Yet Will I Trust

One day at work, I saw a coworker in a hoodie with a single word printed across the chest, big and plain: OBEY.

I'd been baptized a few weeks before, and I was standing in a strange place in my life, and that word hit me the second I saw it. I can't fully explain why. I'd spent most of my life as a rebel — it was the thing I was proudest of — and somewhere in me that whole identity had quietly started coming apart. I was tired of rebellion. I was tired of myself. And here was this word, worn across a stranger's chest like a flag: OBEY.

I wanted it. Not the way you're forced to obey. The way you choose to.

Here's the part that still makes me laugh. It was a misunderstanding. The brand never meant it the way I read it. OBEY, in its own hands, means closer to the opposite — I see what you're doing, I see you want me to bow, and I won't. It's irony aimed at every authority that ever tried to make you fall in line.

And once I saw that, I started seeing it everywhere. Most streetwear is selling the same thing. Be yourself. Stand out. Answer to no one. A whole closet full of slogans, and underneath every one of them, the same small god — you.

I'd worshiped that god a long time. I was good at it. And it had just about wrung me dry.

So I started to wonder. What if you could take that language — the bold print, the big word across the chest, the attitude — and turn it the other way? What if the most defiant thing a person could wear wasn't one more declaration of himself, but the laying of himself down?

I didn't want to lose the moment that word first struck me. Because it taught me something I haven't been able to shake since. Words have weight. Real weight. God spoke, and there was a world. And his word didn't burn out somewhere back in history — it's alive, still doing the thing it was sent to do.

Maybe I can make a living this way. I hope so. But that was never really the point. The point is that I spent years shouting my own name, and I got tired, and I found something better to wear.

This brand started with a misunderstanding.

I've come to think some misunderstandings are beautiful. They walk you somewhere truer than you ever meant to go.