Received
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Happy Birthday, Ben.
Another year on the books — and somewhere along the way, you became a builder.
Old friends get a strange privilege: we get to watch each other become. And watching you, Ben, has been a quiet masterclass in one idea expressed three ways — the people you gather on Sunday mornings at Farragut, the companies you've backed because you saw something in the people behind them, and now this new chapter, where you're building things with your own two hands. It's all the same instinct, really: find something worth tending to, then tend to it well.
I love the picture of it: you with Claude open, turning "what if I could track this better" into an actual fitness app that does. It's a very you project — quiet, practical, figure-it-out-myself, the kind of thing that solves your own problem first and probably a thousand other people's next. Love God. Love people. Serve all. And now, apparently, build them something useful too.
So here's to another trip around the sun — to the congregation you lead, the founders you bet on, the apps still on your whiteboard, and the pleasant surprise of discovering, at this stage of the game, that you're a builder too. Happy birthday, Ben.
Click the candles to make a wish