I began this blog over twenty years ago to keep a record of going to seminary in Nairobi. I was 23 years old. I suspected my upcoming years in Kenya might be formative, hopefully a bit adventurous, and I didn’t want to forget anything, namely the reflections I might have. If the writing, at times, seems unnecessarily self-referential or abstract, it’s because of the impulse I had to care more for the reflection than what was actually happening.

During the five years it was active (2005 - 2010), UpfromtheStump was a real labor of love. The site was handwritten in HTML and all the graphics were mostly self-created, probably in Paint or something free. The writing covered the three years in Kenya, the move back to Grand Rapids in 2008, and then New Jersey and Seattle in 2009 and 2010. I wrote 408 entries totaling 99,546 words, basically a book, which is humbling to realize all these years later. I also uploaded 545 pictures, twelve small movies, and five audio files.

Though the site was online until 2013, I only have traffic data for the first four years:

During this period and excluding bots/scrapers I record 47,633 unique visitors and 66,789 total visits:

People visiting the site directly (typing in the .com or clicking a bookmark) accounted for 45% of these visits. People coming from other blogs/sites added another 11%. This means over 27,000 people actually read this website back in the day, which is not bad for an alt-Christian blog in the mid 00s.

Google drove the remaining 44% of visitors. At one point, UpfromtheStump was the top result on Google Image for “biggest spider in the world.” Yet search traffic also included queries like “elephantitis,” “nairobi pictures,” “kipsongo,” “dagoretti market,” and other Kenya/Africa-related terms.

The timeline above tells a story: in the beginning of the site almost all the traffic was direct (actual readers). Google search traffic began to grow in 2007, and by 2008 the search engine was sending more server requests than direct visitors, suggesting the blog had more become a resource for people searching for Kenya/Africa topics than regular readers. When I originally shut the site down in 2013, I remember a fair amount of traffic still coming from Google.

As I read a few of my blog posts two decades later, it provokes several feelings. On the one hand, I feel a lot of joy over seeing how passionate I was about being intentional and doing things in the best possible way, namely in figuring out how to self-host a blog in 2005 ($60 in hosting + $10 domain fees was a lot of money for me at age 23). Reading old posts, I also find myself cringing. My overly-flowery naivety is often on full display, namely because I had not yet suffered the great disability of CFS/ME that would come later in life. Yet other posts are still touching and beautiful. All in all, getting this blog back online in 2026 produces a mix of sensations, but mostly contentment.

A mirror for this site exists at upfromthestump.pages.dev. Thank you to Cloudflare for the free hosting. If you want to know what I’m up to in 2026, my current homepage is SimonCunningham.net.

           5 December 2010 8:29pm                                                   

thankful (today) for:

           22 October 2010 1:27pm                                                   

It took me six months to finally get him to sit down and have tea. I had heard of him from a friend of a friend, heard of this person who still writes poetry about the Jesus he grew up singing about, but who no longer practices this faith or gathers with others under its wings. Six months of texts and phone calls and he finally is seated across from me, drinking a warm mug of coffee and talking about growing up as a pentecostal. "I hate the God of the Old Testament and I hate Paul," he says, "but I had these experiences growing up and I continue to long for them again. I had moments where something was flowing through me and where the entire world seemed flooded. I tried yoga and meditation, and its close, but its not like the experiences that I had with my family while growing up."

While church planting, I hear stories like this all the time. People truly and honestly try and let go of the God-practice, of the faith that they grew up with, but they can't shake it totally loose. They stop going to church and set their bibles on the shelf (or in his case threw his bible away in a moment of brave self-definition). But then they find themselves spontaneously praying one day, out of the blue, like dreaming in their mother tongue. They can indeed stop the mechanism, but when it comes to the heart, resolve is fickle and fleeting. Try as they might, something was buried deep deep down, and no amount of discussion or self-medication can wrench it free to be thrown on the pavement and abandoned. They feel quiet warmth of a small ember emanating from the ashes of that dusty old religion, but searching within the char they come up empty.

So I asked him finally, do you want to try and rekindle it? Do you want to carry that uneasy ember or will you cultivate it anew, this time within a community which is not defined by its antagonism but by its hope? I told him, like some big-tent dispensationalist preacher out of Huckleberry Finn, that I have found true life from this God, and I believe that he would too. And he looked me square in the face and said he didn't know if he was ready. I believed him. Sometimes people really know that they are not yet ready, especially if they've followed Jesus before.

So: he'll be invited to our gathering in two weeks, and I will be praying that the fruit of God (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, charity, faith, and self-control) might be felt within our group, and that the taste in his mouth would reference a flood of good honest memories. My hope is that he, and all the others like him, might start looking for that ember again, not to snuff it out but to call it forth, to add tinder and watch it gain and glow, and to see how the burning heart of being God's child transforms life to be good and pleasing and perfect.

           11 October 2010 6:00pm                                                   

If we could all just stop throwing stones,
and stoop, knees bent
and write in the dust,
we'd see that the dust
was once stone -
grand, and hard, and proud, and tough -
now ground and dissolved
in grace and tears.
So... how much better
to be a grain of dirt
on that kind prophet’s hands
than a stone
in the cold, accusing
Temple of the pure.

-kester brewin

           10 August 2010 5:08pm                                                   

I have one of those rooms with tall windows that let in a lot of light. As I write these words, the sun has bent its face kitty corner to light up my east wall. The glass between it and me has textured the landing light into something like seawater. Tiny bubbles and imperfections from the old glass dither the light into a character different than that typical outdoor shine. The cedar tree out my window adds a waving haze, and various memorable stones on the sill add bumps. I imagine this ray pushing its way out its hot solar ocean. I imagine it being tempered by distance and then the atmosphere, postured by trees and old window glass, cut by silled rocks, and finalizing on this wall. And for most of the time, its all unnoticed.

But I look at its lilt and know its been there the whole time. I know I've come in this room in a hurry, grabbed things, and pushed myself back out the door while it has stayed on. I've had long talks with my mom while its been there. Entire books have been read beneath it. Long conversations have been had below it these past months with friends in distant cities. I see it now, quietly going about its silvery sway, and I am blessed.

Blessed because it exists. Blessed because it does not need me, and so my occupied life cannot fail it. Blessed because God has established this shimmer as some source of ambient tranquility while I go roving about this new city. How often, without my knowing, have my days been better because of its presence?

God I am surrounded by such silent encouragement. If only I had an insight into your magnificence, I know I would see hundreds of thousands of such silent encouragers, a stringed orchestra which betters my every day without my knowledge. God, I thank you for this radiant world. It is a privilege to even stand on the corner of my street.

           13 July 2010 11:12pm                                                   

I listened to a lot of Indigo Girls with my parents while growing up. This one song always told me how things which were the hardest to learn were always the least complicated. Today while talking with a group of guys who are also trying to start churches in Seattle, my mind broke into that song. People were sitting and discussing how people gain and grow and mature in their compassion for the world, and they kept coming back to issues like listening and trust and honesty, and I heard it and those girls and their guitar were cutting lose. I heard it and realized how far I have to go.

I feel as if I'm finally learning how to walk. I had a couple different friends tell me last month that I have become a better listener in the past couple years. I hear their kind words and feel like these past two years have more broken and quieted me more than made me a better listener. Or is a sense of quiet required to listen? Has so much been happening and I have just always been too moving to see it?

I pray today God that you would help me to listen. Help me to hear where people are coming from and to admire the good things they have instead of analytically picking apart their tiny problems. Your parable of wooden specks and logs continues to be relevant these years later. Help me to slow down and see. Help me to be mindful and present. Help me, above all, to let gratitude saturate everything. I am thankful to be your child.

Tomorrow we have church for the first time.

           7 June 2010 12:59pm                                                   

At times, I return alongside the people of the Exodus. As they fled triumphant and panting into the desert, pursued by the Egyptian death squads, how they must have wept when they came up over the ridge and saw their path blocked by an ocean. Did they turn to their children and hug them in despair? Did the elderly sit down empty-eyed? Did the leadership try to haphazardly organize a new route, crying at the weight of having to rouse their exhausted nation to double back and take another road? Sometimes I feel delivered from hell but on the shore of such an impasse.

What was the sound when God parted the sea? Was it like a rushing rapids, crashing and mighty, the lifting of a world? I like to picture the water parting dead silent, like the sound of tilting a cup. I like to see it catching them by surprise. I see people's attention drawn, not by the sound of the parting sea, but by the widening eyes of their family members.

I look for eyes these days. (What is the sound of a planted church?) I look for the people around me who see it when I can't, when I haven't the energy to raise my face to the wide world. Their astonishment make me realize, yes, this is a good thing. We all need the encouragement of finding fellow travelers, the stories of people to speak of God's proximity when he sometimes feels so far away. An envisioned collective of faith and life and imagination excites the people I am meeting, and by extension, it encourages me. Today I was out of the house by eight in the morning.

This human swing between despondency and hope can be hollowing at times, but at other moments it is the most rewarding thing in the world. I cannot wait to see the land where God is leading us.

           5 June 2010 8:48pm                                                   

Whenever I get out of the shower I'm surprised by my waiting towel. I have no recollection of a time before the shower when I, apparently, brought it from the bedroom and placed it over the bathroom rail. Something must happen to my brain when that aqueous heat descends, because I suddenly forget my to-do list and break into Italian sonnets from high school. The wide world pales, is sequestered to a radiating cell. Tensions fade like dreams upon waking. All is an effervescent ardor and I am a slain pentecostal. I am a pupae. Apocalyptic ash might be falling from the sky, I would stay right here as the world burns.

I am shalom.

And then the same thing always happens. The heated spray suddenly loses its bite. The hot water begins to run out. And, like that last swallow of beer at the bottom of the bottle, the lukewarm arrives unwelcomed. I fight it, for the womb I inhabit is warm. I plead with the shower. I rage. I try bargaining with it, turning the knob farther to H, but it is indifferent. I am routed. The archers are out of arrows.

The worst part of the lukewarm is the threat of the cold winter water that is coming; things only get worse at this point. No, I realize then how the lukewarm is a gift, so I take it and get down to brass tacks. Out comes the soap, the "reason" for this whole process. A few minutes later, and with that lukewarm barely hanging on, the whole thing is over. The flow is cut off, the curtain is drawn.

That's when I am surprised, without fail, by the towel. It lays without judgment, dyed in soothing blues and greens, faded in aged wisdom. I step towards it so needy, a headcase, the veteran of thermal conflict, and it embraces me like a mother. It wipes away the droplets and puts me in fresh proper clothes. I gain a quiet confidence, at home again in the world. I unlock and open the bathroom door.