Zac Johnson · July 15, 2026
One year ago today, I walked out of my law firm’s downtown office and never went back.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous than when I gave my two weeks’ notice to our managing partner. I was a young associate, less than two years into a career I’d spent most of a decade preparing for — seven years of school, two federal clerkships, and finally the job itself, at the kind of firm a lot of lawyers would be glad to spend thirty years inside. And I was leaving it. To build a Catholic app. With a wife and a one-year-old at home.
Almost no one understood it. I’m not sure I could have fully explained it myself, except to say that I believed God was asking for it.
My best friend Jake and I had started Truthly the year before, in 2024, and for a while I built it on nights and weekends. But the more I prayed, the clearer it got that this wasn’t meant to be the thing I did on the side. I was being called to a mission — one that could reach souls, build up the Church, and move the culture toward the good.
And here’s the beautiful thing: I didn’t leave any of my training behind. The writing, the research, the thinking, the problem-solving — every skill I picked up in all those years, I still use now. None of it has been wasted.
It looks like God was trying to teach me that lesson through the calendar. I left on July 15, the feast of St. Bonaventure — the saint who made this exact point. He wrote a short treatise whose title says it all: On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology. He said that every branch of knowledge, every art and skill and discipline, leads back to God, where it finds its deepest meaning. No learning is wasted. All of it, rightly ordered, becomes a way to know and love the One who gave it in the first place.
That’s the whole reason Truthly exists: to help you learn truths of all kinds, from the small questions that pop up throughout the day to the deepest ones about God Himself.
At this point, more than 300,000 people have downloaded Truthly — something I never let myself expect. If you’re just finding us now, welcome. And to everyone who’s made this journey their own: thank you. None of this would exist without you.