The resistance is dead (the blog)

Kevin Mooseles author site and blog

  • The conformity conspiracy

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    This decade has revealed a number of deep unsettling truths about the terms and conditions of being a functional member of modern society. 

    The rules, as we are given, seem to be written and enforced by a class of people entirely devoted to unspeakable secret routines of debauchery. 

    The best and brightest (as defined by Forbes and People, and other voiceboxes of normality dictated to the masses) were spending their free time flying on the Lolita Express with Jeffrey Epstein the whole time. 

    We know this for a fact right now. Are we going to do anything about it? 

    Our sitting president, who whipped up millions of people under the promise of draining the swamp and exposing pedophile networks, is very likely a pedophile himself. His name was in the released Epstein files more than a million times in three million documents. That is a thousand thousand times, in case you forgot how big a number one million actually is.

    His disgusting birthday card came out, the way he used Mar A Lago to recruit for Epstein came out, numerous other embarrassing references that Trump fought tooth and nail to keep hidden came out, and with enough surprise news stories, random invasions of sovereign nations, and other distractions we have simply allowed that shady creepy gross secret to become our new normal. 

    Personally speaking, I have been horrified by the standards and rules of our old normal for decades. I don’t even know where to start when it comes to digesting the new normal. 

    Our system of rules and regulations for being normal and successful in the modern era was penned and rigged by people with severe spiritual deficiencies. 

    When the roots of corruption spread so deep and so wide that they declare themselves to be the standard, that is when normality itself should be understood at a root level to be a fundamental threat to our ability as individuals to decide through our own eyes and ears about what is essentially right and what is essentially wrong. 

    Bill Gates and Elon Musk were both partial to leaning on Epstein to get new kicks and thrills from life in their free time. This has been exposed. Revealed. Uncovered. And yet we continue marching forward anyway. 

    As much as society wants us to believe that wealth and power equal happiness and fulfillment in life, the lived truth of this temptation rests in the fact that we “have nots” of the social pecking order can clearly see from our low perch just how unhappy, unfulfilled, and unquenchable the ruling class actually is. 

    Satan promises everything and satisfies nothing. That’s his whole shtick.

    Yet we, the people, are told and trained to try and aspire to be as much like them, the rulers, as we can be during the fleeting moments of mortal existence that God has gifted us with in the first place. 

    I believe that the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not prizes to be granted to the most conformed and integrated members of a fundamentally corrupted system. Those rights are goals that each generation must decide for itself if they are worth fighting for, or not. 

    It is up to each person to decide for themselves and for their neighbors whether they want to embrace the pain of fitting in, even if it compromises their integrity, or if they want to stand up and stand out against a system that was built and is reinforced through peer pressure to sustain itself, even though sustaining itself means robbing all future generations of any hope to live in freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. 

    One of my favorite Bible verses since I was a teenager is this: “Do not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Taking this verse seriously has affected many choices and branches I have taken in life.

    I have spent quite a few years puzzling through the challenge of rejecting the conformity demands of this world, and the temptation of competition, so that I can value what many do not value, and notice what often goes unnoticed, without entirely disconnecting from the rest of the world.

    I don’t know if I will ever be able to learn what I need to learn about the nature of God, the devil, and the meaning of my own life while also being able to communicate what I’ve learned with others without coming across as a total crackpot.

    So far I haven’t been able to connect in a sustainable and helpful way. That is the main reason why I chose to unpublish and rewrite my third book.

    The third book rewrite project is still being worked on. I’ve missed the second self-imposed deadline of the first day of Fall. I hope to be done and published before the end of the year. I may share a chapter or two of the old version here in the coming weeks.

    When I started my series, I hoped it would take off. There were moments of success. I’ve reached thousands of readers and received a couple dozen mostly positive reviews over the years. Part of me feels defective for not reaching a broader audience, another part feels relieved.

    I am not working on this story now to acheive fame and fortune. I am working on it to maintain artistic integrity, to do something constructive with the lessons I’ve learned in the past decade, and to give this series and these characters and this universe a proper sense of closure.

    I will not fight for the limited attention of potential readers. I will not lose myself into dancing monkey mode for the possibility of financial success. I will not conform to the patterns of this world. I will be myself. I will shine my weird light as bright as I am able and allow the chips to fall where they may. I will love my God and neighbors and enemies to the best of my ability. I will stand my ground without shame.

    Whether that is enough for the world or not is out of my hands. What matters to me most is that my choices are enough for me and the God who has turned his back to a rebellious church culture.

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  • The Parable of Lazarus and Jacob Marley

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    A few days ago, I posted about my experiences being confronted with the reality of death from a very young age through the loss of my grandmother, infant brother, and father before I was ten years old. That was the first part of this two-part series. To sum it up: I have grown up seeing this life as a proving ground for the life to come. While we are here, the main lesson of life is to learn how to love our creator, our neighbors, and ourselves. Between the cradle and the grave there are many opportunities for us to change our minds and become someone else. Either for the better, or for the worse, or perhaps switching from one to the other more than once in a lifetime. The wicked have opportunity to repent, and the righteous are at risk of falling out of righteousness through corruption. (Ezekiel 33:11-20). In the Ezekiel passage, the Lord points out that his people do not consider his ways fair. But the people are wrong about that.

    The 19th century novel A Christmas Carol is considered one of the greatest Christmas stories of all time. The classic Bill Murray movie, Scrooged, is my personal favorite version. In all versions, there is a miserable penny-pinching business man who hates Christmas and is warned beyond the grave of the eternal consequences of his selfishness. This man is begged by his former-business-partner-turned-tormented-soul to change his ways in this life, while he still has the chance.

    The story itself is not explicitly Christian. In fact, the different Christmas ghosts that visit Scrooge are better suited in pagan mythology than anything else, but the core of the tale does have an essence of Christian principles. It is a story of hope, and repentance, and personal transformation. A story of someone who had become lost by his personal greed and who is supernaturally given the chance and the choice to rediscover the roots of basic human kindness before he ends up dying unknown and unloved and buried on some future Christmas day.  

    When I think of Ebenezer Scrooge and the Bible, I first think of Ezekiel 33:11

    “…As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, Oh Israel?”

    According to this passage, God does not want even the wicked to perish. God actually wants the wicked to snap out of it and change their ways so that they will live in this life, and in the life to come.

    So, it would seem reasonable to assume that God would go to such lengths as sending the deceased business partner of a rich man back from the grave to warn him about his wickedness, through the guidance of three other ghosts right? Right?

    Not exactly.

    First of all, if such an approach were on the table, the world would be filled with ghosts and people in their pajamas crying out to newspaper boys that they should find the biggest, finest goose available, and here’s a shilling for your trouble. The world just doesn’t work like that.

    Second of all, the Kingdom of God doesn’t work like that either. According to one of the parables of Jesus (and if you’ve read the title of this post you should know exactly which one), something else happens after death. Luke 16:19-31

    “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores,who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores.The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried.

    In Hades, where he was being tormented, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side.He called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in agony in these flames.’But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.’

    He said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house— for I have five brothers—that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.’Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.’He said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ ”

    This must have been a deeply uncomfortable parable to hear in person. It is deeply uncomfortable to read thousands of years later.

    This parable depicts a universe where death is the end of our chances to learn how to love and live righteously, according to the standards of God. That’s the real world. When we die, we are judged, and we are determined to be a sheep or a goat. Life isn’t the study hall before the final exam we take when we are dead. We can’t plead our case about how things looked from our own perspective when it came to our behavior. Life is the test itself. When we die, that’s when we turn in our test papers to be graded.

    Although there are many wolves in sheep’s clothing who are (and have been for thousands of years) teaching from the Bible while living depraved secret lives in this world, I do not understand how so many people could exist in the first place.

    How can a person go to school to study the Bible, and get a job to teach the Bible and have the ability to understand, digest, and share the Bible as their primary vocation in life…how can such a person think to themselves “I can be a sexual predator in secret and never have to face any consequences”? or “I can use funds donated to help the poor as a means of getting myself a nice new car, or summer home, or personal jet”? or “I can destroy the character and reputation of a person who asks too many questions in my church, kick them out, repeatedly bad mouth them from the pulpit, and nothing bad will ever happen to me”?

    I feel that people with sincere and honest hearts that seek the Lord convince themselves that everybody, even the hurtful ones, have the potential to be a good person if they could only find repentance. While at the same time people who lie, cheat, steal, rape, and abuse others while faking a stance of piety might convince themselves that everyone else must be as depraved as they are in their secret life, so there’s nothing to be afraid of or worry about. Or maybe those people just don’t care. I honestly don’t know.  

    Every day this year the world ends for an average of 174,349 human beings who die. Every single day. Nobody escapes it.

    When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, he wanted to inspire a sense of hope.

    When Jesus shared the parable of Lazarus and an unnamed rich man, he wanted to inspire a sense of sobering dread.

    Ignoring the reality of hell because it is too harsh, too uncomfortable, or too unprofitable for the “vibe” of a ministry is deeply wrong. At the same time, I believe that focusing only on fire and brimstone and using fear to convince others to repent is also wrong. The right approach is somewhere in the middle.

    The light of the gospel is love, joy, peace, community, forgiveness, mercy, justice, salvation. That should be the main focus, as it was with Jesus in his teachings and his examples. But anyone who teaches the Bible and ignores the reality, eternal fairness, and possibility of hell is not only fooling themselves, but lulling those they teach into a false sense of security.

    Consequences are real, even if a person goes through their entire life without ever facing them. This is true for the righteous and for the wicked alike.

    God is good all the time, yes. God is not always in a good mood, though.

    Fools say in their heart that there is no God, and there are no consequences. When it comes to wisdom? The beginning of it is found in the fear of the Lord.

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  • What Happens When a Child is Touched by Death at a Young Age

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    For better or worse, I was introduced to the concept of mortality at a very young age.

    My maternal grandmother died by the time I was 5 years old. I have two memories of her. The first was a random visit to her house before she got sick. I remember her warmth and love and the way her voice pitched up in joy as we played together. I remember singing her a song while standing up on the couch. I remember the tight squeeze of a hug she gave me after. I was probably 4 years old.

    My only other memory of Grandma Miriam is from the hospital, when she was days away from dying. I remember being scared to see this bright and boisterous sunbeam of a woman broken down to a shadow who struggled to breathe.

    The next death in my family was my four month old half brother Matthew, who died of SIDS when I was 7. He somehow wrapped himself up in his baby blanket one night and stopped breathing while the rest of the family slept. I will never forget the shrieks of my mother when I was getting ready to go to school and she found him.

    Two years later my dad died of cancer when I was 9 years old. His journey towards death hit me the hardest. My dad was a barrel-chested bear of a man, a police detective, a comic book and pop culture geek. He was my hero.

    He showed up in full uniform and a squad car for show and tell one day when I was in 1st grade. I had no idea he was coming. He brought the whole class out of the parking lot and demonstrated his red and blue lights and even turned on the sirens for a few seconds. I was the coolest kid in my class for a couple of months after that stunt.

    When I first learned about his cancer, I did not believe I had anything to worry about. I did not believe he would die. I prayed for him to beat it, and he fought. For more than two years he fought. By the end, he had dropped from a weight of around 270 to maybe 115lbs. He was little more than a skelaton before giving up the ghost.

    In the last three months I knew he was suffering more by clinging onto life than he would by letting go. He wasn’t an active Christian, and so I started praying that he would be saved and go to heaven, if he had to die.

    About a week before he passed away he was visted by a Lutheran pastor, who walked him through the sinner’s prayer of repentance. By that point my dad was entirely bed-ridden. His ability to speak had been reduced to whispers. He had no strength in his body. He was basically clinging on to life through stubbornness alone.

    Despite his total lack of strength, when my dad prayed that prayer, with tears streaming down his face, he lifted both of his arms up in praise, like a little kid asking his heavenly dad for a hug. He lifted his arms up in the last demonstration of strength he had left, and kept them raised for at least a full minute. He surrendered and he was saved.

    My dad was a passionate Christian in his youth, and walked away from the faith when he got divorced from my mom when I was two years old. As much as I miss him, I can’t help but wonder if God knew it would take a 2.5 year battle with cancer to bring him back home to the body of Christ.

    After my dad died, I had a very specific awareness of the fragility of life, and felt that I was somehow cursed to die young, especially since every male in my family except my grandpa had died before I was ten years old. I felt doomed. My youthful sense of invulnerability was taken from me. Life itself seemed like a daily roll of the dice. Unsafe, uncertain, unpredictable. What happens after life seemed to be the most important issue of being alive, and I grew to see the afterlife as more real than my own daily existence. It seemed to me that life itself was merely one semester of the school of eternity, and the condition of my character was going to be the final exam that determined whether I ended up in heaven or hell.

    I was filled with the fear of the Lord, and presumed that I would be cut off by middle age at the latest, like my dad has been, so my one job was to make my early years count.

    My response to this feeling was to wholeheartedly devote my life to God, in case I could make myself useful in the long term and possibly stave off the early death curse that surrounded me.

    I read Revelations the summer of the year my dad died, at nine years old, whispering the words out loud in various pockets of free time during church camp. I plowed through it specifically because the end of that book promises a blessing to anyone who read the words out loud.

    I felt deeply in need of a guaranteed blessing, and decided to go for it, even if I was technically whispering the words to no audience and not proclaiming the words to a congregation (as the blessing promise assumed an ‘out loud’ reader would do). I was a weird kid.

    I share all of that because my view of mortal life and afterlife are skewed compared to the normal standards. I see this life, even if long-lived, as a tutorial and trial run of our eternal existence.

    I see the pursuit of money and power as foolish, if those pursuits lead to spiritual compromise or eternal death. I see the games we play to seem important to each other as eternal tests of character, either proving or disproving our individual capacity to love one another.

    I see scriptures like the parable of the Sheep and the Goats as very clear, solid, and scary warnings about how we are judged by the way we approach each other, what faithful obedience to God actually requires, and why we are all here in the first place.

    God says we are here to learn and practice the core principles of loving one another and loving God.

    Jesus said things like “You cannot serve both God and Money”, or “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and yet forfeits his soul?” These words do not compute with modern conservative Christianity, or Christian Nationalism.

    They do not compute because the modern cultural standards, values, and expectations have abandoned the original teachings, not because the original teachings needed to be updated or modernized.

    “There is a way that seems right to man, but in the end leads to destruction”.

    I will publish a follow up post that explores this concept further by comparing the story of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol with the parable Jesus gives of Lazarus and the Rich Man.

    The comparison and contrast between those stories has been stewing in my head for awhile and I’m looking forward to exploring it. Sharing my experiences with and perspective of death in my personal life is necessary context.

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  • Progress Report

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    Before I shadow dropped the new opening chapter for my revamped third book, I shared a roadmap and deadline of publishing the new version by July 4th. I probably won’t hit that deadline.

    I’m not looking to rush anything, force anything, or otherwise compromise the integrity of the project. I carve out moments here and there for storytelling after working a 40 hour week at my day job, and I have less energy at 43 than I did ten years ago when I started this journey. At the same time, I’m very pleased to report that the project is coming together very well so far.

    When I pulled the trigger and unpublished the first version of book 3, I thought I would finish rewrites around the end of Act 1. Now that I’ve made it past that point, I realize that I’ll need to rewrite big chunks of the second act, and also make edits beyond that. I’m up to the challenge, but it will most likely be finished before the end of summer, and not by July 4th.

    I will say that the sense of playfulness I had during the first two books is fully back, and I’m thrilled about that.

    When I get closer to launch I’m going to issue an email list and allow readers who bought the first version to get an ereader version of the new book free, as a “thank you” from me.

    I had good intentions between 2021 and 2023 when I wrote Death is Not the End. But I also ultimately made the wrong call. I tried to cram a nonfiction story into a fiction story and compromised both perspectives by doing so. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to fix that mistake and separate the fiction from the nonfiction.

    My first step is to give the zombie story world back to the characters themselves. My next step will be a nonfiction book about politics, modern church culture, and warnings in scripture that line up with the mess of “cover up culture” and other issues. I’ve spent most of this year talking about theological issues, cover-up culture, and other topics that have nothing to do with zombie fiction, but are important to me as a person. Giving each part their own space is important.

    I’m figuring this out as I grow.

    There will still be a Biblical Apocalypse twist in Book 3, because my original vision for this story was to create a less lame Left Behind, with real characters in their various sins being introduced to the reality of a living and loving God as part of their character arcs.

    That sort of story reflects my own spiritual journey and the general concept of what “born again” means. You go from not knowing, not considering, not aware, to being introduced to the reality of God. I did, at least.

    I’ll be giving the new version a unique name, since it has evolved to be more of a full rewrite than a simple revision. I’m having a lot of fun putting it together and I can’t wait to share it when it’s ready.

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  • Revised opening chapter for The resistance is dead 3.

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    Reggie was bored out of his mind in limbo. The concept of time had lost all meaning somewhere in the endless expanse of past that stretched in the unknowable infinity between when he first died and showed up in this weird waiting room of death and whenever “now” was. That first minute, hour, day, year, whatever was full of f bombs and angry declarations of the essential injustice of mortal life. Reggie had, after all, taken a lot of very drastic and very disgusting steps in the minutes before his death for the specific purpose of avoiding limbo, and yet here he was anyway: dead as a doornail and zapped into this literal waiting room with glowing white walls and glowing hardbacked chairs and no magazines and no tv and no receptionist and no doors.

    After calming down, Reggie discovered a limited ability to change the waiting room from its original barebones template format to something a little bit more manageable. He discovered this ability when he was getting a little sleepy on the first day and thought to himself that he wished there was at least a bed. That same second, a modest full-sized bed winked into existence in the corner, with fresh sheets and two comfortable looking pillows. He then quickly wished for a reclining chair, a flatscreen tv, and a gaming console that could play any game he wanted. Bing, bang, boom. Just like that, the waiting room situation was suddenly much less hellish than it had once seemed.

    Reggie knew he wasn’t in heaven, and he wasn’t in hell either. He was in the in-between. Raised Catholic, he knew that limbo wasn’t the proper term for this in-between place. It was Purgatory. Had to be. That was the only other option as far as post-death destination points. Even still, this Purgatory had way more fringe benefits than he’d ever imagined when he was a kid going to mass and doing his duties as an altar boy.

    He didn’t feel hunger, didn’t need to use the bathroom, didn’t feel pain. He could sleep, but it felt more like a choice than a requirement. For all intents and purposes, he had found himself in a spot of peace and quiet that felt much more like paradise than when he was in the middle of that hungry crowd of undead that swarmed him less than an hour before the end of his life.

    As much as he enjoyed getting caught up on his gaming backlog with no distractions or other obligations, eventually boredom caught up with him. He couldn’t shake the nagging sense of wasting time or being wasted by time. Wondering how his friends were doing without him. Missing life. It all slowly trickled into his thoughts until he turned off the game system, got out of his chair, and started to walk around the perimeter of the room for the dozenth time to let his mind try to work through the situation.

    There were no doors, or windows, or cameras in the corner, or prison bars, or safety glass like some macabre afterlife zoo exhibit. No vents for air circulation. No power outlets. No plumbing. No visible connecting points between his white glowing holding cell and anything beyond it. He walked back to his gaming corner and checked for a plug into the wall. Nothing. The system turned on and off just fine, but it wasn’t connected to anything other than the TV, which also lacked a power supply and also worked without an issue.

    As he stood there scratching his beard and wondering about the rules of his new prison of comfort, he heard the slight squeak of door hinges and a familiar latching sound behind him.

    Reggie spun around and saw a man standing just a few feet behind him, wearing a glowing white lab coat and looking at a clip board. The man stood in front of a door that had not existed on that wall ten seconds earlier. He twirled a pen in his fingers, then tapped the clip board playfully as he looked up and smiled at Reggie. Despite the warmth of the smile, and the reassurance of the medical uniform and the purity of the light glowing from his lab coat, Reggie felt a sharp and sudden pang of terror spread from the core of his heart throughout his body. He felt frozen in place.

    The man smiled even wider, “Good evening, Mr. Edwards. Don’t be afraid. You’re safe here, for now. I mean you no harm.”

    Reggie felt the terror inside him shrink back a bit, and his paralysis broke. “Where did you-?” fell out of his mouth. His own voice sounded foreign to him.

    The glowing man replied, “I came from upstairs. Management sent me down here to touch base with you. I’m sure you have at least a few questions.”

    “Try about a zillion, Dr. Glowstick,” Reggie cracked. The last bit of terror left his body when he rediscovered his sense of sarcasm. “To start with, who’s management?”

    The man tilted his head in mild befuddlement. “Come now, I’m sure there aren’t too many candidates for the title ‘management’ in an environment like this. All those years of Mass and Catholic Sunday school growing up must have left some kind of impression on you.”

    Reggie shook his head. The adrenaline buzz from the initial shock was wearing off. He squinted, “So you’re saying that management is God? As in, ‘God’ God? Don’t get me wrong, mister, doctor, whoever you are, but as nice as it is to have a little corner of entertainment to pass the time in this place, I always imagined that heaven would be more…um…heavenly.”

    The man laughed, “Oh, this isn’t heaven.”

    “So, what? Is it hell?”

    “Is there any fire and brimstone here? Try again.”

    “Purgatory?!” Reggie threw his hands up in exasperation.

    “Close, but not quite. This is a waystation for misappropriated souls. It’s an in-between place. This is the realm where dreams happen, and where the consciousness of people rests when their body is in a coma, or if they are caught up in an epileptic seizure. You look a little weary. Why don’t we both have a seat?”

    The man gestured, and Reggie looked behind him to see a new padded chair directly behind him that wasn’t there before the mysterious man showed up. He plopped down into the chair with a mixture of relief and numb acceptance.

    “Alright, then,” said Reggie, “So you’ve been sent by God to touch base with me in a waystation for misappropriated souls that looks like the waiting room of my local dentist. You aren’t a doctor. You aren’t God. I guess that makes you an angel, although I always imagined your kind would have wings, or be covered in eyeballs or something.”

    “Some angels are covered in eyes. Not all of us, though.”

    Reggie looked up from the ground to see the angel smiling at him. He felt a little bit more strength come back to him. “I guess you’re one of the lucky ones then, huh? Ok Dr. Angel, what am I doing here? How long do I have to stay here? What does God want from me? I know I haven’t gone to confession in a few years but-”

    “Eleven years,” said the angel, “and that’s not why you’re here. This isn’t a punishment, Reggie. Relax. You’re here because of what you did during that last hour before your body gave up the ghost. I’m here to give you a choice about where you want to go next, although I’m pretty sure we all know what you would decide if given the option.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “I mean you can move forward and stay dead, or you can return to your body in the near future.”

    “Just like that?” asked Reggie, feeling suddenly suspicious.

    The angel nodded.

    Reggie thought about it for a moment. “If I go back, am I going to be a halfling zombie like President Chambers, or can I get brought all the way back to life?”

    “What would you prefer?”

    Reggie scoffed. “What I’d prefer is to have skipped the whole dying and being trapped in here thing in the first place. But if I’ve got a choice, I’d rather be brought back all the way.”

    “The man upstairs thought you might ask for that. I’ve already got the approval to grant it. It’s going to take a step of faith on your end to be fully restored, but we’ll hash out the details later. I’m sure you’re already aware of this, but there are going to be more challenges and trials in store for you and your friends when you get sent back.”

    “Tell me something I don’t know. I just got through almost three decades of that gauntlet y’all put together on planet earth. What bugs me the most about all of this is that I got taken off the playing board of life right when things were getting interesting.”

    The angel blinked and asked, “A virus that causes a global pandemic of zombies is what you call ‘things getting interesting’?”

    Reggie grinned, “Sure! What would you call it?”

    “I’d call it what the man upstairs has called it from the beginning: the great and terrible day of the Lord. The zombie uprising is only the beginning, after all.” There was no trace of humor on the angel’s face.

    Reggie felt a twinge of discomfort rise up in his heart. “Well, when you put it that way…Hang on are you trying to convince me to stay dead?”

    “Not exactly. I’ve just seen countless generations of humanity come and go. I know mortal life is normally a mixed bag of good and bad. There are beautiful moments, and horrifying moments. Pleasure and pain. Peaks and valleys. During this global transition phase, the beautiful moments will be brighter and better than ever. At the same time, the pain, suffering, injustice, and evil will also get more potent than what you can probably imagine.”

    Reggie frowned, “Look man, I appreciate your honesty, but I’d rather not hear all the details about whatever horrors might be beyond the zombie uprising. I know most people would rather move on than dive back into the apocalypse. I’m not most people. I want to get back to my friends and face whatever the heck is coming next alongside with them. You gave me a choice, and I’m sticking to it.”

    The angel nodded, “Understood. As it happens, your friends are already working on a plan to help get you back. I’m going to give them a nudge in the right direction, and you should be out of here within the next day or so.”

    “It’s just that simple?” asked Reggie.

    The angel smiled again, “I don’t know if I’d call what’s happened to you, or your choice to dive right back into the apocalypse ‘simple’, but to each their own. You will have some work to do when you get back, but it won’t be anything too hard to handle, and you will have help from upstairs when help is needed. Unless you have any more questions, I’d like to go over some details of what you’ll need to do to bring your body fully back to life after you return, and also give you a general rundown of your assignment further down the road.”

    “One last question, doc. Will I remember this conversation and this place when I’m back in my body?” asked Reggie.

    “For the most part, this experience will fade into memory noise shortly after you get back. Similar to how many dreams can slip away seconds after you wake up. If you need to remember something, you will have help in bringing whatever you need back up to the surface of your conscious mind. Whether you remember or not, you will have help moving forward from others like myself who are working for the man upstairs to see his plan fully brought to fruition.”

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  • Course Correction

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    I’ve recently unpublished book 3 of my series. I am working on a major overhaul that my subconscious has begged for since I wrote that portion of the story in summer/fall of 2021. The whole plot device of including a character based on myself in the first act of the story was the wrong approach and has negatively impacted the flow, focus and impact of the first two books. I was uncomfortable writing in a “me” character in the first place. The character himself doesn’t want to be there and doesn’t know what’s going on. Dez abjectly refuses to be swept into the entire situation and chooses to disengage from that portion of the story. If I’ve got so much reluctant energy from the perspective of the characters, how should I expect readers to enjoy the experience?

    The first several reviews for book 3 were very positive, but the last two involved two readers stopping in the first act for different reasons and refusing to finish the story. As a storyteller, that sort of feedback tells me that I am failing at my job, and it requires a response.

    I don’t regret writing and publishing the first version of the third book when I did. Anyone who has read the first two books would recognize the odd overlaps between my 2016 virus and Covid, or between my subplot of President Chambers uprooting the illuminati from Washington and the basic concept of Q Anon (introduced in Fall 2017, after the first two books were published) that President Donald Trump was appointed by God to uproot the “deep state”.

    Donald Trump is an evil human, the opposite of Jesus in basically every way possible, and a litmus test that most of church culture has tragically failed to register, nevermind pass.

    I saw those coincidences between real life and my stories as a heavy weight of responsibility and pressure in 2021. I have a different perspective now. One that has more breathing room. One that allows the fiction and nonfiction to exist separately, instead of being smooshed together.

    When I started book 3 in 2021 I was very worried about Q Anon and the general trajectory of the right wing. I thought that by sharing my lessons and experiences with conspiracy theories inside the story universe, that I might get through and help at least one potential reader. Maybe I did. But I also hijacked and burned down the sense of artistic trust with my readers that had been built up in the first books.

    I am separating the fiction and non-fiction approach that I am willing to admit did not work in the way I’d hoped.

    I spent three years feeling very uncomfortable about the frankness, rawness, and honesty I had shared in the first version. So this move is my way to change what I have the ability to change, and redirect my energy into more constructive attempts at self expression and communication.

    I am giving the agency of the story back to the characters themselves with this rewrite. It’s going to be hard work, but it feels like the right way for me to process my mistakes, make corrections, and move forward properly. I’m looking forward to it.

    I accept that I may have already burned a bunch of readers by promoting the book in the original format so much already. You only get one chance to make a first impression, after all. I can’t do anything to change the past. But I do have the ability to change my approach and correct my previous mindset now, so I don’t have to stay inside the shadow of old mistakes.

    I’ve overshared, overgiven, and overextended myself in various ways over the years. From a very messy and traumatizing church dynamic, to trying to help an elderly widow for two years who ultimately refused to let go or process her hoarding disorder, to at least one other very personal situation involving a complicated pen pal relationship which blossomed into a possible emotional connection and then went completely sideways two years ago (which I won’t talk about in any further detail publicly out of respect for her).

    Every situation, every iteration was the same life lesson from a slightly different perspective.

    I spent most of my life operating from a place of trying do the right thing in secret. I’ve always been a giver, a helper, a volunteer. For the longest time I assumed that my eagerness to be helpful was an expression of intentional defiance to the selfish standards of modern American life. I assumed that I gave to others from my well of internal energy out of a sense of plenty, with no expectation of reciprocation, and no need for it. My source of replenishment was God, after all.

    I gave of my time and energy from a place of enjoying the act of giving. Somewhere deep down there was an assumption that I would be appreciated and ultimately replenished when I got involved in situations that required a lot of up front discomfort on my end for the sake of accommodating the needs of whoever I was dealing with.

    On all levels, in at least three dynamics over the past seven years, my assumption of proving my value and finding ultimate peace and mutual understanding through my willingness to endure prolonged discomfort was proven wrong. My willingness to remain available diminished my value on both sides of the situation, and left me drained, depressed, and traumatized by the time I chose to disengage and step away.

    This happened over and over again until I chose to pay attention to the underlying lesson and my own approach, assumptions, expectations, and unexpressed needs.

    Making this adjustment to my story, and consciously considering what I am comfortable sharing, enduring, or risking for the sake of maybe helping someone who may or may not even want my help, perspective, or whatever is a new move for me.

    I’m learning how to prioritize myself first so that I can maintain the right amount of spiritual, emotional, or mental energy to be effectively helpful in situations that require my help. I’m learning that the God of “turn the other cheek” is also the God of “wipe the dust off your feet and move on”.

    Moving forward I hope to honor my own needs, boundaries, and requirements as much as I have tried to accommodate the needs, boundaries, and requirements of others in the past.

    Finding that spot in between loving neighbors and loving self is an important life lesson. I aim to keep my heart defiantly soft in this cold world, but also to have it be properly guarded.

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  • The One Who Calms the Storm

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    Today I’m going to take a break from the ongoing scandals of Cover Up Culture at Bethel and other related churches. Mike Winger dropped another couple of videos since my last post. To be honest, I’m digesting this latest round of expose videos from Winger a bit more slowly, because the subject matter is very dark and heavy, and the injustice of the situation is difficult to process.

    I knew there was something rotten in Denmark a long time ago. (That’s a Hamlet reference, not a slight against Denmark, for the record). Even though I knew something was wrong in that culture through personal experience and observations, and even though I hope that all the wolves in sheep’s clothing get taken out of the flock in the coming days, the process of going through this has been triggering, disheartening, and very challenging.

    Seeing the whole situation all laid out and brought to light like this is shocking. This exposure is a necessary pain, like when a broken bone needs to be reset, or a dislocated limb needs to be put back in the socket. There are more videos and posts and discussions and revelations to come. This is an ongoing process. At some point I’d like to do a deeper dive into what the Bible has to say about false prophets, false teachers, etc. There are also many verses about how to hold leaders accountable to their congregation and the general Body of Christ. I’d like to explore those topics here in due time.

    For right now, I think diving into another aspect of the Bible will help me in my effort to navigate the deeper darker corners of this situation. See, I was raised in conservative Christian culture. I was born ten years after the inception of the “religious right” and five years after they rallied behind abortion as their tentpole issue. (More on that in a future post). I have a genuine love for the Bible, and a genuine love for Jesus. I also have a lot of bones to pick with conservative Christian culture, and have been picking those bones either online anonymously or in person since the mid-2000s.

    There is a lot wrong with the church. This “wrongness” was prophesied in the Bible many times, so the fact that it exists shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who pays attention. However, for a long time it has been a blind spot for many who are still inside the bubble of that culture (while also being ridiculously obvious to anyone outside that bubble). I am a Christian who exists outside that bubble, and while I feel it is necessary to warn and correct and be aware of and wary about the false teachings and predatory hirelings and genuine darkness that flies the Christian flag, it is exhausting to focus on what is wrong with the church exclusively.

    What keeps me going in pursuing a vision for a reformed church long term is reminding myself why I love the Bible and love Jesus in the first place. One of the main things is the way the Bible scratches a very particular “nerd” itch.

    Today I want to talk about the ways that the Old Testament and New Testament cross reference each other. Anybody who has spent some time reading the Bible for themselves will come to see that there are references all over the place in scripture to other scriptures. There are repeated themes and patterns. There are prophecies in the Old Testament that get fulfilled through events in the New Testament. I’ve heard in Christian circles that there are 333 prophecies about Jesus in the Old Testament that came true in the New Testament. I’ve never personally gone through and counted them all, but it doesn’t surprise me, because it happens a lot.

    Jesus himself knew about these connections, naturally. He loved the scriptures and was deeply rooted in the word of God. The very first temptation of Christ in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-4) was a challenge by Satan for him to turn stones into bread after a 40 day fast. His rebuttal was a quote from scripture: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Deuteronomy 8:3). He used the same tactic for the next temptation, and when the devil tried to trip him up by tempting him to fling himself off of the top of the temple because of a scripture quoted out of context, Jesus gave the proper context through another scripture. I love that story.

    Throughout his ministry, Jesus kept his feet firmly planted in the scripture and remained that way regardless of the circumstances. Several of his last words on the cross were direct quotes from scripture, such as “My God, my God! Why have you forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1) and “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” (Psalm 31:5)

    Time runs in a straight line. If you or anyone is saying that something will happen in the future, everyone will have to wait and see when the present catches up with the future to know whether or not that prediction was true. Sometimes the wait isn’t long. Often times it feels longer than it should be. Many times in scripture God will promise a thing to happen, and then weeks, months, years, decades, or sometimes even centuries will go by with no sign whatsoever of that promise being fulfilled. For example, Abraham was promised to have children by God when he was first sent to Canaan. He then had to sit on that promise for 25 years before experiencing it fulfilled (15 years if you factor in Ishmael through Hagar, which happened because Abraham and Sarah assumed the problem was infertility, and not divine timing, so they decided to “help” God fulfill his word).

    A lot of false prophets use this gap between the word being declared and the future catching up to their advantage by making bold claims with no verification or authentication in the present moment and no consequences for either overtly lying or getting snared by “wishful guessing”. If they say something will happen and it doesn’t, well then maybe it’s not yet God’s timing, or maybe something that the listener did or didn’t do made that “word of the Lord” not come true. I’ve seen those cards both get played a lot.

    I’ll be diving deeper on the topic of true prophecy and false prophecy in another post, but I’m sharing this now for a reason.

    There is no accountability when someone claims to be predicting the future, at least at the moment when the predictions is made. When looking back into the past to verify the accuracy of predictions? Well, that is another story entirely. Time always tells the truth.

    Many authors of the New Testament were very familiar with the prophecies and ancient texts of the Old testament, and they would often reference the situations they had witnessed and were recording in their lifetime to the predictions that were made by authors who were dead and gone for centuries. They would say something to the effect of “this was to fulfill the prophets when they said (fill in the blank)”. On top of that, there are various chain reference Bibles and study Bibles to push those sorts of connections even further. 

    I can’t speak about every chain reference and study Bible out there, but I know of at least one solid reference in Psalms that unfolded in real time in real life during the ministry of Jesus and none of the gospel authors who shared that story noticed the connection. Three out of the four gospels shared a version of that story. None of them even hinted that the event was a fulfillment from Psalms.

    The story is in Matthew 8:23-27, and Luke 8:22-25 but my personal favorite account comes from Mark 4:35-41:

    “On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’

    He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace, Be Still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the seas obey him?’”

    And here is the Old Testament passage:

    Psalm 107:23-30

    “Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the mighty waters; they saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep. For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea. They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their calamity; they reeled and staggered like drunkards, and were at their wits’ end.

    Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out from their distress; he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. Then they were glad because they had quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven.”

    The Old Testament account gives an answer to the question that the disciples asked, “What sort of man is this?” The answer is: God. The Lord himself, in human form. That’s what sort of man Jesus was, is, and is to come. One of a kind. The first and the last. You get the idea.

    What excites me about this “hidden” prophecy is that God knew when Psalm 107 was being written that one day his begotten son would be asleep in a boat with his followers and would wake up and rebuke the storm and it would obey him. The writer of that Psalm was listing a number of different examples of people being in some sort of trouble or affliction, and God saving his people from their calamity and those people saying thanks afterwards. That author was dead for centuries by the time the story of Jesus rebuking the storm happened.

    All three authors of the gospels, who had done the research to share other prophecies being fulfilled in other circumstances missed this connection. But it is still there. Waiting to be discovered by the hungry and the curious, generation after generation. Things like that feel to me like strong evidence that God is real. I plan to post an update about the book series soon, and have a few other topics I’m working on. In trying to be more consistent with blogging I’ve found myself with several partially written posts that I find difficult to bring to the finish line. I’ve gone through bouts of writers block before. I believe I’m coming out of one now. More on that soon.

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  • Figuring out The right way forward

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    During the past few weeks I have consumed a ridiculous amount of content on YouTube dealing with the impact of Mike Winger exposing a culture of cover up in the charismatic side of the Christianity pool.

    In my last blog post I shared a bit about my own experiences in that environment. I’ve decided to refrain from sharing more of my story in public for now, because I hope that there is repentance in the hearts of those who have hurt me. I hope the scandalous domino effect of what Mike Winger did puts their feet to the fire and pulls their head out of the clouds.

    What they actually do next is up to them.

    When it comes to how I share my side of the clergy abuse story I lived, I am determined to land the plane in a way that honors Jesus.

    In my forty-something years on this planet so far, I’ve learned that there is peace in the space exactly halfway between forgiveness and boundaries.

    It can be way too easy to confuse turning the other cheek with letting yourself be a doormat.

    Jesus was teaching how to stand your ground and maintain your dignity (by offering the second cheek) as a lesson for the Jews who followed him, who had a decent chance of already being slapped by the Romans occupying their home at the time when they heard this lesson.

    Turning the other cheek is a form of nonviolent protest against oppression.

    This same teaching has been weaponized in church culture to encourage people to be doormats.

    Doormats tolerate and enable abusers, and lose themselves in the pursuit of a misguided concept of what purity requires of them at their expense (and for the benefit of their abusers). They forgive and overcome until they are entirely depleted and void of hope, having failed to overcome evil with good (by giving evil the silence and submission that it wants).

    Doormats are running on an imbalanced equation. Enabling or empowering evil to continue isn’t good. Anyone protecting a predator isn’t acting in eternal love.

    Overcoming evil with good requires confrontation. It requires the establishment and adherance to ancient standards of decency.

    Complying to the popular judgment can be a betrayal against universal truth. Saying “this is wrong because it was always wrong, starting with (insert Psalm or Proverb here)” is uncomfortable, and also genuinely loving. The wounds of a friend are always better than the kisses of an enemy.

    I say this with the authority of being a recovering doormat. Life is a journey.

    At some point I learned that I need both forgiveness and boundaries to truly access peace.

    There are many victims of this cover up culture who have been coming out of the dark since Mike Winger released his almost six hour expose of Shawn Bolz, (followed up a week later with another four hour video about a different abusive leader, Todd White).

    This is the start of a new chapter in the movement. Whether leadership chooses to accept it, or fights it is up to them.

    You can’t take back the stone after it is thrown, or the word after it is released.

    There are more foxes in the hen house, and in due time they will be exposed, denounced, and removed. The Lord is behind this.

    Exposure is the only way for anyone in this culture to get through the noise of now and into the nourishing light of actually obeying the commands of the Lord.

    When it comes to what those commands are, that is a whole different post, but everything I believe about the situation comes from what I learned in a collection of 66 ancient books that somehow tell one cohesive narrative about a God who just wants his people to love him and love their neighbors (in a nutshell). He was serious when he said it the first time, in those books (the Bible). He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

    God hasn’t magically changed his mind because so many televangelists and hirelings have been teaching their flocks to hate their neighbors for decades. The church lost the plot. The plot never changed. Now the church has a chance to rediscover the original plot, and I’m hopeful that it will.

    Let God be true, and every man a liar.

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  • Confronting “Cover up Culture” in the Charismatic church (and other “c” words).

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    On January 17th, Christian YouTuber Mike Winger from The Bible Project uploaded a five hour and fifty minute video exposing Shawn Bolz for prophetic fraud and sexual abuse towards numerous former interns. He also exposed certain actions by leaders of Bethel Church and coined the phrase “Cover up culture”.

    If you are not familiar with modern charismatic Christian culture, you probably have no idea what is going on, and that’s fine. I am familiar with it because I joined a local branch of that general umbrella network in 2018, a year after I miraculously survived a drive-by shooting event as I was finishing my second book. That night impacted my life deeply. I put my ambitions to finish my zombie trilogy on hold and took numerous steps to get my life on a more consistent track.

    I had a great time at first when I started going to that church. I joined a few small groups, volunteered at one of those family fun fair events, went to the mid week worship sessions, and attended a couple of conferences.

    Things went south at the end of 2018, and got exponentially more drastic in the beginning of 2019, when I was dragged into a dynamic of spiritual abuse and bullying that stretched on for a long period of time (years). I’ve kept quiet about what I went through for more than half a decade.

    It all started when the lead preacher of the church shared from the stage that God would never use sickness to correct his children. His reasoning was that a loving father wouldn’t give his child the flu as a form of punishment, so neither would God. I wrote him an email with several verses citing that God uses plague, famine, and the sword (specifically) as tools of discipline throughout history. I shared this because the wormwood plague in Revelation which kills a third of all people was the same plague I wrote about in The Outbreak, back in 2016.

    This global pandemic I dreamed up ended up lining up in at least a half dozen ways with the covid pandemic of 2020. Empty streets in cities under quarantine, boredom and cabin fever under lockdown, taxpayer rebate incentives, a virus that seems manageable but then blossoms to deadly. There are more unintended references. Reading the story will shed a certain light on the situation. Writing it without knowing what the world was on the brink of experiencing is a whole new level of pressure and bewilderment that words can’t accurately capture.

    From 2016 to March of 2020, I had no idea how much my stories would come to haunt me. The first act of my third book was written as a way to process that very particular stress while also rescuing the Han Solo of my trilogy (Reggie) at the same time.

    Back to the sermon about God never using sickness as a form of judgment (what people in the biz call “the inciting event”). In my view, to teach the sheep that all sickness comes from the devil hit wrong, so I tried to share privately via email what I knew in a kind and respectful way. I tried to be gentle in my correction and add some praise and encouragement to soften the blow. My efforts did not work.

    This pastor preached his first dig the next week. At first I assumed that several people had emailed him with a list of verses (which would happen in a healthy church environment). He didn’t name names, but he did say that anyone emailing him like that would be wasting their time. Then, over the course of 2019 and beyond this pastor demonstrated numerous times that he hated me specifically for existing in the first place.

    I’m not going to tell the full story of what I went through now. I may go into it at some point, but I do at the very least want to share that I was once part of that group. I was sucked in, chewed up, and then spit out. I was bullied repeatedly by this leader from the pulpit on a regular basis and also ignored by other leaders every time I reached out for help. All that to say I know first hand what “cover up culture” does to people, and it is rotten and needs to be plucked out by the root.

    People have been getting spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and/or sexually destroyed by what Jesus called “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, for a very long time. Instead of publicly confronting and casting out these wolves, the modern charismatic (and Catholic, and nondenominational) culture has rallied around the predators and restored them while skipping over the repentance and consequences of the restoration equation and ignoring the threat, damage, and trauma this self-proclaimed “culture of honor” imposes on their victims.

    The norms of this system treat abusers as precious fragile broken angels who cannot handle the harshness of light or accountability. Their victims? They are labeled as accusers, gossips, and wretched faceless nobodies who aren’t worth the effort to love, or even respond to when they reach out for help.

    I know this, because I lived this.

    I accepted the judgment of this corrupt and self-serving groups of professional Christian shepherds, and I kept my outcast mouth shut for more than half a decade. I deferred to their authority.

    Now I see from a better perspective, and I am adjusting accordingly. Now I see how not-alone I am, and how damaging this un-punishable culture of hirelings has been.

    When Jesus talks about separating the sheep from the goats, his main point when talking to his followers is this: however you treat the least important members of your social structure is how you actually treat the son of God. “Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you have done unto me”. The modern charismatic leadership structure needs to go through a collective crash course on this verse.

    The standard of radical and genuine love is something of a recurring theme in the Bible. Being a good neighbor, a good host to foreigners, and a good spouse are core values that would do wonders for how the outside world perceives Christians if those values were top prioroty now. Unfortunately the main values of church culture seem to be gaining and keeping power, worshiping money, and having as much political influence as possible. It is natural to value power, money, and influence. Jesus refers to those lures as thorns and thistles that choke off a spiritual stalk of grain before it has the chance to grow. To value love instead is the right goal, according to the ancient ways.

    I’m still a Christian because I love the ancient texts and the standards that very few modern churches seem to consider. I love what Christianity is challenged to be, not what the culture that claims to be Christian presently is. Christian culture since the rise of televangelism is a philosophical embarrassment. It is the very epitome of the blind leading the blind right into a ditch. GK Chesterson said “The principles of Christianity have not been tried and found wanting. They have been found hard, and left untried.” That is the core of the problem, in my view.

    When I learned that Mike Winger was speaking up about this core cultural rot and actually getting through to them, I was thrilled. His video has about 1.5 million views the last time I checked. Bethel church responded in interesting ways. The first Sunday night after the nearly six hour expose dropped, Kris Valloten (sp?), who was specifically confronted in the video, preached a stream-of-consciousness rebuttal that fell in line with old cover-up norms of old and landed with a wet thud on the ears of those both pro and anti Bethel who were tuning in. Bill Johnson ignored the issue entirely.

    I like Bethel. I want them to be functional and consistent with their theology. They have the potential to get there, and they also have a lot of work ahead of them.

    The next Sunday gave me a shot of hope. It involved two messages of genuine repentance from Dan Farrelly and Kris Valloten. Then a message from Bill Johnson which felt like at least a few steps in the right direction.

    I’m cautious and hopeful that they will get through this. I don’t expect these guys to be perfect as they change gears and own up to decades of negligent norms. I do expect progress in each step they take after their public repentance. Follow through is necessary for their long term survival in this movement.

    The Bible lays out the proper steps to take when dealing with abusive leaders. Going back to those ancient ways is the only real way forward for Bethel and other churches in that umbrella. Bethel seems to understand the assignment. Lets hope other churches also choose to step up to the plate and uproot the wolves that they have tolerated for far too long.

    Mike Winger lit a fuse. Timely repentance will avoid blowing up the whole powderkeg in the wrong way. If these churches can do the work themselves, they will be ahead of the blast, instead of trying to pick up the pieces in the wake of the blast. The blast is coming either way.

    The actual issue goes far beyond the sins of one abuser and directly challenges an entire system that would continuously protect abusers and harm their victims. If the system is willing to be dismantled, then there is hope. If the effort is to wait until attention spans go away, then there is no hope moving forward, and no integrity or authority for those who would rather stay the course of compromise than genuinely confront seats of compromised power.

    What Bethel and others choose to do in the next few weeks will determine their destiny in the long run. The global church is now in a realm of “be real or be gone”. This phase of accountability has been a long time coming. It was also written about thousands of years ago in the Bible. That’s what all that “spotless bride of Christ” stuff was talking about.

    There is a need for sincerity, honesty, and a sense that the shepherds at the top of this organization fundamentally understand that this situation is a matter of eternal importance.

    Nobody will fake their way into heaven. What is missing in the modern church is the fear of the Lord. We don’t have that right now. We have cover up culture and fleecing grifters being called faithful shepherds.

    The old ways aren’t good enough anymore.

    They never were.

    The church and the world need new ways that are good enough. We need a social contract that protects victims and exposes predators. We need standards and norms that encourage humanizing neighbors, instead of trenches that get dug deeper and deeper by the year. We need to stop worshipping money and power and start validating wisdom and love.

    When I wrote my most recent blog about the difference between peacekeepers and peacemakers on January 21st, I had no idea about the Mike Winger video. The theme I was discussing in that post matches what he did, though. He is an example of a peacemaker. Probably the loudest and most viral recent example available. I hope that he inspires the complacent to readjust their priorities and accept the Fear of the Lord as a natural ingredient to healthy faith instead of something that can be left out.

    Why should the world outside the church be expected to take God seriously if the world inside the church can’t be bothered?

    Every life is a wildflower that blossoms and withers within a single year of the span of infinity. Jesus once asked, “what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and yet forfeits his soul?” The time has come for those at the top of the pile to take that question seriously.

    There are more skeletons in the closet with Bethel and other churches in the network. It will take time to uproot and process. Pastor Dan said “you can’t have microwave solutions to crock pot problems” a couple of weeks ago. That is true, but it is also important for there to be a sense of urgency in leadership at Bethel and throughout the network, because a lot of victims have waited a long time to have the chance to share their side of the story.

    I’d rather deal with a messy church that is working consistently to be pure than a picture perfect church that is rotten at the core. Jesus referred to those leaders and environments as white washed tombs filled with the bones of the dead. Gross. No thank you.

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  • The Difference Between Peacekeepers and Peacemakers.

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    Peacekeepers protect the status quo. They defend established powers. They side with abusers. They blame victims.

    Peacemakers challenge the status quo. They defy established powers. They stand up against abusers. They empower and protect victims.

    Peacekeepers hide in consent and compliance, regardless of whether the system they protect is just or not. They do not rock the boat. They seek to silence and suppress any who do rock the boat because the boat represents their sense of connection to peace. Peacekeepers care first about their peace, and often do not consider or value the peace of society at large.

    Peacemakers refuse consent and compliance with unjust systems. They will rock the boat when that action is necessary. They understand that a system is not their source of peace or security. Connections between human beings are the source of genuine peace. The well being of everyone is the nature of genuine peace. Peacemakers are willing to sacrifice their own peace and hornlock with the forces of chaos and injustice to obtain the ultimate goal of making peace where peace does not presently exist.

    Peacekeepers say, “Peace! Peace!” When there is no peace.

    Peacemakers do not lie about what peace is or what peace should be, or who has the right to have peace at the expense of others. Peacemakers make peace when there is no peace. They do not ask. They insist.

    Jesus of Nazareth wasn’t a peacekeeper. He was a peacemaker. He didn’t say, “blessed are the peacekeepers”. He said, “blessed are the peacemakers”. Two different words. Two different motives. Two different goals.

    The world needs more peacemakers and less peacekeepers. Thankfully people have the ability to change their minds, to change their ways, and to abandon peacekeeping to become peacemakers. The question is whether or not you are up to the challenge.

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