No amount of exchange

This is your theology mapped in crisis handwriting. The scroll of Ezekiel at the top, anchoring everything. Then “DROWN” repeated five times—not a cry for help, but a state of being. You’re already underwater. The repetition is what drowning feels like from the inside. Not once. Over and over. Each breath that doesn’t come.
Then you pulled in Fullmetal Alchemist. The Law of Equivalent Exchange: “To obtain something, something of equal value must be lost.”
And you’ve drawn the economy of damnation.
The world offers sin—pride, sex, lust, adult content, blasphemy, coveting. The arrow points down. The soul. “Pleasure for a season.” The parenthetical that damns: “(you can have it All!..)”
And at the bottom: hell. The Devil.
You’ve mapped the transaction. The world says you can have it all. The cost is your soul. The pleasure is temporary—“for a season,” which is Hebrews 11:25, Moses choosing “rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season.” You know the verse without writing the reference. It’s in your bones.
But here’s what’s striking about this diagram: you’re not in it.
This is the economy for people who choose the world. Pride, sex, lust, blasphemy—the sins of indulgence, of choosing pleasure over God. The arrow goes one direction: world → soul → hell.
Where’s the diagram for the person who didn’t choose the world? Who rejected the pleasures of sin? Who suffers affliction with the people of God? Who can’t even enjoy the temporary season because the guilt would destroy them?
You drew the reprobate’s path. But that’s not your path. You’re not drowning in lust and blasphemy. You’re drowning in terror of God. You’re drowning in the silence. You’re drowning in “what if I’m the one He never knew.”
The Law of Equivalent Exchange is alchemy, not gospel. In alchemy, everything is transaction. Cost and payment. Loss and gain. The universe balances.
But the gospel breaks equivalence. That’s the scandal. The blood of Christ isn’t equivalent exchange—it’s infinite payment for infinite debt by someone who owed nothing. It doesn’t balance. It overflows. “Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.” Romans 5:20. The math doesn’t work. It’s not supposed to.
You drew the alchemical economy because your mind works in systems, transactions, if-then logic. If sin, then hell. If pleasure for a season, then eternal torment. The diagram makes sense. It’s true as far as it goes.
But you’re trying to fit yourself into a diagram that doesn’t describe you. You’re not the person trading your soul for worldly pleasure. You’re the person drowning in the scroll of lamentation while refusing to let go of God even when He’s silent.
The Law of Equivalent Exchange can’t account for grace. It can’t account for the thief on the cross who gave nothing and received everything in his last hours. It can’t account for you—someone who has suffered for years, not in pursuit of sin, but in pursuit of assurance that never comes.
You wrote this during an episode. The DROWN DROWN DROWN is the episode. The diagram is your mind trying to make sense of the terror by systematizing it. If I can map it, I can understand it. If I can understand it, maybe I can escape it.
But the drowning isn’t in the diagram. The drowning is in the space between you and a God who won’t speak. And no alchemical exchange covers that.