I used to think consistency was one of the highest virtues—that if you believed something on Monday, you should believe the same thing on Friday, and changing your mind meant you were compromising, backsliding, or being deceived. Looking back, I realize how much energy I spent trying to stay the same, even when life was inviting me to grow.

I’ve lived enough lives now to know that growth almost always looks suspicious to people who aren’t growing in the same direction.

One of the more amusing parts of getting older is discovering that your younger self would probably argue with your current self—and lose spectacularly. At least I hope he would. Although, if I’m being honest, younger Randy had the confidence of a man who’d read three books and was prepared to explain the universe to anyone who accidentally made eye contact.

That last paragraph is cringe and chuckle-worthy all at once :)

These days I’m far less interested in winning arguments than I am in understanding people. That’s not because I’ve become soft. It’s because life has a remarkable way of sanding down the sharp edges of certainty.

I’ve buried people I loved. I’ve watched marriages thrive and others quietly unravel. I’ve celebrated extraordinary joy and sat beside heartbreaking grief. I’ve learned that real life stubbornly refuses to fit inside tidy theological systems, political slogans, or inspirational coffee mugs.

Experience has a way of humbling us—if we let it.

There was another lesson I learned the hard way.

When I came out, a lot of people were shocked. To them, it seemed like I’d changed overnight. They couldn’t understand how someone who had spent years in ministry and leadership could suddenly announce something that, in their minds, came out of nowhere.

What they didn’t know was that it hadn’t come out of nowhere. I’d spent several years wrestling with questions I wasn’t ready to share. Those years were lonely, painful, and often confusing. I kept that journey to myself because I already knew what many of my church family would say. I didn’t need to imagine their responses—I had spent enough of my life saying some of those same things to other people.

When I finally did come out, they said almost exactly what I expected. It hurt, but it didn’t surprise me. In an odd way, keeping my journey private had given me time to prepare for that moment. I wasn’t trying to deceive anyone. I was trying to survive long enough to tell the truth.

That experience taught me something I hope I never forget: when someone’s life seems to change overnight, it almost never has. You’re usually seeing the final chapter of a story they’ve been quietly living for a very long time.

Imagine how different our friendships, families, and communities would be if our first response to someone’s growth wasn’t, “But that’s not who you used to be.”

Well… I certainly hope not.

I don’t want my fifty-eight-year-old self to be trapped inside the worldview of my twenty-eight-year-old self. That wouldn’t be faithfulness. That would be emotional taxidermy.

And let’s be honest. None of us wants to be preserved like a mounted deer head hanging over someone’s fireplace. We were made to breathe, to wander, to question, and occasionally to discover we’ve been spectacularly wrong.

Preferably before posting about it on social media. #learnedthehardwayrepeatedly

Change isn’t always improvement. People can become more fearful, more cynical, or more rigid. Growth isn’t automatic just because the calendar keeps flipping.

But healthy change usually leaves clues. It produces more compassion than condemnation. More curiosity than certainty. More peace than performance.

I’ve found that the people who are most comfortable allowing others to evolve are usually the ones who’ve given themselves permission to do the same. They know what it costs to rethink old assumptions. They understand the courage it takes to apologize, to learn, and sometimes to begin again.

Maybe that’s why grace matters so much.

Grace isn’t pretending our past didn’t happen. It’s refusing to chain someone to it forever.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with who I’ve become. Frankly, there are days I’m still getting acquainted with him myself. But I hope I’ve become someone who’s quicker to listen, slower to judge, and much more willing to admit when I don’t know something.

That feels less like losing my convictions and more like finally growing into them.

If someone in your life is changing, resist the urge to freeze them in an old photograph. Get curious instead. Ask questions. Listen to their story. You may not end up agreeing with every conclusion they reach, but you’ll probably understand them better.

And if you’re the one who’s changing, don’t apologize simply because your journey makes someone else uncomfortable.

We’re supposed to change. Trees do it. Rivers do it. Caterpillars have built an entire public relations campaign around it.

Maybe becoming isn’t a betrayal of who we were.

Maybe it’s exactly what we were created for.

Life is weird, people are complicated, and apparently I have a lot to say about both. Subscribe (free or paid) and I’ll deliver fresh stories, reflections, and the occasional bad joke straight to your inbox—saving you from having to remember to check Substack yourself.

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I almost didn’t go.

It was my first Pride after coming out, and I spent far too much time trying to think of reasons to stay home.

What if someone recognized me?

What if I didn’t belong?

What if everyone else looked like they knew exactly who they were while I wandered around looking like a tourist who had taken a wrong turn?

For years, I had lived inside a world where Pride wasn’t something to celebrate. It was something to warn people about. Something to debate. Something to fear.

And now I was driving toward it.

Terrified.

I wish I could tell you I arrived full of confidence and immediately felt at home. I didn’t. I felt like an imposter. Like someone who had accidentally wandered backstage before the show started.

The funny thing about fear is that it rarely tells the whole story. Because somewhere in the middle of that overwhelming, noisy, colorful day, a man asked if I’d like to get coffee sometime. That man is now my husband.

Life has a wicked sense of humor.

The place I had once been taught represented everything wrong with the world became the place where my future quietly introduced itself. Not with fireworks. Not with a choir of angels. Just with coffee.

…

Looking back, I realize my fear that day wasn’t really about Pride. It was about identity. For years, I had believed the greatest act of faith was protesting the very person I was. I didn’t stand outside Pride with a picket sign. I carried something much heavier.

I carried the belief that if I prayed long enough, surrendered hard enough, and obeyed faithfully enough, God might someday make me someone else. I wasn’t protesting gay people. I was protesting Randy.

…

These days, when June rolls around, I think about that frightened man walking into his first Pride carrying more fear than confidence. If I could find him in that crowd, I’d probably put a hand on his shoulder and tell him to breathe. I’d tell him that healing isn’t nearly as loud as fear makes it sound. I’d tell him that one day he’ll stop negotiating with God over whether he’s allowed to exist.

And then I’d smile and point across the crowd. “See that guy over there?” “Go have coffee when he asks you to.” You never know how God is going to answer a prayer.

Sometimes the answer isn’t becoming someone else.

Sometimes it’s finally becoming yourself.

Welcome to Mugwump Ramblings, where one week I’m untangling decades of religious trauma, the next I’m laughing at myself, and somehow it all ends with coffee.

If you’ve ever felt like a ping-pong ball in a dryer, you’ll fit right in.

Come subscribe (free or paid, right now all content is free). We have stories, questionable life choices, and occasional moments of unexpected grace.

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There’s a particular kind of clarity that only comes after you’ve been doing something the hard way for long enough.

You don’t notice it while it’s happening. You’re too busy figuring out plugins and category IDs and whether your featured image is the right aspect ratio and why the block editor just ate the last three paragraphs you wrote. You tell yourself this is just part of it. This is what having a real blog looks like.

And then one day you sit down to write something that matters to you — something personal and a little raw and maybe even important — and you realize you’ve spent forty-five minutes on formatting and approximately eleven minutes on the actual words.

That’s the moment.

I built a space on WordPress because I wanted ownership. Control. The ability to make it mine in ways that a platform couldn’t take away. And those things are real. WordPress delivered them. I’m not here to throw shade at a tool that did exactly what it promised.

But here’s what I didn’t fully account for: I am a writer. Not a webmaster. Not a developer. Not someone who should have strong opinions about DNS settings or plugin conflicts or whether the mobile version of my site is rendering correctly on a Samsung Galaxy S22.

I have opinions about words. About stories. About the particular kind of honesty that only happens when you stop performing and just tell the truth.

WordPress is a fantastic platform for people who want to build a website that also has a blog. Substack is a platform built for people who want to write, full stop. And somewhere along the way I forgot which one I actually am.

So here’s what’s changing. All of it.

Mugwump Ramblings. Wayfinder. Thrive. The whole operation has moved to Substack. Every vertical, every category, every post I write from here on out — it’s all happening there.

No more block editor. No more plugin drama. No more spending a Tuesday afternoon troubleshooting why my featured image looks fine on desktop and completely unhinged on mobile. Just writing. Actual writing. The kind where the only thing standing between a thought and a published post is whether I have something worth saying.

And honestly? I almost always have something worth saying. You know I am right… right? I mean really, like all the time :).

Substack does something WordPress never quite cracked for me: it makes the relationship between writer and reader feel like a relationship. Notes. Replies. The sense that we’re in a conversation rather than me shouting into a website and hoping the algorithm decides to tell you about it. You’ll get the posts in your inbox like letters. You can write back. We can actually talk.

That’s the version of this I’ve wanted all along.

So what happens to randyscobey.com?

It becomes what it probably should have been for a while now — an archive and a home base. The memoir page stays. The about page stays. The years of posts stay, exactly where they are, not going anywhere. But the living, breathing, weekly writing? That’s moving to Substack, effective immediately.

Glad you are here! Subscribe. Tell a friend. Bring snacks.

The duckknuckles have migrated, and there’s plenty of room.

randyscobey.substack.com

Thanks for coming with me. The next chapter’s already started.