About

Ever since I was a kid I have enjoyed reading. Often, if the book is good enough, I will stay up reading into the early morning hours. I enjoy reading classic literature, contemporary fiction, and even the occasional bit of poetry. As a matter of fact, I enjoy reading more than any other form of story telling, whether it be movies, TV, or the spoken word, because reading requires you to use your imagination. Your imagination is capable of creating amazing worlds and characters. The world created by your imagination is more vivid, more compelling, than one created by Hollywood or TV. All your imagination needs to take off into this world of adventure and delight is the right kind of fuel. A well written story is imagination fuel.

During my formative years I drifted from one occupation to another. I just didn’t care what I did for a living. I had no purpose. As a matter of fact, between the ages of 16 and 26, I held 26 different jobs. Now that’s what I call drifting! At age thirty I was a college drop out who was wasting his life away working as a technical service advisor for a small lawn and garden distributor in St. Louis. One day, as I was driving into work, I found myself thinking about a book I was reading. I was thinking about how I could write certain passages better than the author had. I was even writing some of the changes out in my head. That’s when it hit me. I was meant to be a writer. I was meant to write imagination fuel. For the first time in my life I wanted to stop drifting. I finally felt like I had a purpose.

Realizing my vision and making it happen are two different things. By age 30 my wife and I had a mortgage, two car payments, a heap of credit card debt, and to top it all off I worked in a depressing, agonizing dead end job. Now that I had identified my goal I wanted desperately to leave the lawn and garden distributorship and write full time, but I couldn’t afford to quit my job. There was no way to make the finances work without seriously lowering our standard of living. I was trapped in my job by my lifestyle. So, I trudged on, living day to day, pushing off my dream and getting more and more depressed about it.

One day I received a phone call from a woman named Terry. She happened to be a co-worker’s sister-in-law who worked for a commercial equipment dealer in St. Louis. She wanted me to apply for a technical service adviser position where she worked. I thought, “Why bother? It’s doing the same thing I do now and I hate what I do now.” If you have ever suffered severe depression for an extended period of time you know that it is harder to get yourself out of the depression than it is to stay depressed. The depression holds you down, and in a way you become dependent on it. You have to experience it to fully appreciate it. That was where I was with my job. I didn’t want to leave the comfort and relative safety of my depression, or the job that created it. It sounds weird, but it is true. I think many people who suffer depression feel much the same way. On a whim I decided to go ahead and apply thinking, and kinda hoping, they would never hire me. Low and behold they made me an offer. I didn’t really want the job so I counter offered with a salary amount that I felt would kill the deal. Instead they accepted my counter offer.

I talked to Jenn about whether or not I should accept the job offer. She reminded me about the prayer I made when I wrote the counter offer. I prayed that if God wanted me to have this position then he would have them accept the counter offer. If God didn’t want me to have it they would decline it. Either way I was putting the decision in God’s hands. Since they accepted it she thought I should take it. I still wasn’t convinced. Finally, after many hours of discussion, Jenn said something that made me pause. She told me that she had a strong feeling in her heart that I was supposed to take this position. She didn’t know why, or how this would allow me to write, but she was sure I was supposed to take it. So, based more on her instincts than my own, I took the job.

Little did I know that by taking the position with the commercial distributor I had started down a path God laid out for me. A path that is right now taking me to my hearts desire of being a writer. Over the course of the next two years I left the service position with the commercial equipment distributor, took a position with a technology training company, found out the training company wasn’t for me, and then came back to the commercial distributor as their IT Manager. Now I love what I do during the day, taking away the negative emotions associated with hating your job, and have my nights and weekends free to write. Praise God!

In February of 2008 I started SeanDareOnline.com for three reasons, which I have outlined below. Writing is last on the list because without God in my life the writing would never have come about. If you enjoy my writing, or it inspires you, and you want to compliment me you should know that I will appreciate the complement, but the praise for my skill, and the opportunity to write in the first place, goes directly to God.

As of April 2008 I am a 35 year old IT guy who writes every time I get a chance. I am married to my soul mate, something I urge you to do, and have the cutest dog in the world. His name is Buddy. I live an ordinary life and go to Church on Sundays. From the outside you might think I am nothing special, but with God’s help I hope to get my imagination fuel out to the world.

The reasons I started SeanDareOnline.com:

Reason One - To Glorify God

God gives us everything we have, and in my minds eye, everything we as humans take for granted. Our culture ignores God and tries to weed him out of everyday life. The subtitle of my blog is “An Everyday Christian” and speaks to my desire to show everyone who reads it how I try to find the greatness of God in everyday things.

Reason Two - To Educate the Non-Believer

I feel that Christians have a bad image in today’s society. I believe this image has come about unjustly. Yes there have been atrocities performed by the Church, and yes people have done horrendous things in God’s name, but that doesn’t mean those people were following the teachings of Christ. My goal is to show that Christians are not all narrow minded fools or overly pious self righteous insensitive elitists. Christians are flawed human beings, what we call sinners, who desperately want to become like the one person who walked this earth without a flaw, e.g. without a sin, who is Jesus Christ. We also believe that he is the key to a spiritual awakening like no other. This spiritual awakening is called being “born again”. When one is born again he dies to his old flawed sinful nature and is awakened anew to the grandeur of God and his creation.

After experiencing this reawakening we often try to spread the good news of our discovery to the world, but the world doesn’t like to hear it (this is to be expected), but we are commanded to try. Only those whom God had chosen to hear his word will hear our story for what it is and in turn follow him. Even while writing this I realize it must sound a little crazy to an outsider, hence the second reason for this website. If I can show the Christian life from behind the scenes maybe it will convince the Non-Believer that we aren’t crazy and that there really is a God and he does love each of us and wishes to have a relationship with us.

Reason Three - An Outlet for My Writing

It will shortly become no secret that I want to write novels. Really good ones at that. The novels will hopefully fulfill reasons one and two which I have listed here. Anyone who writes will tell you that you need to write everyday to get better. That and they tell you to read a lot and to STOP WATCHING TV! (more, probably much more, on that in later posts) A blog is a perfect outlet for daily writing as it includes built in accountability. Special thanks to Tom who left a comment early on in the life of this blog asking me to continue writing. That is the kind of support this website needs. Read it daily and if you see I haven’t posted in a while be sure to comment on it! You can also email me at sean@seandareonline.com. Hopefully one day, with your support, I can change the subtitle of this blog to “An Everyday Christian Writer”.

There you have it. Three reasons why seandareonline.com was born. I hope you will continue to come back and see whats new on a daily basis, and, if the mood strikes you, maybe you will comment on a post now and then. Hopefully SeanDareOnline.com will inspire thoughts and decisions about God. In the mean time you have the chance to come along with me as I pursue one of the great American dreams, the writing and publication of a novel. No matter what the outcome, no matter what level of success, seandareonline.com promises to be a great ride. Do you want to come along?

- Sean