start my own business.

Through countless miracles in the millennia prior to my baptism and the 19 months after, I married Beth on November 9, 1996, and God has continued to shower miracles upon us daily, blessing us with three boys and a dog (our second, and we had a cat for a year). I live in Texas and smoke a mean brisket. I am fond of a good cigar, especially when there is a good porch and good conversation accompanying it, and a cold beer or few fingers of Jack Daniels would top off that perfect evening. I also fancy myself a pretty good No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em poker player, having finished eleventh out of 300 in the only casino tournament I ever entered.

I started speaking from the stage in 1993, when I stopped feeling sorry for myself and what I thought was a bad hand that life had dealt me. Inspired by the teachings of Stephen Covey, who taught me that if I know my past I can change my future instead of blaming my past for my lot in life, I quickly became a professional motivational speaker, being paid obscene amounts of money (at least for a 24 year-old) for presentations that my Speech professors were giving me Bs for…!

Today, chronically ill and now blind in one eye, I see opportunity in life where once I saw nothing but hopelessness. And I like to share that with people, as well as my philosophy and concrete guidelines on how to not just make it through life, but to succeed in a way that can only mean God has something special only you can do.

In 2013, twenty years after showing me that His gift to me was the talents of writing and speaking, God gave me the vision for what is now a Catholic apostolate, ManHusbandDad. I like to say that God gave me a talent for writing and public speaking, and made me aware of it before I even believed in Him. It just took almost two decades for Him to train me on what he wanted me to write and speak about – being a Man, Husband, and Dad. And it took several more years for him to bring my training to a point here I could share what He wanted me to share.

This conclusion was not an easy discernment. Who was I to teach others how to be a Man, much less a Husband and a Dad? I had grown up in abject poverty; sexual, physical, emotional and mental abuse; a broken and dysfunctional family life; subjective agnosticism and atheism; misogyny; and moral relativism that justified all of it including divorce, abandoning children, and degenerate and purposeful lack of parenting. Combined with a constant fear of not knowing when or where the next meal would come, or if I would be allowed to eat it, I not only started out with no training in how to be a Man, Husband, or Dad, but actually had a diametrically opposite idea of what those vocations were – though I had no clue they were vocations, or even what a vocation was or that such a thing even existed. At the time that I discovered my talents for speaking and writing, the only thing I could speak and write about in that genre was how to break all Ten Commandments and how to best avoid being a Man, Husband, or Dad, which of course would only be profitable at a convention of pornographers. Which is why my motivational speaking career of the 90s failed, since all I could do was mimic the great speakers like Covey, Ziglar, and Nightingale; I had no foundation in Truth back then. I was a parrot while I was slowly, through the inexorable patience of God, learning.

I have been around a couple of blocks, some of them more than once. And I’ve had a fair share of rodeos, too. Whether being an On-Air Radio personality or selling Radio advertising; delivering newspapers, ice, t-shirts, pizza, or custom photography; designing web sites; fixing computers; DJ’ing; steel and road construction; slinging burgers at McDonald’s or a beach concession stand; or running legal files and consulting on Parliamentary Procedure issues, training organizations on membership recruitment and retention, and social media and traditional marketing and owning several businesses that provided these products and services, I have professional experiences that mix with my personal life experiences to provide a Pandora’s box of topics and presentations that not only teach, but inspire (and I can also write really long sentences apparently!). And I haven’t even told you about my personal experiences during my eight years of misguided college life – I think your imagination might not be able to think of everything. I hope not, anyway. There are broken souls in my wake.

I have paved my way down a path that God has shown and led me down, making the way a bit less bumpy for those who follow – starting with my Wife – Mama – and our three boys – The Boyz. Growing up without guidance on so many fronts that a Man, Husband, and Dad must be able to meet head-on, I took the vocations seriously from the start, studying successful ManHusbandDads and purposefully applying the success to my own life and family; when I met my future Father-in-Law I kept a small notebook in my pocket to write down everything he did because I could tell he was exactly what a ManHusbandDad should be, though I did not even know that concept yet. Everything I do is my own making revealed by God as the path to take, including specifically rejecting the way I was raised in order to forge a new family tree from those seeds my Grandmother planted. I am not a self-made Man – God made me. I am a self-discovered ManHusbandDad, chiseled out of the vision I had of myself into the vision God has for me.

My oldest son is a Dean’s List student at Franciscan University of Steubenville, and my wife has earned her Master’s degree from Franciscan as well, and is now an adjunct professor at that fine school. I’ve run my business from home for the last 20 years, and I have been the lead educator in our home school since 2010, since my oldest son was in fourth grade. Our family eats dinner every night at the dining room table and that alone will tell anybody what else our family is and does. To see me today is a vigorous denunciation of who I was half a lifetime ago, and the only one who recognizes me is the God who saved me and the woman who married me. I owe it to Him to share his love, that I have seen most perfectly echoed through Beth, with the nations, starting with my family. So I may not have the formal training to do it, but I have helped my parish and deanery and diocese in ways that tell me it is time to help others in tandem with my Wife and Boyz, so here I am, Lord.

No, I do not have the formal training my wife and children have. I have decades of catechetical teaching and mentoring and living. There is practical application to the faith we form, and that’s where I fit into this wonderful thing called Holy Owned and Operated. I keep it real. It may be jagged and rough, but so is life. You won’t get too many pretty words from me, and I may be a Dumb Ox, but I’m exactly who God wants me to be and doing exactly what he wants me to do…and I want to help as many other people as possible have the pleasure of knowing that about themselves, too.

Far from perfect, I seek that goal of perfection in the Biblical sense. I make many mistakes daily and still drop the ball in relationships. But I continue to improve by remembering that defeat only happens if you don’t get up one more time. What you see is what you get with me, and hopefully that makes me someone you can relate to. But in the long run, I know that I am turning the ship of multi-generational dysfunction from my own past and setting the right path for my children as what Stephen Covey would call a transitional parent – and while that is not what I planned for my life, I am very comfortable knowing that I am following God’s plan for me to be a Man, Husband, and Dad.

And you’re invited to walk along that path with me.