Some have asked me how I ended up where I'm at. How I have become such a dichotomy or as Green Day said, a walking contradiction. How I survived the insanity and stupor of my childhood and twenties. A 250lb behemoth at nearly 57 years old. Versed in the Bible to an extent I could be a pastor in a church but don't have a church. In job interviews I'm asked how a person with a theology degree ended up as a Quality Engineer/Quality Auditor. Why I've jumped between 15 employers in 38 years. You good folk are about to find out, warts and all. To all who thought they knew me then, I’m no longer that person. I’ve been washed and sanctified in the Resurrection of Christ. To those who know me now, you’ll understand what makes me so dogmatic and why I dig in and use logic and reasoning to shutdown lofty arrogant pretension from educated people. At times I'm not a pretty picture.
If people were honest, they’d admit their lives haven’t aren't pretty either. We all have things to hide. Skeletons in our closets. I no longer do…my life is an open book for all to peer inside of. I don't care how I am perceived anymore. People that care what other people think of them is for people who are trying to impress others. Simps. Betas. The spineless that will change their theology and worldview for the shifting winds. These people should not be teaching the Bible or talking about God. They're theological liabilities.
I'll state that this isn’t going to be a self-pitying post but it will be brutally honest. It is a general observation of my life that I believe many can relate to. As I approach my 7th decade on this orb, I realize with few exceptions…nothing happened in this life the way I expected. I didn’t have a great childhood. I was pretty badly abused behind my parents back when they were both at work. Beatings, sometimes daily. Who did it wasn't important. My parents were not aware. I was in a form of Stockholm Syndrome. I said nothing and the abuse lasted 5 years until I could take no more and lashed out. In desperation I said something to someone and the nightmare ended.
The damage it did to my head didn’t end. I learned to internalize it. When I
attempted to come forward with it later in life it was trivialized or I was demeaned
being told, “It couldn’t have been that bad.” Everyone else’s opinion was that
my past didn’t matter, only theirs. I learned to keep to myself. I never realized this would make me a voice in the wilderness like Elijah later in life.
Part of the world but not of it. A loner by choice.
I carried scars and hate with me for decades afterward. The people in my
teen years seemed to intuitively know this about me and poked at me constantly.
I was super sensitive and reacted poorly instead of thinking. Reacted in emotion...which is why I so thoroughly distain the woke reactives. I badly wanted to
be part of a group but learned that I was better off a alone. Looking back, I
realize it was kids being kids and just doing it for laughs. Had I not been through
what I’d been though, I’d have probably laughed too. I was a loud mouth and
still am. Then I wouldn’t back it up. Now, I most certainly will. My fiancé understands this as we are similar in a rebellious way. She with the tattoos and Harley. Me with the gym, 250lbs of muscle and a chip still sometimes on my shoulder.
Failure to address the mistreatments in my youth came out in a desire to be the largest and strongest. It came out in a desire to destroy my destroyers. In this way I became the evil I hated. This led to a decade in my twenties of constant conflict, fighting, addiction to alcohol, addiction to substances, addiction to sex, addiction to anything that was addictive. Anything that could be done, I did to self-destructive extremes dodging death a couple of times along the way. This mindset went to other less destructive things too. I was a powerlifter, a bodybuilder, a bouncer…a force to be reckoned with. All the frustration, anger and disillusionment were well channeled for a time.
If things were in my way I tried to walk around them and if I couldn’t I
was a bulldozer. I leaned my head down into you until you relented or I got you to
the ground. I wasn’t a great fighter as most will attest but I would exhaust
you. I was relentless. Today they call it ground and pound. Intensity for intensity’s sake. People drifted in and out of my life. They
sloughed off of me like dead skin. I just wasn’t a good person for 20 years.
At best a backslidden Christian. At worst a sinner with a straight path for Hell.
This was an end in itself and I knew it so by my early 30s I
turned to family and marriage and children. Having not addressed long
dormant issues the marriage ended within a decade and floundered for another 4
or 5 until I gave up and left. I don’t blame her. She had given up. I left more towards the end because I realized I needed to change for my sons. I had already begun to own my own baggage and started on a path to
seek out God again and rectify wrongs where I could. After 23 years as a draftsman,
quality inspector and a few other vocations I settled into a career as quality
manager at Mack Trucks. I lasted there 10 years and was laid off in 2009. Towards
the end of my 30s and tenure at Mack Trucks, God dramatically reentered my
life in supernatural ways.
In the beginning of reemergence I was challenged by a
paster named Randy Johnson to read my Bible...so I did only to prove him, and the Bible wrong.
Then the world stopped turning because the more I read it the more I realized,
not only couldn’t I prove it wrong. The deeper I went into it, the more
internally coherent it became. This was an inflection point for me mentally and spiritually.
I asked myself if there really was something more to the ‘God stuff’ I had been
exposed to my whole life. Turns out…there was. Volumes of things. I now have a
library of thousands of books that range from the 18th century to recent
publisher’s releases. I now publish my own work like you’re reading now.
I went back to school due to encouragement from family and church and in 2013 basically graduated from what I would consider seminary. I quickly realized that few churches wanted a super-intense, ex-addict in a pulpit. No one really wanted me in their churches because I was what the theologians call a New Testament prophet.
Please
understand I didn't label myself this. Everyone around me that understood their
Bible like my professors, scholars, pastors ended up telling me
this. I fought this label for years because I viewed it as absurd. I believed
the office of prophet died with the Apostles, John the Baptist and the Old
Testament. Then I learned that’s not what they meant.
I'm person that speaks unsavory truths to a world that doesn’t
want to hear them. I do it fearlessly and don’t do it politely
either. I try to have grace and love but I quickly become indignant when
immoral liars with twisted words lie to the masses and further corrupt the world.
Conversely, don’t always get it right and I am usually called on it by others. I
correct myself, I learn, I move on. Most often, unfortunately, I get things correct.
Many times, I am intolerable to be around because every
single time I see injustice or God being mocked the old pieces of me come out
and I am on the hunt to end it. No more Stockholm Syndrome. I
am not a Christian doormat. Even my own friends have told me
that when I am in a room the environment shapes around me,
not me around it. It is another manifestation of the prophetic office. It has
happened with ten people in Bible study and in congregations of over a thousand
people. When I speak from the Bible the words take on their own life and I am exhausted
at the end of the sermon. Having this responsibility is heavy. Heavier than any of the weights I've lifted.
I realized the world pays for what it values and few value
the word of God. Pastoring and tending of a flock doesn’t pay. The world is
cheap and Christians are some of the worst tightwads the world has produced.
They speak of faith until it hits their wallets. So…I returned to Quality
Engineering as it so closely resembles the Mosaic law and a desire to correct behavior
to make humanity’s behavior better. I realized that the Bible and Quality are
synonymous. They both seek to correct errant behaviors.
I didn’t foresee any of these things about myself. The irony
being that when you say the word prophet people just assume that the prophet foretells or forespeaks the future. That was the Old Testament prophet. I don’t foretell anything. I use the wisdom of Scripture and
compare it to the current culture and world (as messed up as it is) and make
intuitive statements about it. Many have misconstrued some of my ability to state
some things before they happen as some form of prophecy. Nonsense. Some have been caught off-guard with the accuracy some of my
statements. It is just commonsense to me. I look at
Scripture, see the modern scenario and draw correlations. Not forthtelling…more like, past-telling or past-seeing. I study history and human behaviors and draw obvious conclusions. It astounds
me how prone humanity is to repeat itself. As shown in the examples of Scripture,
it only takes a generation for a people to forget the past. We see the same
today.
In conclusion, my life has been a long and winding road. Constantly moving forward.
Changing, adapting and being what I believe God wants me to be. My kids
turned out okay. For this I am glad. They understand their dad now and I have tried to help them navigate and avoid pitfalls that befell me. I have raised them as men and men they’ve
become. One is studying Criminal Justice. My other son is working towards a level 3 welding certification. I’m proud of the men they’ve become. Men’s men.
I pray their lives aren’t as unpredictable and arduous as mine has been at times. Then again, the life I have lived to this point has tempered me and made me what I am. An unrelenting advocate for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
What have I taken away from all this? Life is short and fleeting. Enjoy it. Youth is here then gone like a vesper. I've seen peak health and I've seen disease. I've seen goodness and I've seen evil. I've seen most of these within myself. I've seen people born and seen people die. The real question is what did you do when you were here? Did you bring good into the world? Did you get back up when you got knocked down or did life beat you?
The Grateful Dead were right, its been a long strange trip and it’s not over yet. Not all who wander are lost.
As Robert Frost said years ag0 in 1916:
Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
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