becoming, the thing I never planned to build

Yeah, I built an App! Come try it out.

Last time we were together, I told you about a record player.

About the cash-only record store and the walk to the ATM, the seam I felt between the slow analog world my soul keeps reaching for and the frictionless digital one I still live in. I ended on a line I have not stopped turning over: not less music, more presence.

I thought I was writing about records. I was not, not really. The record was just where I could feel it. It’s me realizing the strange truth that presence is almost always something you have to choose, usually by choosing less. One album instead of the infinite catalog. One side, start to finish, with nothing better only a tap away. The bounded choice is what sets you free to actually be there.

But here is what I didn’t say in that post, because it wasn’t the subject, not yet. The question of presence doesn’t stop at the edge of an evening with Robin. A record is a bounded thing. You set the needle down, you stay for one side, and the choice mostly holds itself. Going through an entire day is harder. The day does not come in sides. There are endless distractions and many, many unbounded choices.

Here’s how it looks for me. I meet God in the morning. Some days what He stirs there carries into the hours that follow. Many days, though, it slips by the time the inbox and the first meeting have their say. I have tools that can hold my tasks and my calendar, sure, but none of them can hold my attention on the people and the slow work that actually matter most to me. The morning kept arriving full, and the day kept emptying it out.

So I did something that should be a little funny, coming right after a whole post about the gift of the analog. I built a piece of software. (Are you laughing?)

I want to be honest about that, because it’s the same seam from the record store, and I haven’t resolved it any more than what I described before. I’m still caught between wanting less and reaching for more. I spent nineteen years helping put Scripture into the hands of people everywhere, and I believe in what a digital tool can do. I’m not anti-technology; I’m one of its builders and leaders. But I started to notice what the wrong kind of tool does to me. It fragments. It hunts. It trains me to half-attend to a hundred things and sit with none of them. What I don’t want is another one of those. I wanted a tool that did for the day what the record does for the evening. Something that carries you toward presence instead of away from it.

becoming

That’s its name, the same word I keep using. It is, at its simplest, a companion for the apprenticeship of everyday life with Jesus.

At its heart, it’s meant to aid you in one thing: the carry. It takes what God stirs in the morning and helps it travel into the rest of your day, into the work and the people in front of you.

The center point comes from Dallas Willard and John Mark Comer, whose words have shaped me for years. Some of you will remember the Willard line:

The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish, it is the person you become.

That sentence is the thesis of this whole thing. I want to name John Ortberg here too. His friendship and the work of the Become New podcast and team have been a steady part of my formation these last few years.

Being with Jesus.

Becoming like Jesus.

Doing what Jesus would do if He were me.

That three-movement sequence is the spine of becoming, and the third movement is the one I kept underestimating. Willard taught that being formed by Jesus was never a private self-improvement project. Real transformation into His character does not stay inside us. It re-wires how we love, and love pushes outward, into the people right in front of us. Being with Him and becoming like Him are for something. They are for the ordinary, daily work of loving the people I am actually responsible for. So the app does not stop at morning. It carries formation into the day, into the relationships I am shepherding and stewarding, the people I’m carrying, and the ones I keep meaning to. And the carry is not mine to manufacture. What survives the morning is the Holy Spirit, who does not stay behind in my chair. He is already out in the day, ahead of me. becoming is not trying to help me remember something. It’s trying to keep me turned toward the One who is already at work in my hours. That’s where being formed by Jesus either becomes real or stays an idea.

I built it because I needed it. I knew the gap from the inside. And the conviction underneath it is the same one the record player kept (keeps) teaching me: that the measure of a life is presence, not production, and that we are made to live from love, not for it. I wanted something less like software and more like a wise companion walking with me through the day. Unhurried. Rooted. The analog impulse, somehow, living inside the digital thing.

Be warned… It’s still early. The edges are a little rough, surfaces are unfinished, decisions are still being made about what stays and what gets cut. But it’s real, and it holds. I use it every day. I am opening it up now, in its half-completeness, because it’s far enough along to live with, and because I would rather not walk the early stretch of it alone.

So this is an invitation to come along and live with it for a while. I would love your honest eyes on it. I’d love to know what lands. What feels off. What is broken. What is missing. It’s still being formed, and the people who use it early will help shape where it goes.

A few practical notes, should this resonate:

becoming is iPhone only right now. You will need Apple’s TestFlight app installed to join. There will be bugs, unfinished surfaces, and things that change from one week to the next. The app does not yet do everything I have imagined, and may never do all of it. That’s part of what slow building looks like. It’s the season the thing is in, and you would be stepping into it with me on purpose.

If this is of interest, I have started calling early users ‘forerunners.’ The first ones in, going on ahead, so the path is a little more known for everyone who comes after.

Keep in mind that it’s not for everyone. It’s not trying to be. If you’re looking for a better contact manager, habit tracker, or productivity system, those tools exist and do their work well. becoming is a different kind of thing.

The link below will take you to becoming through TestFlight. Install it, live with it for a few days, and tell me what you find. Replies reach me directly, and I read every one.

(If you are not on an iPhone, or would rather receive updates instead of becoming a forerunner, hellobecoming.app has a place to leave your email.)

When I stepped away from YouVersion, I called it my temporary retirement, and Robin was kind enough not to laugh out loud. I said I wanted time to be quiet, to pay attention, to figure out what the next chapter wanted to be. I have been telling you, in pieces, what has come of it. New wine, poured slowly. Some of it went into the work at BibleProject. Some of it went into a record player and an evening with my wife with a needle scratching before the first note. And some of it, I am beginning to see, went into a small vessel I never planned to share… until I did. The same lesson, carried out of the evening and into the day.

More presence.

The door is open. Come and see.

Until next time,

Terry