I didn't start this brand because I had it all together.
I started it because I didn't.
When I was 18, I hit the lowest point of my life. I was running with a crowd I had no business being around. I got set up and robbed at gunpoint. Not once. Twice. Somebody broke into my car. And then the girl I was in love with walked out on me, and went straight to one of my old friends from high school.
I felt worthless. My heart was in pieces.
So I did what a lot of us do. I tried to fill the hole. Drugs. Partying. Chasing every single thing the world told me would make me feel whole again.
None of it worked. Not for one second.
Then it all came crashing down.
I got arrested. I ended up in a jail cell, and there was only one bunk open.
The guy in that cell looked over at me and asked me a question I wasn't ready for: "Do you believe in God?"
I told him I did. I just didn't go to church like I used to.
He stayed up the entire night praying with me.
And as he talked, something hit me. Everything he'd been through sounded like my life. The wrong friends. The betrayal. The emptiness. He pulled down his shirt and showed me the scar on his chest where one of his own friends had stabbed him.
Here was this broken man, covered in prison tattoos, and God used him to reach me. Looking back, I honestly believe he was the only person on earth who could have gotten through to me that night.
God wasn't finished.
I got out and started turning my life around. But I still had to go back and serve the sentence for what I'd been charged with. Twenty five days.
And it happened again.
Another man in there started reading the Bible to me. One verse grabbed me and wouldn't let go:
"I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee." (Hebrews 13:5)
The Sunday after I got out, I walked into church. The pastor was preaching on a completely different part of the Bible. Then, out of nowhere, he stops, says "Hebrews 13," looks right at me, and reads another verse from that same chapter.
I don't believe in coincidences like that anymore.
That's where the name comes from. Through the robberies, the heartbreak, the jail cell and everything I put Him through, He never left. He never departed. Not once.
Why Never Depart exists
The message is simple. I want to make being a Christian cool again.
Somewhere along the way, faith got a reputation for being boring. Cheesy shirts. Corny slogans. Stuff nobody under 30 would be caught dead wearing.
I want to change that. I want to make clothes young adults actually want to wear. Shirts that look good enough that you'd put them on whether or not you ever noticed the message underneath. The kind of thing you'd wear to a show, to the skatepark, or to the gym.
And I want to be straight with you about something.
This is not a publicity stunt. This is not a brand slapping God's name on a shirt to make a quick buck. I've seen enough of that, and so have you.
This means more to me than that. My hope is that Never Depart sparks something real. A change in our culture. A change in the secular music scene. A change in somebody who's sitting where I was sitting, feeling the way I felt, and needs to hear that they haven't been left behind.
Because they haven't. And neither have you.
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"I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee." (Hebrews 13:5)