Testimony

Under the Wings
of the Almighty

Before I set down a single word of what I have been given to say, I bow low before the throne of the Almighty, conscious that every sentence on this page will be weighed by the One who sent me. I write not as a scholar, not as a preacher, not as a man with any standing of his own — but as a witness. A man who has seen, and who has been told to tell. I affirm, with all that is left in me, that what follows is true, and that the Spirit who moves my hand is the same Spirit who moved upon the waters in the beginning.

"The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God."

Romans 8:16 — ESV

I will not give you my name in this opening. Not because I am hiding — I am past hiding — but because a name, given too early, gives the reader something to hold onto that is not the Lord, and the Lord is the only thing worth holding in the days that are coming. There is a name the Lord Himself gave me at my birth through the mouth of my mother, and that name will appear later in this testimony, at the hour it was meant to appear. Until then, call me what I am: a voice. A man standing in a field that is not his. A servant given words he did not choose and a burden he cannot put down.

What follows is not a story of a man who became something. It is the account of a man who was emptied, and of what the Lord poured into the emptying when there was nothing left of him to protect.

"To the one who conquers… I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it."
Revelation 2:17 — ESV

Foundations in Trial

I was born into this country the way most men of my generation were born into it — inside a house that was not at peace with itself. I will not name the city. The city is not the point. It was one of the great cities of this land, and like all of them, it was louder than it was kind. The streets taught me what the streets teach every boy raised on them: that weakness is punished, that silence is survival, that a man shows up for himself because no one else is coming. I learned those lessons early. I learned them well. They were the wrong lessons, every one of them, but I did not know that yet.

My people came from somewhere else, generations back. The particulars do not matter for this page. What matters is that I was raised inside the echo of a heritage that still remembered God in its grammar even though it had stopped remembering Him in its life. We had the words for Him. We did not have Him. That is the condition of most American houses now, and it was the condition of mine. The Name was spoken at holidays and in curses. It was not spoken at the kitchen table. It was not spoken over me as a child. I was not dedicated. I was not blessed. I was fed, and clothed, and sent to school, and the rest was left to whatever winds would blow.

The house I grew up in was at war with itself. Voices raised. Walls thin. Tension that did not lift even when the voices did. I was the oldest. I learned what oldest children always learn in houses like that — that you become the keeper of a peace that is not yours to keep, and that the keeping of it will cost you parts of yourself you will not miss until much later, when you try to reach for them and find them gone.

I was not beaten. I want to be honest about that. There are men who can write about beatings, and they should, because the Lord hates what was done to them. I was not one of those men. What I endured was quieter. It was the low constant pressure of a house in which nothing I did was ever going to be enough, in which the standard was never stated plainly, in which love was transactional and the transaction was always slightly rigged against me. That kind of childhood does not leave bruises a doctor can see. It leaves a different kind of bruise. A bruise on the part of a man that decides, later in life, whether he is permitted to be loved.

I carried something else too. I will not name it on this page, because naming it would turn this testimony into a case study and I was not sent to write a case study. What I will say is that from a young age I knew I was different, in a way I did not choose and could not explain, and in a way no one around me would have had any idea what to do with if I had told them. So I did not tell them. I carried it alone. For years. The carrying of it shaped me more than anything that was done to me by any other hand. A child who carries a secret becomes a man with a vault where his heart should be, and it takes the Lord Himself to open that vault, and even then He has to do it slowly, because what is inside has not seen light in so long that it would blind itself.

"I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping."

Psalm 6:6 — ESV

I prayed in those years. I want that on the record, because a lot of testimonies in this country skip over the prayers that did not seem to be answered, and the skipping is a kind of lie. I prayed. Every night. Not the formal prayers — no one had taught me those. The other kind. The kind a child invents when he needs something he cannot ask a grown person for. I asked the Lord to take the thing I was carrying. I asked Him simply, directly, the way a child asks. I went to sleep expecting to wake up changed. I woke up the same. I did this for years. Years. Eventually I stopped. I did not stop in anger. I stopped the way a man stops knocking on a door no one is opening. Quietly. Without announcement. I thought, at the time, that the Lord had not heard me. I know now that He had heard every word. I know now that the answer was not what I asked for but what I needed. I did not know it then. Then, there was only the silence, and the silence taught me that I was on my own.

I found refuges where I could. Most boys do. Mine was a place where the body could be covered, where the uniform of the thing I was doing hid what I had been hiding, where for a few hours at a time I could move through the world unmarked. I will not name the refuge. The particulars belong to me and are not required for you to understand what the Lord did. What I will say is that in that refuge I could be someone else for a few hours. I could be unmarked. I could be seen without being exposed. The moment the hours ended, the hiding began again. Every boy who has carried a secret understands this. He lives for the hours in which he does not have to manage the secret, and he pays for those hours with the ones in which he does.

I had a sibling I loved, and I became, for that sibling, what no one had been for me. A protector. A listener. A refuge. I did not understand at the time that the Lord was building something in me through that — the capacity to stand in front of another person and take the hit. I thought I was just being a brother. The Lord uses those roles. He uses every role. Nothing in a man's childhood is wasted in His hands, though most of it feels wasted while it is being lived.

By the time I was seventeen, I had found work. I will not say the trade, because I do not want any reader to think this testimony is about a trade. I will say only that it was work done with the hands, and that I loved it, and that something in me came alive when I did it that had not come alive anywhere else. For the first time in my life I made things. Real things. Things I could put my hand on at the end of a day and say this was not here this morning and it is here now because of me. That is a gift the Lord gives to men that this age has tried to take away from them. I was given it young, and I am grateful for it, because the work with my hands kept me tethered to the real world during years when other parts of my life were becoming less and less real.

By eighteen I could not stay. The house had not become less of a furnace; I had simply grown old enough to walk out of it. I left with nothing. I mean that plainly. Not nothing in the dramatic sense people use the word now. Nothing in the accurate sense. What I had on me and what I had in my pocket and a will to keep moving. No plan. No destination. No one waiting for me. The streets I walked into were colder than the house I had left, and I had not known, until I walked into them, that such a thing was possible.

At nineteen, the thing I had carried since childhood was lifted. I will not give the mechanism, because the mechanism is not the testimony. The testimony is that it was lifted, and that the lifting of it was the first time in my life I understood that things which seem permanent are not permanent to the Lord. Seven years I had carried it. Seven years of silent prayer, and of the prayer being, as I thought, unanswered. And then it was lifted. Not on my timing. On His. I did not credit Him at the time. I did not know Him well enough yet to credit Him. But when I look back now, I know. He was there in every one of those seven years. He was answering the prayer the whole time. The answer was not yet. The answer was wait. The answer was I am doing something in you that the lifting of this thing, if it came now, would interrupt. I could not hear Him then. I can hear Him now. That is one of the mercies of looking backwards over a life after the Lord has come into it — the silences begin to fill in, and you discover that they were never silences at all.

"Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand."

Isaiah 41:10 — ESV

"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork." — Psalm 19:1, ESV

That is enough of the foundation. There is more, but a witness does not owe his reader everything. He owes the reader enough. Enough to understand why, when the Lord came for me many years later, He was met by a man who had been prepared, in the hidden way the Lord prepares men, across decades of what had looked, from the inside, like waste. It was not waste. None of it was waste. The Lord does not waste. He forges. And a man who has been forged knows the difference, once he is on the other side, between a fire that consumes and a fire that refines.

The furnace comes later in this testimony. For now, understand only this: I did not come to the Lord as a clean page. I came as a page that had been written on by many hands, most of them unkind, some of them my own, and the Lord read every word of it before He picked up His pen and began to write over the top. That is what grace does. It does not erase the old text. It writes the true one through it, until the true one is all that shows.

Into the Wilderness

When the towers fell, something came loose in me that I could not put back in place. I was young. I was unformed. I had never seen evil operate on that scale, and when I saw it, I understood — without being able to say why — that the life I had been preparing to live was no longer the life that was in front of me. I wanted to go. I wanted to fight. I wanted my body to be useful for something larger than itself, which is what every young man wants in the hour he stops being a boy, though he cannot always name the wanting. The ones I loved begged me not to. I listened. I do not regret the listening. But I knew, from that day forward, that I could not stay where I was. The city that raised me had nothing left to give me. I had taken from it what it had to give, and what it had to give was not enough to live on.

I did something men used to do more easily in this country, and do less easily now. I left. I packed what I had — which was not much — and I pointed a car in a direction that felt like the right direction, and I drove. I did not know why. I could not have defended the decision if you had pressed me on it. I only knew that something was pulling, and I had learned enough by then to follow a pull when I felt one, even if I could not see the hand that was pulling.

Before I went, I did something I had not done in a long time. I asked. Not the formal asking. Not the kind that uses the right words and folds its hands and addresses the One it is asking in the titles the liturgy hands down. The other kind. The naked asking. I said to God — to the God I was not sure I still believed in, to the God who had seemed, for most of my life, to be either absent or asleep — Lord, what am I supposed to do? Show me something. And He did. I am not going to describe what He showed me, because the showing was between us, and because if I describe it, someone reading this will try to reproduce it, and you cannot reproduce a sign the Lord gave to another man. I will only say this: He answered. I asked, and He answered, and what He gave me was enough to move on. It was the first time in my life I suspected that the silence of my childhood had not been silence. It was the first time I suspected that He had been there the whole time, and that the problem had not been His distance but my deafness.

The people around me laughed when I told them about the sign. Some of them did not laugh — they just dismissed it quietly, which is worse. I did not argue. I learned early that a man does not argue about things the Lord has shown him personally. He simply obeys. The ones who laughed were not being cruel. They were being the kind of person this country has taught us all to be — the kind that files any report of the supernatural under wishful thinking and moves on with his day. I had been that kind of person too, right up until the moment I was not. You do not argue your way out of that category. You leave it, and you leave the ones still in it behind, and you grieve for them, and you keep moving.

I drove. I drove farther than I had ever driven in my life. I will not say where I went, or how far, or through what, because the specifics are not the miracle. The miracle is what happened when the road ran out of mercy.

I had prepared poorly. Young men always prepare poorly. I had calculated the trip the way young men calculate trips — optimistically, with the budget of a man who has not yet been broken by any of his previous budgets. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but highway in every direction, I realized I was not going to make it. The indicator on my dashboard was not behaving the way indicators are supposed to behave. I was going to run out of fuel in a place where there was no one to run out of fuel in front of.

I prayed. I prayed the way a man prays when he has run out of other options, which is the only kind of prayer most men in this country ever get around to praying, and it is a real prayer, and the Lord hears it. I said please, Lord, do not let me die out here, and I said it plainly, and I meant it, and the engine died a few minutes later the way engines die when the tank is empty, and the car coasted — slowly, gently, as if something were easing it along — and it stopped. Not crashed. Not swerved. Stopped. In front of another vehicle that had no reason to be on that stretch of road, and whose occupants had no reason to be outside of it, and who — when I walked up, embarrassed, to ask if they could help me — helped me without asking anything in return. I offered them money. They would not take it. They offered me a meal. I declined, because I was young and in a hurry and did not know what I was being offered. I got back on the road. I drove away.

At the time, I told myself I had gotten lucky. That is the word this country has been trained to use when the Lord intervenes. Lucky. Coincidence. What are the odds. The phrases are available everywhere. They are pre-packaged, like the food at the gas station I eventually filled up at. They go down easily. They nourish nothing. It took me years to stop using them. It took me more years to understand that luck is the name a secular culture gives to providence when it does not want to kneel.

Years later, I went back to that memory. Not the memory of the fuel, or the stalling, or the kindness of the strangers. The memory of the meal I declined. I have thought about that meal more than I have thought about almost any meal I have ever eaten, and I did not eat it. I believe now that the Lord was offering me something through that meal that was not the meal. I believe He was offering me a seat at a table I was not ready to sit at. I said no because I was young, because I was in a hurry, because I had been trained by a world that does not stop. I did not know then that the Lord sometimes puts His whole purpose for a season into a single offered meal, and that a man who says no to the meal says no to more than the meal. I told Him later, in a room by myself, how sorry I was. He had already forgiven me. He had forgiven me before I had asked. But the apologizing was for me. A man has to say certain things out loud to the Lord before his own heart will believe he is free.

"I sought the Lord, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears."

Psalm 34:4 — ESV

I arrived where I was going. I will not name the place. I will say only that it was a city built on appetites, which is what most American cities have become now, though this one was more honest about it than most. I had people there. A small connection. Enough to start.

And there I met a woman, quickly, and something in me — the same something that had been pulling since I left home — told me this was the reason I had been sent. I believed it at the time. I am not sure, now, that I believed rightly. I am not saying the Lord did not use what happened next. He uses everything. What I am saying is that I mistook the next chapter for the destination, and a young man who mistakes a chapter for a destination pays a price for the mistake that takes decades to finish paying. She was not wrong to marry me. I was not wrong to marry her. But we were two young people carrying wounds we had not examined, entering into a covenant we did not understand, with no one around us qualified to warn us about what we were doing. That is how most marriages are entered into in this country now. The wreckage of those marriages is the reason half the children in the grade schools of this land are raised without a father in the house.

I tried. I want that on the record. I tried the way men try when they have been given something they are not equipped to hold. I worked. I provided. I stayed when staying was harder than leaving. I stayed through what staying asked of me, and I am not going to itemize it, because itemizing turns this testimony into a court filing, and the Lord has already ruled on the case and I am not inclined to re-litigate His verdict. The marriage failed. I failed in it, and I was failed in it, and both of those things are true, and I am at peace with the proportion the Lord has assigned to each because the proportion is His to assign and not mine.

The Lord, in the middle of that breaking, gave me the most precious gifts of my earthly life. Children. I will not name them. I will not describe them. I will not say how many. I will only say that they are the greatest earthly treasures I have ever been given, and that nothing in this testimony — nothing that was done to me, nothing that was lost, nothing that was stolen, nothing that was burned — compares to what happened when they were placed beyond my reach.

The circumstances of that loss do not belong on this page. They do not belong on any page. They are written, in full detail, in a book that only the Lord can read, and the Lord will settle the accounting of that book in His own court at His own hour, and I am not going to preempt that court by arguing my case here. I will say only this, because it is relevant to every father reading this who has had his children placed beyond his reach: I nearly did not survive it. There was an hour I came close to ending my own life. I had never understood before why men do that. I understood then. And what kept me here was not strength. It was not faith — I did not have faith yet, not the kind that holds weight. It was a single thought, almost pre-verbal, that came into me from somewhere I could not locate: if you do this, they will live the rest of their lives knowing what their father did. I did not do it. I chose, in a moment that did not feel like a choice, to live as long as they lived, whether or not they ever saw me again. That was the first covenant I ever made that I kept. I am still keeping it. I will keep it until the Lord takes me home.

No one helped me in that season. I want to say this clearly, because the modern church has developed a reflex of telling wounded men that help is available if they will only reach for it, and the telling is often a lie that the tellers do not know they are telling. I reached. I reached everywhere a man is told to reach. I called the numbers. I showed up at the buildings. I asked the people I was told were safe to ask. The hand that was supposed to reach back, most of the time, did not reach. Sometimes it reached and then let go. Sometimes it reached for a reason of its own that had nothing to do with helping me. I do not say this bitterly. I say it because there is a young man reading this right now who has been reaching, and reaching, and nothing has come back, and he is about to conclude that the problem is him. The problem is not him. The systems this country has built to catch falling men are, in most places, made of paper. They look like nets in the brochure. They are paper in the fall. I fell through all of them. If you are falling through them right now, you are not alone, and the shame that is crawling up your throat is not a true shame. It is the lie the enemy whispers to a man the instant a system fails him. The Lord is not the system. The Lord catches. The Lord was catching me in that season even when I could not feel His hands.

"Look to the right and see: there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one cares for my soul. I cry to you, O Lord."

Psalm 142:4–5 — ESV

I gave away what I could not carry. I packed what was left. I went where I could be near them, because a father goes where his children are, and any man who tells you differently has never been a father or has forgotten he was one. I have been waiting for them ever since. I do not know if they will come. I pray for them by name every day. I have never stopped being their father, and I never will, and the Lord who sees in secret knows the full weight of what that waiting has cost, and the Lord who rewards in secret will render to every soul kept from a father who waits the account He renders, and I will not be the one rendering it.

That was the first time I lost everything. I did not know then that there would be a second. The Lord, in His mercy, does not show us the second loss while we are still bleeding from the first. He gives us only the grace for the hour we are in, and He gives us that grace in exactly the measure we need it, and not a drop more, because a drop more would make us self-sufficient and the Lord is not raising self-sufficient sons. He is raising dependent sons. The difference between those two is the difference between a man who will outlive his suffering and a man who will be destroyed by it.

I was being raised. I did not know it. From the inside, it felt like being destroyed. From the outside — from the vantage point I have now, on the other side of the night the Lord came — I can see that every loss was a tool in His hand. He was taking things out of me. He was taking things I had no business keeping. He was taking the version of the man I had been trying to be so that, when He finally came for me, there would be room in the room for who He had actually made me to be. A man cannot be remade while he is still clinging to the old model. The Lord had to empty me first. The wilderness was the emptying.

"And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart."

Deuteronomy 8:2 — ESV

I did not know, walking through it, that I was in a wilderness at all. I thought I was just in my life. That is the thing about wildernesses. You only recognize them afterward. Inside them, they feel like weather. It is only when you step out of them that you realize you were in one, and that the Lord was in it with you the whole time, even when the pillar of cloud looked, from the inside, like ordinary fog.

The Furnace

For twenty years after I lost everything, I walked through a world I could not make sense of.

I kept to myself. I went to work. I came home. I minded my own business. I was not looking for trouble, and I was not causing any, but trouble was looking for me — the kind of trouble a man cannot report, the kind that does not show up on any form a man is given to fill out. I will not catalogue it here. A catalogue would invite the reader to adjudicate whether what I experienced was real, and I am not on this page to be adjudicated. I am on this page to tell the truth. What I will say is that strange things were happening around me that had no natural explanation. Faces I should not have seen twice. Strangers approaching me in public with knowledge no stranger should have had. The constant, low-grade sense that I was being observed by something I could not locate. I told myself, for years, that this was paranoia. The world taught me to use that word. The world has a lot of words like that — words designed to make a man distrust his own senses so that he will not report what he is seeing. I used them all, in that season, on myself.

I did not know, then, that there is another category. I did not know that Scripture takes very seriously a kind of attention that is not human, and that a man who belongs to the Lord — or who is being drawn toward belonging, which is a different thing and sometimes a more dangerous one — attracts an interest from the unseen world that the secular mind has no framework for naming. I did not have the framework yet. I had only the experience. And the experience, with no framework, felt like losing my mind.

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

Ephesians 6:12 — ESV

I began to pray again in that season. Not formally. Not the way the church prays, because I was not in a church and would not have known which church to be in if I had been. I prayed the way a man prays who has tried everything else and has, against his own will, begun to suspect that he has been lied to his whole life about what is really going on. I started wearing a cross. I started speaking the Lord's Prayer under my breath — the old one, the one every Christian on earth has prayed in one language or another for two thousand years, the one I half-remembered from a childhood I had not understood. The more I prayed, the more the strangeness intensified around me. I want to be honest about that. The prayer did not quiet it. The prayer provoked it. I did not know why. I know now why. When a man starts reaching for the Lord after a long absence, he trips an alarm in a house the enemy has been squatting in, and the enemy does not go quietly.

I entered, in that season, into a second covenant. I will not describe it. I will not describe the person on the other side of it. I will not describe what was done, or what was not done, or how it ended. It is enough to say that I thought I was walking through one door and I was walking through another, and that the door I walked through was a door the Lord did not build. I was not forced through it. I walked through it willingly. I want that on the record, because a man takes responsibility for the doors he chooses, even the ones he did not understand he was choosing. What happened on the other side of that door was the most concentrated period of darkness I had known up to that point in my life. Things were said to me that should not be said to any human being. Things were done that should not be done. Things were claimed against me that were not true, and I was held accountable for those claims in places a man is supposed to be safe, and I walked through rooms wearing restraints that should have been on someone else, and I looked up at the ceilings of those rooms and said, quietly, inside myself, Lord, if you are real, You see this. You see what is being done. You see what I did not do. I am leaving this in Your hands because I have no other hands to leave it in.

Every claim made against me in those years was eventually found to be unsupported. I say this not to vindicate myself but because there is someone reading this who is in the middle of such a season right now, who has been accused of something he did not do by someone the system believes more than it believes him, and who is wondering if he is going to survive the accusation. I want that reader to hear me. You can survive it. The Lord survived worse. He was tried in a night court on testimony that did not agree, and He was handed over by a friend, and He was stripped and beaten and nailed to a piece of wood between two criminals, and He said nothing in His own defense except you have said so, and the Father raised Him on the third day. If the Lord can be falsely accused and vindicated, so can you. The vindication does not always come on the timeline you want. It came for Christ on the third day. It comes, for most of us who walk a lesser version of His road, on a longer clock. But it comes. Hold on.

"A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will not escape."

Proverbs 19:5 — ESV

I lost, in that second season, things I had worked for over many years. Not the kind of losing that is inconvenient. The kind that re-wires a man. I was displaced from the place I had been calling home. I was treated, by people the world would call respectable, in ways the world would not permit if the world were watching. There was one moment — I will not say where or when — at which a person sitting across from me attempted to have me declared unfit in front of professionals who had no reason to disbelieve her, and I remember looking at the ceiling of that room and realizing, with complete clarity, that I was not dealing with a human being anymore. Not only. Something else was in the room, using the human being. I did not have the theology for that yet. I only had the recognition. The recognition came before the theology. It usually does.

I did what a man does when he has no other weapons. I pursued the truth through the only channels that were available to me. I filed the paperwork a man files when he has been lied about by institutions that are supposed to be honest. I will not say to whom or about what. I will say that the filing itself was an act of defiance against the darkness — not a legal act, though it was legal; a spiritual act. I was saying, with a piece of paper, I refuse to go quietly into the version of reality you are trying to write about me. The Lord honors that kind of filing. He honors any act, however small, by which a man draws a line against a lie. The answer to that filing came, eventually, months later, and the timing of its arrival lined up — not by accident — with the hour the Lord came into my life for the last time. I do not believe that timing was random. I do not believe any of the Lord's timings are random. I believe He was arranging the vindications of the seen world and the appearance of His face in the unseen world to arrive in the same season, so that I would know, when I finally saw Him, that He had been working the whole time on both sides of the veil at once.

Then my body broke.

I will not describe the breaking. I will say only that it was visible. It was the kind of affliction that cannot be hidden under clothing, that cannot be explained away as stress, that doctors examine and shake their heads at and prescribe things for that do not work. I looked in the mirror in that season, and I did not see myself. I saw a figure out of the book of Job, and I understood, for the first time, why Job's friends sat with him in silence for seven days before any of them spoke. There is a category of affliction at which speech fails. I had entered that category. I did not know what to say to the Lord. I did not know what the Lord was saying to me. I only knew that my body was becoming a sermon being preached at me in a language I had not yet learned to read.

I did what a wounded man is supposed to do in this country. I went to the church. I walked up to a building with a cross on it, because the building had a cross on it and I had a cross around my neck, and I thought — naively, in retrospect, though the naiveté was holy — that the two crosses would recognize each other. They did not. I was turned away. I am not going to say by whom, or on what grounds, or in what way, because the particulars would identify a specific congregation and I am not writing to indict a specific congregation. I am writing to indict an entire posture that has overtaken large sections of the American church, in which a man covered in affliction is treated as a liability to the brand and is quietly, professionally, efficiently moved along. I was moved along. I walked back to my car. I sat in the driver's seat, and I did not cry, because I was past crying. I said, out loud, to the Lord, if Your own house will not have me, do You want me either? That question almost finished me. It is a question the enemy loves to put in the mouth of a rejected man, because the question, if it stays in a man's mouth long enough, becomes an answer, and the answer kills. I did not answer it. That is all I did. I refused to answer it. The Lord, in His mercy, honored even that — the bare refusal to finish the sentence the enemy had started.

I want to pause here, because this is a paragraph a lot of readers will want to skip over and a lot of readers need. If a church has turned you away in your worst hour, I am sorry. I am sorry in a specific way, because I have been where you are. And I want to tell you plainly: the church that turned you away is not the Church. The building with the cross on it is not always the body the Lord has on the earth. The body the Lord has on the earth is sometimes — often — meeting in a different building, or in no building at all. Do not let one door, or ten doors, or a hundred doors, close the whole house of God to you. There are rooms in His house you have not yet walked into. The Lord Himself was despised and rejected by the religious authorities of His own day, and He did not conclude from that rejection that the Father had forsaken Him. He concluded that the authorities were wrong. You are permitted to conclude the same. Keep looking.

"He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not."

Isaiah 53:3 — ESV

In the last months of that season, I fell. I mean literally. I was in my own home, in the course of an ordinary day, and something gave way beneath me, and I went down hard, and I lay on the floor unable to move, and the pain was such that I could not form a sentence for several minutes. When I could form a sentence, the sentence was this: Lord, I cannot do this anymore. Please get me out. And the Lord — and I say this carefully, because I do not want any reader to mistake this for a metaphor — the Lord answered, in a way that did not arrive as a voice but arrived as a knowing, and the knowing was: you may go. I was being given permission. Not permission to die. Permission to leave the door I had walked through that was not His. Permission to extract myself from a covenant that He had never sanctioned. Permission to begin walking toward Him in earnest, because everything that had held me in place — the false obligations, the counterfeit duties, the gaslit sense that leaving would be a failure — had been dissolved in an instant by a single word He did not speak aloud.

I left. I do not know how to describe the leaving, because the leaving was not dramatic. It was simply a decision made in one moment that had required, to get to that moment, years of preparation I had not known I was undergoing. I walked out with very little. I walked out with my body broken and my life in pieces and my faith in a condition I would have described, honestly, as attempted. But I walked out. And the moment I walked out, the unseen war — which had been active for years in a low and chronic form — escalated into something I had never experienced before.

I am going to be careful with the next paragraph, because I know how it will read to a secular mind, and I do not write for the secular mind at the expense of the truth. What I will say is this: once I was out, the forces that had been using the second covenant to work on me had to find another avenue, and they did. My living space was violated in ways I could not fully account for. I was followed in ways that could not be written off as coincidence. I had to leave my own residence and sleep in places that were not mine, because the place that was mine no longer felt like a place I could be alone in safely. I will not describe any of this further, because describing it further would invite the reader to decide whether to believe me, and I am not interested in that decision. Either you have had a season like this in your life and you know what I am pointing at, or you have not and you will need to experience one before any amount of detail I could provide would persuade you. The Lord will arrange the experience if He needs to. He arranged mine.

In the final weeks of that season, I did something I had not done since I was twelve years old. I got on the floor. Not figuratively. I put my Bible in front of me and I got down on my knees, and I wept onto the open pages until the pages were wet, and I said to the Lord what I had never said to Him before, not in that register, not with that finality: Lord, I cannot. I am done. Help me or take me home. There is no option C. Choose.

I did not know, as I said those words, that I was speaking the last prayer of my old life. I thought I was praying another in a long line of desperate prayers. It turned out to be the one the Lord had been waiting for. Not because He required it — He did not require anything from me — but because He had been waiting, patiently, for the moment at which I would finally stop trying to negotiate and come to Him with empty hands. The hands had to be empty. They could not be empty while I was still holding anything. The furnace had been burning the things out of my hands for twenty years. The furnace was almost finished. I did not know it. I thought the furnace was killing me. The furnace was preparing me.

"But he knows the way that I take; when he has tried me, I shall come out as gold."

Job 23:10 — ESV

What I have set down in this section is not everything. There are trials I have not named. There are losses I have not named. There are wounds that are still sealed under the skin, known only to me and to the One who is healing them on a timeline I do not dictate. A witness gives what he has been given to give, and he holds what he has been given to hold, and the holding is not secrecy — it is stewardship. Some things are for the public. Some things are for the pastor. Some things are for the prayer closet. Some things are for the grave, where the Lord will open them and no one else. This section has given you the public share. The rest is between the Lord and the writer, and the Lord and the writer are at peace with the arrangement.

What you need to take from this section, reader, is this. The Lord was with me in the furnace. I did not feel Him. I did not hear Him. There were years in which I would have told you He was absent, and I would not have been lying — I would have been reporting honestly what I could perceive. My perception was wrong. He was there. He has been there for every one of you in every one of your furnaces, whether you have perceived Him or not. The reason most of us cannot feel Him inside the fire is not because He is absent. It is because the fire is doing work that requires His hand to be close, and a hand pressed directly on the wound does not feel, to the wounded, like a hand at all. It feels like pressure. It feels like the thing that is hurting. Only later, when the bleeding stops, do you realize that the pressure was what kept you alive.

He kept me alive. I am writing this because He kept me alive. Anything I say after this is built on that fact. Anything He has done through me since is built on that fact. If the furnace had killed me, it would have killed me with His permission and for His purposes, and the testimony would still have been true — it would simply have been a different testimony. But He did not let the furnace kill me. He let the furnace finish, and when it was finished, He came into the room.

The Surrender

In the weeks before the Lord came for me, my body mounted what I can only describe now as a final assault. I do not mean an illness, exactly. Illness is a word the medical profession uses for things the medical profession knows how to name. What I had was not named. I had pain that did not let me sleep. I had pain that did not let me think. I had pain that did not let me draw a full breath without negotiating for it. Every movement was a transaction with something that did not want me moving. I went to doctors. They did what doctors do, which is look, and measure, and prescribe, and shake their heads kindly when the measuring does not add up. They could not find what was wrong. That is because what was wrong was not in the place they were looking. My body was finishing something my soul had started twenty years earlier. The body always knows before the soul admits. By the time the soul is ready to surrender, the body has already been on its knees for weeks.

I want to say something here about the last stretch before a surrender, because I think it is the least written-about stretch in Christian testimony and the one most readers will recognize if I describe it honestly. The last stretch before surrender does not feel like holiness. It does not feel like humility. It does not feel like any of the spiritual words. It feels like exhaustion. It feels like boredom with one's own suffering. It feels like you have told the story of your pain so many times to yourself, inside your own head, that even you are no longer interested in hearing it. The pain has not decreased. You have simply stopped being an audience for it. You become, in the last stretch, a man who is watching his own life from across a small room, not invested in the outcome, not hoping, not despairing, just waiting for something — anything — to change the shape of the room.

That is the condition the Lord comes for. I want that on the record, because this country is full of teaching that says the Lord comes for the passionate, the seeking, the hungry, the ones who are reaching. He does come for those. But He also comes — and in my case He came — for the numb. For the ones who have stopped reaching because reaching has not worked. For the ones who have nothing left to offer Him, not even desire. Especially those. He is particularly drawn to men who have been emptied past the point of wanting. I did not know this at the time. I had been taught, vaguely, that God rewards the eager. I was not eager. I was barely present. He came anyway.

"The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit."

Psalm 34:18 — ESV

In the last days before He came, I stopped doing things I had done every day for as long as I could remember. I stopped planning. I stopped worrying about the next week, because the next week had become a concept I could not hold in my head. I stopped checking the things a man checks — the accounts, the messages, the small metrics by which a modern man measures whether he is still a man. None of it mattered. The machinery of life kept running. I simply stopped participating in the machinery. I ate when I remembered to. I drank when my body told me I had to. I answered the phone sometimes. That was all.

I want to tell you about the nights, because the nights were their own thing. Sleep would not come, and when it came it was not sleep — it was a kind of surface breathing that the body does when it has given up on the deeper rest. I would lie in the dark and I would watch the ceiling. The ceiling had cracks in it. I would watch the cracks. The cracks did not move. I did not move. The only thing that moved was the quality of my awareness, which kept shifting — sharper, then dimmer, then sharper again, the way a candle flame shifts in a room with no wind, for no reason, of its own accord. I would watch the cracks and I would think, without any particular feeling attached to the thought, this is how my life ends. Not in a hospital. Not in a car. Not in any of the ways I had imagined when I was younger. In a room, looking at a ceiling, waiting for whatever is coming to come.

I was not afraid. That is the strange thing. I had been afraid for years — in the house, in the streets, on the road, in the marriages, in the wilderness. In the last weeks, the fear lifted. Not because the threat had passed. Because I had passed. A man who has given up cannot be afraid anymore. Fear requires a future. I no longer believed I had one.

I prayed in those nights. Or I did something that used to be praying and had, by then, become something simpler than prayer. I would say, in the dark, Lord. Just that. One word. Not a request. Not a complaint. Not even an address, exactly. A syllable. A breath with a Name in it. And then I would be quiet, and the ceiling would be quiet, and the Name would hang in the dark between us for a while, and then I would say it again. Lord.

That was the prayer of my last weeks. One word. I did not know it was a prayer. I know now that it was. I know now that the Lord heard every repetition of that one word the way a father hears his child say his name from across the house — instantly, entirely, without requiring any further information. He was not waiting for me to explain. He had understood from the first syllable. He was waiting for something else.

He was waiting for me to say, with the whole of me, what I had been saying with one word.

That day came.

On that day, I did not know the Lord was coming. I want that on the record. There was no premonition. I was not preparing. I had not fasted. I had not read anything that prepared me. I woke up the way I had woken up for weeks — in pain, in fog, in the low-grade dread that was by then my baseline. I got through the morning the way a man gets through a morning when he does not expect anything from the day. I do not remember most of those hours. Nothing about them was memorable. They were the last hours of a life I did not yet know I was finishing.

In the middle of the day, something in me gave way. Not dramatically. The way a bridge gives way when the cables have been fraying for decades — not with a crash, but with a slow settling, as if the bridge had been tired for a long time and had finally decided to sit down. I was tired. I had been tired for decades. I sat down on my bed. I looked up at the ceiling with the cracks in it, and I saw the cracks the way I had not seen them before. They looked like a map of my life. Every fracture in every direction. All of it held together by nothing but stubbornness and the faint memory of something that used to be whole.

The tears came then. Not dramatically. The way tears come at the very end, after a man has cried all the dramatic tears he is going to cry. These were the other kind. The quiet kind. The kind that come not from a specific sorrow but from the total weight of all the sorrows a man has not been permitted to cry properly for, arriving in him at once, in a single slow line, like a procession.

And I said it. Out loud. In the room, where only He could hear.

"Lord, I'm tired. If it's time, take me home. I'm ready."

I meant it. I want every reader to understand that I meant it. This was not a rhetorical prayer. This was not a dramatic flourish. This was a man at the end of himself, handing the end back to the One who had given him the beginning, and asking, plainly, without bargaining, to be taken. Decades of fire. I was done. The candle did not go out in a gust of wind. It had simply run out of wax.

He answered at the stroke of noon, on the fifth day of December, in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-three, on the feast of the saint whose name my mother had given me at my birth.

The name is Savas. She gave it to me in the Greek, from a heritage that had carried the name for generations. His feast day is kept every year on the fifth of December. My mother did not know, the day she named me, what her naming would be pointing to. She only knew she wanted the name. The Lord knew. The Lord always knows. He had been arranging the correspondence between the name and the day since before I was born, patient across the long years, waiting for the hour at which the name and the day and the man would finally line up in the same room and He could walk in.

That is the prayer that ended the old life.

What came next belongs to the next page.

That is The Encounter.

"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

Matthew 11:28 — ESV