Seeds Planted Thirty Years Ago

I had one of those moments recently where something from decades ago surfaced in my memory and suddenly made sense in a way it never had before. Not a new thought. An old one — one that had been sitting quietly for almost thirty years, waiting.

I want to tell you this story because I think it says something important about how God works. Not in a mystical, hand-wavy sense. In a very practical, look-back-and-connect-the-dots sense. The kind where you realize that an idea you thought was just an exercise was actually a seed.

Houston, 1995

In the mid-1990s I was working at an offshore drilling firm in Houston. I was still early enough in my career to be flattered when I got tapped to lead a reengineering team. Business process reengineering was the hot topic at the time — the kind of thing consultants were selling and executives were buying, and most of us on the ground were trying to figure out what it actually meant.

The company brought in a consultant named Mark — who remains a good friend of mine to this day — to teach us the methodology and then guide us through actually doing it. Our assignment was to reengineer the finance and reporting business process. Another team was tasked with reengineering the procurement process. Two teams, parallel tracks, structured approach.

But before we touched anything related to finance, Mark did something I’ve never forgotten.

The Clean Slate

Mark introduced an exercise — something like a clean slate scenario. The premise was simple and radical: everything has been destroyed. All of it. Infrastructure, institutions, systems, technology. The only thing left is people.

Your job is to rebuild from the ground up.

But here’s the twist: you’re not just free from what existed before. You’re free from the laws of physics. Free from technological constraints. Free from any limitation. Mark told us to think Star Trek thoughts. Design the Ideal — not the practical, not the affordable, not the realistic. The Ideal.

We were broken into teams and each assigned a piece of society to redesign. My teammate was an electrical engineer. Our assignment: redesign the education system.

I took the exercise seriously. Jim, my teammate, did as well although some of my ideas... well, you'll see.

Barney, Mighty Mouse, and the Future of Education

What we came up with was this: in our Ideal education system, students would not be required to go to a physical school. They could sit at home and participate in class, because class would come to them — as a hologram.

And the teacher wouldn’t be a standard human-looking instructor. The teacher would be a character of the student’s choosing — or the parent’s choosing. At that time, Barney was huge with kids. For me, it would have been Mighty Mouse; the universally-recognized coolest cartoon character ever. The point wasn’t the character. The point was that the learning experience could be personalized to the learner in a way that made them want to engage.

A kid who loved dinosaurs could be taught by a dinosaur. A kid who loved superheroes could be taught by a superhero. The content was the same. The delivery was shaped around who was receiving it.

When we presented this to the executives, some of them laughed. They didn’t get the point of the exercise. They heard “hologram Barney teaches math” and checked out. What they missed was the principle underneath: that the most effective teaching happens when the experience is shaped for the person being taught, not standardized for the institution delivering it.

From Ideal to Optimal

The methodology had a second step. Once you designed the Ideal, you backed down to what Mark called the Optimal — applying the best principles from your unconstrained thinking to the real constraints you actually faced.

For our finance team, that meant exploring voice recognition to drive analysis and reporting at the speed of thought. In 1995, that was ambitious. The technology was barely there. But the seed of the idea — that humans should be able to interact with information naturally, conversationally, without being bottlenecked by interfaces and manual processes — that was sound.

We didn’t implement most of it. The technology wasn’t ready. The organization wasn’t ready. And honestly, I filed the whole experience away as a good learning exercise and moved on with my career.

For about thirty years.

And Then I Started Building Appostolic

Here’s what hit me recently: the thing I’m building now is remarkably close to the spirit of what my team imagined in that conference room in Houston.

Not holograms. Not Barney. But the principle underneath all of it: that learning works best when it’s personalized to the person receiving it. That a teacher should be free to shape the experience for their specific context — the age group, the setting, the struggles people are carrying into the room. That the content should serve the learner, not the other way around.

Appostolic does exactly this. A pastor sets the teaching direction. A Sunday school teacher, youth group leader or small group leader takes that direction and generates a lesson tailored to their specific class — the eight-year-olds, the teenagers, the young married couples, the retirees. Same truth. Same scripture. Different delivery, shaped for who’s in the room.

While holograms might still be a few years out, we have AI that can understand context, adapt language for different age groups, and generate teaching material that actually fits where people are. We’re not that far from what seemed laughable in 1995.

Seeds and Seasons

I’ve been thinking about why this story matters to me so much. And I think it’s this: God plants seeds at one point in our lives and fulfills them at another.

That reengineering exercise wasn’t just a corporate methodology session. It was a moment where an idea got lodged in my mind — an idea about personalized, context-aware teaching — that I wouldn’t have the tools or the calling to act on for nearly three decades.

And I don’t think that’s an accident. I think God does this on purpose. Not to tease us or to test our patience, but because He’s working on a timeline we can’t see. In this incomprehensible way, seriously... in a way that I cannot understand, God is not constrained by our sense or reality of time. The seed needs soil, and sometimes the soil isn’t ready yet. Sometimes we’re not ready yet.

When I look back at that moment in Houston — a twenty-something finance guy and an electrical engineer dreaming up hologram teachers — I see God’s hand in it. Not because the specifics were prophetic, but because the instinct was right. The instinct that teaching should meet people where they are. That technology should serve relationships, not replace them. That the best tools disappear into the background and let the real work — the human, relational, Spirit-led work — come forward.

That’s what Appostolic is. Not hologram Barney. But the principle underneath it, thirty years later, with the technology to actually make it real. And who knows... maybe my two grandsons (Caden and Trevor) will get to see Mighty Mouse 2.0 teaching Sunday School in the near future!

For Anyone Holding a Seed

If you’re carrying an idea that feels too big, too early, or too impossible — I want to encourage you: hold on to it.

Not because every wild idea becomes a company. But because God gives us ideas for reasons we don’t always understand in the moment. Some of them are meant for right now. Some of them are meant for a season you haven’t reached yet. And some of them are meant to teach you something about how God sees you — that He had you then, and He has you now.

So much of life in God's Kingdom - in fact maybe everything - is not about the destination. Our destination is already set by what Jesus did on the cross. But it's about the journey. I've had a great journey with that seed!

The executives laughed in 1995. I’m not laughing now. I’m building.

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Appostolic helps ministry leaders prepare faithfully — with lessons shaped for the people actually in the room.