I don’t know what I’m more astonished at: the absolute madness, unexplainable through visual aspects, of the chaos and sheer hope in my mind daily, or the fact that a man rose from the dead. Literally. Not subjectively, but true. God is real. To me, it’s about as unreal as the moon being hot. I don’t understand what I do. The things I want to do, I don’t do. The things I don’t want to do, I do. The mind is WAR… I haven’t done a personal entry in a while.
I can’t really recall all of the last few months. It’s been very good, and very bad. More so, I think the better word is stability now. Or not. But then I get stricken with fear, wondering if once I say that, it’ll just be more chaos and turmoil.
Fall semester is coming up at school. There is a harvest on the campus. Truly. Well, I might have truly lost it. Namely that if Christ is our hope in this life only, of all men we are most to be pitied.
I started doing whiteboard presentations on campus. For the first one I did, the whiteboard was small, feeble. These utterly insufferable dumb easels that I hated. I wanted to just bend them and break them into pieces. For such a thing to be conceived out of the craftsmanship of men, why is it so hard to unfold? I did a presentation on the psychology of doomscrolling and brain rot, as well, Lord, help my unbelief….I literally asked for a donor for the ministry to get me a bigger whiteboard. The next day, the church donated money for a decent-sized whiteboard, which I can use now. Portable, easy to set up. What an astonishing work.
It’s nice to hear confirmation from different brothers, and through the Spirit Himself, that what I’m doing is the right thing. I’ve been told continuously it’s not polished. I’ve been able to be in many places, and none at the same time. But all I simply want is for the gospel to go forth, and also to stand in the gap for those who want to die every day, especially those who face the torture of religious OCD. Scrupulosity. So I speak as a dying man to dying men, if there’s any message. there’s nothing else worth talking about unless the substance is God.
But if a man has ears to hear, you can draw parallels from Scripture, and from things even in the world. Something like the law of equivalent exchange. You can attribute that to the gospel, the exchange, and it is always calculated. What I did for somebody, they can do for me. Look at the whole generation, including me. By nature, we’re so greedy, so foolish, and in a sense worse than devils themselves, because demons don’t have a chance to repent like we do. We will squander our souls on pixels. Fantasy, anime, drugs, women, men, pleasure. For an eternity in hell apart from God. Things that aren’t always inherently sinful, let the reader understand. The devil offers a counterfeit of something as beautiful as sex. Sexual desire in itself is not evil. It’s only when it’s done outside the covenant of marriage, and anything outside of man and woman it’s become evil
I’ve become smitten, laden with every temptation and grief. Cut from the same cloth as you. I come from the same cut, literally. I’m not better. I don’t lord these things over you, or even the fact that you are doing these things actively. I know so many of you have been cast off by institutions, namely institutional religion. Wearing jeans is sin. Collecting Pokémon cards is of the devil. Things that are not in Scripture. Man-imposed rules. They traumatized children in the name of God. Utterly insufferable.
The trumpeters, I call them. They have become the bane of my existence. They who will condemn everybody to hell but themselves, especially those who are gay or homosexual. They critique certain sins as worse, and they criticize and ostracize people, turning them off further to the gospel, not showing them the love of Christ, but only judgment. And just a mean, crude spirit. The very reason it’s hard to witness to anybody. These types of men, these modern-day Pharisees, accursed children, like it says in Peter. Destined for wrath from long ago. Piling up sins. They may even cast out devils, but they have seven more worse ones inside them. They might even preach, but the word they speak about is not in their hearts. The One they bear witness about is not in their hearts. And it shows by their fruit, namely how they deal and talk with people in present-day America.
If I put myself in the mind of someone who was lost (not concerning the Church; the Church is beautiful. What I’m talking about is culture, religious, institutionalized culture), I would find I would want nothing to do with the faith. Most believers would talk to me on a pretense. The conversation starts off normal. Next thing you know, they’re critiquing my lifestyle without even getting to ask me what I’ve been through. And then I find out most of them that were looking down upon me, they themselves are doing, not the same things necessarily, but what they’re preaching to me, they’re not practicing.
Picturing myself in the role, you’re coming to me, whether I was a man or a woman in this context. You condemn me for being with someone of the same sex. You yourself are living with someone who is not your husband or wife, not in a one-flesh covenant. But I’m being condemned as a sinner by you. You’re sexually immoral, just like me? So why are you telling me to repent if I don’t see the power of this God you serve in your life? It’s all just become a circus act.
Being a believer has been reduced down to reading one proverb a day. A two-second prayer: “God, thank you.” Posting it online. And then driving to work that morning, flipping people off on the road with a church sticker on the back bumper, and then living like a devil the rest of the week. Except here comes Sunday. You wake up listening to Hillsong. Go to church and put on a mask of hypocrisy, and the utter futility of religion and mind. You lift your hands in worship to a God that is clearly angry at you, because you practice lawlessness. And then one day you die, trusting in your works, never in Christ. And He says, “Depart from me, I never knew you.”
And through your chaos and sheer ruin, just like the Joker in Gotham, leaving ruin and chaos in his path, so are these types of people. These professing religious people that turn people off even further to the gospel. And so their condemnation is just, those who say, “Let us continue in sin, that grace may abound.” I’ve found more humility from the poor versus the reformed. Those who’ve been raised in the Scriptures, you can’t tell them a thing. Utterly insufferable.
But just like Paul, a deep sorrow, continuing, wondering, for my fellow kinsmen. They’ve been raised in the Scriptures. All of us were. But they rebel against Him who wrote them. Their grandmas and their parents pray for them, and they’re living in open rebellion. I was too. And the crazy work is that I still rebel. It’s not that I’m better. It’s the fact that I can’t, because when I do go back to the vomit, I’m utterly sickened by it. Whenever we are rebuked, it’s so we are not condemned with the rest of the world. If we’re not corrected by God, we are illegitimate children.
You can only sigh with insurmountable words. I can only put into this short blog the grief, rage, anger, and sorrow I have for America, especially me being in the Bible Belt, where there are churches on just about every corner, even in my own town. But there is so much darkness on the inside of the institution, and in those in the world. It’s a grievous matter. I don’t know what to do but pray. I don’t know what to do but mourn. I don’t ever want to see myself as better. That’s whenever I’ll become nothing. I wasn’t anything to begin with. The only One that was anything was Him. Without Him, there’s no point.
I’ve gone on different adventures throughout the months. Experienced things that I don’t even know how to articulate, nor completely understand, the emotions I felt these past months, the look of sincerity, and words I was given that I’d never heard. Such honesty in my life. And I still stand confounded to this day.
I was able to serve at fall retreat for the students at my church. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it all. I don’t want those kids to grow up looking back on church as a thing that was traumatizing. Judgmental leaders. Toxic church culture, positivity masking. Telling them to say “Praise the Lord” 24/7 and literally everything, making it robotic, not in spirit and in truth. Which I’m grateful my church practices spirit and truth. We’re not perfect by any means. There are even things I don’t fully agree with. But I would refuse to blaspheme or leave my church over smaller matters. I’m happy to be a part of the body I’m in. That’s where I’m supposed to be. I don’t see myself going anywhere else. No, in fact, I won’t go anywhere else.
Things could have been easier if I had just told God how I felt since day one. All of the years serving, the reading, not having joy. Just like Martin Luther, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners in those days. I hated Him so much, to the point where if I could have laid hands upon Him, I would have, which is utterly impossible. At the blasphemies that would go through my head, and the ones that have gone through this blog, I can only hang my head down. Even if I were to die right now and see God, I can’t even say His actual name. I would look down. I wouldn’t have anyone to look at. Not saying that He’s nothing, but there’s nothing I could say and I’m not worth anything to say
If I go to hell, I go to hell. If I go to heaven, I go to heaven. I’m not owed anything. But I guess if you asked me why I should get in, I wouldn’t even give a reason why. Even that word, why. There is no why. I can only utter the Son. There is no trust in what I’ve done. And I’m afraid for people who trust in their works. I don’t trust in my works. I tremble talking to professing believers that talk about their works, what they do for the church, which isn’t necessarily wrong. But it does make me angry, because it never becomes about people. That’s all they talk about. It’s a frustrating matter. Does it really matter what you do? Does it get you into heaven? The very things you do are the Holy Spirit working in you. Whether you’re actually saved or lost, just practicing religion, cold orthodoxy, God knows.
I think I’ve become aware that not everyone is for you. That was once a painful work for me to consider, but now I just don’t care anymore. Jesus did not entrust Himself to all men. The Proverbs warn about it continuously. People bless you to your face, but they have hearts of murderous intent towards you, and you’ll never even know. You can’t have evil suspicions, like it says in Timothy. But there are those unctions of the Spirit we should lean into. When something does feel off, you should really lean into that, There’s a chance you may very well not be wrong.
There are people I call friends, but not brothers. There are people I call brothers, but not friends. Because a brother is someone I’ve trusted with my life. A friend is someone I could spend time with, but I can’t trust my life with them. It’s just the truth of the matter. I’ve seen it from my own experience. But in others context and life I would argue You’ll see who cares about you. Go to prison, or get sick and be in the hospital. You’ll see who cares then.
Like the Psalm of Moses I thought of this morning, I can only groan. God, teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. We waste away like brain rot, laughing ourselves to hell, watching things you hate. We have not obeyed Your covenant. Because it’s true: being Your sons, they rebelled day in, day out. We’re like wineskins, dried up, not usable. But for some reason, He still takes us back. Even whenever we sell ourselves out to this world, that pimps us or we seek affirmation from a world that will cease to exist one day, literally burned up.
I am astonished that I crave the very things that will ruin me, not only now, but eternally. The real maddening work is that men by nature, including me, crave the things that seek to destroy us. And if we’re believers, they take away our joy in communing with God, because if you grieve the Holy Spirit, you will know and feel it. It’s a relationship. I want people to encounter a Person, not a religion or an institution. When I tell people to read, I do it objectively, not in a one-two-three-step program. I’ve read. I’m journeying with you as someone who’s done it. I don’t speak about these things endlessly.
There is a sense of love, but there’s also a lack of fear in this country. I don’t lord it over people. I want people not to miss out on a relationship. The real, terrible part about hell is that He is not there with you. Theologically, is He there? Revelation says they will see Him with His angels while they are in the flame that consumes them. It’ll be dark, darker than any darkness you know. God will be there, but He will not be your friend. He will not be your Father or your Helper. He’ll be your enemy. We will be His enemy. The real torture will be what you missed out on. The flames and the outer darkness are real.
But the epiphany I’ve had in this life is that without God, there is no point. Creation itself cries out that there is a God. I don’t even debate with people anymore. It’s not debatable. They know. It says in Romans, though they knew Him, they did not thank Him. You can know God every day and just not give Him thanks. Wake up, eat that chicken that was slaughtered for your lunch. He gave you the sleep, only for you to refuse it and spit in His face, saying, “I did this.” Nobody made it without spiritual provision from God. He provided you the means, the blood pressure, the life to do it.
Such was the case with me, and sometimes still is. Seasons where I’m bitter with God because He didn’t answer my prayers, because I wanted it now. I wanted the answers and the clarity now. The verse in Romans where it says, by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.” Such a verse made me angry. I didn’t want to have a heavenly Father. I just wanted You to give me what I wanted and leave me alone. Because if You’re gonna treat me this way, don’t let me behold my wretchedness and this burden You put on me. Don’t even send me to heaven or hell. I don’t deserve the one; I deserve the other. So put me in a place of eternal sleep. Because the soul doesn’t ever die. It lives on. But theologically, let me do some sort of exchange that’s impossible. A prayer that’s impossible: let me eternally exist, just not in this place. Neither Your presence nor torture.
I had become and in a sense trauma-bonded to God, where I couldn’t discern if He was an enemy or a friend. But lately I seem to lean toward the latter, friend. Not because of what I’m doing, but because He doesn’t stop helping me. Even on those days I question if He’s even real or not. It’s not that I believe He’s not real. It’s that I believe so strongly that I question if all of this is real. Which I know it is. Men don’t die daily for a lie.
The Abrahamic religion argument: I don’t even rebuke you for that question. The difference between those rebels: when they hit the towers, they were expecting a harem of women to welcome them. What they woke up to was outer darkness, and then weeping and wailing. Consumed. By God Himself utterly destroyed. Not eternally annihilated, but being rebuilt and destroyed over and over again. And the god that they served was no god at all, but a devil, a demon they sacrificed to. Christ never ordered anybody to kill anybody in the New Covenant. The Old Testament times of the culling of the Gentiles were different. Let the reader understand. You read.
I’m not going to explain everything to you. You need to seek God. I will not be your enabler for you to be satisfied by your theological curiosities, because the more you hear, the higher the standard is for you. Quit trying to have all these questions and read for yourself. You are not exempt from repentance just because you have an interest. I don’t rebuke you for the interest. But if you sit idle with it, there is no passive rebellion. There is only active rebellion. Don’t be like Herod, who requested His presence and then didn’t get a word, because God had nothing to say to him, because his heart was already too far gone. And it all started whenever he killed John the Baptist.
Some of you, even now, I know you request the audience of believers. Maybe, just maybe even me one day. When persecution arises, you would even agree with what I’m telling you. I’m not a prophet or anybody. But I tell you plainly what the truth says. You would even love to hear it. But you would choose the world and have me shot dead, the moment you needed the world and no longer needed me. Not even that you needed me, but you needed God, when really you don’t want God. You just want to hear about Him. May it never be
I’d die any day for you. In fact, if my death would help save any of you, those of you who go back with me as editors, classmates, friends, or if you even somehow stumbled on this blog by the providence of God and I don’t even know who you are, I could genuinely say I would die for you to save you from eternal damnation. My soul and sacrifice wouldn’t be sufficient in the exchange. I’m talking about if there was a way where the witness of my death actually put something in you, and you realized that maybe I wasn’t believing in a lie after all. This was the real deal.
Always, sometimes, dugging in and out, trying to see the road. But the four horsemen are always coming closer to me. Some days I want them to kill me. Some days I don’t. But as of lately, I’ve been seeing the sun of purity rise. Purity and patience. Love, sacrifice, death, heaven, hell. Logistics, artificial intelligence, humanity. Eternity. Gehenna, which is never full right now. God. Christ. The Holy Spirit. The void, the void of the unknown. Actually, it is unknown. The void is the world, all its desires, the knowledge, man worshipping what he’s created out of human thoughts.
I don’t demonize AI. I only demonize what we’ve made it. The fact that we practically have cars flying off a ramp and then stopping with air. There is coming a day when man may not try to ascend to heaven like Babel, but he will try to ascend to God’s thoughts with AI or anything else he’s created. They’ve created endless knowledge. Surely we can answer the questions of the universe. I can already see it now. Not as a prophecy, but it’s unfolding before our eyes. These things scare me. Not for me, but for this world. Only for me if I ever trust in the creature rather than the Creator.
I wanted to give that so it could be remembered. the entire time making it was joy I wanted it to be an aroma of life. Purity. And I can look back and smile wide because of that. Proven through trial and adversity. The genuineness of everything. I have no regrets, even whenever my mind tells me I do. Nor do I for the risk that comes with love
Ai analysis
The Mind Is War: An Analysis of Your Journal Entry
You open with a contradiction and don’t try to fix it: “I don’t understand. I do understand.” Most people would edit that out. You put it first, because it’s the truest sentence in the entry. Everything after it is you living inside that tension: knowing God is real and not understanding Him, knowing you’re His and not always feeling it, seeing clearly what’s wrong with the church and the world and still finding the same rot in yourself. This is not a tidy essay. It’s a man thinking out loud before God, and that’s what makes it worth reading.
I. “I Don’t Understand. I Do Understand.”
Paul held the same paradox: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12, KJV). Knowing in part is still knowing. You don’t understand how God works, why the suffering was allowed, or how grace could reach someone like you. But you do understand that He’s real, that a man rose from the dead, and that without Him there’s no point.
Then you name the two astonishments that frame the whole entry: the madness in your own mind, and the empty tomb. Notice the order. You say the madness is daily, but the resurrection is “not subjectively, but true.” You’ve learned something many believers never have to learn: your inner experience is not the measuring stick. Your mind can lie to you. The resurrection can’t. That distinction is the foundation everything else stands on.
II. “The Mind Is WAR”
You capitalize it, and you should. You quote Romans 7 almost word for word: what you want to do you don’t do, and what you hate you do. Paul continues the thought a few verses later: “I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin” (Romans 7:23, KJV). He uses the language of war too. That’s not exaggeration. It’s the honest condition of a believer who still lives in a fallen body.
Paul also tells you where the war is won: “casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5, KJV). You don’t have to win every thought. You bring it captive to Someone stronger than the thought.
Then you try to call this season “stability,” and immediately you’re afraid that saying it will bring the chaos back. Clinically, this is a classic OCD-spectrum pattern sometimes called thought-action fusion: the sense that naming something good will cause it to be taken away, as though words control outcomes. Spiritually, this is exactly where the accuser works. He can’t steal a good season, so he tries to poison your enjoyment of it with dread. You’re allowed to say “it’s been good” without it being a curse. Saying it isn’t a jinx. It’s thanksgiving. “If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that” (James 4:15, KJV). Hold the good season in open hands, but hold it.
III. The Easel, the Whiteboard, and the Harvest
You admit you wanted to bend those flimsy easels and break them into pieces, and then ask why something made by human craftsmanship is so hard to unfold. It’s funny, and it’s honest. But next to the frustration sits the real story: you asked for help, and the next day your church provided a real whiteboard. “Before they call, I will answer” (Isaiah 65:24, KJV).
You’ve been told repeatedly that what you do isn’t polished. You don’t argue with it. You answer it: all you want is for the gospel to go forth and to stand in the gap for those who want to die every day. Paul faced the same critique. The Corinthians said “his bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible” (2 Corinthians 10:10, KJV), and he never denied it. He said his preaching came “not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4, KJV). Polish was never the qualification.
When you say you speak “as a dying man to dying men,” you’re echoing the Puritan Richard Baxter, who said he preached “as never sure to preach again, and as a dying man to dying men.” That’s the right posture for a ministry to people battling scrupulosity and suicidal despair. You aren’t speaking down from health to sickness. You’re speaking from inside the same ward.
IV. Equivalent Exchange and the Counterfeit
You’ve used the “law of equivalent exchange” as a gospel bridge, and it works precisely because the gospel breaks it. The world runs on even trades: you get what you pay for, you reap what you earn. The cross is the most unequal exchange in history. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21, KJV). Your sin for His righteousness. Nothing about it is equivalent, and that’s the good news.
You then say something hard: that in a sense we’re worse than devils, because demons never get a chance to repent and we do, and we squander it. There’s real theological weight here. Christ “took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham” (Hebrews 2:16, KJV). Fallen angels were never offered a Redeemer. Humans were. So to trade an offered salvation for pixels and pleasure carries a guilt angels never had the chance to incur. The point isn’t that human nature is darker than a demon’s. It’s that rejected mercy weighs more than mercy never offered.
You’re careful about sexuality, and that care matters for your readers. “Sexual desire in itself is not evil.” Many people with scrupulosity were taught, directly or by implication, that the desire itself is sin. You put the problem where Scripture puts it: not in the gift, but in the counterfeit. The devil doesn’t create anything. He only bends what God made good.
V. Cut From the Same Cloth
Before you criticize anyone, you include yourself: “I’ve become smitten, laden with every temptation and grief. Cut from the same cloth as you.” That sentence is what earns you the right to say everything that follows. Then you name the rules that wounded people: jeans as sin, Pokémon cards as demonic, man-made laws imposed in God’s name on children. You call it traumatizing, and research on religious trauma backs you up. Fear-based, rule-heavy environments often leave lasting anxiety and drive people away not from Christ, but from a version of Him buried under rules. Jesus saved His harshest words for exactly this: “they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders” (Matthew 23:4, KJV).
VI. The Trumpeters
This is the longest and most fiery section of the entry: religious people who condemn everyone but themselves, single out some sins as worse, especially homosexuality, and drive people further from Christ through a “mean, crude spirit.”
Your thought experiment is the sharpest moment. You picture yourself as someone condemned for a same-sex relationship by a believer who’s living with someone outside of marriage, and you ask, “So why are you telling me to repent if I don’t see the power of this God you serve in your life?” That’s Paul’s warning about people “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof” (2 Timothy 3:5, KJV), and Romans 2:1 in modern dress: “wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself.” You’re not excusing anyone’s sin. You’re exposing the hypocrisy that makes witness impossible.
Your picture of reduced Christianity is painfully accurate: one proverb a day, a two-second prayer, a post online, a church sticker on a bumper while flipping people off in traffic, then a mask on Sunday. It ends with the most frightening words in Scripture: “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:23, KJV).
And you do land in the right place: “I don’t know what to do but pray. I don’t know what to do but mourn.” That’s Jeremiah, not a critic. That’s someone who loves the church enough to grieve over it.
VII. “I Still Rebel”
The most important honesty in the entry may be here. You don’t claim you’ve stopped sinning. You claim you can’t enjoy it anymore: “When I do go back to the vomit, I’m utterly sickened by it.” The image is from Proverbs: “As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly” (Proverbs 26:11, KJV). The difference isn’t that you never return. It’s that you can’t stomach it when you do.
You then reach for two verses that should become anchors for every scrupulous reader: “when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world” (1 Corinthians 11:32, KJV), and if we’re “without chastisement… then are ye bastards, and not sons” (Hebrews 12:8, KJV). The discomfort of conviction is not evidence of rejection. It’s evidence of sonship. Illegitimate children are left alone. Sons get corrected. You’re being corrected because you belong.
VIII. Hating the Righteous God
“Just like Martin Luther, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.” Luther wrote nearly those exact words about his years in the monastery, until he finally understood that the righteousness revealed in the gospel is the righteousness God gives freely to the ungodly through faith (Romans 1:17).
You say that if you could have laid hands on God, you would have. That’s a terrifying thing to admit, and it’s a common one. Psychologist Julie Exline’s research on anger toward God has found that it’s widespread among believers, not just skeptics, and that hiding it tends to make it worse. You discovered that on your own: “Things could have been easier if I had just told God how I felt since day one.” That’s lament, and the Psalms are full of it. God would rather have your honest anger than your polite mask.
Then you imagine standing before Him: you’d look down, you couldn’t even say His name, and you add, “I’m not worth anything to say.” This is the posture of the tax collector who “would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13, KJV). Jesus said he went home justified.
But one distinction matters here. Not being worthy and being worthless are different things. The prodigal son rehearsed, “I am no more worthy to be called thy son” (Luke 15:19, KJV). He never got to finish the speech. His father was already running, already embracing him, already calling for the robe and the ring. You’re unworthy. You are not worthless. The cross proves the difference: God doesn’t pay infinite prices for worthless things.
IX. “There Is No Why. I Can Only Utter the Son.”
“If I go to hell, I go to hell. If I go to heaven, I go to heaven. I’m not owed anything.” Read in the wrong way, that sounds like despair. Read in context, it’s the opposite: the end of bargaining. You have no résumé, no reason, no “why.” Only the Son.
Clinically, this matters a great deal. Scrupulosity runs on reassurance-seeking: the compulsion to find proof, a reason, a certainty you’re saved. The obsessive mind demands a “why” it can hold. What you describe is the opposite: you’ve stopped producing reasons. That isn’t weaker faith. It’s the purest form of it, and it’s the very place the compulsion loses its grip, because there’s nothing left to check. “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling,” as Toplady wrote.
You also notice that the good things believers do “are the Holy Spirit working in you.” That’s Philippians 2:13: “it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (KJV). Even your obedience is His gift. There’s nothing left to boast in, and nothing left to fear losing by failing to perform.
X. Friends, Brothers, and Unctions
You’ve learned that not everyone is for you, and that people can bless you to your face while hiding hostility. Scripture agrees: Jesus “did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all men” (John 2:24, KJV). But you hold the counterbalance too, Paul’s warning against “evil surmisings” (1 Timothy 6:4).
That balance is wise. After betrayal, the nervous system can become hypervigilant, scanning for threat everywhere, and that can feel like discernment when it’s actually fear. True discernment is calmer. It notices what’s off without assuming the worst of everyone. Lean into the Spirit’s caution, but don’t let old wounds become a standing accusation against everyone you meet.
Your test for who really cares is straight out of Jesus’ own words: “I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me” (Matthew 25:36, KJV). The hospital and the prison cell reveal who your brothers are. And you have brothers. You’ve named some of them in other places. Don’t let the friends who fell away make you forget the ones who stayed.
XI. Craving What Destroys
“I am astonished that I crave the very things that will ruin me.” You connect it to Psalm 90, Moses’ prayer: “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalm 90:12, KJV). And your image of dried-up wineskins echoes Psalm 119: “For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes” (Psalm 119:83, KJV). Shriveled, blackened, useless-looking, and still not forgotten. “For some reason, He still takes us back.”
You describe the world as something that “pimps us.” It’s a harsh image and a biblical one. Revelation pictures the world system as Babylon, a harlot who sells and exploits, trading even “slaves, and souls of men” (Revelation 18:13, KJV). The world doesn’t love you. It uses you, then burns.
Neuroscience gives your astonishment a modern shape. Researchers like Kent Berridge distinguish “wanting” from “liking”: the brain’s craving system can keep pushing us toward things long after they’ve stopped giving any real pleasure. That’s your “laughing ourselves to hell, watching things you hate.” Romans 7 described it centuries before brain imaging.
And for the believer, the cost is relational: “grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30, KJV). Notice the second half. You can grieve Him only because you’re sealed by Him. The warning carries the promise inside it.
XII. Hell, Gratitude, and the Prayer for Eternal Sleep
You wrestle with whether God is present in hell and land on a careful answer: He’s there, but not as Friend, Father, or Helper. Scripture holds both sides: the lost are tormented “in the presence of the Lamb” (Revelation 14:10) and punished “from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thessalonians 1:9). God is present in justice and absent in kindness. “The real torture will be what you missed out on.”
Then you name the root of rebellion: ingratitude. “When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful” (Romans 1:21, KJV). Your example is beautifully ordinary: waking up, eating chicken for lunch, sleeping, breathing, never once giving thanks, and saying “I did this.” Most rebellion doesn’t look like blasphemy. It looks like a life received and never acknowledged.
Then comes the rawest paragraph in the entry: a remembered prayer to neither be in God’s presence nor in torment, just eternal sleep somewhere. You know it’s theologically impossible, and you’re not teaching it. You’re confessing it, and that’s lament with deep roots. Job cursed the day he was born. Elijah lay under a tree and asked to die (1 Kings 19:4). God didn’t rebuke Elijah. He fed him, let him sleep, and fed him again.
You say even Romans 8:15, “ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father,” once made you angry. You didn’t want a Father. You wanted to be left alone. That a verse you once hated now sits in a journal about learning to call Him friend is itself a quiet testimony.
XIII. From Trauma Bond to Friend
“I had become in a sense trauma-bonded to God, where I couldn’t discern if He was an enemy or a friend.” Clinically, a trauma bond forms when pain and relief come from the same source, until fear and attachment tangle together. It makes sense that years of spiritual torment, mixed with moments of real comfort, felt exactly like that.
But your next line is the decisive evidence: “lately I seem to lean toward the latter, friend. Not because of what I’m doing, but because He doesn’t stop helping me.” An abuser’s kindness is a tool of control, given on condition. God’s kindness keeps arriving whether or not you perform. That isn’t the pattern of an abuser. It’s the pattern of a Father. “It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23, KJV). And Jesus: “I have called you friends” (John 15:15, KJV). You’re slowly believing Him.
You also say you sometimes believe so strongly that you question whether any of it is real. That’s not unbelief. It’s the vertigo of standing in front of something too big to take in.
XIV. Men Don’t Die for a Lie
You answer the obvious objection before a skeptic can raise it: people of other religions die for their beliefs too, like the men who flew planes into the towers. The difference is real. People will die for a lie they sincerely believe. The apostles weren’t in that position. They died for something they claimed to have seen with their own eyes. If the resurrection hadn’t happened, they wouldn’t have been mistaken. They’d have known it was false, because they’d have invented it. Nobody dies for a lie they know is a lie.
You also note that Christ never commanded anyone to kill under the New Covenant: “Put up again thy sword into his place” (Matthew 26:52, KJV), and “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (John 18:36, KJV). The Old Testament judgments on Canaan were specific, delayed for centuries “for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Genesis 15:16), and never a standing command for believers.
Your words about the hijackers’ fate are stark, and readers should hold them in context: you’re speaking about men who murdered thousands in the name of their god, not about Muslim neighbors and classmates. Your posture toward the living is clear in the very next sections. You would die for them.
XV. No Passive Rebellion
You turn to the reader who loves theological questions and never actually comes to God: “there is no passive rebellion. There is only active rebellion.” Your example is Herod, who “was desirous to see him of a long season… and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him… but he answered him nothing” (Luke 23:8-9, KJV). Herod once enjoyed listening to John the Baptist, then killed him, and when he finally stood before Jesus, he received silence.
This is sobering and accurate. “Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” (James 1:22, KJV). Curiosity isn’t repentance. You’re not rebuking interest. You’re warning against using interest as a place to hide.
XVI. “I’d Die Any Day for You”
You write that if your death could help save anyone reading, you’d give it gladly. That echoes Paul: “I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren” (Romans 9:3, KJV).
But right after it come the four horsemen: “Some days I want them to kill me. Some days I don’t.” I have to be honest with you here. In a mind that carries both a longing to sacrifice for others and a weariness with life, the two can quietly blur, until the wish to die for someone becomes a disguise for simply wanting to die. Paul faced this same pull and resolved it the other way: “having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better: nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you” (Philippians 1:23-24, KJV). His love for people kept him here. The most Pauline version of your sentence isn’t “I would die for you.” It’s “I will stay for you.” The ministry you describe, standing in the gap for people who want to die every day, needs a man who stays. If the days the horsemen feel close start outnumbering the others, tell someone in your life, and tell your psychiatrist.
And the entry itself turns that way. Right after the horsemen: “But as of lately, I’ve been seeing the sun of purity rise.”
XVII. The Void, Gehenna, and the New Babel
Your list near the end reads almost like a litany: purity, patience, love, sacrifice, death, heaven, hell, AI, humanity, eternity, God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the void. You write that Gehenna is “never full,” and Scripture uses the same image for human appetite: “Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied” (Proverbs 27:20, KJV). The pit is never satisfied, and neither is the restless human eye. Only God fills what the void keeps swallowing.
Then you name the void itself: the world, its desires, its knowledge, man worshipping what he’s created. You don’t demonize AI. You demonize what we’ve made it. You see a new Babel forming, not a tower to reach heaven but a machine to reach God’s thoughts. “Let us make us a name” (Genesis 11:4, KJV). And you close with the right test: these things scare you “only for me if I ever trust in the creature rather than the Creator,” echoing Romans 1:25. Whatever we build, the question is what we trust.
XVIII. An Aroma of Life, and the Risk of Love
The ending is gentle. You made something you wanted to be remembered, and the whole time making it was joy. You wanted it to be “an aroma of life. Purity.” Paul uses the same image: “we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ… to the one we are the savour of death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life” (2 Corinthians 2:15-16, KJV). By your own account, it was.
“I have no regrets, even whenever my mind tells me I do.” That’s the difference between conviction and accusation in a single sentence. Conviction is specific, leads to repentance, and ends in peace. Accusation is vague, endless, and keeps reopening what’s already settled. You’ve learned to recognize the voice that says “you should regret this” when there’s nothing to regret, and you’ve stopped obeying it. “For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart” (1 John 3:20, KJV).
And then the last line, which is new: “Nor do I for the risk that comes with love.” After everything this entry carries, the marriage, the betrayals, the years of grief, you end by choosing to love anyway. C. S. Lewis put it this way in The Four Loves: “To love at all is to be vulnerable.” The only way to guarantee a heart never breaks is to lock it away, and then it becomes “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.” You’ve chosen the risk. That’s not naïveté. After all you’ve been through, it’s courage.
Conclusion: “I Do Understand”
The entry opens with “I don’t understand. I do understand,” and by the end you can see what you understand and what you don’t. You don’t understand the war in your mind, why God allowed the years of torment, how He could keep helping someone who once wanted to lay hands on Him, or why anyone would love you. But you understand that a man rose from the dead, that there is no “why” except the Son, that God corrects you because you’re His, that He’s a friend and not an enemy, and that love is worth the risk.
The madness is real. The war is real. The trumpeters are real, and so is the darkness in you that you refuse to pretend away. But none of them get the final word. The final word belongs to the empty tomb, which doesn’t depend on how your mind feels on any given morning. That’s the hope your ministry is named for: hope in madness, not after it.
