Why I’m Calling It ‘Life’ Now

By LONNIE KING

For a while now, I’ve been sensing that the title of this blog no longer fully described what I’ve been doing here.

Randomly Rudimentary Faith Stuff was honest enough when I started. Fourteen years ago, it fit who I was then. It captured a kind of rough-edged, unfinished reflection about belief, doubt, and questions I was only beginning to ask.

But over time, both the writing—and the writer—have changed.

Much of what I’ve been writing isn’t confined to what many people hear when they hear faith.

I’ve written about politics and power. About music and memory. About baseball and belonging. About grief, dignity, hypocrisy, justice, and the daily struggle to remain human in a world that often rewards the opposite.

In other words, I’ve been writing about life.

So I’m changing the name of this space to Randomly Rudimentary Life Stuff.

That doesn’t mean I’ve left faith behind. In some ways, it means the opposite.

Truthfully, there was a time when I did separate faith from life.

Faith could be performative then—something professed, defended, even displayed—while the deeper values I was slowly discovering had not yet fully reshaped how I lived. When I started this blog, some of that separation still existed.

Over time, that separation began to dissolve.

I found myself less interested in protecting a religious identity and more interested in whether what I called faith aligned with compassion, honesty, dignity, and the way I moved through the world.

Somewhere along the way, faith became less a category I talked about and more a way I tried to live.

And that has a lot to do with why I’m calling it life now.

When I’ve written about faith, I’ve usually been asking how belief shapes the way we live and relate to other people. What good is faith, after all, if it never touches how we treat a neighbor, how we respond to suffering, or how we confront injustice?

And when I’ve written about life—whether it’s Bruce Springsteen, evangelical politics, family stories, sports, or ordinary moments on a Texas backroad—I’ve often been expressing convictions rooted in what I believe most deeply.

That’s why this doesn’t feel like abandoning one word for another.

It feels more like naming the larger reality those reflections have always been reaching toward.

To be candid, there’s also another reason for the change.

The word faith can sometimes function like a boundary marker. Some readers may assume a blog with “faith” in the title is aimed at insiders, or that it trades in certainties I’ve spent much of this blog interrogating.

I understand that.

And if changing one word makes this space feel more open to readers who might otherwise have passed it by, I’m glad for that.

Because what I’ve wanted this blog to be has never really changed:

• A place for honest reflection.
• A place for questions without forced conclusions.
• A place to think out loud about what it means to live decently and truthfully.

Maybe life has become the truer word for what I was reaching for all along.

So—same wandering spirit, same unfinished thoughts, same occasional detours into theology, politics, road trips, and baseball.

Just under a name that better fits the terrain.

Thanks for reading along.