The handle is ImJustDex. That's not branding. That's the whole point.
I grew up in a house where faith wasn't a side conversation. It was the architecture. Five kids. Two parents who built something from the ground up. A mother whose quiet authority held the family together in ways nobody outside those walls fully understood. A father whose pulpit voice carried further than any of us could have imagined. My parents are Bishop T.D. Jakes and Serita Jakes. I say that early because you'd find out anyway, and I'd rather you hear it from me than read it in a bio someone else wrote.
The Jakes household was loud, layered, and deeply particular. We were preacher's kids, but we were also just kids — competitive, creative, too smart for our own good, and shaped by a family culture that expected excellence without performing it for anyone else's benefit. That house gave me weight and humor in equal measure, sometimes in the same sentence.
I'm the Executive Director of Marketing at The Potter's House of Dallas. I run the department that shapes how the ministry meets the world. Brand, campaigns, digital, creative, strategy. Before that, I studied music production and recording. I have a degree in making things sound right. Turns out that skill transfers. A mix has balance. A campaign has balance. A sentence has balance. I just changed the medium.
This is not a blog. This is a room where everything I care about lives under one roof.
I married Larissa. She's Brazilian, brilliant, and the reason I learned to cook. Everything I know about patience, I learned standing over a dark roux while she lined up my ingredients in small glass bowls like a surgical prep team. She calls it helping. I call it the reason the food is any good.
I study the Bible the way I study everything else. Obsessively. I pull the Greek. I read the commentaries. I sit with the parts that don't resolve. I'm not a theologian. I'm someone who thinks the text is worth the time, and I write about what I find.
This site is where all of that lives. Faith. Music. Food. Work. Marriage. Identity. Grief. Whatever I can't stop thinking about long enough to leave alone. I didn't build this to define who I am or package myself into a label that's convenient for a bio. I built it because I'm a lot of things at once, and none of them cancel each other out. ImJustDex. And all that comes with that just might find a home here.