They Shall Not
Be Forgotten
This is an act of worship before it is anything else. The prayer cards, the saints and the research are all offered to God first.
Why This Exists at All
I have built businesses before. I know how to make money. That is not what this is.
For a long time I built things and sold them and built again. I was good at it. And somewhere inside that cycle, a question kept returning that I could not answer: how do I give my work to God? Not just pray before bed. Not just go to church on Sunday. I mean the way a monk gives his life when he is tonsured. Everything.
I started a new business. It began to grow. And I made a decision I had been circling for years: I was going to stop building things to sell and start building something to give directly to God.
The day I decided, before I had done anything yet, was the best business day I had ever had. Months of revenue arrived at once. Then came offers to buy the business. I sat with it. I prayed over it. And I came to believe the timing was not coincidental. I had made a decision before God, for God, and the world decided to give me every reason to change my mind at exactly that moment. I thanked the people who reached out. I turned them down. I deleted the website and ended the business. I could have sold it, or left it running passively, but that felt like not putting full faith and trust in God to provide.
What followed was not a season of peace and confirmation. It was one of the hardest periods of my life. My wife and I both felt the weight of it. The ground became uncertain. Things moved slowly. Looking back, I recognize it as the dark night of the soul, which many of the saints describe as something that often follows a real act of faith. It does not last forever. And it did not.
This website, these prayer cards, these articles and this research are what came after. I do not always feel like I am doing enough, or doing it well, or doing it right. I am just trying my best.
I decided to stop building things to sell, and to start building something to give directly to God.
I am a layperson, a husband, and a researcher trying to preserve every saint from every apostolic tradition. I am not a monk, but I am trying to live like one from where I am standing.
Why You Won't Find My Name Here
More than one of you has written to ask why no name appears on the articles and who is actually writing them. That is a fair question, and you deserve a straight answer.
Pride has been one of the biggest and worst sins of my life. For years I did things I called charity, helping and giving and serving, and told myself I was doing it for God. Much later, when I finally looked honestly at my own heart, I saw how often it had been for me. For how it made me look. For my own glory. A great deal of what I believed was generosity at the time was vanity dressed up as generosity. I cannot undo that. What I can do is stop feeding it.
That is why the articles are signed A Servant of God and why the prayer cards carry neither my name nor the name of my business. If someone appreciates something here, there is no person to give the credit to. The saints and the prayers are what matter here. I am not the point.
I know hiding can become its own kind of pride, the vanity of humility, and I am not immune to it. So I keep returning to repentance instead of trusting my own motives. As for who I am: a layperson in Austin, Texas, a husband and a former businessman. Not a priest and not a monk.
How I Try to Live
I believe you do not have to go to Mount Athos to live before God the way a monk does. The desert is where you are: in your marriage, your job, your kitchen, your car. These are the ways I am trying, imperfectly, to live that out.
The Jesus Prayer, All Day
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. I try to carry it through the whole day, while working, driving, cooking and standing in line, until returning to it is as natural as breathing. I wear a small prayer rope on my wrist that looks like a bracelet, and I move through the knots with one finger inside a closed hand. No one knows it is happening.
Work as Worship
Work is not separate from prayer. Each day I try to build something to give to God instead of something for myself.
When I make a prayer card, I pray for the person who bought it and the person who will receive it the entire time. Printing, cutting, trimming, packing, every step is done in prayer for them. Each order comes with hours of prayer. I pray to the saint on the card they ordered, I pray the Jesus Prayer for them, and I pray to the Theotokos, our Blessed Mother, for them.
The Home as a Cell
My wife and I are always downsizing, always looking for something to sell or give away. The goal is freedom from the material world, to pray and to be present to God rather than to possessions.
Marriage as Asceticism
The patience it takes to love one person selflessly over decades, through conflict and tedium and suffering, is a school of holiness as demanding as any fast or vigil. My wife does not make this life harder. She is the person through whom God is doing the most important work on my soul.
Clothing as a Quiet Reminder
Black most days, to remember that I will die and should be ready to meet God at any moment. Red on Fridays, for the blood of Christ and to remember everyone deployed. White at church. None of it announces anything to the world. The meaning stays inside, where it belongs.
What Happens Here
All of it comes down to two things, done in secret and offered to God.
Preserving the Saints
I research the lives of holy people from every apostolic tradition: Orthodox, Eastern Catholic, Oriental Orthodox, and all those whose lineage traces back to the Apostles. If a disciple of our Lord Jesus Christ began your tradition, then every holy person who followed in that tradition deserves to be remembered, regardless of which hand they made the sign of the cross with.
I also try to document the lives of the blessed, the servants of God and others whose causes are open, so that more people know them and their causes for canonization can be helped along. All holy people deserve to be remembered and to be examples of holiness to the world.
I search especially for the obscure and the forgotten, the ones who exist as a single paragraph in an old document or a footnote in a martyrology. Even AI needs something to be trained on. If this knowledge does not exist somewhere on the internet, it does not exist anywhere the next generation can find it. Someone has to put it there. I hope this work outlasts me.
Making Prayer Cards by Hand
Every card is made to order, one at a time. The person receiving it never knows prayers were said for them while it was made. That unknowing is part of what makes it beautiful.
The monks of Mount Athos make prayer ropes, every knot a prayer, the work and the prayer the same thing. This is my version of that, from where I am standing.
Made One at a Time.
Prayed Over, Every One.
Nothing here sits in a warehouse. There is no batch printing, no assembly line, no anonymous production facility. When an order comes in, I make that order. I print it, cut it, finish it by hand, and I pray while I do it.
I care especially about saints who are rarely seen outside their own tradition: Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Ukrainian, Armenian, and others whose names are unfamiliar to most people. That is by design. Holy is holy. Whether they are venerated in a small village church in Lebanon or a monastery in Ethiopia, their witness belongs to the whole Church. Getting their cards into homes and prayer corners and wallets is the mission.
Museum-quality archival paper. Industrial double lamination. And genuine prayer at every step. That is not a marketing line. It is what the work actually is.
Explore the Work
Whether you came for the saints, the prayer cards, or something you cannot quite name yet, you are welcome here. Stay as long as you like.
Made prayerfully in Austin, Texas, by one person trying his best.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.