My name is Ben Chilcote. I have a wife and 4 kids. I currently engineer happiness for Automattic.
Before that, I worked in full-time Christian ministry for a little more than a decade. I’m an artist, musician and have many other varied and perhaps unusual interests.
Above all, I’ve had a serious relationship with Jesus for most of my life and I continually asking Him how this world – and my life – is supposed to work. In recent years He has opened my eyes to His Kingdom and I have began a journey of life transformation – one that goes against what my culture has taught me.
I feel like God has given me a gift of influence, which I must steward strategically and responsibly. Through my creative projects and blog posts on this website, I hope to share the things that God is teaching and showing me and my family. I trust they will be valuable in building up others who are also seeking a life of obedience under the leadership of Jesus.
Sometimes I think I must be crazy. However, I trust I will find out I am not and that God is faithful. I hope you find value in what I share here.
Family
I’ve been married to Nicole since 2001 and God has given us 4 children, each with their own unique story. After doctors told us our chances of natural conceptions were “nil”, we pursued adoption. We adopted our oldest girl in 2004 and our oldest boy in 2006 through private adoption agencies – both children joining our family at birth. In 2009 we had a little boy who was an unexpected biological miracle. And in 2013, we finalized an adoption of our daughter after a year and a half as her foster parents. We homeschool our children and have plans to explore the world together.
Creative Life
Ever since I can remember I have been pursuing creative expressions through any media I could get my hands on. In my early years, I was very interested in how things were created and often experimented with my creative ideas. Making multi-track recordings with two boom boxes, making my own pop-up books, 3-d anaglyph marker drawings, composing songs on the piano, crafting things with wood, cardboard, junk, and other things. Through my early teen and high school years I took many music and art classes and finally entered college to study film production (the perfect conglomeration of my multimedia interests). Academically, that didn’t pan out but I did get the opportunity to sing professionally for a few years with a Vocal Band before entering into full-time ministry. Whether it’s sound, light, paint, words or ideas you can’t see – I love to create.
Entrepreneurship
In the past 5-6 years I have been discovering that God created me to be an entrepreneur. After trying to resist a number of times, I have given in to pursuing online business, internet marketing, digital publishing, and other cool web stuff. Having consumed hundreds of hours of podcasts and trying my hand at dozens of internet business ideas, I now have a handful of small income streams and more ideas than I have time to pursue. I love WordPress and one of my current projects is helping churches build websites on WordPress which saves them time and dollars while giving them the most powerful web platform there is.
Contact me at benchilcote@gmail.com
How awesome to come across you when I was looking for a song to sign at my daughter’s baptism that is coming up. Our daughter is quite the blessing as well. I was told I would have no more children after my son and we almost gave up and I found out a month before I was going to have surgery, that I was pregnant. God is Good. I wanted to let you know I love your song. It is beautiful. Thank you for writing such a wonderful song.