Goodbye YouTube?

Are my days with YouTube over? Will I ever publish another video? What's coming next for Directional Faith?

A New Chapter

Many of you followed the Directional Faith YouTube page, but I have not posted for a while. What happened? Will I ever post on there again?

Let’s start with what happened…

Becoming a Jedi Master

First and foremost, things were busy - too busy. As many of you know, I was busy working on a Master’s in Christian Spirituality degree at Loyola University Chicago, and the workload picked up near the end.

As part of the degree, I specialized in spiritual direction, a practice where you guide other Christians in their spiritual life. You become their spiritual counselor of sorts.

To complete that portion of my studies required actually becoming a spiritual director, so I set out to do just that. The response was overwhelming! I was looking for a handful of people willing to work with me during my internship, and there were more requests than I could handle. Still, I took on 10 brave souls for the year, and I still meet with several of them to this day (even after graduating).

As time went on and graduation drew near, I had the final research and integration project to complete, which was a lengthy 50-page research paper that took up most of my time.

Life was busy, and I decided to take a step back intending to return quickly.

And then life happened…

Enter: Life

At some point, I’ll possibly share some of the personal struggles that I faced over the past year. Things definitely did not turn out as planned. But for now, I will start with this.

Just as I entered that final year, my mother became gravely ill, and in a few shorts months, we lost her to cancer.

This triggered other catastrophes and issues in some relationships, and things have not been the same. But for right now, I won’t get into that. Let’s just move forward.

The Next Chapter

So am I done with YouTube? No, I don’t believe so. In fact, I have some different plans for it in mind.

With my original videos, an 8-minute video would take 8 hours to make. It was time-consuming. I enjoy the process and creativity of it, but it took up a lot of time.

My goal now is to streamline the process and continue to work on other platforms.

Towards the end, I started doing a livestream video each week. This worked pretty well, but I don’t think that I had a large enough audience for it yet. Still, it made me think of another plan, and it will rely more on writing - my first love.

Writing

In a future post, I will go into detail on why I decided to focus on writing, but I realized I could use my skills as a writer to help with YouTube.

One of the most difficult parts of creating YouTube videos was the editing. It took HOURS! To avoid that, I plan on pre-writing most of it in a more podcast-like style.

Are you cringing?

I know… another podcast. But I hope the content will actually be better. I’ll be able to sort out my thoughts and present them clearly. I can even take the audio and share it on other podcasting platforms.

With pre-written material, I can drastically cut down on the editing time and actually produce more content - content that can be shared through audio, video, and even the written word.

And that’s where substack comes in.

What’s Next?

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