I Built This Because I Needed It to Exist

Before I built anything online, I managed a sawmill in Canada. Not exactly a tech origin story — but callings don’t check your resume first.

I’ve been building online businesses since 2004. Before YouTube existed. Before most people knew what a membership site was. But the story that changed everything started in 2010.

My phone rang in the middle of the night. A hospital in Las Vegas. My father was in heart failure — and they were calling for my permission to stop resuscitation.

Both my parents had been in a car accident a week earlier. Both in ICU. Both healing, cleared for the air ambulance home. Then his heart failed. I was alone in an unfamiliar city, my wife and kids a thousand miles away, and grief hit me like a hurricane.

Then my online business — a site I’d grown to over 300,000 email subscribers — collapsed. I didn’t see where the market was heading. I didn’t respond fast enough. By the time I realized, it was too late. The weekend I admitted defeat is still viscerally remembered in my gut.

Then the anxiety. The gut-clenching, wake-you-in-the-middle-of-the-night kind. I believed providing was my responsibility — full stop. My uncle, a lifelong counselor, missionary, and pastor, challenged me: “You are replacing yourself with God as the provider.”

That cracked me open.

It was in the silence — in Christian meditation, not emptying my mind but filling it with God’s presence — that I met with Him in a way I hadn’t before. The practice didn’t argue me out of my storms. It walked me through them. And I found that He, not I, was enough.

In 2016, I launched MeditateOnChrist.com to share what I’d found. It grew to 19,641+ subscribers — people across the US and Canada dealing with anxiety, grief, depression, and spiritual dryness writing to say it was working.

Have you been there? The place where your deepest pain becomes the seed of the thing you’re meant to build?

Over 21 years online, I’ve coached more than 800 therapists, coaches, and business owners — personally answering 18,124+ emails as a coach, jumping into their platforms to help them build, and advising on everything from pricing to tech setup. I was good at it.

But the Christian coaches — the ones I cared about most — kept hitting a wall I couldn’t explain away.

Every one of them was building alone. Own website. Own ads. Own landing pages. Rebuilding identical infrastructure from scratch. And every platform they turned to was designed around one assumption: you’re an entrepreneur.

Revenue dashboards. Conversion metrics. Leaderboards ranking income.

If you’ve ever stared at a dashboard full of zeros and felt like it meant YOU were a zero — I understand. But that metric was never designed to measure what you actually do. If your real measure of success is lives transformed — people growing closer to God — those systems literally cannot see what you’re building.

And here’s the part that broke my heart: many of these coaches already felt guilty for wanting to earn a living from their calling. The platforms didn’t just fail to measure their impact. They deepened the tension between ministry and money every single day.

You’re not failing. You’re succeeding at the wrong game.

I couldn’t unsee it. So I built Davar.

Davaris the Hebrew word for “word.” You might know the Greek — logos— from John 1:1. But the Hebrew carries something the Greek doesn’t. Davaralso means “thing,” pointing back to Genesis 1. God spoke, and things came into being.

As coaches, teachers, preachers, and authors, our words do the same. They create change. They build faith. They heal.

We believe our words matter. That’s not a tagline. It’s a theological commitment.

Davar Communities is designed from the ground up for Christian coaches, mentors, and authors. Where transformation is the metric. Belonging is the architecture. No coach is alone online.

I hold a degree in Religious Education from Canadian Bible College. I’m a self-published author. I co-founded Davar with my son, Jeremiah Davis, through our company Solomon Websites Inc. And after 21 years of building, failing, rebuilding, and refining — this is what it was all leading to.

I’m not a guru. I’m a practitioner who’s been knocked flat and got back up. More than once.

My singular professional mission: helping Christian coaches help others.

Where your calling and your livelihood coexist without compromise.