In sixth grade, home sick with chicken pox, I wrote my first complete computer game. I was twelve, feverish, and I could not stop. The act of building something interactive out of words (computer code) felt like the most alive I had ever been. Like I was reflecting back to my Creator some tiny mote of what had been formed into me.
Then I spent the next twenty-five years unlearning it.
Chemistry degree. Master’s degree. Forestry PhD. Professorship. Partnerships with the National Park Service and Forest Service. Work I love. Somewhere in that accumulation of credentials, I absorbed the western assumption that science and art are incompatible: that reductive analysis and generative imagination live on opposite sides of a wall, and you must pick. I stopped creating. Work became work.
My sister-in-law Aya, a Nautilus alum, told me to apply to the GreenHouse program. I let the deadline pass. She came back. She insisted I meet SB (Stephen Bailey, Goldenwood Team Member). I went, skeptical, certain that a scientist who cannot draw a stick figure had no business being there.
I was wrong about almost everything.
What surprised me
Driving to the inaugural January retreat, I listened to a newly dropped podcast by Dr. David Kim. I learned about Charles Darwin’s late-life grief over the slow death of his aesthetic sensibility a man who had let the scientist crowd out the poet until he could no longer feel music. Shakespeare writing through plague. Kepler encoding physics as musical notation. Lewis and Tolkien creating under the shadow of world war.
I was moved to tears on an Amtrak train. That is not a thing that happens to me.
What astonished me was not the historical examples. It was the realization that the disintegration I had felt: the slow dimming of the creating impulse, was not personal failure. It was a predictable consequence of a cultural lie I had accepted without examining it.
What I’m learning
Reintegrating the creative drive that was always in me with my analytical, reductionist scientific training feels like relearning to walk after a neurological injury. My brain knows the gait pattern. Translating it back through the rest of me is real, slow, sometimes frustrating work.
I’m learning that God gives us creative Dreams not as hobby filler but as something meant to be used… something we’re accountable to. That the Dream placed in me has its own gravity if I don’t suppress it. That I have permission to be wholly integrated: scientist and creator, analyst and builder, not despite the faith woven through me but because of it.
I have been training for this my whole life. I just forgot I was.
What has been challenging
The familiar one: keeping the torch lit inside a full life. Fulltime research and teaching, a marriage, and a Dream that wants to expand into a small company of creators and publishers. The rainfall of Real Mundane Life is relentless and the flame is sometimes small.
What helps is what the GreenHouse framing keeps returning me to: our Creator provides what we need, step by step. Not all at once. Not on the timeline I would write if I were writing it.
In the month or so of evenings and weekends since February, I shipped a playable pre-alpha prototype of a trading card game contemplated for years, a dev blog, and a short gameplay preview reel. Next comes continued development, the legal groundwork for a Kickstarter campaign, and bringing in artists and musicians with the actual artistic skills I do not have.
Sure, the prototype is too ugly to live, but I’m having too much fun making this to let it die.
It started with Aya refusing to let me disqualify myself, and with the good people of Goldenwood confirming what I had somehow stopped believing: I had permission all along to be exactly who I was made to be. Feels good to race forward in the slow work of Dream creation. Finally.
Logan is part of the 2026 GreenHouse Cohort. His dream is to use ludology and game design to follow Jesus into communities that have been othered, pushed aside, or turned away by the modern normative church.