I grew up in Trinidad, the youngest of three, the son of a theologian who would go on to lead a Bible college. Church wasn’t something I attended – it was the family business. I played drums on the worship team beside my brother and sister; the Maginley name carried its own quiet expectation before I’d chosen anything for myself.

A friend and I started reading Scripture together, cover to cover, in a year. We finished, and started again – chronologically the second time, so the story could speak for itself instead of the order the 66-book canon happened to land in. That habit stuck. Nine years in, still reading, I noticed something: the text itself had changed under me. Verses missing. Numbering that skipped. I went back to an old King James gathering dust under my bed, then further back to 1611, and started to see how much had quietly been edited out of what I’d been taught was the whole counsel of Scripture.

By then I’d already started pulling away from church – the performance of it, the sermons that stopped exactly where the text was about to explain itself. Then COVID came, and with it a divorce, after twenty-seven years of marriage. I ended up sleeping on an air mattress at my parents’ house, praying one honest prayer: that I would never again let love for another person outweigh my love for the One who made me. That’s where the real turning point was – not an argument I won, but a loss I couldn’t out-teach.

In that season I found His actual name in Exodus 3. Not a title, not a translation – a name, given to Moses, older than the ones I’d inherited. Knowing it turned what I’d been doing all those years from an abstraction into a relationship I was actually accountable to.

I hold no title. I’m not a pastor – I’m a disciple, same as anyone walking this with me. What started as Zoom calls from my mother’s living room during lockdown has become a channel, this site, and a small, steady gathering that meets in person for the Moedim. Yah, since that prayer, has been faithful in ways I didn’t expect – including bringing my wife into my life, who I trust because He led me to her, not because I went looking. That’s still where I live – testing everything, one Shabbat at a time, so nobody else has to walk this alone.