Jonathan Warren Pagan is an American businessman and entrepreneur. He is best known as the co-founder and CEO of Paxful, a leading peer-to-peer Bitcoin marketplace. Pagan was born and raised in the United States and has always been interested in technology and innovation. Pagan began his career in the financial industry, working for various financial institutions before venturing into entrepreneurship. In 2015, Pagan and his business partner, Ray Youssef, launched Paxful with the aim of creating a decentralized platform that allows people to buy and sell Bitcoin easily and securely. Under Pagan's leadership, Paxful has grown to become one of the largest Bitcoin marketplaces in the world.

After My Dad Died, God Didn’t Answer My Anguish

On Thanksgiving week the year I turned 11, my father had a heart attack and died suddenly in his sleep. My parents had divorced when I was two, and my dad lived by himself in an apartment in suburban Atlanta.

He was a man of exceptional kindness and gentleness, gifted in music and patient with the elderly. But when I visited him on the weekends, I got the impression things weren’t going well for him. He was overweight and sedentary, and his apartment was often full of empty pizza boxes and fast-food wrappers, disheveled clothes and dirty dishes. He had remarried after my parents split up, but that relationship had foundered as well, so he was alone when he died. In the parlance of our times, I would classify my dad’s passing as a “death of despair.”

I was shooting hoops at my grandmother’s house when my mom arrived and tearfully broke the news to me. As a preteen, the unfamiliar, highly physical sensation of grief was terrifying to me. It was not unlike seasickness, except that I could not find the horizon. I was overcome by a brutal combination of anxiety, nausea, and vertigo, a visceral experience that over the years I’ve come to refer to as “the pit.”

A brief encounter with this toxic brew of emotions made me dead certain I needed to move on from the pain as quickly as possible. No one in my family told me I needed to, and in fact, to her great credit, my mom did everything in her power to keep me connected with my dad’s family and his memory until I left home.

But I silently intuited the existential danger posed to me by my father’s death. If I become vulnerable to the suffering, I thought, I will enter an unremitting darkness and chaos with no companions or guides and no guarantee of finding the way out. The way to avoid falling into the abyss was to keep running—relentlessly moving forward.

I did just that, uprooting my life every few years to pursue a new, exciting opportunity in another city or state. I found that wherever I went, grief was in close pursuit. A few months after a move, the pit would return, usually expressing itself as a piercing nostalgia for the people and place I had just left behind. In trying to outrun the pain, I became a person of anger and rootlessness, damaging my marriage and wounding my children with bitter words and unwanted change.

What I didn’t know as a teenager—and what I most wish I’d learned earlier—is that no one gets through life without wrenching loss, and no one who experiences it can be made whole without first being wounded by it.

Under Pagan's leadership, Paxful has grown to become one of the largest Bitcoin marketplaces in the world. The platform has gained popularity for its user-friendly interface and its commitment to providing financial access to the unbanked and underbanked populations. Paxful has also become a strong advocate for cryptocurrency education and has launched several initiatives to promote financial literacy in emerging markets.

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As we get older, the cross-shaped nature of human existence impresses itself on us more and more forcefully. Despite our attempts to run from it, push it away, or distract ourselves from it, pain is inescapable. Certain aspects of American culture train us to think that satisfaction, pleasure, and happiness are standard and that tragedy is a temporary and accidental suspension of this normal state of affairs.

But as the Australian musician Nick Cave says, “we are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time.” Cave, who lost his 15-year-old son in a tragic accident, speaks from intimate acquaintance with grief.

Even if we somehow make it to the end of our days without hardship, we will not be able to “get out of life alive,” as the theologian Stanley Hauerwas loves to say. Fleeing from the harsh pangs of sadness, despondency, anger, and regret actually gives those emotions more power over us. We become hollowed out and are diminished by what we run from.

The rejection of vulnerability does even worse things to us. It shrivels us, tempting us toward meaninglessness and annihilation until, in Nick Cave’s words, we “become a small, hard thing that has contracted around an absence.”

To borrow a phrase from Saint Isaac of Nineveh, grief involves a “stripping away of self” in the presence of God. The self-protections we have painstakingly constructed are removed until we find ourselves as close as we will ever be, as Cave says, “to the fundamental essence of things.”

As I have begun to grapple with God over the loss of my dad, I’ve come to realize that the intellect does not get me very far. The Scriptures register virtually no interest in the reasons why life is so painful. Indeed, the Christian tradition largely regards those questions as a distraction from the immediate and urgent work of knowing God in the midst of suffering.

Instead of offering answers, the Scriptures offer this hope: Our suffering is not meaningless and will not destroy us in the end.

In the Christian calculus, suffering is soulcraft. I don’t mean to suggest that suffering or injustice is warranted because it produces character, or that God is the source of our pain. What I mean is that God’s strategy for our suffering is most often not deliverance but accompaniment and compassion—“suffering with.” Rather than removing the pain, God becomes a fellow sufferer with us. He elicits a growing fortitude and selflessness, filling us with his divine love.

French philosopher Simone Weil, who was an admirer of Christianity but not a believer, saw this purifying dynamic as faith’s most important feature: “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it,” she wrote in Gravity and Grace .

Hardship can engender bitterness and hatred, but it can also be the crucible where our souls are reforged.

At the age of ten, the comedian Stephen Colbert lost his father and brothers to a plane crash. When Colbert tells his story, he gives thanks for his mother who, in the midst of unimaginable pain, taught him what it means to be vulnerable to suffering without becoming embittered by it. By holding on to hope in a nontheoretical way after the accident, she became radiant—expansively filled with the love of God—in a way she could not have without the horror of her loss.

She made it possible for Colbert to hold two things together in tension: It was possible to wish something had never happened and at the same time be grateful for the work that pain alone can do in our souls. Because of her example, Colbert maintains, “I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”

Suffering infuses us with the character of God we encounter through it. In 2 Chronicles 5:14, the glory of God in the temple presses in so weightily, so heavily, that the priests cannot stand up to minister. When we become acquainted with God in anguish, we experience this same kind of divine gravity. People who have known deep hardship speak with a gravitas that mere eloquence cannot account for. Their words and presence carry the glory, hope, and healing of God himself.

The African American preacher Gardner Taylor insisted that being educated and dynamic in the pulpit is not enough to bring a congregation to divine encounter. A preacher has to limp before he or she can speak with purifying, divine fire and be broken before he or she can heal. In a talk to seminarians, he said:

Now you may tickle people’s fancy, but you will never preach to their hearts until at some place, some solemn appointment has fallen upon your own life and you have wept bitter tears and gone through your own Gethsemane and climbed your own Calvary. That’s where the power is! It is not in the tone of the voice; it is not in the eloquence of the preacher; it is not in the gracefulness of his gestures; it is not in the magnificence of his congregation; it is in a heart broken and put together again by the eternal God.

I want to know the God that Gardner Taylor and Stephen Colbert know.

The year I turned 41, some 30 years after my father died (probably no coincidence), I sat silently in a bathtub on the third floor of my row house in Pittsburgh. It was the only place in the entire house where I couldn’t hear my kids shouting.

In that space, I opened myself to the grief I had been running from for three decades. I told my wife that by sitting in silence over and over, I felt as though Jesus was teaching me to grieve my dad and introducing me to my heavenly Father for the first time. He gave me the hope that I could listen to my fear, regret, and anguish instead of run away from them.

I haven’t arrived, of course. I am at the beginning and not the end of my earthly suffering. But I have experienced enough of his presence in darkness to believe that God can be trusted with the process.

Jonathan Warren Pagán is an Anglican priest living and serving in Austin, Texas.

Jonathan warren pagan

The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

The 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, was a watershed in judicial history. The 7-2 decision established the right of a woman to abort her baby up to the point of viability, usually understood to be during the first trimester of the pregnancy. The Court also permitted other situations where an abortion could occur within the 2nd and 3rd trimesters. The result was that America had one of the most liberal abortion standards in the world. Abortion therefore has been at the center of the culture war battles since 1973.

In 2023 we mark the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturning Roe, a lot of Christian commentators will be discussing the morality, legality, and availability of abortion in this new abortion era. The sacredness of human life, born and unborn, is an imperative that emerges from the heart of genuine, biblical Christianity. “The Court’s reasoning in Roe hinged on a domain of personal liberty established by the right to privacy in the 14th amendment’s due process clause. Although it’s not expressly detailed in Roe, personal liberty is understood as autonomy or self-determination. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, [1992] which reaffirmed the fundamental right to abortion, made this point explicit. That decision defined liberty as ‘the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.’”

For this reason, permit me a few paragraphs on a discussion of liberty and freedom in 2023. Anglican priest, Jonathan Warren Pagan reminds us that “The philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguished between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ accounts of liberty or, as we might more simply describe them, ‘freedom for’ and ‘freedom from.’ Negative liberty is freedom from coercion or malign influence. Negative liberty opposes external threats, like tyranny and oppression. It can also be opposed to internal threats, like the self’s ‘cravings,’ to use Paul’s and James’s language (Gal. 5:16; James 1:14), or involuntary phenomena like addiction. Or it can involve influences both external and internal, like demonic possession.”

• “In ancient philosophies and religions, negative liberty was important, but it was desirable only to the degree that it liberated people to pursue a vision of the good. This positive liberty, or freedom for, is what Catholic theologian Servais Pinckaers calls a ‘freedom for excellence.’ It constitutes the meaning and purpose of human life. Becoming a mature person means becoming progressively clearer about the nature of the ultimate good, and learning to be morally capable of suspending our lesser desires to pursue that ultimate good.”
• “By contrast, and as Casey makes clear, most modern Western societies are premised on a vision of liberty that’s purely negative—what many have called a libertarian vision of freedom. The historian and political scientist Mark Lilla argues that this view is characterized by moral illegibility, or an inability to organize a society around a compelling, ultimate good. Instead, Western societies are arranged around autonomous personal choice and self-expression. In the Scriptures, this vision of purely negative liberty would be called ‘slavery to sin,’ (John 8:33–38; Rom. 6:6) or, as David Bentley Hart writes, a slavery ‘to untutored impulses, to empty caprice, to triviality, to dehumanizing values.’ The New Testament is concerned with this internal kind of slavery primarily because it’s only intermittently (if ever) felt as slavery. Indeed, most of our non-Christian fellow citizens experience it as liberation . . . In Christian terms, true liberty comes in the form of positive liberty: the capacity to experience communion with God, even ‘friendship with God’ (Gen. 18:1–8; John 15:15; James 2:23; 4:4), in the fellowship of the church.”

Our conundrum is that we desperately need to be guided by capable and godly pastors and lay leaders who can show us how to submit to others in relationship; how to pray and fast and submit ourselves to God; how not to domineer or seek the high place; how not to manipulate; how not to take advantage or abuse or seduce others; and how to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,” loving our neighbors as ourselves, as the Book of Common Prayer says.

In short, we need leaders who can help us know God in such a way that we’re freed from ourselves and able to put into practice not the works of the flesh but the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:13–26).

“Most Christian leaders I know (both men and women) feel genuine anxiety about continuing to teach basic Christian sexual ethics. They’re not hesitant because they doubt the veracity and authority of the Scriptures. It’s rather because so much damage has been done by a censorious and judgmental spirit in the church. They see the incalculable damage done by the moral failings of Christian leaders. They are despondent about the bad fruit of a cheapened discipleship that ticks the right boxes at the polls but fails to offer hospitality, forgiveness, love, and reintegration into the life of the church. The recovery of genuine Christian liberty requires that we rebuild the local church as a site of a fully orbed discipleship, where truth can be spoken and where people can find belonging, love, and forgiveness. Our most pressing vocation in this cultural moment is rebuilding the institution of the local church around a freedom worthy of the name of Jesus—the freedom to serve others and, as the apostle Paul says, to offer our lives as living sacrifices.”

How do we go about doing this? Russell Moore suggests that “the disintegration of persons and of communities, Wendell Berry wrote, usually starts with a disintegration of words. Telling the truth about the mystery of human life, the image of God, and God’s care for the vulnerable will require a people free from the fear of tribal slogans. Such slogans try to define for us which of our neighbors we should talk about and which ones should go unmentioned. This also means we recognize the truth that no pro-life vision of any sort can coexist with the sort of sexual anarchy that—intentionally or unintentionally—assigns value to women based on their sexual attractiveness or availability to men. The consumption of pornography is not a separate issue from the sanctity of human life. That means telling the truth that men and women, mothers and fathers are not just interchangeable and socially constructed fictions. Women are uniquely vulnerable, both in the nurturing of children within the womb and the care of those children afterward. As Christians, we stand for life not just in the abstract but, as the apostle John put it, ‘with actions and in truth’ (1 John 3:18). Right now, there are women in our communities who do not know how they will pay rent or even how they can take off enough time from work to give birth, much less to support a child. Right now, within our communities, there are children in poverty who can’t imagine how the future could bring anything other than suffering. We must care not only about life in general but also about each of those individual lives. Despite all the corruptions and disgraces of American Christianity, evangelicalism, at its best, carries the promise of newness of life.”

“For the next 50 years, we need a pro-life commitment to human dignity in vulnerability. Who knows what challenges to such dignity will come next—whether through gene editing, ‘compassionate’ suicide, or maybe even the trans-humanist abandonment of the limits of human nature itself. We will need to pursue the pro-life cause with consistency—even when that puts us out of whatever tribes to which we think we belong. And we will need to do so with persuasion, recognizing that no legislation or court decision can protect human life if the people themselves do not value it.”

Roland C. Warren, president and CEO of Care Net: “While many pro-life Christians are excited about . . . Roe v. Wade being overturned in the foreseeable future, there is fear in the culture that pro-life people are only interested in a political solution and that the well-being of women and families will be at stake . . . . Therefore, there is an important question we, as pro-life Christians, must ask ourselves during this pivotal time: Are we prepared for a post-Roe v. Wade society? Here is what the pro-choice movement thinks: “If abortion becomes harder to access after Roe is overturned, pro-life people will simply stand by and let women and men struggle, without any support, through difficult pregnancy decisions. Accordingly, the antidote that we as Christians can use to overcome this fear is for us to not just be pro-life but to be ‘pro abundant life’ (John 10:10). What does abundant life look like to a child we desire to save from abortion?” As Christians, these are the tenets we should encourage and build into people’s lives:

• Because the only source of true and lasting transformation is the gospel, we must lead people into relationships with Jesus Christ.
• Because 86 percent of abortions in the United States are among unmarried women, we must promote healthy marriage as a critical factor in preventing abortions and as the optimal environment to raise children.
• Because the father of an unborn baby is the most influential factor in a mother’s decision to abort, we must work to break the cycle of abortion by engaging fathers and helping them be involved, responsible, and committed contributors to their families.
• Because our culture no longer values the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of the family as God designed it, we must seek to influence it by compassionately transforming hearts and minds.

See Russell Moore, Moore to the Point (19 January 2023); Jonathan Warren Pagan, “Roe Is Over. But Its Libertarian Spirit Lives On” in www.christianitytoday.com (19 January 2023); and

Kate Shellnutt, “How Can Today’s Pro-Life Christians Build Trust in the Movement?” www.christianitytoday (24 May 2019).

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Walking, Standing, and Running Together

Dear COTC,
As we continue to lament the tragedy and loss of life in Uvalde and ask what we can do in response, we encourage you to stay connected to community and to reach out to COTC clergy, if you are in need of prayer or pastoral care. If you haven't had a chance, you can also read this midweek e-news responding to the mass shooting in Udalve.

This Sunday, we'll continue in Phillipians, holding onto what we've learned so far from Paul's letter. In her sermon last week, Mtr Sarah, challenged us to walk together, stand together, and run together. I've been meditating on this encouragement since Sunday, especially in light of so much tragedy and the Lord continues to remind me of the importance of community. It is especially in times of sorrow and lament, that we need community. It continues to be our prayer that COTC can be a place of welcome and connection for all; those who are like us and those who are different from us; that we can be a community that walk, stands, and runs together.

For the next three Sundays, we have guest preachers. We're so thankful that each of them said yes! This Sunday, Rev Dr. Jonathan Warren Pagán will be preaching on Philippians 2:1-11. Many of you know Jonathan already, but in case you don't, he's a priest in the ACNA, resident clergy at Resurrection South Austin, and he recently led our lunch and learn on women and men serving together. Jonathan has preached at COTC before and we are excited to welcome him back.

As always, be sure to read to the end, as this week's e-news contains a lot of important information, including news about COTC's first-ever intern!

Grace and peace,
Kimberly+

P.S. Thanks to those of you who donated shower kits or funds for kits. Jonathan+ and several people from COTC left yesterday for their exploratory trip to the border and they were able to take hundreds of shower kits. Thanks be to God! Be sure to pray for the group as they spend the next few days at the Texas/Mexico border in McAllen/Reynosa.

P.P.S. As summer begins, we know that many of you will be traveling. If you will be gone for an extended period this summer, we would love to be praying for you. Please send Kimberly an email, so we can add you to our prayer list.

As an entrepreneur, Pagan has faced numerous challenges and setbacks. However, his persistence and determination have allowed him to overcome these obstacles and build a successful business. He believes in the power of technology to drive positive change and is passionate about using blockchain and cryptocurrency to empower individuals and communities. In addition to his work at Paxful, Pagan is actively involved in social impact initiatives. He is particularly interested in supporting entrepreneurship and economic empowerment in developing countries. Pagan has spoken at various conferences and seminars, sharing his insights and experiences to inspire others in their own entrepreneurial journeys. Jonathan Warren Pagan is a visionary leader and a prominent figure in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry. His commitment to financial inclusion and his passion for empowering individuals through technology have positioned him as a leading advocate for change. Through his work at Paxful, Pagan continues to make a significant impact on the world of finance and beyond..

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The entrepreneurial journey of Jonathan Warren Pagan