Dawn of Valor: The Name That Waits
How a dream, a death, and a name collided—and what I’m still learning about timing, obedience, and good passions.
The day that Valor died was the same day that I was supposed to sit down to record the first episode of a long awaited podcast.
I had it penciled in—finally. After months and MONTHS of circling around the idea like a vulture & it’s prey.
I didn’t have a name yet, or even a clear structure. But I had a pull. A deep knowing that I was supposed to begin speaking.
Sharing.
Wrestling out loud with all the things I had been quietly unraveling for the past year.
At this point, I was still very much the face of Mikayla Dawn Photography. I was still shooting weddings, editing galleries, doing business coaching, and making Instagram stories like my life depended on it. (Because well, it kind of did)
But the prior year, 2020- had changed something in me. Not just in the world—but in me. Maybe you felt it too?
Like many of us, that year sent me searching.
For answers.
For meaning under the noise.
It shook my world so hard, that I was forced to face the fact that I had an unreliable, untested, and untrue worldview.
Nothing until that point had ever been big enough to make me look the cracked lens through which I was viewing reality — square in the face.
I had to go find a new lens to look through— and it rattled me when I realized that contrary to what the world told me— truth could be found.
I spent many nights curled in the fetal position on a closet floor (true story) as the dissonance was all consuming and God quietly unraveled me.
As my fourth baby was being knit together in my womb internally, everything externally and familiar began to dissolve.
My illusions of control.
The world's empty comforts or security.
My own strength.
I felt it all slip through my fingers.
So when God dropped the name ‘Valor’ into my mind a few months before I was due— I kept it a secret and knew that it was so much more than a baby’s name.
It was a calling, to a new life.
One that I knew was likely going to take a lot more courage than I currently had, to live out.
I just had no idea what that would entail. Or that it would take the death of Valor, to begin to birth valor within my own heart.
Valor was born In 2021, and when he was 6 months old, after a true unprompted salvific moment in my home, the gospel shattered through it all— and everything and I mean everything came into focus.
It turned out that all the soil shifting the prior year was preparation for this moment. So that the truth would have good soil to finally take root in when I heard it.
The scales came off, and everything in my entire life, the entire world, all of human history, my family, creation, nature, art, everything — made sense in a way it previously hadn’t.
I was wrecked by my sin, cried out in repentance, and the gospel- which I had heard my whole life but never bit into, was there for me to taste it’s sweetness as if it were offered for the very first time.
“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
―C.S. Lewis
Once that moment happened, there was no going back. I could not unsee what I had seen, unhear what I had heard, or be unchanged. God had done an irreversible thing in me.
And thats when it happened, shortly after there started a stirring in me—an insatiable desire to say something.
To be a mouthpiece for my own generation.
I felt this ache, sadness, and passion towards wanting to forsake my old life and do something valiant with the gifts that I had.
I wanted to help others see that Christianity was not only a reasonable worldview— but that it was the only worldview that has history, cosmology, science, archeology, logic, reason and TRUTH on it’s side.
I wanted non-Christians to come to truth, and I wanted lukewarm Christians to be reignited by it.
I wanted to remind people that we can know what we believe, why we believe it and that truth is worth the pursuit.
If I had to put a word to it— it was going to be this apologetic-esque type podcast.
In my mind, I imagined myself being able blend Alisa Childers’ wisdom, Allie Beth Stuckey’s boldness, and Candace Owens’ grit—and letting it rip through a microphone.
So September 23, 2021— I was going to set out on this quest. To start speaking.
That morning I had a voice memo in my DMs from a guy named Kendan—one of those sweet Instagram strangers turned internet friend. He was a believer too, and had noticed something shifting in my content. I told him I’d been thinking about starting a podcast. He encouraged it, and then, that very day, he sent me a name idea, I’ll share that with you now: