Why I Made This

People sometimes ask me how someone who spent his career in high-tech marketing ends up publishing a calendar full of classic hymns. 

I grew up the son of a minister and a church organist. My dad preached and cared for the congregation; my mom played sometimes when she wasn't working too. Hymn music was always just there, the same way the furniture was there, woven into every Sunday and many weekdays too. I sang in choirs through high school and in the contemporary praise and worship group as a young adult. And as the years went by, I loved the older hymns more and more. This calendar just sort of found me.

A few years ago I started noticing how often a hymn would get stuck in my head — like a small, persistent gift. A line from "It Is Well with My Soul" would show up on a hard day. A phrase from "Be Thou My Vision" would surface during something ordinary, like running to the hardware store. I started wondering if other people experienced that too, and whether there was a way to make room for it more intentionally — not by adding another app or another notification, but by putting one hymn verse, one day at a time, somewhere I'd actually see it.

That's really where Hymnbook Treasures started. Not as a business idea. As a question: what if there was something on your desk that gave you thirty seconds with a hymn every morning and again every night?

The harder and more surprising part of the project wasn't picking the hymns — it was the people behind them. I'd sung "Joy to the World" a hundred times without knowing anything about Isaac Watts. I didn't know Fanny Crosby was blind almost her entire life and wrote thousands of hymns anyway. I didn't know Catherine Winkworth spent years translating German hymns into English so that congregations who'd never speak a word of German could sing Paul Gerhardt's prayers as if they were their own. Once I started reading their stories, I couldn't stop.

My dad wrote the foreword to this calendar, which still means more to me than I can easily say. He and my mom, and both sets of grandparents, are the reason I love church, music, and God in whatever order those things get loved in a person's life. This calendar is dedicated to them.

It's also, in a very direct way, for people I love who are living on a fixed income right now. Every net dollar this calendar makes goes to support them. That part of the project isn't a marketing angle — it came first, honestly, before the design decisions and the hymn selection process. I wanted to make something worth buying and sharing, and I wanted the reason for buying it to matter beyond the desk it sits on.

I hope when it arrives on your desk, dresser, or window sill, it does what it's done on mine: a small, quiet interruption, once a day, pointing at something older and steadier and truer than whatever else is going on that day.