About This Blog

“Writing can be a creative and invigorating way to make our lives available to ourselves and to others. We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told – we may discover that the better we tell our stories, the better we will want to live them.” -Henri Nouwen

The Why

My name is Michael Daniels. I initially created The Unedited Life with my wife, Heidi, but she’s moved on to other endeavors and outlets for her own thoughts and creativity, so I’m now the sole author of this blog. My hope, as always, is to write with raw honesty, authenticity, hope, reality, and vision.

The name of this blog portrays my hope for it. I desire to truly be unedited. I do not plan to “edit” my writing according to cultural expectations of what’s appropriate or according to what others think that I am “supposed” to believe. In my writings about life, God, love, marriage, desire, fear, intimacy, church, and society, I hope to approximate Harry Blamires description of what he calls “the thinker”:

The thinker challenges current prejudices. He disturbs the complacent. He obstructs the busy pragmatists. He questions the very foundation of all around him, and in so doing throws doubt upon aims, motives, and purposes which those running affairs have neither time nor patience to investigate. The thinker is a nuisance.

I hope to be a nuisance to the typical Christian establishment, challenging its communities to think rather than accept; to feel rather than to shut down; to live rather than survive. There are no sacred cows here at The Unedited Life – no topic that we won’t talk about, no cherished belief that is above doubt and questioning. I invite you to join me in this journey. Dialogue and conversation are the most that I can hope to inspire from this small corner of the web. So pull up a chair, grab a latte, and join me over in the comments.