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How many tattoos do you have? I have one tattoo. The first tattoo I got was on my arm, right
here. I was actually the first person to get the tattoo we have. The tattoo we have is
Brothers in Christ. On each of my wrists above the Brothers in Christ on this side, and then
by itself on this side, I have two tattoos in braille. My tattoo is two Greek words.
The first one is eklegomai, the second one is proskuneo. I believe I have eight. I have
a lot of tattoos. Too many... one, two, three, four, five, and then my half sleeve, so I
guess six? My parents are both pastors, and my mom has a tattoo now, but she was against
it. And my dad kinda thinks they look ***, but my dad is very much so, you're a good
person on the inside and as long as that outshines your tattoos, that's fine. But, he's like,
I feel people judge you based on them, and I definitely get that but I want my light
to shine bigger than my tats. I sent pictures to my mom, because she lived in California
and I was in Virginia, and she didn't like them. She said she understands that I was
an adult, and I make my own decisions. I don't think it has anything to do with what the
Bible says about tattoos. Tattoos in the Old Testament were connected to pagan worship,
and that is why they were forbidden. Not because there was anything intrinsically wrong, I
don't think about tattoos. It's kinda a dicey issue in my family. My uh, my mom is not a
fan, not a fan of tattoos, is not a fan of changing your body. She believes that we're
created in God's image, and to change that is sorta a Christian middle finger to what
God has created. I've never gotten any pushback about it. I think the only thing I would say
is, I think my grandma said, you know that never goes away. That's, that's about the
only thing I've ever heard in response to it. I think my favorite one, I really really
like the, I've got a tree with an iris behind it. And I went ahead and did the tree of good
and evil. I thought that was really cool, because I had a friend pass, and uh, he had
blue eyes, and I like to think of him being like, in the Garden of Eden area and seeing
that going on, even though I know it's whatever God has for me or whatnot. But getting that,
and just remembering him, is really an awesome thing. And then I got Eve, I thought that
it was a pretty dark moment, to just go ahead and get a silhouette of her doing it. You
know the fall of man, I just, I just really liked the idea of having her by the tree,
not actually touching the apple, but the act of doing it. To remember that that forbidden
fruit, you know we're always struggling to not to reach for that and to not to do that
stuff, and not to fall into sin. And having that right there, and you know, I have trouble
just like everybody else, and it's not quite there, she hasn't taken the bite of it, and
I just like to think of I don't have to. I have the word authentic tattooed on my wrist.
And basically as a therapist, I work as a psychotherapist, as well as a professor, a
lot of times I'll be teaching people about the concept of being authentic in life. Like
how do you be who you are really designed to be? And so part of my own life journey
has been about becoming more and more authentic. And so, I want to always be reminded of that,
and it's also a great visual in therapy, to go, I take this so seriously in my life, I literally tattooed it
on
my wrist. And so, being able to
kind
of explain it that way, a lot of
times with clients can be
really powerful.