David ☦︎

Husband and father. At home between America and Tbilisi. Found the Orthodox faith through beauty rather than argument. Still learning to see.

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

I went to Tbilisi for the wine.

That was ten years ago.

I came for the oldest wine culture on earth, the extraordinary tables, the rare and lovely blend of old world and new.

I was still an evangelical then, and I looked at every thousand-year-old church on those ordinary street corners through borrowed eyes.

Beauty, for the moment, was only beauty.

But we kept going back, summer after summer, until the returning stopped feeling like travel and started feeling like homing.

And slowly I began to see what I had been walking past: a whole people whose year was still ordered by the fasts and the feasts, whose long table, the supra, lifted its toasts to God and to the departed, who kept without arguing about it the very things the West had quietly let slip.

I had spent my whole life inside the photographic negative of that.

In Georgia, for the first time, I was standing in the photograph.

I am beginning to write from that road twice a week at Beauty Went First.

Free to read: https://t.co/WX65UctdMN

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

@fyrewede @JWhitebread1 @Opera_Rocks 🙏

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

I went to Georgia for the wine. 🍷🇬🇪

I kept ending up in dark old churches with no reason to be there, standing long after I'd seen everything in them.

A man I couldn't see was singing one low line I couldn't understand, and it reached a part of me my arguments had never touched.

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

Everyone, please pray for Harry (Haralambos) who just reposed in the Lord.

He has no living family whatsoever, and is reliant solely on the Church for his prayers.

☦️🙏

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

☦️

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

Second article is live:

https://t.co/D8hAwFz9P8

🇬🇪☦️

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

The second article is live:

https://t.co/D8hAwFz9P8

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

@kalezelden 😂

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

I went to Georgia for the wine. 🍷🇬🇪

I kept ending up in dark old churches with no reason to be there, standing long after I'd seen everything in them.

A man I couldn't see was singing one low line I couldn't understand, and it reached a part of me my arguments had never touched.

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

@PrairiePoietes Brings tears to my eyes

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

@economic_eth Thank you! 🙏

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

The second letter is up:

https://t.co/ooSDo8EJZY

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

@criticalreya @TheosisQuest Failure of the great commission.

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

You shouldn’t have to learn a new language to be Orthodox in your own country.

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

@LizzieMarbach This statement makes zero sense from an evangelical Protestant context.

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

☦️

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

☦️

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

@HairryL21415 You literally have what is likely illegal content on your page.

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

If you have ever suspected the world should mean more than you were told it does, that the ache under everything is not a flaw to be managed but a hunger pointing somewhere, then these letters are written for you.

A body doesn't invent an appetite for a food that was never made.

[David ☦︎ @BeautyWentFirst]

The beauty of Orthodoxy ☦️