As I prepare for the next class of Yeshua School students, I came across this verse below and had to write on the explosive declaration:

This verse is filled with contrast and deliberate incompatibilities. Yeshua does not say the kingdom needs us to “identify and dress like the wolf in order to win the wolf.” No, you do not need to look like John the Baptist with Camel’s hair jeans and a locus bento box, but dressing in the clothing of the ain’t it. You are sheep amidst the wolves; that contrast matters. Survive, but do not become wolf-like to do so, and he never says surrender your sheep-nature.

Yeshua is sending out the sheep deliberately into wolf territory; this means the Christian bubble mentality where we pass around audiences to ourselves and talk within our holy huddles is the schematics. Even the apostles' works of casting out demons and healing the sick were supposed to be AMONG THE WOLVES territory and jurisdiction. Let that blow your mind. Too often we see healing, deliverance, garments of exchange, and prayer as an exclusive Christian display, but he is sending them…you get it.

They have authorization in instruction, message, boundaries, discernment, spirits, and over the body. Wolves survive as the alpha predator through power, fear, and resource gatekeeping. Sheep survive through authority, attentiveness to the Shepherd’s voice, and authority.

The Greek word for “in the midst” is “en mesō” (ἐν μέσῳ), which conveys the idea of being inside the predator's den and system, working their way out with authority from heaven. Think of Yeshua saying,

The temptation is a funny oxymoron, but I feel most live by it. The temptation is for us all to interpret this verse like many have, as we need “Christian wolves,” which is like saying we need “Christian swingers.” There is no such thing.

He then says “be wise” or in the Greek, “keep becoming continually,” prudent, discerning, shrewd, and possessing divine judgment about your actions among them. In street terms, this means “stop showing everyone your cards and wondering why they keep winning the race you are in.”

Yeshua only disclosed himself to two disciples and told them not to tell; he refused to answer certain questions; he perceived what was in man’s heart and ran the other direction.

Then he mentions possessing the discernment of a serpent with the purity of a dove. A serpent without innocence is a manipulator, and a dove without discernment and shrewdness is naive. You see traps but do not set them and guide others around them; you can also understand power but do not worship it and think you need it to advance the kingdom, as your authority is not your resume from earth but Heaven’s. This verse is an artistic marvel.

In Hebrew, there is a word that complements here: “tamim” (תָּמִים), which means blameless and without defect. This means that what you were before entering the “wolf-territory” remains intact after walking through it. Emphasis: as we walk through it, we are not supposed to stay and settle down.

Yeshua is putting them and us on game by showing us how to navigate systems and places capable of destroying us. He says to learn their ways, approaches, and habits better than they expect you to know, but never let that understanding turn you into someone who longs to rule their kingdom; unmake it and establish a new one.

Sometimes you have to let the pen bleed, like Jigga said: “I can’t see it falling down my cheek so I gotta make this song cry.”

With 28 years of ministry, I have lost count of the number of pastors, Christ-following entertainers, and unaliving themselves, leaving their wives, and having affairs while saying, “I have accountability,” never gets old; the grief and deception I see in men who were once sincere but become arrogant and haughty is crushing.

Men have a propensity to lie, deceive themselves, and get crushed by the enemy; it starts sincere, calling their “struggles and burdens” admirable and “not wanting to burden anyone,” when the Scriptures say the exact opposite: “carry one another’s burdens and fulfill the law of Christ.” Men have ego problems, conscious or subconscious, it is true, and don’t want to look weak, wounded, or needy, but that is what we all are. IN NEED OF COMMUNITY, are we not? “The eye cannot say to the hand I have no need of you.” But we say that every time we are asked, "How are you?" The response, “I am good,” is too easy and often, when…NO YOU ARE NOT.

But here is my pain point: the one they never see themselves in; they eventually become that, and all that I have seen are so good with words. BUT SO WAS SATAN YALL. He loves to use the gift of words to become the prison we think we don’t need a visitor or a pardon out of.

Check the story of Abram with Pharaoh’s callout in Genesis 12:18b: “Genesis 12:18

[18] So Pharaoh called Abram and said, “…Why did you not tell me…she IS your wife? (ESV)”

Abram thinks using technical terms of Sarai being his half sister, which is true (same father TERAH, different mother, but this is not that post), absolves him of his lack of declaring the truth to Pharaoh; EXPOSING INFORMATION WITHOUT IT BEING PULLED OUT FELLAS. Who wants to be the FBI?! That is not brotherhood.

For clarity, Pharaoh is not saying, “Why did you not bring this up over the lamb dinner we just had for your trifling self?” more so he IS saying, “Why didn’t you declare to me the knowledge I needed necessary for me to understand what I was doing in bringing this woman into my chambers and going against God?

Read the story in Genesis 12 for the end.

The point is, for over 28 years, men have followed Abram's pattern. They call themselves walking with men, dapping them up, saying they are ‘good’ while carrying burdens, untruths, forms of deception, using words to justify why they do not higgadtā, announce the necessary information to the men they say they are walking with, to keep them and those their lives touch from destruction. This keeps men from having the information they need to know what they should really be doing in prayer, accountability, fasting, and being a true spear and/or shield. Oftentimes it is not the information men want for shame and wrath; the men I know want to be real brothers to keep said person from destruction, and when you do not higgadtā, then your brother cannot be a brother, more so a spiritual acquaintance.

So many men get hurt thinking “I had no idea” when the moral failures happen, deaths happen, and bottoms fall out. I have seen a good bit over the last 28 years, and the truth is, men do not know how to announce when they are not okay, why, because they allow the enemy to use their gift of words and reasoning against them just like the Nāḥāš (the shining, brilliant, snake one) did to Adam and Eve. You want to be free from the enemy's grasp and self-deception; announce where you are before the check engine light comes on. A brother cannot be a brother if you play the war of words in your head. Satan loves it when we think we are more deceptive than the Father of Lies.

To quote the Odyssey, “you can't save people from themselves.” The older I get, I'm starting to ask, “Can Yeshua save people from themselves when they don't want him?”… just because you preach and write about him doesn't mean your heart loves and knows him.

Y'all pray for my son please, he's not well.

I am stunned by what did in uncovering the story of Yosef using historical findings (receipts), Hebrew, and the pastoral admonition “They traded the tent of Abraham for the palace of Avarice (Avaris)” in his Youtube breakdown about Yosef. Hallelujah, what a true word. The people of God were only supposed to be in Egypt for a maximum of 14 years: 7 for the good years and 7 for the famine; then they were supposed to move on (Genesis 41:20-30). They fell in love with the idols and names of Egypt (read Ezekiel 20:7-35) and stayed in the Land due to rebellion.

The point is not to give a lesson and a connection to every bible passage that speaks to the commentary on why and how the people of Yis’rael got stuck in Egypt due to their greed and fascination with Egypt, but to speak to THIS IMPORTANT COMMENT:

This comment sums up the war in our hearts for identity, glory, provision, and generational legacy until we die.

From the promise of YHWH ELOHIM to Abram: if you leave your legacy of culture, blood, land inheritance, and ways of acquiring a future bloodline, I will make your name great, I will give you my name, I will give you a seed. Genesis 12:1-2. All these promises decentered Abram’s ethnicity, what he stands to inherit for his kids, kids, kids, kids. This promise decenters him and calls him away from a customs- and bloodline-based approach to the future (no prefaces or qualifiers).

YHWH ELOHIM says I will give you all these elements, but it will not be tied into anything you know: being established, settling down, not moving, and making a central empire. You must move, live in tents, and a land I will show you, and what happened? “They traded the tent of Abraham for the palace of Avarice (Avaris) .”

THE TRUTH WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR

YALL, we are never supposed to settle down, from the first command to be fruitful and multiply and FILL the earth, Genesis chapter 1, to the tower of Babel where in the Hebrew they refused to “..lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” as a rebellion response to the Genesis 1 mandate found in Genesis 11. They created one land, central hub, and approach to doing life.

The point is: if we are of the seed of Abraham, if we come through Yeshua, who points to the God of Abraham, who instituted our call, “never settle in a place and be a stranger and alien in a land until you return home.” We are never called nor appointed to be in a palace, but to embrace the tent. Hebrews 11 hall of faith says, “all of them died having received their promise from afar as they realized they were strangers and aliens in a foreign land.” Our purpose is never to get out of the tent, but to see and reject the temptation to live in the palace of Avarice (Avaris) .

This is a great temptation that has run from Abram to Yeshua to the churches in Revelation. What is wild about this thought is “Israel took multiple trips down to Egypt before the 70 moved down during the great famine under Joseph; they took multiple trips and never stayed. But there was something about the greed and societal allure of Egypt during this time under Yosef that they didn't stay; they settled, and according to Ezekiel's prophetic account, refused to leave.

I leave you without a bow on this gift of a write-up, if you will, with a question: “Are you trading the tent of Abraham, the call of YHWH ELOHIM to fill the earth, for the continued acquisition, greed, and insatiable appetite to settle in the palace of Avarice (Avaris) ?” To my prophetic eyes, it seems like the “neo-Christian” way: promote greed, just make sure you give God the credit when they ask you.

There are moments when a society consistently reveals the value of life, black life and authors like myself string the centuries together of revelation together for a time like this.

Sometimes they arrive in the wake of national tragedies that dominate every headline and command every camera. At other times they unfold quietly, almost unnoticed, in the life of one family whose world has come to a standstill while everyone else’s continues moving. Airplanes still take off. Restaurants remain full. Children laugh in neighborhood parks. Pastor’s build brands. False prophets give words. Social media fills with vacation photos and weekend celebrations. Hiphop artist drop albums asking you to purchase. The machinery of ordinary life hums along with astonishing efficiency while somewhere a black mother stares at her phone, praying that the next call will bring the answer she has been pleading for since her son disappeared. Or a text, “I’m good mom.”

But instead this mother, in the historic millions of others, gets the cold too familiar response that squeezes the silent of unanswered texts around her throat “we don’t know where he is.”

like Cain, YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHERE YOUR FRIEND (BROTHER) NOLAN IS?!?

That is why I cannot stop thinking about Nolan Xavier Wells.

Whatever the final outcome of his story, one truth already confronts us. A family is living inside unanswered questions while the rest of us possess the luxury of returning to normal. There is a unique anguish in not knowing. Grief, as painful as it is, eventually finds a place to rest. Uncertainty offers no such mercy. It suspends a family between hope and despair, forcing them to wake each morning into the same unanswered question they carried to bed the night before. Where is my son? And is black life that cheap that no one cares to reveal the answer but instead be like Cain and play the self-seeking absent minded fool?

What has troubled me even more than the headlines is how quickly those headlines fade. I cannot ignore the uncomfortable reality that when the missing face belongs to a young Black man, our collective attention often proves painfully short-lived. We repost a photograph. We offer a prayer. We promise to stay aware. Then another story arrives, another controversy fills our screens, and a family that has not moved an inch in their suffering watches the rest of us quietly move on.

Again, a Black mother does not receive her child home, another Black family waits.

Again, uncertainty becomes another family’s burden to carry while the rest of us return to our routines.

That should disturb every one of us. EVERY TIME!!!

Black history in America has been marked not only by death, but by absence and coverup. Families waited for fathers taken into slavery who never returned. Mothers searched for children sold away from them. Millions deceased in the sea during the middle passage. Communities endured lynchings, disappearances, and racial terror that left generations asking questions no one seemed eager to answer. Even today, too many Black families over the centuries know what it means to wait while the broader culture, slowly shifts its attention elsewhere with a criminal coverup of “I don’t know.”

Yet I cannot help but wonder if our grief remains far too small because our vision of human life has become far too small.

We have trained ourselves to count lives one at a time.

Scripture rarely does.

Long before I ever noticed it in the Semitic Hebrew, I sensed that something about God’s response to Cain carried a weight larger than the murder of one man. If Abel’s death were only the ending of a single biography, the tragedy would already be immeasurable. But the biblical story has never viewed humanity as isolated individuals moving through history. From Genesis onward, God speaks in the language of seed, descendants, inheritance, covenant, and generations. Human beings are never merely themselves. They are mothers and fathers who turn into potential 16x grandparents of futures they may never live to see. They are the beginning of family trees whose shade they will never sit beneath.

That is why I believe our outrage should reach beyond the disappearance or death of one image-bearer. Every act of violence strikes at a future known to God. It threatens children yet unborn, testimonies yet untold, families yet unformed, and generations that may never have the opportunity to do what Genesis says Seth’s line eventually did: to call upon the Name of the Lord.

Perhaps this is why, when God confronts Cain, He does not speak of Abel’s blood in the singular. The Semitic Hebrew text uses the plural—“the voice of your brother’s bloods cries out to Me from the ground.”

קוֹל דְּמֵי אָחִיךָ

qōl dᵉmê ʾāḥîḵā

It is a haunting phrase. It communicates loudly that what cries out to heaven is not only the life that has been taken, but the lives that would have flowed from it. Abel’s blood is not alone in the soil. It carries within it generations that will never be born, prayers that will never be prayed, worship that will never rise, the Messiah that will never come. And too often this is the case for black folks and yet again in 2026.

If that is true, then every act of violence is heavier than we have allowed ourselves to imagine. It is more than a life that is lost, but a lineage that is silenced; futures cut off before a legacy unto YHWH ever has the chance to unfold.

And perhaps this is why, when God later reveals His covenant heart in Deuteronomy 5:10, His faithfulness is described in generational terms, extending to “thousands or a thousand generations” of those who love Him and keep His commandments. Whether translated “to the thousandth generation” or “to thousands,” the point is unmistakable. God delights in blessing that outlives us. His covenant purposes are measured not merely in years but in generations and so is the blood of an individual.

If that is how heaven measures covenant faithfulness, then perhaps heaven also measures covenant violence differently than we do.

Perhaps the disappearance of one son is never only about one son but the potential of 1000 generations halted.

I’m certain now the murder of one brother is never only about one brother.

Perhaps every image-bearer carries within them generations that heaven already sees—generations who might one day look back with gratitude toward the ancestor who first taught them to call upon the Name of the Lord.

When that life is violently interrupted, something larger than a heartbeat is lost. Future descendants are erased and testimonies of the blood of Yeshua are silenced.

And the grief that follows is not confined to the present moment. It stretches forward into generations that will never experience the covenant blessings God delights to give. It is the sorrow of Deuteronomy 5:10 cut short; the grief of thousands who will never exist to love Him, to keep YHWH ELOHIM’s commandments, or to receive the mercy He longs to extend.

That is why I cannot look at Nolan Wells merely as another missing person’s case.

He is someone’s son, brother, created in the image of God.

His absence diminishes all of us as he will never be an ancestor of children, grandchildren, great, great, great, great and beyond.

If Genesis teaches us anything, it is that heaven refuses to normalize missing brothers. God asks the question that every generation must answer anew: “Where is your brother?”

The haunting reality is that Cain’s response still echoes through our culture. We distance ourselves from one another’s pain whom we once walked along side of. We convince ourselves that concern belongs to someone else. We mistake awareness for responsibility and sympathy for action.

But Scripture will not allow us that escape.

The first question God asks after the first murder was never intended for Cain alone.

It was intended for us.

It confronts every church that grows comfortable while its community suffers, every neighborhood that learns to coexist with violence that continues to erase “bloods” and every society that can return to business as usual while another family lives suspended between hope and heartbreak.

The answer God seeks has never been found in excuses.

It is found in lives that refuse to abandon one another. Who take pride in being the “keeper of your brother vs hiding behind I don’t know”

Yes, we are our brother’s keepers, not because we can solve every tragedy, or we possess every answer; but because love refuses the luxury of indifference.

So until Nolan Wells is found, his family should not have to carry this burden alone.

Until every missing child is accounted for, the Church should remain restless.

Until every grieving mother knows that her pain has become our pain, we have not yet answered Cain’s question faithfully.

Genesis does not permit us to ask whether our brother is our responsibility.

It assumes he is.

The only question left is whether we will answer differently than Cain did or will the ground, trees, oceans, and rivers prove to be a better voice and witness than the assigned keepers of humanity and all of this realm.

As I stand, taking my son and his friends through one-on-one drills with NBA champion Justin Holiday and 3-point shooting legend Kyle Korver, I look at them and other kids being trained as they move through drills on euro-steps, jump-stops, and pound dribbles, Carmelo jab-step-foot work, and it hits me: this is why!!!🤯🤯🤯🤯😮😮😮😮😮.

Born in the 80s, all of us trainers and players couldn’t go learn a move from YOUTUBE or being told; we couldn’t use someone's mixtape or pay for insight. You know what we had to do? PLAY THE GAME, AND TAKE THE JOURNEY. We learned the crossover by being crossed over. We learned the in-and-out move by trying it one way, then having the defender jump it and react quickly.

Real trainers and players don’t teach predicting the game; we teach falling in love with the journey as a teacher, counselor, comfort, and guide. Teaching the answers cuts open the preverbal cocoon.

The crisis convinced parents, pastors, and pundits to tell the audience the answer rather than how to love the journey.

The Crisis, back to the gym, this is why no one is original, and self-esteem is at an all-time low, we don’t encourage “collective uniqueness” (term mine), we encourage, really shove, results-based sameness down kids' throats from sports, education, to the very life they live. I’m always telling my son in the gym, "You are a funny, trolling-type kid, and yet you play basketball so stiff." But could it be that he’s being shown moves rather than the journey of the sport and life?

YHWH ELOHIM (term for a personal, unique creator God) made such a “collective unique” realm we live in, the birds aren’t the same, similar in grouping, but no life shares the EXACT DNA code. I LOVE THAT GOD DID THIS. The oceans and even the waters themselves are not the same, yet we have a crisis of telling boys, girls, and adults the lie that sameness is the trophy, vs living the full uniqueness that YHWH ELOHIM crowned you with amongst the collective whole, which is the “well done,” not earthly assimilated success.

As a bowhunter, you find yourself in the hunt, not the kill. In sleepless nights, lying army-style, looking through a scope, wearing a gillie suit, with a compound bow ready, in the rain, sometimes 10 degrees, you find who you are in the elements. Teach the journey as the joy, not outcomes, teach them to love the strain, or we will continue raising crisis kids who refuse to play the game of life themselves and grow by figuring it out because they’ve been taught moves, not finding joy in finding their “collective uniqueness” through the joyful strain of becoming in the journey.

I’m an ’80s baby, which means my parents had a very clear grid for life. Get good grades. Stay out of trouble. Don’t get any girl pregnant. Love the Lord. You’ll be set. That was the framework. And to be fair, it worked in producing people who could function, who could survive, who could build something that resembled stability. But there was a massive, gaping hole in the middle of it that no one named, no one taught, and no one seemed to notice until it started costing us something we couldn’t get back.

Emotional health.

I didn’t learn what that was. Not as a category, not as a discipline, not as a responsibility. No one told me that ADONAI cares deeply about the inner world—about the לֵב (lev)…the innermost chamber of a person, the place where desires are formed, fears hide, identity is forged, and communion with Him actually happens. Not behavior modification, not external performance management, but the lev. So I did what most of us did. I grew up, carried that same blueprint into adulthood, got married, had children, and assumed that if I reproduced the outcomes, I would reproduce the health.

Good grades. No major mistakes. Love God. They’ll be fine.

But somewhere along the way, a realization crept in that I couldn’t ignore. When my father left when I was eleven, I told myself a story: just don’t leave, and you’ll be a good parent. Just be present. Stay in the house. Don’t abandon your family physically, and you’ve done the job.

And it’s more violent than we want to admit, because it hides behind success. Your oldest daughter will have straight As and still break down, along with her other friends who look just like her on paper, because they are not being seen. That realization didn’t come to me as information; it came as conviction. It forced repentance. It raised a question I could not shake: what am I actually building if my main energy is not directed toward my greatest inheritance, my children?

You can sit at the table, show up to the games, fund the life, pray the prayers, open the Scriptures, and still be nowhere to be found where it matters most. Not toward my mother specifically, but in general, I began to see it everywhere…men and women who never left, but who were emotionally gone. A whole generation that mastered presence in body but not in being.

We show up to everything. We don’t miss events. We celebrate everything—birthdays, graduations, recitals, small wins, big wins. We provide at levels our parents could only dream of. We open the Word. We talk about calling. On the surface, it looks like we are crushing parenting. But underneath that surface, there is an anemia we don’t want to name, because we have equated visible results with internal health. If my kid is performing, they must be okay. If they are not acting out, they must be fine. If they are achieving, they must be thriving. And yet, the data…and more importantly, the quiet confessions, tell a completely different story.

In GIRLS®, Freya India points out that one in three teenage girls has seriously considered or attempted suicide. Not the ones we label as troubled. The ones smiling. The ones getting straight As. The ones we brag about. Which means something is deeply off in how we are measuring success.

Most of us are parenting out of reaction, not revelation. We are giving our kids what we did not have instead of asking what a human actually needs to be whole before ADONAI. Those are not the same thing. Giving them opportunities, stability, access, and comfort may soothe something in us, but it does not necessarily form something in them.

ADONAI was never unclear about what matters. “Children are a heritage from the Lord” (Psalm 127:3). Not your career, not your status, not your ability to provide a lifestyle. The children themselves. Which means the thing we often treat as secondary is actually primary, and the things we center our lives around are often the distractions we have baptized as responsibility.

We are trying to give our kids the childhood we did not have, the security we did not feel, the access we were denied, and we call the stress it produces sacrifice. Meanwhile, our kids are not asking for more. They are asking for us. Not the curated version, not the exhausted version scrolling to decompress, but the present, attentive, listening version. They want our face, and if we are honest, our phones get more of that than they do.

I remember living in Ramallah, Palestine, playing basketball there for three months back in 2000. When everything escalated recently, I reached out to a friend of mine, a Green Beret, and asked if there was any way to get in. I wanted to document what was happening. He checked with his people and came back with a simple answer: no. He said it was a 360-degree danger situation…a threat from every angle. Walking into it would be a suicide mission.

That phrase has been sitting with me.

Because our children are living in a 360 emotional assault every single day. It is relentless. Identity confusion, sexual pressure, comparison loops, isolation masked as connection, performance culture, anxiety that hums under everything, and a culture that disciples them faster than we do. And if we do not show up in their inner world, something else will.

Something will sit with them in the quiet. Something will listen. Something will answer. And sometimes that something is not neutral. Sometimes it is that quiet, calculating presence that studies your child with more patience than you have given them, waits until the house is full but no one is present, and then begins to make its case. Death does not always scream; sometimes it whispers, sometimes it watches, sometimes it becomes the only voice that seems to understand.

That is the 360.

And we think a quick prayer, a Bible verse, and good grades will shield them from that, while we remain absent from the actual war.

At some point, we have to tell the truth. We are becoming emotionally absent parents. Deadbeat is a strong word, but if provision replaces presence, and performance replaces connection, and we are more attuned to the lives of strangers online than the emotional state of our own children, then the word fits more than we want it to.

We do not need more guilt. We need repentance and realignment.

And here is where we stop softening it.

They will eventually see it for what it is. They will feel that you are unsafe…not because you harm them, but because you do not see them, and they will quietly long for the day they can be free from someone who thinks things warm the soul.

The change is not complicated, but it is costly. It starts with shutting off the noise, not symbolically but actually creating space where your child does not have to compete with your phone, your work, or your exhaustion for your attention. It looks like carving out time that is not about correction or performance but about curiosity. It requires learning how to ask questions that go beneath behavior and into the lev, learning language for emotions you were never taught so you can help name what they are experiencing instead of dismissing it.

It means becoming a student again, reading, listening, paying attention, not so you can become an expert but so you can become available. It means scheduling emotional presence the same way you schedule work, because if you do not, it will always get the leftovers.

It means repenting in a very practical way, telling your child, “I have not been seeing you. Not really. And I am changing that.” That kind of humility rebuilds trust faster than control ever will.

It also forces us to reconsider what we think obedience to God even looks like in this context. Yeshua says He only does what He sees His Father doing. That is not just obedience language; it is relational proximity. It is attention. It is a Son whose gaze is locked in, and it implies a Father whose gaze is just as locked in on Him. Nothing could pull Him out of that.

So the question shifts. It may be less about our kids needing to listen to us more and more about whether we have created a life where they are actually heard. That begins with us learning to listen to the Father again, not for sermons or platforms but for how to steward the lev entrusted to us, and then creating space daily to listen to them in a way that tells the truth about their value.

We do not fix this with a new parenting strategy or a clever hack. We fix it with repentance, with attention, with presence that costs us something. Because the inheritance we are meant to give our children is not primarily what we can build for them, but how we behold them.

And it is not too late to turn back toward them and answer the question they have been asking all along…with your life, not just your words.

Does anyone see the inner core of me and what I need?

Appendix: Six Considerations for Those Who Know This Is Hitting Home

1. Your child’s behavior is rarely the real story.
   What you correct externally is often a symptom, not the root. A shutdown, an outburst, a lack of motivation, even overachievement—these are often signals coming from the lev, not problems to be managed but messages to be understood. If you only address behavior, you will miss the soul of your child while thinking you are helping them.

2. Silence does not mean peace.
   Just because your house is not loud does not mean it is healthy. Many children learn very early that expressing what they feel either burdens their parents or gets dismissed, so they adapt. They become agreeable, high-functioning, low-maintenance. And in that adaptation, they disappear. Do not confuse a quiet child with a whole one.

3. Performance can hide pain better than rebellion.
   The child who is excelling can be harder to see than the one who is acting out. Achievement becomes camouflage. You celebrate what is killing them slowly because it looks like success. If you only move toward your child when something is wrong, you will miss the one who has learned how to suffer well.

4. If you don’t create space, something else will fill it.
   The lev does not remain empty. It will be discipled. If you are not present, attentive, and engaged, your child will find formation elsewhere—in peers, in the algorithm, in culture, or in darker places that do not announce themselves upfront. Absence is not neutral; it is an open door.

5. Your healing is not separate from your parenting.
   The work you avoid in your own story will leak into how you raise your children. What you have not named, processed, or surrendered will shape what you normalize, what you ignore, and what you cannot tolerate in them. You do not have to be perfect, but you do have to be honest. Your ceiling of awareness becomes their ceiling of freedom.

6. Presence is the inheritance they will remember.
   Years from now, your children will not primarily measure your love by what you provided, but by whether they felt known. Not managed, not evaluated, not coached into outcomes, but seen. The moments where you slowed down, listened, asked, stayed, and did not rush them to a conclusion—those moments form something in the lev that no amount of success can replace.

Let’s begin

Therefore, I say to you: pray for those who curse you and bless those who humiliate you in public, in business, in front of friends, and everywhere else, and you will be called children of the Most High. For His rain falls on the just and the unjust, on those who acknowledge Him and those who curse His name. You go therefore and do likewise.

The mark of kindness is not revealed when life is easy, when the room agrees with you, when your business is up, your friends are loyal, your marriage is warm, your ministry is praised, and nobody is poking the wound in your unhealed trauma and ego. Anybody can be pleasant when things are going their way. Yeshua says as much.

“Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you” (Luke 6:27–28). “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them” (Luke 6:32). “Love your enemies, and do good… and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil” (Luke 6:35). That last line should make all of us sit down somewhere; IN ALL THE SEATS. He is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. Not soft on evil. Not blind to evil. Kind in the presence of it.

Not discerning, courageous, or holy. Unkind.

The age we live in has taught us to make a sacrament out of self-protection. We have taken fragments of wisdom about boundaries, justice, accountability, safety, and consequence, and turned them into permission slips for lovelessness.

Now, to be clear, I am not advocating passivity, spinelessness, or pretending evil is not evil. God has judgment for crimes committed. Scripture is not confused about that. Human societies need courts, consequences, protection for the vulnerable, and real justice. Romans 13 does not imagine a world with no sword at all, and the prophets certainly did not preach a God who shrugs at oppression.

You can seek justice with a heart clothed in peace, or you can seek the same outcome with blood in your mouth. You can confront to heal, or confront to humiliate. You can name evil while remembering the offender is still made in the image of God, or you can weaponize their failure to annihilate them. You can desire repentance, truth, repair, and appropriate consequence, or you can secretly enjoy finally having a moral reason to ruin somebody. Those are not the same thing.

“Let the shalom of Christ be your heart’s decision maker” (Colossians 3:15). Earlier in verse 12, it says CLOTHE your heart with feelings of compassion with kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. This goes beyond your worship set and prayer closet. We should see this flood into your decisions, reactions, sentences, emails, comments, process, divorce proceedings, staffing decisions, your response to betrayal, church split, correction of a child, rebuke of a brother, and your exposure of corruption.

This is why the New Testament keeps saying the same thing in a hundred ways, because apparently, we are slow learners when our pride has been bruised, and unhealed wounds are touched.

“Outdo one another in showing honor” (Romans 12:10). “Owe no one anything, except to love each other” (Romans 13:8). “Love is patient and kind… it is not irritable or resentful” (1 Corinthians 13:4–5). That phrase “resentful” is even stronger than most of us let it be.

“A soft answer turns away wrath” (Proverbs 15:1). “A gentle tongue can break a bone” (Proverbs 25:15). “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone… correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance… after being captured by him to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:24–26). That is stunning. Even while correcting, the assumption is that the person is ensnared, captured, bound up. So the posture of the servant of God is not savage delight but gentle rescue. Firmness, yes. Clarity, yes. Kindness, still yes.

Why?

Because Romans 2 is more about us than we would like to admit. “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself” (Romans 2:1). Then Paul says something we quote at other people but rarely let stab us: “Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?” (Romans 2:4). Not ADONAI’S theatrics, public dragging, and humiliating thread; but his kindness, patience, restraint, refusal to crush you when He had every right.

And then Paul turns the knife: your hard and impenitent heart is storing up wrath for yourself (Romans 2:5). In other words, harshness toward others often exposes a heart that has never actually been melted by the mercy it claims to believe in.

Some people obey Christ the way a dog wears a shock collar. They are technically staying within the perimeter, but they hate the fence. They do not actually love holiness. They resent it. They do not see purity as beautiful. They see it as deprivation. They do not see faithfulness as joyful participation in the life of God. They see it as losing out. They do not see restraint as love. They see it as cosmic frustration management. So when someone else falls, they do not move toward them with tears and towels. They move toward them with the rage of a person who feels they have denied themselves everything and now want somebody else to pay for making their own misery visible.

That is why there are so many “unkind Christians.” Most are not joyful in holiness; they hold envy in a church outfit, resentment with a concordance. It is a person whose deepest passions are not actually healed, only fenced. Christ is not their treasure. He is their governor.

They want to sleep around. They want to be greedy. They want to indulge power. They want the private jet at the expense of the poor. They want image without surrender, status without sacrifice, platform without purity. So when someone stumbles, they do not restore them in a spirit of gentleness.

Paul says, “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness” (Galatians 6:1). Restore him. Do not vaporize him. Don’t turn his failure into your brand.

Do not use his fall to advertise your superior discipline. Restore him. And watch yourself, Paul says, lest you too be tempted. Why? Because the spiritual person is not the one with the sharpest rebuke. The spiritual person is the one who is still aware of how much mercy they require to stand upright for five minutes.

And let me say this plainly of myself because I do not want to write as if I am above the article. I love being faithful. I love being honest. I love being sober. I love being centered in the Lord. Even if they found Yeshua's bones tomorrow, I would not change. Why? Because there is an imago Dei holiness in restraint found in characters like Job (whom I take literally). There is something deeply human, deeply beautiful, deeply God-like in not taking what you could take for yourself and leaving it for others, BOAZ. There is glory in refusing to devour. There is power in self-government given to us before the fall, and it was not completely eradicated; see Adonai’s appeal to Cain. There is freedom in not being dragged around by appetite. Yeshua brings clarity and power to the why, yes, but even at the level of creation, there is a holiness in not consuming your neighbor, using a body, exploiting a weakness, hoarding what was meant to circulate, not feeding your momentary hunger at somebody else’s long-term expense. “Be holy, for I am holy” runs deeper than a religious scorecard (1 Peter 1:15–16). It is about becoming the kind of person who can be trusted with power.

And power matters. Purity matters. Not because God is prudish, but because indulgence deforms the vessel. There are people you may one day need to heal, carry, restore, deliver, protect, disciple, and strengthen. Your appetites are not private when they blunt your authority. Your bitterness is not private when it curdles your discernment. Your lack of restraint is not private when it empties your words of weight. Another post for another day on healing, deliverance, and why purity matters. But it is connected.

So how do we fix this?

We repent not simply by acknowledging it, but by teshuvah, turning back to Adonai.

Not the flimsy repentance that says, I’m sorry you were offended by how hard I ride for truth. I mean the kind of repentance that admits I have enjoyed my harshness. I have confused sharpness with strength. I have hidden cruelty under discernment. I have made a home in offense. I have nursed memories God told me to release. I have loved being right more than I have loved being redemptive. I have corrected people from irritation, not tears. I have wanted justice without mercy because mercy feels too costly when I still worship myself.

We need the kind of repentance that asks God to do surgery beneath behavior. “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10). Because this is a heart issue. Yeshua said, “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matthew 12:34).

Plenty of people can parse Greek and leave bodies behind them. Plenty of people can preach holiness and make everyone in their orbit feel like the cross did not actually happen.

And the change would alter the world.

Imagine leaders who could confront sin without enjoying exposure. Imagine online Christians who did not react like feral tribes every time they smelled weakness. Imagine communities where the first instinct when someone faltered was not, How could you? but, I am with you to restore. Imagine if “speaking the truth in love” actually meant both halves of the sentence (Ephesians 4:15). Imagine if our social feeds looked like people who had genuinely been forgiven much and therefore loved much (Luke 7:47). Imagine if the watching world saw a people incapable of being bullied into hatred.

That would preach, actually look like another Kingdom, and would make the world ask what kind of God creates humans who can be wounded and still not worship vengeance.

Because that is the miracle, isn’t it? Not that Christians can be kind when complimented, quote love passages at weddings, or post “grace and truth” in our bios. The miracle is that a human being can be betrayed, exposed, lied on, cheated, robbed, misunderstood, maligned, and still respond in a way that smells like heaven and shows we are smothered in Yeshua’s dust.

“Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). “Put on then… compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Colossians 3:12). Put it on. Clothe yourself in it. Not when it is deserved. When it is costly.

That is the truth beneath the truth.

So yes, repent. Repent not just of obvious sins, but of enjoying lovelessness. Repent of the thrill of moral superiority. Repent of secret resentment toward holiness itself. Repent of acting like the cross saved you but did not make you gentle. Repent of wanting consequences for others more than restoration for them.

Then receive God's kindness again.

Let it offend your pride. Let it expose how much patience He has had with your contradictions. Let it dismantle the version of you that only knows how to be warm when adored. Let it make you softer without making you weaker. Let it teach your nervous system that peace is not passivity and gentleness is not cowardice. Let it show you how to stand firm without becoming cruel. Let it train you to correct with tears in your eyes and steel in your spine.

Then when people falter, do not think, How could you?

Say, I am with you to restore.

Those are the children of the Most High and the true followers of Yeshua, packed in his dust.

There was a vision I had last night, early this morning really, that would not leave me alone.

It was grotesque.

Faces stretched beyond proportion. Eyes swollen with demand. Mouths hanging open in a kind of ungoverned madness. Tables loaded with excess. Rage in the presence of abundance. Human beings no longer looking fully human, but distorted by appetite—warped by craving, inflamed by wanting, reduced by indulgence.

So I used Midjourney to bring the vision into an image.

And what came back felt less like fantasy and more like a diagnosis.

Not just a diagnosis of gluttony, food, but a diagnosis of modern man.

“Therefore, since the Messiah suffered physically, you too are to arm yourselves with the same attitude. For whoever has suffered physically is finished with sin, with the result that he lives the rest of his earthly life no longer controlled by human desires, but by God’s will.”
— 1 Peter 4:1–2

There it is.

Two ways to live…Two governing powers…Two inner worlds.

That is not a small distinction. That is the line between sanity and madness.

Appetite is a terrible master

Peter is not merely giving moral instruction here. He is drawing a war map.

“Arm yourselves with the same attitude.”

That is military language. Violent language. Prepared language. This is not Peter telling you to try harder and be nice. This is Peter telling believers to take up the mind of a suffering Messiah like a weapon. Why? Because the flesh, the age, and the entire social order of fallen humanity are trying to recruit your appetites away from God (Ephesians 5:16).

That means the fight is not just about what you do.
It is about what rules you.

Human desires are not presented as innocent impulses needing gentle management. In this passage, they are rival governors. Rival masters. Rival formations of life. Peter is telling us plainly that if you do not arm yourself, you will be ruled. If you do not suffer with Christ, you will drift with the world. If you do not let the soul be fortified, the appetite will take the throne.

And once appetite takes the throne, distortion begins.

That is what I saw in the vision.

Not hunger alone, desire alone, but desire out of rank. Desire without government. Desire grown too large for the soul that houses it.

We are not merely living in a sinful age

We are living in an age of swollen appetites

Peter says:

“For you have spent enough time already living the way the pagans want you to live…”

Enough.

That word alone preaches.

Enough living driven by lust, platforms, and being seen.
Enough living driven by flood-like indulgence.
Enough giving the body, the mood, the urge, the impulse, the craving, the microphone.
Enough baptizing ungoverned desire as personality, freedom, self-expression, healing, or culture.

Enough.

Peter lists debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, wild parties, and forbidden idol-worship. We read that list, and modern people often imagine only the most obvious ancient excesses. But Peter’s point is deeper than the list. The list is showing a pattern: life organized around appetite.

That is the real indictment.

That is us. AND OUR PRESIDENT LEADS THE WAY with a deformed appetite to be Yeshua himself, careful, the Lord is not lenient with proclaiming yourself equal to God, as Nebuchadnezzar, Assyrian king, Pharaoh, and the leader in Acts who donned the gold robe all suffered great consequences.

I digress.

We have built an entire civilization around the expansion of desire and the weakening of restraint. Every algorithm studies appetite. Every platform monetizes appetite. Every ad disciples appetite. Every luxury economy feeds appetite. Every pornographic impulse of the age—sexual, emotional, political, economic, spiritual—depends on one thing: that desire remains uncrucified and ungoverned.

So yes, Peter is ancient.

But he is staring directly at us.

The flood is still here

Peter says they think it strange that you do not “plunge with them into the same flood of dissoluteness.”

That image is terrifying.

A flood.

Not a puddle.
Not a mistake.
Not an occasional stumble.

A flood is overwhelming. A flood normalizes chaos. A flood carries things away. A flood makes resistance feel unnatural. A flood punishes whatever refuses to move with it.

That is exactly what this age feels like.

A flood of porn, food addiction, indulgence, and self-worship is everywhere cloaked as “your time.” A flood of drunkenness, endless stimulation, ego inflation, vanity, outrage, lust, and curated excess.

And Peter says something stunning: the world finds it strange when you do not join it.

That means holiness now looks weird to the insane.

Why?

Because a person who refuses the flood is a rebuke to everyone drowning in it.

This is what I think the vision was showing me

The grotesque faces were not random surrealism. They were revelations.

What happens when a civilization spends too long plunging into the flood?

The human form starts telling on the soul.

Eyes enlarge with demand.
Mouths widen with craving.
Features distort with entitlement.
Presence becomes frantic.
The table is full, yet there is no peace.
The plate is loaded, yet there is still rage.
Provision is present, yet gratitude is absent.

That is spiritual grotesquery.

Not because the body itself is evil.
But because the body becomes the billboard for what is ruling within.

Peter’s language is not cosmetic. It is governmental. Controlled by human desires, or governed by God’s will. Those are the options. And when a person lives too long under the government of appetite, he begins to lose his human proportion.

That is why I keep coming back to this sentence:

Our capacities for wanting have expanded.
Our capacities for restraint have shrunk.
Our capacities for consumption have multiplied.
Our capacities for communion have thinned.

We have become people of enlarged mouths and diminished interiors.

Mad.

Less than animals

I know that sounds severe, but I mean it carefully.

Animals can be wild, but they are not usually decadent. They do not build systems to endlessly inflame instinct. They do not create economies around engineered dissatisfaction. They do not monetize lust, mass-produce vanity, industrialize distraction, and then call all of it progress.

Humans do that.

Not mere weakness.
Not mere temptation.
A disciplined rebellion against limits.

The world calls that freedom. Peter calls it the old life. The wasted years. The pagan flood. The reign of human desires.

And he says, in effect: you have spent enough time there already.

Messiah suffered physically, and that matters more than we think

Peter does not begin with behavior modification. He begins with Messiah suffering physically.

Why?

Because suffering in the flesh breaks the illusion that immediate appetite must always be obeyed. Messiah did not live governed by impulse. He did not live governed by relief. He did not live governed by the avoidance of pain. He submitted flesh to the will of God even when obedience cost him physically.

That is why Peter says to arm yourselves with the same attitude.

To suffer and not sin.
To ache and not grab.
To long and not plunge.
To be insulted and not return to the flood.
To be misunderstood and still obey.
To let desire remain a servant rather than become a sovereign.

That is freedom.

Real freedom is not getting whatever the flesh wants.
Real freedom is the soul becoming so anchored in God that desire (idols) no longer dictates identity.

That line should shake us. IT IS A PROMISE, NOT A SUGGESTION. This kills false interpretations of white flag waving, thorn in the flesh, men’s groups.

Because most of modern society is built on the exact opposite promise: live the rest of your earthly life controlled by human desires and call that authenticity.

Peter says no. That is not authenticity. That is bondage with good branding.

The insult is part of the proof

One of the most validating things in the passage is that Peter expects mockery.

If you refuse the flood, the flood will talk.
If you refuse the plunge, the plungers will react.
If you stop calling indulgence freedom, people intoxicated by it will name you the problem.

That is not failure. That is confirmation.

And because they cannot easily name what troubles them, they often heap insults.

Peter says: let them.

They still have to give an account.

That is part of the sobriety of this passage. This is not just lifestyle commentary. This is judgment language. The living and the dead will answer. Which means appetite is not trivial. Indulgence is not morally cute. The flood is not harmless entertainment. There is a Judge standing ready.

Which means this vision was not merely artistic.

It was warning.

The real battle of our age is soul versus appetite

Not left versus right.
Not old versus young.
Not religious versus secular in the shallow sense.

At the deepest level, the battle of our age is whether the human person will be governed by appetite or by God.

And it is clear that we are all fighting to have our appetites rule the land.

Will we be a people incapable of bearing limits?
Or a people armed with the mind of Messiah?

Will we plunge?
Or will we suffer and stay clean?

Will we swell with craving?
Or will we be deepened by obedience?

That is the dividing line.

Because when appetites outgrow the soul, man becomes mad. But when the soul is armed with the mind of Christ, desire gets put back in its place. The body is no longer a tyrant. The age is no longer a master. The flood is no longer destiny.

You can live another way.

Peter says so.

Final word

The vision was grotesque because the age is grotesque.

But the passage is hope.

Because Peter does not merely diagnose the flood. He shows the path out of it.

Arm yourselves.
Suffer with Messiah.
Be done with sin.
Stop being controlled by human desires and letting humans use desires to control you.
Live by the will of God.
Let the world think it strange.
Let them talk.
Do not plunge.

That is the word.

And maybe this is the cleanest way I can say what I saw:

When appetite outgrows the soul, man becomes spiritually grotesque.
When man is ruled by appetite long enough, he becomes mad.
But when he arms himself with the mind of Messiah, he becomes human again.

You have no idea how pagan your Christianity can become while you are still saying the name of Jesus.

“Thus the people of Isra’el did what was evil from ADONAI’s perspective, forgot ADONAI their God, and served the ba‘alim and asherim” Judges 3:7

That is the offense. Not that the world is dark. That part is obvious. The offense is that many believers think idolatry means bowing to statues while they are quietly living off other saviors all week, then calling it maturity because “God is first.” No. That phrase has covered a mountain of compromise.

What most people were taught about idolatry is so reduced, so unserious, it can barely touch modern bondage. We were trained to imagine ancient people kneeling before carved wood and to congratulate ourselves for being too enlightened to do the same. Meanwhile, our lives are being interpreted, soothed, governed, sedated, and rewarded by a thousand rival powers, and because none of them are made of stone, we think we are free.

But Scripture is more invasive than our Sunday definitions. The issue was never only what a person bowed before physically. The issue was always what they turned to functionally for life.

That is why the line in Judges is so unsettling once you stop reading it safely. They served the ba‘alim and the asherot. The problem there is not only that Israel picked the wrong god. The problem is that they submitted themselves to a fractured order of reality.

Ba‘alim is plural. Lords. Masters. Possessors. Functional rulers. Sources. Claimants. It is a vision of life scattered across many dependencies, many promises, many places of refuge, many secret agreements about where peace, fruitfulness, identity, power, and protection are actually found.

That world of horrific idol worship is not gone. It has become sophisticated, attached to artists, careers, actors, food, and accepted coping mechanisms.

We do not have shrines on every hill; we have streaming platforms, pharmaceuticals, branded identities, therapeutic vocabularies, curated aesthetics, dopamine machinery, political tribes, performance spirituality, digital mirrors, and more sanctioned escapes than any civilization in history. We no longer ask a carved object for rain or fertility. We ask content for rest, romance for worth, money for safety, sex for comfort, outrage for aliveness, substances for peace, platform for significance, control for wisdom, and endless distraction for relief from the ache of being human. Then we sprinkle “God is good” over the whole structure and call ourselves disciples.

But the architecture underneath is still pagan.

That is why I keep returning to Abram. ADONAI did not merely tell Abram to relocate. He called him out of a world where life was assembled through clan, bloodline, land, father’s house, ancestral loyalties, household gods, fertility systems, inherited protections, and negotiated blessing. He was summoned out of fragmentation itself. The call was not “believe in Me too.” The call was leave the distributed system. Leave the many little masters. Leave the fractured imagination of reality and come into covenant wholeness under one voice.

What unnerves me is how much of modern Christianity looks like the very order Abram was called to abandon. We have become experts at keeping Jesus verbally central while remaining existentially divided. People say Christ is everything, but they still turn elsewhere first when the pressure hits. Their nervous system goes into anxiety. Their heart goes out to approval. Their private life goes to lust. Their imagination goes to fantasy. Their body goes to food, alcohol, weed, or scrolling. Their future is money. Their significance goes to the audience. Their rest goes to entertainment. Their sense of self goes to romance, productivity, or a sense of being needed. Their interpretation of reality goes to fear, tribe, or resentment. Yet because Jesus remains the official name above the door, nobody wants to call it what it is.

This is why the phrase “God on top” can be so deceptive. It sounds reverent, but often it is just hierarchy language masking a split life. The biblical vision is not that ADONAI becomes the highest-ranked authority over ten tolerated inner lords. The biblical vision is that the whole person is brought back into singular belonging. Holiness is not a better-ordered list.

That phrase may sound dramatic, but it is exact. Inner polytheism is what happens when a person gives one part of themselves to God while allowing other chambers to be ruled by whatever delivers the fastest comfort, the strongest sense of control, the most reliable sedation, the deepest illusion of power, or the most immediate feeling of being okay. A person may never call those things divine, but they are still serving them. In Scripture, worship is not mainly singing. Worship is service. Worship is what you entrust yourself to. Worship is the pattern of refuge you return to. Worship is labor rendered to a source.

That is why Yeshua did not come merely to make people more religious. He came to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8). And the works of the devil are not limited to spectacular evil, occult theatre, or obvious depravity. They are systems, agreements, reflexes, structures of dependence, counterfeit mercies, cultural liturgies, and hidden arrangements that teach people to seek life from somewhere other than God. The enemy does not need open allegiance at the beginning. He only needs access through relief. He only needs a person to decide, usually in pain, that something else can carry what belongs to God.

This is how false lords gain ground. They show up looking useful. Merciful. Practical. Understandable. They present themselves as help, not rebellion. They offer relief from grief, stress, insecurity, loneliness, shame, boredom, weariness, rage, fear, rejection, sexual frustration, creative blockage, family pain, inner emptiness, or the terror of silence. Once relief is repeated, it becomes refuge. Once refuge is repeated, it becomes dependency. Once dependency is repeated, it becomes part of identity. Then culture steps in, normalizes the whole thing, and starts naming bondage with flattering words. Self-care. Empowerment. Living your truth. Balance. Having an outlet. Being human. Staying sane. Protecting your peace. Needing a release. Deserving comfort.

That is how mass forgetfulness happens. Not through one dramatic denial of God, but through endless little arrangements with counterfeit mercy.

You can see it everywhere if you stop reading culture innocently. Streaming is not just entertainment; it is catechesis. It trains taste, atmosphere, sympathy, emotional expectation, and moral imagination. It teaches people what to admire, what to excuse, what to eroticize, what to mock, what to fear, what to normalize, and what to call depth. A person may sit under ten hours of narrative a week and still think only sermons are formative. That is absurd. Repetition disciples. Story disciples. Mood disciples. A world people enter repeatedly starts to define normal for them.

RIVAL LORDS Ba’alim in plain sight

Music does similar work, often faster. It bypasses some of the mind’s defenses and moves directly into the body and memory. People call it “just vibes” while it tutors lust, melancholy, hardness, vanity, emotional chaos, self-deification, revenge, seduction, or numbness. A hook can become a private liturgy. A chorus can become a confession. A mood can become a house spirit people return to daily. The fact that it sounds good has never made it harmless.

Then there are substances, which the modern world treats with a strange mix of honesty and denial. Everyone knows they alter something, but few want to talk about the spiritual dimension of why they become so beloved. A substance can begin to function like a priest. It mediates. It stands between the person and pain, the person and sleep, the person and memory, the person and social anxiety, the person and creativity, the person and shame, and the person and joylessness. The chemistry matters, yes, but so does the deeper question: what role has this thing taken in the life? Once it starts carrying what belongs to the Spirit of God, you are dealing with more than a habit.

Food can become a rival lord without anyone ever naming it that way. Not because eating is evil, but because food can quietly become anesthesia, reward, emotional regulation, self-parenting, grief management, boredom relief, compensation for a loveless day, or a predictable source of comfort when the inner world feels unheld. The question is not only what is eaten. The question is what eating is doing spiritually and emotionally.

The same scrutiny belongs on work. Productivity is praised so universally that few people notice when it has crossed into lordship. But once output becomes righteousness, once usefulness becomes worth, once busyness becomes protection from self-examination, once achievement becomes the narrative that justifies existence, a person is no longer just diligent. They are serving a master. Hustle can be as religious as ritual. Performance can function like atonement.

Romantic life is just as revealing. Many people are not looking for companionship so much as proof of value. To be wanted is to feel real. To be pursued is to feel chosen. To be desired is to feel visible. Once romance, chemistry, or erotic attention begins bearing that kind of metaphysical weight, it is no longer a relationship issue only. It has become an altar. Sexual culture then deepens the deception by promising intimacy without covenant, pleasure without responsibility, exposure without covering, and access without sacrifice. Pornography intensifies the whole economy by turning image into priesthood and fantasy into refuge. It is not merely visual immorality. It is anti-covenant discipleship.

Our age also quietly worships comfort. This one is devastating because it sounds so harmless. We assume we are entitled to easy regulation, painless choices, curated environments, soft landings, quick relief, and the ability to escape any sustained discomfort. But comfort is a brutal ruler once it takes the throne. It makes obedience negotiable. It makes self-denial feel abusive. It makes conviction feel cruel. It makes holiness seem extreme. The person under its rule begins to confuse peace with the absence of friction.

Then there is the more respectable idolatry of image, audience, platform, and visibility. Social media did not invent vanity, but it industrialized it. It turned comparison into atmosphere and self-curation into habit. It taught people to feel real when witnessed, significant when affirmed, threatened when ignored, and unstable when unseen. Peace starts rising and falling with reception. Identity becomes answerable to reaction. The self gets outsourced to the crowd. That is not a neutral tool problem. That is a lordship problem.

Even therapeutic language, which can be genuinely helpful in the right hands, has become a hiding place for false lordship when it is used to preserve self-rule rather than open the person to transformation. Healing can become another ego project. Safety can become more sacred than truth. Boundaries can become a sanctified wall against love. Trauma can become not a wound being healed but a totalizing identity. Diagnosis can become destiny. The self can become a permanent orbit. Once that happens, pain is no longer brought to God for reordering; it becomes the organizing principle of the whole life.

Politics offers its own priesthood. So does outrage. Many people today are being emotionally governed by anger and calling it discernment. Wrath gives them purpose, tribe, superiority, and a sense of aliveness. Fear does the same in another key. It becomes the interpreter of reality, the planner of every future, the governor of money, family, place, medicine, and trust. Once fear and outrage become ruling intelligences, the person is no longer merely struggling with emotions. They are serving powers.

This is why vague Christianity cannot help anyone. It leaves the architecture untouched. It tells people to pray more without asking what they actually use as refuge. It tells them to put God first without confronting the fact that their inner world is still parceled out to many masters. It teaches the language of devotion while leaving the liturgies of bondage intact.

The sharper question is not “Do you believe in idols?” The sharper question is what in your life acts like lord right now.

What do you run to first when pressure lands?

What feels impossible to lose?

What thing do you believe you need in order to be okay?

What gives you the fastest counterfeit peace?

What do you defend even while it is deforming you?

What interprets your worth on bad days?

What carries your future in your imagination?

What does your body reach for when pain rises?

What has become so normal you do not even notice you are serving it?

Those questions are invasive because they uncover the real altar; our False Lords, our Ba’alim.

And once the altar is exposed, repentance has to get more honest than our usual language. Repentance is not an acknowledgment of struggle, it is a returning and exiting from the rule. It is not enough to say, I made some mistakes, or I need to get back on track. The truth is harsher and cleaner. I handed parts of myself over to rival lords. I asked created things to do what belongs to God. I trusted counterfeit mercies. I let culture disciple desires that were never meant to rule me. I called sedation peace, appetite freedom, mixture maturity, and fragmentation normal.

That kind of repentance is not morbid. It is liberating because it finally tells the truth about why so many people feel spiritually sincere and inwardly divided at the same time. You cannot live in covenant peace while still drawing life from ten competing centers. You cannot know rest while fear interprets the future, approval interprets worth, comfort interprets peace, lust interprets intimacy, money interprets security, and entertainment interprets rest. That is not merely “struggle.” That is a divided house.

Which is why the gospel is more severe and more merciful than modern religion knows how to handle. Yeshua did not come to become your favorite Lord among tolerated others. He did not come to be the best option in a crowded spiritual marketplace. He did not come to manage your idols from the top floor. He came to reclaim the entire house.

This is the part that people find offensive until they realize it is the only way wholeness works. He wants exclusivity because the human person was not built for shared rule. A divided life always breaks down. Fragmentation is not freedom. It is exhaustion. It is confusion. It is instability. It is what happens when the soul keeps reaching to created things for jobs they were never built to perform.

So no, Yeshua does not want to be “on top.” That phrase is too weak, too managerial, too modern, too willing to leave the structure beneath intact. He wants to be only. Not because He is insecure, but because only singular lordship can restore a human being to wholeness. Only singular lordship can pull down the hidden asherim in the imagination. Only singular lordship can sever the relationship between pain and counterfeit mercy. Only singular lordship can reunify appetite, fear, memory, desire, ambition, body, grief, sexuality, identity, and worship in one holy center.

The call of God has always sounded more radical than religious people prefer. Come out. Come out of distributed loyalties. Come out of negotiated blessing. Come out of medicated comfort. Come out of hidden altars. Come out of the many little saviors you have protected because they made life bearable. Come out of every arrangement that lets you keep Jesus in name while remaining inwardly ruled by something else.

This is not extremism. It is the end of fragmentation. It is a covenant. It is what Abram was called into. It is what Israel kept resisting. It is what Yeshua died to recover.

And if that feels too exclusive, too absolute, too invasive, that may be the best evidence yet that modern Christianity has made peace with a divided house. Adonai calls that another lover; adultery…Come to your only true and full love and be free (Ephesians 1:4)

Too many men were taught that following Christ meant becoming harmless, needy, and missionless instead of grounded, courageous, and dangerous in the right direction.

I was reading a book with my son on becoming a young man. The cover was terrible. One of those covers that makes you assume the content is going to be stiff, cheesy, or ten years late to the conversation. But the actual book? Practical fire. The kind of fire that sneaks up on you because it is not trying to impress you. It is just telling the truth plainly enough that you can no longer avoid it.

And while I was reading, I felt the Lord interrupt my thoughts with something that hit me so hard I had to stop.

This is why nice guys finish last with women.

Not kind men. Not godly men. Not men with tenderness, patience, or self-control. I am not talking about those men. I am talking about the baptised counterfeit that so many Christian men have been trained to become. Neutered men. Men who confuse holiness with passivity, which is still a form of violence.

A lot of men have been handed a disastrous script. They were taught that what women want is a man who is always available, always accommodating, always emotionally spilling, always soft, always affirming, always there, always bending, always proving, always reassuring, always nice. And for a moment, especially in a world full of abusive, arrogant, unserious men from Andrew Tate to Donald Trump to Future, that can feel refreshing. It can even feel safe. But eventually, if that man has no mission, no direction, no inner clarity, no boundaries, and no governed strength, what first felt comforting starts to feel heavy. Then confusing. Then unattractive. Then, if we are honest, repulsive.

She may enjoy the attention at first. Who wouldn’t? But when all of a man’s emotional weather is tied to her texts, her moods, her validation, her body, her praise, her approval, her availability, something begins to rot. He starts crossing emotional boundaries without even realizing it. He calls it vulnerability when it is actually overdependence, which is a child. He calls it pursuit when it is actually fawning. He calls it love when it is actually an unhealed need to be chosen and nurtured that comes from his mother. And women can feel the difference even when they cannot always articulate it. They do not want to be a wife that you have sex with.

That is where the “ick” comes from.

Not because women are shallow. Not because courage is toxic. Not because masculinity is a threat. But because deep down, most women are not looking for an adult son with Bible verses. They are looking for a man who knows where he is going, who can carry weight without making her his oxygen supply, who can love deeply without collapsing inward, who has emotions without weaponizing them or drowning her in them, who can be tender without becoming fragile, who can be strong without becoming cruel, and who understands that she is a gift in his life, not the reason his life exists.

A massive difference.

One is love. The other is idolatry with flowers.

And idolatry always rots the thing it worships.

This is part of why so many marriages feel exhausted. The man has no mission beyond keeping her happy, managing her perception of him, avoiding conflict, or staying “nice” enough not to be accused of being harsh. So he stops telling the truth cleanly.

That man is not safe. Even if he is polite.

In fact, sometimes politeness is the disguise cowardice wears to avoid being exposed.

We have done Christian men a deep disservice by acting like the opposite of abusive masculinity is soft, indecisive masculinity. It is not. The opposite of abusive masculinity is governed masculinity.

Masculinity with tears, yes, but also with tensile strength. Masculinity that can say, “I hear you,” without becoming mentally colonized. Masculinity that can say, “I love you,” without saying, “my existence depends on your constant emotional approval.” Masculinity that can carry a mantle.

And that word matters.

Mantle.

Because men are not just struggling with dating. Many are struggling with initiation. They have bodies of men, appetites of boys, and no felt sense of assignment. They have chemistry without calling, desire without direction, sentiment without sacrifice. They want a woman to make them feel like a man because they have never gone on the journey that would have made them one.

Women can feel when a man has never left home inwardly and has never learned to love a woman.

Yeshua learned to love and cover a woman with no sexual strings when he lost his dad before adulthood. He learned early on that a healthy, healed man covers women with no expectations.

And I think many Christian men are more confused here because they have been fed an incredibly shallow picture of Yeshua.

Yeshua was not “nice.”

He was good. He was courageous. He was merciful. He was compassionate. He was patient. He welcomed children, defended women, touched lepers, wept openly, and moved toward the broken. But He was not nice in the thin, domesticated, non-threatening way modern church culture often teaches men to be. He was confrontational when truth demanded it. He disappeared from crowds. He offended people.

He did not chase people who wanted to leave. He did not beg for understanding. He did not reorganize His mission around making sure everyone felt perpetually comfortable around Him. He had emotional depth without emotional chaos. He had love without neediness. He had power without vanity. He had focus. He had boundaries. He had a face set like flint.

That kind of man is not boring. He is not “safe” in the modern, flattened sense. He is safe the way a strong bridge is safe. Safe because he can bear weight. Safe because he does not crumble. Safe because he is anchored somewhere deeper than his impulses. Safe because his strength has been surrendered to God instead of being surrendered to insecurity. He is safe but stays on the kingdom mission, inviting his love into it, but does not make her the finish line. My marriage changed when Yeshua became the full lover and affirmer of my soul, not my wife.

I think a lot of women are starving for that.

Not perfection. Not machismo. Not dominance theater. Not some algorithmic alpha-male cosplay. But actual courage. Actual groundedness. Actual initiative. Actual emotional stewardship. Actual masculine peace that takes risk and calms nervous systems. A man that stays on adventure and protects. A man with a journey, a calling, a center of gravity, a willingness to tell the truth, and enough self-possession that love does not turn him into a puddle of apology and overexplanation.

And men need to hear this without shame but with urgency.

Your wife cannot be your mission. Your girlfriend cannot be your mission. Female attention cannot be your mission. Marriage cannot be your mission. Being liked cannot be your mission. Being seen as “one of the good guys” cannot be your mission. A woman can be part of your life, a glorious part of your life, an adorned and weighty part of your life, but if she becomes the center, both of you will eventually feel the distortion.

She was meant to be an accent, not the axis.

That is not a reduction of her value. It is the only way to preserve it.

Because when a man has no center beyond a woman, he eventually asks her to carry something she was never designed to carry, the joyful cross of marriage. Husbands “love your wife as Christ loved the church.” “Live with her in an understanding way lest your prayers be hindered.”

The irony is that men often do this in the name of love.

But love without structure becomes suffocation.

Love without mission becomes obsession.

Love without courage becomes appeasement.

Love without boundaries becomes emotional trespassing.

Love without God at the center becomes hunger pretending to be holiness.

And many of us have seen the fruit of this up close. Marriages where the man is physically present but spiritually unformed. Dating relationships where the man is hyper-attentive but internally absent. Christian cultures that reward men for being agreeable and punish them for being courageous and divinely dangerous. Homes where men avoid hard conversations, outsource leadership, collapse into porn, drift into passivity, or become subtly bitter because somewhere along the way they traded initiation for image management.

This is why I want better for my son.

I do not want to raise a “nice” Christian boy who becomes an apologetic adult male waiting to be chosen for not making mistakes. I want to raise a courageous, surrendered, emotionally mature man who fears God, tells the truth, can hold tenderness and strength in the same body, knows how to govern his desires, and has a mission big enough that love becomes part of his obedience, not its replacement.

I want him to have spiritually calloused hands from working, not soft hands afraid to try anything.

I want him to know that women are not trophies, therapists, or personal saviors. I want him to know that his job is not to become harmless but holy. Not to become emotionally dead, but emotionally disciplined. Not to crush a woman with force, but not to let himself be ruled by her responses either. Not to perform masculinity, but to become the kind of man whose very presence makes others breathe easier because he is under authority, Yeshua’s, awake to his calling, and unafraid of weight. I want women to feel at rest around him, and he is not tempted to be with them but set them up for a future that will include other godly men being raised the same way.

That man does not finish last.

He may finish lonely for a season. Misunderstood for a season. Uncelebrated for a season. He may be out of step with the shallow scripts of the age. But he does not finish last. Because he is not running a race for female approval in the first place. He is running toward the kind of man God can trust with love.

And that changes everything.

“God Gave Them Over”

There is a phrase in Scripture that should make every generation tremble.

Three times in the opening chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans we read the same line:

“God gave them over.”

The phrase appears in Romans 1:24, Romans 1:26, and Romans 1:28, forming the structural spine of the entire chapter. Paul is not repeating himself for emphasis alone; he is describing a spiritual process. A slow unraveling. A kind of moral gravity.

Most readers assume the phrase means that God punishes people by pushing them toward evil. But when you slow down and read Paul through the lenses of Greek language and Hebraic thought, something more unsettling emerges.

What Paul is describing is not primarily God imposing evil.

He is describing God removing restraint.

And that kind of judgment is far more terrifying.

1. The Greek Word Paul Uses

The phrase translated “God gave them over” comes from the Greek verb παραδίδωμι (paradidōmi).

The word carried legal weight in the ancient world. It was courtroom language. When a judge declared someone guilty, they were paradidōmi—handed over to the authorities.

The same verb appears in the Gospels when Jesus is “delivered over” to be crucified.

Paul intentionally uses this language to describe divine judgment.

God does not need to invent punishment. Instead, He releases people into the consequences of what they insist on pursuing.

Judgment in this passage is not lightning from heaven.

It is God stepping back.

2. The Structure of Romans 1

Romans 1 unfolds in a clear progression.

Humanity first rejects the knowledge of God.

“They exchanged the truth of God for a lie.” (Romans 1:25)

Paul then introduces the three moments of divine release:

God gave them over to impurity, dishonorable passions, and a depraved mind.

This is not three separate sins.

It is one unfolding process.

The soul moves from distortion of worship to distortion of desire to distortion of perception.

Eventually, the mind itself becomes unable to recognize reality correctly.

3. The Hebraic Pattern Behind Paul’s Words

Paul was a Hebrew thinker writing in Greek. When he says “God gave them over,” he is echoing an older biblical pattern.

Psalm 81 records God saying to Israel:

“So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels.”

This is the language of divine restraint being lifted.

The same pattern appears in the story of Pharaoh in Exodus. Pharaoh hardens his own heart repeatedly before the text eventually says that God confirms that hardness.

In other words, God does not always stop us from walking toward destruction.

Sometimes, He lets us discover what that path actually leads to.

4. Judgment Through Permission

This is the terrifying brilliance of Paul’s argument.

God says, in effect…

“You insist that this is wisdom, freedom, and truth.”

So God allows the culture to organize itself around that belief.

A lie that once required secrecy becomes public virtue.

This is how civilizations drift.

Not through immediate collapse but through a smiling normalization of what once would have been recognized as madness.

5. The Depraved Mind

Paul’s final phrase is especially striking.

God gives them over to ἀδόκιμον νοῦν (adokimon noun).

The phrase literally means “a mind that fails the test.”

In metallurgy, the word adokimos described metal that was found impure when placed in the furnace.

The mind has lost its calibration.

The result is not simply immoral behavior. It is an epistemological collapse.

The culture no longer knows how to recognize truth.

Foolishness is called wisdom.
Darkness is called enlightenment.
Self-destruction is marketed as liberation.

The tragedy is not only that people do these things.

It is that they become convinced that these things are good.

6. When Applause Becomes Judgment

The scariest part of Romans 1 is not the sin list.

It is the applause.

Paul says people “approve of those who practice them.”

The culture becomes self-affirming.

Everyone claps.

Everyone congratulates one another.

Everyone celebrates the same distortions.

At that moment the judgment of God is already active—not because God has struck the culture but because He has stopped interrupting it.

The lie now runs unopposed.

7. Romans 1 as the Reversal of Genesis

There is another layer to Paul’s argument that many readers miss.

Romans 1 is written as the reverse of Genesis 1.

In Genesis, humanity is created in the image of God and is given authority over creation.

In Romans 1, humanity exchanges the glory of God for images of creation.

Creation was meant to point upward to God.

Now humans bow downward toward what was meant to serve them.

In Genesis, humanity receives ordered dominion.

In Romans, humanity descends into disordered desire.

The image of God fractures.

Reason collapses.

The result is what could be called the de-creation of humanity.

Creation moves toward chaos when the Creator is rejected.

8. A Prophetic Mirror for Our Moment

Romans 1 is not merely ancient theology.

It reads like a diagnostic report for modern civilization.

Entire industries now exist to affirm the lie.

The media celebrates it.
Institutions codify it.
Education trains new generations to inherit it.

When a culture exchanges truth for lies, God eventually gives that culture what it wants.

And the most frightening judgment is not persecution or disaster.

It is normalization.

Eight Signs of Cultural De-Creation

If Romans 1 describes the unraveling of humanity, we can see its fingerprints everywhere.

First, the worship of the created world replaces reverence for the Creator. Nature, technology, and even human identity itself become sacred objects.

Second, desire becomes the ultimate authority. Instead of asking whether something is true or good, we ask whether it feels authentic.

Third, identity becomes self-constructed rather than received. Humanity begins redefining what it means to be human.

Fourth, institutions celebrate what previous generations warned against. Cultural memory is erased in the name of progress.

Finally, joy becomes strangely absent even as pleasure multiplies. The culture smiles, but anxiety and despair rise underneath the celebration.

This is exactly what Paul described.

A civilization convinced it has found enlightenment while quietly drifting toward collapse.

The Mercy Hidden in the Warning

And yet Paul’s goal is not condemnation.

Romans 1 sets up the larger message of Romans.

Everyone—religious and rebellious alike—stands in need of mercy.

The gospel begins precisely where human wisdom fails.

Because even when humanity has exchanged truth for lies, God has not abandoned the world.

The same letter that diagnoses humanity’s de-creation will soon proclaim the restoration of humanity through Christ.

But Paul begins with this warning for a reason.

If a culture refuses truth long enough, God may eventually give it exactly what it wants.

And the most terrifying judgment in Scripture is this:

When God stops interrupting the lie.

I’m going to assume most of us have never asked the obvious question: who exactly was Valentine, and how did his name end up printed in cursive on a $7.99 card next to a cartoon baby with a bow and arrow?

Because if you trace the line honestly—from the third century to aisle seven at Target—you realize we didn’t just commercialize a holiday. We inverted it. And I mean that in the strongest way.

Most of us were today years old when we found out that Saint Valentine was not a rosy-cheeked mascot for erotic optimism. He was a priest in third-century Rome who was executed under Emperor Claudius II. The story goes that Claudius believed single men made better soldiers and banned marriage for young men. Valentine kept marrying them anyway. Not because he was trying to engineer candlelit proposals, but because he believed covenant mattered, that love was holy, and that the state does not get to define what God calls sacred. He was imprisoned. Beaten. Ultimately beheaded.

Some traditions say that while he was in prison he ministered to his jailer’s blind daughter and signed a letter to her “from your Valentine.” The origin story is not erotic. It is pastoral. It is defiant. It is costly.

This man died because he refused to let power redefine love.

And somehow, in the West, that turned into pink glitter and chocolate fountains.

I don’t say that as a cynic. I say that as someone who just realized we’ve replaced a martyr with a mascot.

Enter “St. Cupid.”

And now we call that progress.

Let me say this carefully because I am not anti-romance. I love romance. I am married, and we went out to celebrate our covenant. I understand intimacy, longing, and pursuit.

We don’t ask: who is lonely?

We ask: Who bought flowers?

We don’t ask: who is in prison?

We ask: who posted their bouquet?

We don’t ask, "Who needs covenant protection”

We ask: who booked the reservation?

And this is where it gets uncomfortable.

Because the historical Valentine was closer to the Sermon on the Mount than to a Hallmark commercial. The early Christian imagination didn’t equate love with private pleasure. It equated love with public risk. Love was not a feeling you curated; it was a burden you carried. The poor, the imprisoned, the abandoned—these were the objects of Christian affection.

The modern Valentine economy runs into the billions annually. We have an entire industry engineered around proving you care through purchasable symbols. We’ve baptized capitalism in pink and called it sacred.

He would probably blink.

He might ask why we turned a martyr into a marketing strategy.

And this isn’t about being anti-culture. It’s about asking how we got here.

Somewhere along the way, the church itself forgot its own memory. Instead of telling the story of a man who resisted imperial overreach and cared for the vulnerable, we outsourced the narrative to advertisers. We allowed a Roman god of erotic chaos to narrate a Christian feast of sacrificial fidelity.

We didn’t lose Valentine accidentally. We traded him.

Because lust is easier to sell than legacy.

Lust is immediate. Legacy is inconvenient.

Lust requires stimulation. Legacy requires suffering.

Lust asks what I feel. Legacy asks what I give.

One makes you a consumer. The other makes you dangerous.

And if I’m honest, this is bigger than February 14. It is symptomatic of how we treat history in general. We flatten it. We sentimentalize it. We strip it of its moral demand. We keep the aesthetic and discard the cost.

We do this with civil rights leaders. We do this with reformers. We do this with prophets. We quote them on Instagram and ignore the conditions that killed them.

Valentine joins that club.

What would it look like to reclaim the day?

I can already hear someone saying, “Why can’t we just enjoy chocolate?”

You can. But you should at least know whose name is on the wrapper.

Because when we don’t know our history, we are easily redirected by whatever is easiest to market. And nothing is easier to market than desire.

The real St. Valentine reminds us that love confronts power. It protects vows. It tends to the weak. It absorbs cost. It refuses to let the empire define intimacy.

“St. Cupid” reminds us to book the table early.

If you were today years old when you learned that Valentine was executed for protecting covenant and serving the marginalized, then welcome to the club. I was too. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The question isn’t whether you’ll celebrate. The question is which saint you’re honoring.

The martyr who died loving the least of these, or the mascot who shoots arrows at your hormones and sends you to checkout?

Choose wisely.

Subscribe now

I did not press play on The Diary of a CEO, expecting to be corrected. I expected information—clinical insight, performance data, something about bone density or muscle retention. What I encountered listening to Vonda Wright (episode here) was not a cultural critique but a physiological explanation of a stage of life that many women quietly endure while the rest of us misinterpret what we are witnessing.

Let me be clear at the outset: I am not a physician. I am not a neuroscientist. I am not attempting to explain women’s bodies to women. What struck me was not that I discovered something; it was realizing how much I did not know. The conviction was not based solely on hormones. It was about how quickly I—and many men—can misread what hormonal shifts reveal.

Dr. Wright described perimenopause and menopause not as a psychological unraveling but as an endocrine recalibration. Estrogen fluctuates dramatically before it declines. Progesterone drops. Testosterone changes. Sleep becomes unstable. Muscle mass decreases. Cognitive sharpness can feel inconsistent. For many women, it can genuinely feel like something is wrong at a fundamental level, as though the body is malfunctioning. Her work, as she described it, has included telling women plainly: you are not dying; you are transitioning.

That phrase stayed with me.

Because if something is transitioning, then something else is emerging.

What surprised me most in her explanation was not the biochemistry but the social implications that follow. There is a long-standing psychological observation that women, on average, score higher in agreeableness as a personality trait. Some evolutionary theorists speculate about its adaptive value in pair bonding and child-rearing; others argue that what we call agreeableness is heavily reinforced by social conditioning. I am not here to settle that debate. What I am saying is this: whether chemical, cultural, or some blend of both, many women have been trained—explicitly or implicitly—to accommodate.

To smooth conflict.
To manage emotional temperature.
To carry invisible labor.
To prioritize harmony over personal clarity.

If estrogen has mood-stabilizing and buffering effects on the brain—and there is evidence that it does—then the hormonal shifts of midlife may not simply destabilize emotion; they may also remove some of the neurological cushioning that once softened perception. What if part of what we call irritability is actually unfiltered clarity? What if part of what we label volatility is the nervous system no longer dampening what it previously absorbed?

I remember sitting with this realization and feeling unsettled, not only because I had discovered some hidden truth, but because I recognized patterns in myself. There have been moments in my own marriage and friendships where I assumed that tension was about mood, timing, or stress. Hearing Dr. Wright made me revisit those assumptions. Was I interpreting a boundary as instability? Was I mistaking long-standing endurance for contentment? Had I benefited from accommodation without recognizing the cost?

There are statistics showing that divorce initiation increases among women in midlife. That fact is often framed as evidence that something is going wrong during menopause. But what if, in some cases, it is evidence that something is finally being named? I am not romanticizing divorce. I am not suggesting that every marital rupture is a righteous awakening.

When a woman who has managed a home, raised children, absorbed emotional labor, and supported a spouse’s ambitions begins to say, “This is not sustainable,” it is convenient to attribute the shift to estrogen. Biology certainly plays a role in mood and cognition; denying that would be naïve. But biology does not fabricate injustice. It may simply make it harder to ignore.

We also have to consider the cultural architecture in which this transition unfolds. We live in a society that has historically centered male experience as normative. Work structures, economic expectations, and even religious leadership models have often assumed that someone else—frequently a woman—will absorb the unpaid, unseen labor that keeps everything functional. If midlife brings a reduction in the internal impulse to keep accommodating that imbalance, then what surfaces may feel disruptive precisely because it challenges what was quietly convenient.

I do not want to write this in a way that sounds like I have arrived at some enlightened posture. If anything, the podcast exposed how limited my understanding has been. It is easy for men to hear the word “misogyny” and feel accused. Yet misogyny is not only overt hatred; it can be structural, habitual, unconscious. It can exist in small expectations—who cooks, who tracks birthdays, who anticipates everyone’s emotional needs—without ever being named as ideology.

There is also a spiritual and psychological dimension worth acknowledging. Midlife, for both men and women, often forces a confrontation with mortality, purpose, and identity. For women, that confrontation coincides with the end of reproductive capacity, which carries enormous symbolic weight in cultures that tie female value to youth and fertility. To move through that threshold and emerge with a stronger sense of self is not pathology; it is maturation.

So when I say, “She’s not crazy,” I am not denying the very real suffering that hormonal dysregulation can cause. I am not dismissing anxiety, depression, or the need for medical support. I am saying that alongside the biological turbulence, there may be a sharpening of perception that deserves respect rather than ridicule.

If you are a man walking through this season with your wife or partner, the invitation is not to become an amateur endocrinologist. It is to become a student. To ask better questions. To listen without defensiveness. Heal so your ego serves and is not bruised. To examine whether her previous agreeableness functioned as a stabilizer for your unexamined habits. To consider that what feels like rejection might be differentiation and full human expression.

And if you are a woman in this stage, I hope the primary takeaway from Dr. Wright’s work—and from this reflection—is that your body is not betraying you. It is transitioning. The fear that something is fundamentally wrong may ease when you understand the physiology. And the relational clarity that accompanies it does not automatically invalidate decades of shared life; it may simply require a more honest renegotiation.

I left that podcast less certain, not more. Less certain about my interpretations. Less certain about how often I have defaulted to comfort narratives. More aware that midlife in women is not merely a medical chapter but a relational reckoning for many couples. If we are wise, we will treat it not as a crisis to manage but as a moment to grow up—chemically, emotionally, and structurally—together.

Some things don’t increase my faith; they increase my frustration.

Sometimes, I can’t even stand to read writers like myself.
WHOA, ADAM. Yes, you heard that right.

There’s a temptation for us—those who write from the trenches of faith—to sound like we’ve arrived, like we’re fully healed, like pain is behind us and no longer touches us. But that’s the furthest thing from the truth. Right now, I find myself living in the tension between grief and glory, and some days what I see doesn’t make my faith stronger at all—it just makes me more frustrated.

Take this.

I pull up to a stoplight in my city, heart already heavy with so many burdens, but one that always presses in is the reality of homelessness. This isn’t theoretical for me; it’s heartbreakingly practical. The temperature outside is brutal—twelve degrees, sixteen degrees—and I find myself asking God out loud, How is this possible? Why, in a world overflowing with resources, do people still have nowhere to go?

As I make my usual turn toward the arena and rehearse my chapel message to motivate the players before they play the Houston Rockets, I pull up to the light doing what I can to acknowledge and help where I can. I roll my window down, seeing one of the ones standing on the corner asking for some type of help. This time it’s two of them together—Willie and Andre. I give what I can, but I’m burdened by Jesus’ way of moving through the world, by the way He didn’t just help people from a distance but touched them, embraced them, entered their space. So I say it, not caring if traffic stops or horns honk, give me your hands, I want to pray for you.

I think Jesus wouldn’t just help—He would touch.

I pray for them with force and love while holding their hands, mom, dad, friends, skin to skin, as a sign of connection, as a reminder that they are still human, still seen. And as I roll off, I am frustrated. I am in my heated truck.

Some things don’t increase my faith; they increase my frustration.

I am frustrated that as we age we don’t evolve into the heart of God—selling all we have, giving to the poor, following Him because we love obedience and compassion more than comfort, because we want to be catalytic conduits of God’s love instead of insulated spectators.

I am frustrated that money flows to some in such abundance that they interpret it as divine favor, proof that God wants them traveling the world and owning multiple homes, while Willie and Andre fight for warmth. Paul says naked we come into this world and naked we leave it, be content with food and clothing, but we fight for convenience every step of the way.

I am frustrated that money gives access to so much and withholds so much. Why send us into a fractured world like this, Lord? What is our mission—to fight each other for space and territory we cannot take with us?

From the great rulers like Alexander the Great, whose bones are in the ground, to Pharaohs who buried themselves in gold, thinking they could carry it with them, and it is still there—tombs being raided still, all puns intended—to this modern economy where we all have to generate some form of income just to eat. And yet when I look around, I don’t see abstractions. I see the Willies and Andres in mass. I see shelters in Ethiopia that need my attention, but require resources.

God wants to lament, but instead, others and I hold up our signs: will pray for support, will heal for food, will travel to you for food to heal this land.

The frustration is seeing the healing, the feeding, the restoring of shalom clearly in front of us, while living in a fractured world that already has enough resources to address these issues, yet remains stuck and entangled in comfort and ease—praying and asking God to renovate our hotel rooms on vacation even though we know we’re going home, and home is glory.

This grieves me.

I see clearly—in dreams, in visions, in the spirit realm—by God’s doing, what the answer is. I saw it when my pops passed. Dad, you could do this and remain if you want to. He didn’t. Only to come to the end of his life and wish he had. That didn’t increase my faith; it increased my frustration. I know so many who are older, still pursuing comfort, ease, and experience that leads nowhere, while millions remain hungry, untouched, unfed, trafficked, targeted, and discarded.

I started asking myself this: if Ecclesiastes 12:7 says that when my journey is over, my body returns to the earth and my spirit returns to God from where it came, then Lord, why did You send me into this realm at all?

No, I’m not depressed. I’m good. I’m strong. I’m just being honest that the frustration of a fallen, fractured world is real when you know where you’re from and what actually matters. When you’re burdened for much, you often find yourself trying to convince those entangled—those who think they’re free—that you’re the imprisoned one.

I would solve the issue of homelessness in Atlanta and across the globe. And I mean shelter—basic protection from the elements. I would tend to an orphanage structure in Ethiopia that already exists, but needs two Americans who care enough to train staff and generate sustainable funding for kids who need leadership more than vision.

I would build kingdom cities. Planting churches is dead. We need kingdom cities that function as havens, places of refuge, economic centers, centers of healing, and centers of life.

I would travel as a vessel for broken men to heal fully, because we need healed men to heal this world and usher in a divine shalom we have not yet seen. As a man God chose to open his eyes—to see into hearts and souls with compassion, through dreams, visions, and glimpses of the future—I know what could free people, and I also know many will refuse the road of freedom. I see demons, afflictions, and unclean spirits on people, and I know some will remain bound because of dishonesty, deception, and because they love what their demons give them more than the unknown freedom God offers.

Sometimes that doesn’t increase my faith.
It increases my frustration.

Even writing on Substack, being a voice calling people away from deception for over twenty-eight years, I still ask myself why I think people should listen to the message of heaven through me.

I’m naïve enough to believe it could heal and unite the world until Christ returns. For me, this has never been about the come-up, the platform, or prestige. I genuinely believe darkness can be eradicated and harmony restored based on what my Rabbi lived and passed on—the same faith, and the same frustrations, carried by the Mandelas, the Mother Theresas, the Tutus, the Fannie Lou Hamers, Mary the mother of Jesus, the widow with her mites, the Hebrew women, and even those sawn in two and left to die in caves for the faith. I believe that deeply, fiercely—but the frustration walks alongside that belief, a friend of the family I wish did not have access to my soul.

I am frustrated seeing so many of us believe the same things, yet some of us receive so little interaction, not speaking of myself, but friends who battle depression because no one seems to hear the message they believe God entrusted to them.

That question doesn’t weaken my faith.
It exposes my frustration.

And I’m not cleaning that up.

There’s a way we talk about Judas that feels dishonest, not because the betrayal wasn’t real, but because we strip it of the world that made it possible. We isolate his act from Roman occupation, from inherited trauma, from what it meant to be Jewish under the empire. We turn him into a villain without ever asking what it costs to live faithfully in a system designed to break you slowly and publicly.

Imagine watching your own people taxed into ruin, not because of bad decisions but because of who they were and what they believed. Roman taxation in Judea wasn’t a neutral policy; it was punishment. It was economic warfare. Land confiscation. Debt cycles that followed families for generations. Interest structures that made sure you never climbed back out.

Now imagine living under military occupation where soldiers—men and women—had unchecked authority over your body. Brutality wasn’t accidental. Sexual violence wasn’t a rumor. Public execution wasn’t hidden. Crosses lined roads as warnings, not symbols. Rome didn’t crucify people in private. They crucified them where everyone could see. It was terror by design. You didn’t grow up imagining freedom; you grew up knowing exactly what happened to people who challenged the regime.

And then there’s the betrayal closer to home.

The Pharisees and Sadducees, who hated each other like Bloods and Crips, suddenly found common ground when Rome offered power, protection, and proximity. Enemies in theology became partners in preservation. The Temple still stood, but the prophetic voice had been domesticated. Faith survived as long as it didn’t threaten the system.

But Judas didn’t come from a passive tradition.

AVENGE FOLK AS KINFOLK

He came from Maccabean memory. From stories of guerrilla faithfulness. From a lineage that remembered God vindicating resistance. This wasn’t abstract theology. This was family history. God preserved them. God allowed victory. God let oil burn longer than physics would allow as a sign that heaven endorsed their refusal to bow. Hanukkah wasn’t sentimental. It was proof that zeal, when aligned with God, could overthrow an empire.

And then Jesus shows up and celebrates the Feast of Dedication.

That matters more than we usually admit. He doesn’t distance himself from their past. He steps into it. He affirms it. He places himself in continuity with ancestors who resisted assimilation and paid for it in blood. This God-in-the-flesh doesn’t rebuke their history; he honors it.

Now Judas watches him.

He sees death obey him. Lazarus walks out of a tomb. Hunger dissolves in the hands of scarcity. The spiritual occupation of Roman territory is dismantled when the Gerasene man is freed, a man living among tombs in a Decapolis stronghold now clothed and sane. Lepers are touched and instead of contamination, cleansing flows outward. Power isn’t theoretical. Authority isn’t symbolic. This is observed reality.

And yet Jesus keeps talking about loving enemies.

So he interprets.

Not as a villain, but as a convinced man. A man who believes the end is inevitable and only needs a catalyst. He doesn’t think he’s undoing Jesus. He thinks he’s accelerating him. He believes there is no possible outcome where this man dies. Rome’s time is up. History says so. Scripture says so. His own eyes say so.

So he makes a deal.

Not to destroy Jesus, but to force revelation. To force resistance. To force the hand of a Messiah who surely will not allow himself to be executed. After all, this Messiah looks like them, bleeds like them, lives in poverty like them, carries the ache of occupation like them. He is us. Liberation isn’t a side note; it’s assumed.

And then Jesus dies.

SHOCK AND SHAME

No uprising. No divine intervention in the way Judas expected. No legions descending. Just a cross. Just blood. Just silence.

This is where Judas meets the same ancient fracture that entered humanity in the garden.

Shame.

Not guilt. Shame is different. Guilt allows return. Shame convinces you return is no longer possible. Shame doesn’t say you did wrong; it says you are wrong. And once shame becomes the loudest voice, mercy begins to sound distant, even unreal.

Like Adam and Eve, he hides. The God he walked with, ate with, listened to now feels inaccessible not because God withdrew, but because shame has rewritten the story inside him. The possibility that Jesus could still love him feels implausible. The idea that mercy could survive his failure feels offensive.

So he executes himself.

Not because justice demands it, but because shame convinces him it does.

And this is where I think we are far more like Judas than we want to admit.

JESUS IS A BETTER JUDGE THAN WE

We borrow the voice of the accuser as our own and call it 'being human' instead of 'torment.’ It’s agreeing with Satan about ourselves.

Jesus is not our inner critic.

And sometimes—even when the condemning voice sounds like our own—we have to rebuke ourselves for speaking against mercy.

Author’s Note

Judas feels more of a reality to me than Peter, not because his failure is worse, but because his failure feels closer to the kind of collapse that happens when conviction hardens into certainty, and certainty leaves no room for mercy to interrupt it. This is our current age. Peter denies Jesus out of fear and confusion, and as painful as that is, grief still keeps him nearby. He stays close enough to hear the rooster. He stays in the orbit of the story long enough to be found again. His failure happens in weakness, and weakness, for all its mess, still leaves space for restoration.

Judas doesn’t fail that way. Judas is convinced. He believes he understands what God is doing, how liberation should unfold, and what must happen next to move history forward. His actions are not impulsive but intentional, shaped by interpretation and expectation, and when that interpretation collapses, he doesn’t bring his confusion back to Jesus. He turns it inward and begins to prosecute himself.

That is the part that unsettles me, because it mirrors something I recognize in myself. I am less afraid of moments where I fall short in weakness than I am of moments where I am convinced I am right, only to discover later that I was wrong, and then struggle to believe that grace still applies to me in the aftermath of that realization. There is a particular kind of shame that doesn’t just grieve what you’ve done, but rewrites who you believe you are, and that kind of shame doesn’t drive you back to God; it persuades you to disappear from him.

Peter allows Jesus to question him back into relationship, to restore him slowly, publicly, painfully, but truthfully.

Resurrection doesn’t only answer denial, fear, or cowardice. It also addresses the kind of shame that convinces you that waiting is pointless and that a return is no longer possible. Judas terrifies me because he could not wait long enough to hear that answer, and I know how easy it is to mistake self-condemnation for humility when what it really is, is a refusal to let mercy have the final word.

What if many of our prayers go unanswered not because God is silent, absent, or withholding—but because they are processed-food prayers?

Stay with me.

My kids will cry and whine for processed foods like Cap’n Crunch (WHICH I LOVE WITH BERRIES), Sugar Smacks, Cinnamon Toast Crunch—the kind of cereal engineered to hijack the tongue and bypass discernment. If I said yes, they would eat it for every meal, every day, to their ruin. They would swear it was good for them because it tastes good, they may not even care if it were good or bad, just that it tastes good. Their bodies would tell a different story later.

I know what’s in that food. I know the cancer-causing agents. I know the way sugar tricks the brain into calling poison nourishment. Love does not permit me to agree with their cravings simply because the craving is loud.

I grew up in a no-sugar-of-any-kind household. No, Honey Nut Cheerios, Toasted Oats (no hint of sugar). My dad read a book called The Sugar Blues in the 1970s, and by the time he had children, he had already decided that processed sugar was poison. Not indulgence. Not moderation. Poison. At the time, I didn’t understand it. As an adult, I recognize it as one of the greatest gifts he gave us: resilient immune systems, clarity about appetite, and an early lesson that not everything pleasurable is permissible.

I HATE SKITTLES

But every Friday, he gave us a treat day. Chips, donuts, candy—whatever we wanted. The rule was simple: get what you want, in whatever quantity you want (reasonable), and we will stop you if it goes too far.

One time, he let us go out for ourselves to the corner store, back when kids actually walked places on their own, yes, I sound old, but WHO IS LYING?!? I digress. I went and bought four bags of Skittles with the money I saved.

I remember thinking heaven had descended like a dove and kissed me directly on the mouth. The first bag was bliss, sticky face and all. By the middle of the second, something started shifting. My eight-year-old body rebelled before my mind could articulate what was wrong. I gagged. I was overwhelmed. I threw the remaining bags away. To this day, the smell of Skittles makes me nauseous.

PROCESSED PRAYERS

Which brings me to prayer.

Have you ever considered that a loving Father in heaven can tell whether you are asking for what will sustain your life or whether you are asking for the spiritual equivalent of processed food? CAP’N CRUNCH PRAYERS YALL (yeah string it together) What if some unanswered prayers are not rejection but protection? What if He knows that giving you what you are asking for would hollow you out, make you sick, derail you, or shorten your life?

What if the more faithful prayer is not give me this, but teach me what to ask for? What if the invitation is to trust His sight when your appetite is compromised, to believe that He sees what your spiritual system and tongue cannot yet discern?

Deuteronomy warns about this kind of desire with unnerving precision. It speaks of the person who hears the words of the covenant and still blesses himself in his heart, saying, I shall be safe, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart. The result is not neutrality but consequence—the sweeping away of the watered land with the dry, the healthy with the diseased. The text calls it a root-bearing, poisonous, and bitter fruit, something hidden beneath the surface that eventually contaminates everything it touches.

Numbers sharpen the diagnosis even further, moving the problem from belief to appetite. God names the heart and the eyes as unreliable guides, capable of leading a person into unfaithfulness without ever feeling rebellious. The language is severe: going about whoring after one’s own heart and one’s own eyes. It suggests exchange—the quiet trading of covenant for craving. Not defiance, but drift.

The solution in the text is not condemnation but interruption. A reminder placed close enough to the body to disrupt desire before it becomes action. God assumes the danger is not ignorance but appetite. That what we want will often lie to us, the same way sugar convinces the tongue it is nourishment while quietly poisoning the body.

That question—what am I actually asking for and what is my purpose—has haunted me most of my life, but a deep pain showed me my assignment.

PAIN IN PURPOSE

Grief is not a friend who leaves your house. It may not sleep beside you every night, but it always keeps a room. It moves furniture. It changes how sound travels through the space.

While everyone is posting highlight reels from 2016—the trips, the wins, the best-year-ever declarations—I realized that year marked something else for me. Not success. Assignment.

There were good moments. My wife and I traveled from Carmel, California, to a couples retreat on the JH ranch. I stood near the borders of Saudi Arabia. I traveled with a close friend and mentor to Doha, Qatar, and witnessed underground churches gathering quietly and faithfully. I don’t minimize those experiences. They mattered. They were sacred.

But the image that arrested me wasn’t exotic or impressive.

It was a photograph of my father and me standing side by side in an airport that summer as I was leaving.

My dad was tremendous in my early years. Legendary, honestly. He ran a strict household on sugar but somehow made it joyful. He taught us the books of the Bible. He taught us self-defense techniques he learned in the military. He invented Thomason Bucks to motivate chores, and it worked. He coached our baseball teams. He was that dad—the kind other kids noticed.

And then, when I was eleven, the legend vanished; he left.

He later explained it as exhaustion from parenting and a craving for romance, which he felt was his good. For the next thirty years of our relationship, that pursuit took precedence. We weren’t enemies, but we were distant. We saw each other occasionally. His presence returned in fragments, but his emotional investment never fully came back as he lived a processed life, if you will.

Then, in the summer of 2016, the Lord pressed on me to go see him.

I remember walking through the airport tunnel, carrying the image of the man I expected to see. The version I had preserved in my mind. I imagined summer in South Carolina, time together, conversation, some repair.

I stepped onto the escalator, walked toward the baggage carousel, and saw him (see picture above).

It wasn’t his face anymore. It looked like something was consuming it.

My mind went clinical before my theology caught up. Severe protein deficiency or cancer. Neither option was benign. My body knew before I had language.

It wasn’t easy. Bringing up health concerns after decades of emotional distance is never easy. On the last day, I finally did. He brushed it off. Dismissed it. Gaslighted me in front of his wife and later in front of the family. I left knowing something was wrong because God revealed what he wanted to hide, and yet feeling the old ache of being unheard.

After he passed, I learned the truth.

He already knew. He had been told his cancer was terminal. Stage four. And he had decided not to tell anyone.

Going back through my 2016 photos after his death, something settled over me with sobering clarity: my assignment in this realm is to extend life where death has already started negotiating terms—if people are willing.

In my father’s case, speaking up despite resistance, awkwardness, and relational cost bought him seven more years. He had been prepared to succumb within one year, even months (more to the story but too long). I could not carry blood on my hands, so I pressed. I endured the pushback.

You would think people would want more life.

But many are tired; he was tired.

Life is hard. Life is cursed. God says so in Genesis. Sweat. Work. Answered prayers. Unanswered prayers. Freedom. Entanglement. Death is constantly negotiating early access.

People do not stumble into death. They often agree with it slowly.

One of the most emotional things my father ever said to me before he passed was that he wished he had fought harder. Foods he should have released. Strength he should have built. Choices he should have made earlier. But by then, time had narrowed.

Waiting too long eventually becomes too late, and it settles over a person who has a name. The name is regret.

I wish he hadn’t had to learn it that way. Dad, work on your body, dad, change these habits, dad, that is killing you, and y’all, to see a man want to fight when his death is fixed is one of the most divine encounters of God’s economy I will never unsee.

THE SECOND DEATH

When I learned about the second death through a Hebraic lens, Revelation 2:11 stopped sounding distant and apocalyptic and began to sound immediate and intimate. The second death is not merely about what happens after the body fails; it is about eternal severance from mercy, presence, and belonging. It is the full and final isolation of a soul that no longer believes it is wanted by God or His people.

That understanding reframed Genesis for me.

The Hebrew in Genesis 3 does not say, “the day you eat of it you will someday die.” It says, “you will surely die”—literally, die die. We think God is the executioner of death, but it is we who kill ourselves; Paul says death entered through one man’s decisions. Watch.

A doubling. A layered death. Physical, yes, but also something deeper and more immediate. We tend to fixate on biological death as the worst outcome, but Scripture suggests otherwise. There is a death that begins while the heart is still beating, and it is beyond just biological aging.

God does not first remove Adam and Eve from His presence. They run. Shame initiates the exile. Fear rewires their perception. They hide from a God who is still walking, still calling, still seeking. The second death began working through their decision, not through divine rejection, but through internalized severance—through the belief that God does not want you anymore, that you are unsafe in community, that exposure is fatal because of the shame you put on yourself, not what God executed upon you.

Seen this way, desire is never neutral. What we crave can either pull us back toward presence or push us deeper into hiding. This is why Scripture treats appetite with such seriousness. Not because God is restrictive, but because He understands how quickly desire, left unexamined, can teach us to flee life itself, HIM.

So when I ask what is y(our) purpose, I am no longer asking it abstractly. I am asking it the way a father asks what he will allow his children to consume. Purpose is not just about what we are called to build, say, or carry; it is about what we learn to stop craving once we understand its cost.

Purpose, then, is not found by indulging every hunger of the soul, but by learning discernment—by allowing God to retrain our appetites so that what we ask for sustains life rather than shortens it with a deathly smile.

That is the work, my call and assignment until I go to glory. In my work, I can see death in, on, and around a person, but I have also learned that God makes vessels who extend life (my purpose)—who heal, who resist the second death while breath still remains, who call people back from hiding into presence, who are extensions of his love and kindness. God is kind; it is we who are unkind to ourselves, running from the one who is trying to draw near and bring life.

And I am still learning how to carry it.

—

Reader reflection
This is not a debate question, but an honest one: what desire have you been calling harmless or faithful that, if you are truthful, has been “processed” and shaping your prayers more than trusting God’s voice has?

Scripture Appendix: Torah Passages Referenced

Deuteronomy 29:18–19
Beware lest there be among you a man or woman or clan or tribe whose heart is turning away today from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of those nations. Beware lest there be among you a root bearing poisonous and bitter fruit, one who, when he hears the words of this sworn covenant, blesses himself in his heart, saying, “I shall be safe, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart.” This will lead to the sweeping away of moist and dry alike.

Numbers 15:37–41
The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the people of Israel, and tell them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and to put a cord of blue on the tassel of each corner. And it shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the Lord, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after. So you shall remember and do all my commandments, and be holy to your God. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I am the Lord your God.”

Art by Lumkile (no AI)

Please read in full

An Unwelcome Clarity

When I came across the passage in Revelation 2, it was one of those moments where freedom arrives wrapped in dread. The kind that makes you say, almost involuntarily, oh no—not because the truth is wrong, but because it dismantles the version of hope you’ve been relying on. The passage did not offer reassurance. It offered exposure. It confirmed a suspicion I had carried quietly for years: that faithfulness does not guarantee improvement, and that the gospel itself is not organized around the promise that things will get better.

A Gospel That Refuses to Reassure

What startled me was not the severity of the language, but its honesty. The text left no room for reinterpretation or delay. It said plainly what I had spent years circling around without ever stating directly. It may not get better. And once that sentence landed, it became impossible to unhear it.

A Letter to the Unprotected

John, caught up in the Spirit, records a letter addressed to a church that is neither powerful nor protected. The message does not soften reality or spiritualize suffering away. It names it. Poverty is acknowledged, trials are not minimized, and the future is described without illusion. Satan will act. Prison will come. A people group will posture as those pursuing God while functioning as an organized opposition to His purposes. Some will die in confinement. And still, the letter insists on triumph—not because conditions improve, but because the second death will not touch them.

Text Without Illusion

The passage reads, in full:

“I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich) and the slander of those who say that they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan. Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have tribulation. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death.”
— Revelation 2:9–11 (ESV)

Presence Without a Timeline

This is not the gospel most of us were handed. There is no promise of relief, reform, or rescue on demand. There is presence. There is a witness. There is vindication—but it is not scheduled according to history’s clock and our eyes see in our timeline.

When History Reappears With New Uniforms

That clarity came back to me in recent weeks as the country absorbed yet another act of state violence, this time in Minnesota, with the killing of Alex by federal agents. The incident did not exist in isolation; it arrived already layered with the accumulated trauma of the last decade—the repeated deaths of Black men and women at the hands of police, the rehearsed justifications, the predictable cycle of outrage followed by institutional defensiveness. In that moment, a friend reached out to me with an honest question: “How do you deal with all this? How have you been processing it?”

I answered him with Revelation 2.

I told him what no one wants to hear: it may not get better.

TRIUMPH DESPITE OUTCOMES

That sentence is not resignation; it is historical literacy. It did not get better for our ancestors. Many lived and died on this soil after being taken from West Africa, beginning with the first capture and the systematic psychological torture of the slave castles. Those structures were not simply holding cells; they were laboratories of dehumanization, designed to fracture identity before bodies were ever sold. From there came the Middle Passage, a suffocating journey where darkness, disease, sexual violence, and death were not incidental but expected.

The trade continued on this side of the Atlantic through breeding, trafficking, castration, forced labor, and a form of existence so disoriented and regulated that human beings were legally classified as less than cattle—chattel property.

For generations, prayers for change went unanswered on humanity’s timeline. Emancipation did not erase terror. Reconstruction did not protect life. Jim Crow refined domination rather than ending it. And even now, the last decade has shown us how fragile legal protections are when power feels threatened.

1942 Was Not an Exception

This is not unique to Black history. In 1942, under the authority of the federal government, Japanese Americans were targeted not for what they had done but for who they were. Families were removed, property was seized, and incarceration was justified through the language of national security. Internment was presented as necessary, temporary, and lawful. History has since named it what it was: collective punishment enforced by the state. When I look at modern immigration enforcement, particularly the posture and tactics of ICE, I do not see an aberration. I see continuity. Different uniforms, different vocabulary, same logic. Entire communities marked as threats, surveillance normalized, detention expanded, and force justified in the name of order.

Satan as a System, Not a Symbol

This is why Revelation 2 refuses to sentimentalize faith. It names Satan not as an abstract evil but as an organizing force that works through systems, institutions, and even religious language. It acknowledges that persecution often comes from those who claim divine legitimacy. And it tells the truth about outcomes: some will not survive this life.

How They Made It

For most of my years, I asked a single question that never felt theoretical: how could they make it? How did people endure centuries of tyranny without losing their souls? Revelation finally answered that question for me after forty years in this realm. They endured not because they believed circumstances would improve, but because they believed the second death would not have the final word.

That distinction matters more than we admit. Change in this realm is not ultimate. Knowing that death itself does not win is.

Assignment Over Results

This does not excuse passivity. Do we fight for humanity? Yes. Do we march? Yes. Do we call out religious actors who posture as God’s people while using His name and Scripture in vain, leading little ones astray? Absolutely. Kingdom justice is not quietism. But kingdom living is not measured by outcomes alone.

It is measured by assignment. I am doing what I have been given to do, even if no one agrees, even if nothing changes, because I know what heaven says.

The Matrix of Mammon

We are all breathing the odorless gas of Mammon. His gospel is prosperity, comfort, and therapeutic relief. God exists, we are told, to remove pain. Christ never made that promise. He promised nearness in the midst of pain. Presence in suffering. Faithfulness unto death, not exemption from it.

Nearness Instead of Relief

This is how my ancestors survived tyranny. Not because the storm calmed, but because they learned how to walk into it and through it without surrendering their interior life. Their peace and purpose were not tethered to results. My rabbi’s weren’t either.

I do not know if the storm will calm. I do know that my peace is not contingent on whether it does. That, I am increasingly convinced, is the good news my ancestors lived by.

And it leaves us with a question that Revelation does not answer for us but places squarely in front of us: if it does not get better here, will you still live as though heaven has already spoken?

What about you?

This Is Not Quietism

A few readers will inevitably mistake this essay for resignation. They will read “it may not get better” as passivity, withdrawal, or a theological excuse for injustice. That misreading says more about our formation than it does about the text.

Quietism is what happens when suffering is denied or spiritualized away. Revelation does neither.

The letter to Smyrna does not tell the church to stop resisting evil, stop witnessing, or stop naming injustice. It tells them the truth about the cost of doing so. It does not sanctify oppression; it unmasks it. It does not bless empire; it exposes Satan as an organizing force that works through systems, institutions, and even religious legitimacy.

If this were quietism, the text would promise safety in exchange for silence. It does the opposite. It promises prison, slander, and death precisely because the church refuses to align with power.

To say “it may not get better” is not to abandon justice. It is to refuse to make justice conditional on visible success. It is to reject the lie that faithfulness is only valid if it produces immediate outcomes.

History makes this plain. Enslaved Africans were not passive. Japanese Americans under internment were not complicit. Civil rights marchers were not naïve. None of them were guaranteed improvement when they acted. What they had was clarity about who they were and whom they served, even when the state responded with violence.

Revelation’s claim is not that resistance is futile. It is that resistance is costly—and still required.

The gospel does not promise that doing the right thing will work. It promises that doing the right thing will be remembered, judged rightly, and vindicated beyond death.

That is not quietism.

That is courage without illusion.

If your theology requires guaranteed results in order to act, it is not biblical hope—it is risk management.

Revelation offers something stronger.

Faithfulness that does not depend on winning.

Companion Note: Revelation 2, Suffering, and Eschatological Triumph

This essay intentionally resists a therapeutic or motivational framing. Revelation itself is not written to comfort communities into passivity, but to stabilize them in truth under pressure. The letter to the church in Smyrna (Revelation 2:8–11) is widely recognized by scholars as one of the clearest examples of Christian hope that does not depend on historical improvement. Suffering is not framed as failure, delay, or misalignment, but as a foreseeable consequence of faithfulness within hostile systems of power.

The essay’s engagement with slavery, Japanese American internment in 1942, and contemporary immigration enforcement reflects a well-established historical pattern: state power often justifies collective punishment through the language of security, order, or necessity. These systems function by marking entire populations as threats rather than addressing individual guilt.

Finally, the emphasis on the “second death” reflects a central eschatological claim of the New Testament: that ultimate victory is not measured by survival or success within history, but by participation in God’s final judgment over death itself. This framework helps explain how oppressed communities have endured prolonged injustice without surrendering faith—not because circumstances improved, but because death was denied ultimate authority.

For further reading:

• Craig R. Koester, Revelation and the End of All Things

• Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation

• Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination

• Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

Art by Lumkile (no AI)

For over 28 years in ministry, I’ve heard some version of this sentence more times than I can count:

“That’s why I don’t hire beautiful women. I don’t want to stumble into sin.” (Another post we will address why that phrase is hyperbolic and problematic)

It’s often called wisdom.
At best, it’s fear.
At worst, it’s chauvinism baptized in spiritual language.

What that statement quietly assumes is this:

“A woman’s body is a liability.”
“Her beauty is a threat.”
“My lack of healing is her responsibility.”

It suggests that a woman is readily available to a man willing to abuse a power dynamic.
It assumes she lacks moral agency, discipline, or a life with God.
It even puts the blame back on God — for creating her the way He did.

Beauty is not a sin.
Beauty is not a temptation.
Beauty weaponized with ill intent is the adulteress — and most women are nowhere near that category.

P&rn Is a Symptom — Not the Root

The church keeps calling p&rn “the thorn,” but Scripture never treats symptoms as origins.

P&rn didn’t appear out of nowhere.
It didn’t form men — it fed what was already wounded.

“That’s just how men are.”
“This is my thorn.”
“I’ll struggle with this forever.”

That language sounds humble, but it’s actually surrender.

What’s consistently ignored is the origin story:
early exposure before discipleship,
sexual discovery without formation,
abuse, secrecy, shame, and silence.

We bottle all of that up — then subtly exile women from leadership, proximity, and trust because of how they look.

That’s not holiness.
That’s displacement.

Structural Misogyny Wearing a Spiritual Mask

P&rnography thrives in cultures where women are already reduced.

Doctors, psychologists, and sociologists have been clear: repeated exposure to sexualized imagery trains the brain to associate women with consumption, dominance, and control. It doesn’t create misogyny — it reveals and reinforces it.

Which means porn is not merely a personal moral failure.
It’s a mirror.

When men are discipled only to manage urges instead of heal wounds, misogyny stays intact — just quieter.

And quiet misogyny is still misogyny.

1 Peter 4 Is Not About “Trying Harder” — It’s About Re-Formation

Here’s how Peter frames it — and this matters:

“Those who have suffered in the flesh are done with sin.”

Not managed sin.
Not white-knuckled sin.
Done.

Peter doesn’t say, “Those who avoided temptation.”
He says, “Those who suffered.”

Then he names the programming:

“You have spent enough time living the way the world has programmed you to live — in lust, drunkenness, debauchery, orgies.”

That’s not a p&rn verse.
That’s a de-programming verse.

“You no longer live for human desire, but for the will of God.”

And here’s the tell:

“They find it strange that you don’t join them anymore.”

Healing looks strange to people still enslaved to the system.

If You’re Blaming Her, You’re Avoiding the Real Work

If a man says, “I can’t work with women because I struggle,” the issue isn’t proximity — it’s unhealed interior terrain.

Women are not responsible for male regulation.
Women are not the gatekeepers of male holiness.
Women are not objects men must manage around.

Women do not exist for male pleasure — good or bad.
They exist to image God.

That imaging happens in healthy relationships across covenant levels:
friendship, collaboration, leadership, marriage, community.

When men externalize blame, they delay freedom.

P&rn Is Not the Thorn

P&rn is a tool.

A tool that keeps the mind fragmented.
A tool that keeps the eyes trained to consume instead of honor.
A tool that keeps men disconnected from real women — and from God.

The thorn is not the image.

The thorn is:
The wound that let the image in,
The spirit that stayed unchallenged,
The lie that said healing wasn’t possible.

There is a higher spirit at play — and Scripture is clear: it can be driven out.

The Way Women Are Depicted Reveals the Deeper Sin

How women are portrayed in this world is not accidental.
It is formative.

Research confirms what Scripture has been diagnosing for centuries: p&rnography does not exist in a vacuum. It catechizes. It trains the imagination. It disciples desire.

Mainstream p&rnography consistently depicts women in objectifying and dehumanizing roles — marked by male dominance and female submission — reinforcing distorted sexual scripts and feeding sexist beliefs. Repeated exposure to degrading imagery has been shown to increase the objectification of women and cultivate hostile, entitled attitudes toward them. Scholars are clear on this point: p&rnography does not create misogyny — it mirrors and magnifies a culture already steeped in patriarchy and contempt.

Which explains why men’s groups and discipleship spaces so often circle back to the same tired refrain, usually wrapped in humor:

“That’s just how men are.”

That’s not theology.
That’s not healing.
That’s resignation.

Structural Misogyny, Not “Thorny Temptation”

P&rnography functions as a tool — not an isolated vice — one that reflects and reinforces cultural misogyny already present beneath the surface. As Andrea Dworkin once said,

“Anti-feminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of women hating.”

When misogyny goes unnamed, p&rnography becomes its visual and psychological echo — a system that trains men to consume rather than honor, dominate rather than commune.

Misogyny, defined plainly, is a hatred of women — not always loud, not always violent, thought violent, but always persistent in systems that diminish, distrust, and displace them.

And until misogyny — the hatred and devaluation of women — is named, pornography will continue to be treated like the problem instead of a symptom.

This is not a call to try harder.
It is a call to purify the waters we have waved a white flag at and decided were acceptable to be polluted.

We were never commissioned to coexist with contamination.

We are endowed with a force that breaks the chains of the enemy, not one that adds links to bondage and calls it grace. Grace does not manage captivity — it dismantles it.

Christ did not set us free so we could white-knuckle sin with better language.
He set us free to eradicate darkness.

And darkness is not driven out by avoidance, fear, or the exclusion of women.
It is driven out through healing, through truth, and through the restoring power of God’s love, to destroy anything spiritual that causes havoc in his creation.

Freedom doesn’t come from restraint alone.
It comes from being made whole.

And wholeness — real, embodied, relational wholeness — is still on the table.

Sources Referenced

Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981).
https://archive.org/details/pornographymenpo00dwor
Foundational work examining pornography as a cultural and political system that reinforces misogyny rather than merely reflecting private desire.

Paul J. Wright, Robert S. Tokunaga, and Ashley Kraus, “A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Attitudes Supporting Violence Against Women,” Archives of Sexual Behavior (2016).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-016-0825-8
Peer-reviewed research linking pornography consumption to increased objectification of women and hostile sexist attitudes among men.

Paul J. Wright et al., “Pornography Consumption and Sexist Attitudes Toward Women,” Journal of Communication (2017).
https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/67/3/1/3862460
Analysis demonstrating how repeated exposure to pornographic imagery shapes beliefs about dominance, entitlement, and gender roles.

Fight the New Drug, “Study Finds Porn Exposure Leads to Objectification and Discrimination.”
https://fightthenewdrug.org/study-finds-porn-exposure-led-to-objectification-discrimination-wtr/
A synthesis of NIH- and APA-backed studies showing how porn trains the brain toward consumption rather than connection.

Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE International), “The Church’s Crisis: Pornography and Patriarchy.”
https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/church-crisis-pornography-and-patriarchy/
A theological and sociological examination of how unaddressed patriarchy within the church enables pornography culture rather than dismantling it.

American Psychological Association, Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (2007).
https://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report
Comprehensive research on how sexualized imagery forms identity, expectations, and power dynamics in both men and women.

Why These Sources Matter

These sources don’t compete with Scripture — they corroborate it. What the Bible calls formation, research calls conditioning. What Scripture names as darkness, scholarship traces as pattern. Together they expose the same reality: what we repeatedly behold reshapes our vision of others. Pornography does not merely tempt individuals; it disciples cultures. And healing — biblically and neurologically — does not come from suppression or avoidance, but from restoration: learning again to see women as image-bearers, men as capable of wholeness, and freedom as something Christ actually secured.

Art by “Lumkile” no AI

Have You Ever Felt Like a Spiritual Side Chick?

Have you ever felt like God’s messenger by day and someone’s disposable fix by night?
Like a voice people visit for relief, but not for relationship.
Like a prophetic pit stop.
Like a spiritual strip mall where folks pull up, grab what they need, and disappear without learning your name.

Paul warned us: “In the last days people will acquire for themselves teachers to tickle their ears.”
Not to sharpen their souls.
Not to deepen their love.
Not to build covenant.
But to satisfy an itch.

And when I read that, I don’t just think about pulpits.
I think about swipe culture.

Swipe left. Swipe right.
Not searching for love — searching for sensation.
Judging by surface. Consuming for momentary pleasure. Moving on.

And I realized something painful:

We have imported hookup culture into the spirit.

We “date” voices.
We “use” gifts.
We “sample” anointings.
We consume insight without committing to relationship.

God has been extraordinarily kind to me. I don’t say that lightly.
But for much of my life — not from everyone, but from many — I have felt treated like a spiritual side chick.

Come give me the word.
Come give me the breakthrough.
Come give me the interpretation.
Come give me the dream meaning.
Come give me the prayer.

And then… silence.

No follow-up.
No “How are you?”
No “What do you need?”
No walking together.
Just extraction.

It hurts. And I’ll be honest — some of that pain is on me. I refuse to become cynical. I refuse to harden my heart. I keep believing in people. I keep hoping for mutuality. I keep offering myself fully.

But hope without reciprocity leaves bruises.

People call me all the time:

“Can I pick your brain?”
“I need your insight.”
“God told me to reach out to you.”
“Can you pray about this?”

Rarely does the sentence end with:
“How can I bless you?”
“How can I support you?”
“What’s heavy on your heart?”

We don’t just have spiritual hunger.
We have spiritual objectification.

We treat prophets, healers, intercessors, counselors, pastors, creatives like vending machines.

Insert prayer.
Receive miracle.
Press next button.

If we could, we’d put them all in a building with labeled rooms:

Room 1: Deliverance
Room 2: Healing
Room 3: Prophetic Word
Room 4: Dream Interpretation
Room 5: Financial Breakthrough

Swipe your card. Get your portion. Exit quietly.

But here’s the inconvenient truth:

We are not services.
We are not content.
We are not dispensers.

We are people.

With bills.
With families.
With exhaustion.
With unanswered prayers of our own.
With nights where we ask God, “Who is pouring back into me?”

I remember last year sending out my ministry donation link — not to get rich — but to see who would partner in helping reach people locally and globally. Thousands had benefited. Many had received counsel that helped build businesses, ministries, platforms, careers.

And at the end of the year?

$120.

Until a close friend surprised me with tears and generosity that reminded me humanity still exists.

This isn’t about money.
It’s about mutuality.
It’s about dignity.
It’s about community.

I don’t want a life where people only show up when they’re bleeding and disappear when they’re healed.
I don’t want friendships built on spiritual adrenaline and abandoned when the high wears off.
I don’t want to be valued only for “What did the Lord give you today for me?”

I want to do life.

I want shared tables, not just shared revelations.
I want presence, not just prayer requests.
I want relationships that survive silence seasons, not just miracle moments.

And here’s the harder confession:

My kindness won’t let me shut it down.
I keep giving.
I keep loving.
I keep answering calls.
Because Jesus keeps doing it with me.

But I am asking something of us — of the Church, of the community, of the spiritually hungry:

Be human.

If someone prays for you, follow up.
If someone pours into you, pour back.
If someone stands with you in crisis, stand with them in ordinary days.
If you receive, reciprocate.

Don’t treat spiritual people like disposable encounters.

We are not side chicks.
We are not one-night stands.
We are not spiritual entertainment.

We are brothers.
We are sisters.
We are family.

And family doesn’t just take.

Family stays.

Family checks in.

Family walks together when the miracle fades and the laundry still needs folding and the bills still need paying and faith still needs breathing room.

So yes… sometimes I feel like a spiritual side chick.

And it hurts.

But I refuse to let that pain turn me bitter. Instead, I’m letting it turn me honest.

Because maybe — just maybe — if we name this out loud, we can finally build something better than spiritual hookups.

We can build covenant.
We can build community.
We can build love that lasts longer than a prayer request.

And that’s the kingdom I’m still willing to bleed for.

How do you explain the human heart? A heart with so many chambers flowing fluidly into others with an amalgamation of bliss, while others remain locked with fruit, not knowing if it is forbidden or free to be explored. How do you explain the heart, my heart, the heart of a thousand loves?

Birth

When my eyes slowly opened, blurred with vision, to a room I did not recognize, the sterile, cold breeze, suspended in the open air, was the opposite of the pressed fluids and closeness of the loving closet I had existed in for nine months.

When they placed me on your skin, the closeness of your pheromones calmed me instantly, and without words, “I know this,” we finally met. To this day, no one has ever been more mesmerized by my skin, enamored of my eyes, and enthralled by my innocence as I discover my firsts in this world. I offered you nothing, but you instantly gave me everything; I cried and took from your body, disrupted your sleep, and you remained enchanted with me and prophetic about my future understanding of you and this world, my first chamber, my first love... yeah.

Adolescent

When I was able to jump and run, I saw I had two older versions of myself. One was the opposite in nature but an extension of the one who carried me: come outside with me, she beamed with a gleam; it is called double dutch, follow my lead. You led, loved, and embraced me with no hesitation; you brought me into your tribe as one of your own, dolls, baseball, games, or destruction, it didn’t matter, and I didn’t care; you loved me through partnership; I offered you nothing but presence and learning, and you held my hand in moments that I didn’t know I needed, you were 18 months ahead of me in the journey, but it seemed like centuries, my second chamber...yeah.

I did not think the house of my soul could expand into more rooms capable of hosting love beyond my true first, but I was thankfully wrong to see, receive, and accept this second chamber. But how many times can this happen? Will this happen...

Elementary

What is this anticipation of angst, a consumed concern of captivation, that floods my heart? I want to share the same space with you as we usher our elementary, wide-eyed classmates across the street. We yell HOOOOLD to make sure the surroundings are safe and secure. It did not matter what I yelled; all that mattered was the aroma of your presence, exuding Johnson & Johnson with a subtle hint of cocoa butter. The twinkle of your brown baby doll eyes, blue jeans, and high tops with your orange security stripe, even the way you drank from your juice box and opened your milk carton upside down, jolted my heart across stratospheres. I would follow you anywhere, Sheree Debold. Was it you, or was it the potential of you, us? My fourth-grade crush had us sailing on the stars to lasso the moon while slow dancing on Mars; no one told me to see you the way I did, but the eyes of my humanity beheld your essence, and I could not look away...another chamber, yeah.

I love my brown-skinned woman, from the almond tones, light and bright, to the deep, rich, mesmerizing cocoa; there is nothing like the covering and shimmer of the black woman. So when I was introduced to your beauty, I didn’t think your straight black hair and horizontal baby-doll almond eyes were anything I’d ever known would freeze time. To know you were a beauty never explained, only with heaven’s heart; this is your Aunt Saun; she is from Thailand and married your uncle D. You showed me secrets to your culture that I carry as a holy grail. Never told, but never lost was and is your love for me. You gave me favor in many things as we stood side by side sipping the flavors of unending cuisines. You showed me more than culinary brilliance. You gave me your deepest secrets, your loving legacy, manifested on a plate, and you knew I would not shatter this fragile gift. You remain the surprise in my soul I did not know I needed...another chamber, yeah.

Highschool

Back, back, forth, and forth were the internal fluctuations for you. You were my Aliyah, and I didn’t mind. Our go-to: three pieces and a biscuit. All we needed was a drive-through order and each other for the sun to stand still. Puppy love, sure, but we puppies were convinced of this fancy, for the other, though it never brought a future litter; you gave this insecure one confidence and a chance. We lived and loved in many moments, given the trauma of the streets we traversed...another chamber, yeah.

College

When I met you—time stopped as the crowd cheered, and the prep for the game was all muffled; you floated through time and space from another dimension; my heart grew, but how? I was not looking for this chamber. From late-night talks to humor, your way unraveled all my hardened edges, the ones hardened by the streets and past faux love; like that pleather that cracked under the sun, my brittle boundaries melted under your kindness and charisma. You were a mirror I wasn’t ready to see, but couldn’t look away from. We shared music, written realities we’d paint in the sky, and dreams, wandered under the coastal stars, mapping out futures we thought would intertwine forever.

You loved me when I didn’t yet know how to love myself, but not you. You were the architect of a new chamber—spacious, daring, tender. The almost and forever moments, the near-forever, the love that expanded me beyond what I believed I could be. You taught me love could be depth and choice, but also release. Another chamber, my almost and somehow always, and I left, ghosted you for reasons only a boy knows, and now a man can keenly see; it was fear itself...Yeah, I know. That was an enormous chamber...yeah.

For years, the renovation of my heart remained paused as I traversed the world, encountering hundreds of loves bound in the expression of mankind through the cultural joy of expression, which exploded my heart into a mansion that could not contain all the gifts and newly flipped rooms and chambers.

Wife love

So when I thought the house of my heart had reached its limit, she appeared—a light brighter than I imagined, in a sea of white; you were the only one with a love more profound than I’d ever known. My partner, my equal, my safe harbor in storms I didn’t see coming. She wasn’t just a room in my heart; she built a new wing. Together, we filled the walls with the echoes of laughter, with tiny feet running across the floorboards of our shared lives. Our daughters and son, reflections of us both, taught me that love isn’t just held—it multiplies. It spills over and floods into spaces you didn’t even know existed. This chamber is vast, warm, and eternal. It is the love I live inside, my sanctuary, my forever chamber...yeah.

When I met you, I no longer wondered if I was wonderful... and worthy of wonderment. With a braised brush, you softly scrubbed the brittle, debased corners of scorched crevices I was afraid to show you, but you knew already and saw them as lovely; you patiently waited. As you scraped and scrubbed so softly, each piece of grime that broke off and dissolved somehow was renewed into a pristine piece of heaven’s pageantry. You never focused on my dirt but on how heaven saw me, on what I would become, not how much you cleansed. Your cleansing was a prophetic blessing of healing, wholeness, and jubilee. I never flinched; you would always pause and ask, “Is this okay? Do you feel loved?” which displayed a patience I never knew. I brought you nothing, yet you were fascinated with the fabric of my being before I entered my mother’s womb. You were and remain fascinated with me; ohhh, this is the one that knows me, my maker, my lover, the chamber from which all chambers flow, eternity...yeah.

As I look to the tailor and seamstress of my soul, I see it now—the thousand loves, each chamber connected, not separate. My loves have built this cathedral of the heart, each room an expression, a reflection of Adonai’s love. I see the sacred from the first touch of my mother’s skin to my daughters’ laughter, from my sister’s guidance, college love, and wonder to my wife’s love. Every chamber, every love, was a lesson, a window into the divine.

All are afraid of real love, heaven’s love, because it is so whimsically watered down with whiffs of unrealistic romanticism; you only attach love to intercourse, the bedroom. But my son wasn’t thinking of those sheets when he entered that human form, eventually dawning death’s door. No, it was bigger, more vast, more expansive, with more chambers, and not bound by current space and time.”

The heart of a thousand loves is not mine alone—it is a dwelling place, an echo of Adonai’s endless love flowing through me. It is not closed; it is infinite, always leading me back to Him, my true love, a thousand loves...yeah.