Narrow Path Collective

Jesus Showed Me a Tree I'd Never Seen in Scripture

Thomas M. Hamilton — Tue, 26 May 2026 23:01:34 GMT

The suitcase sat by the door again. Another Sunday night, another flight Monday morning, another city where would prove she was worth the salary she was paid. She knew the drive to the airport by muscle memory.

What she didn’t know…what she couldn’t have known then, was that no amount of proving in the world was going to fill the place inside her that had started bleeding out.

Bethany had known the name of Jesus Christ since before she could tie her own shoes. She just hadn’t learned how to sit still long enough to let Him love her.

Heart Shapers, Legacy Makers

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Led By Emotion (from THE LOST HEART SONG…

13 days ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Bethany Heyne

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A Name I Always Knew

I look back on my life and honestly cannot remember a day when I didn’t know the name of Jesus Christ. I was raised in a Christian home, baptized in the Catholic Church, and prayer was as natural as breathing in our house. My mother deeply loved the Lord and taught us not only about Scripture, but about a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

I still vividly remember being seven years old at Vacation Bible School in Bulverde, Texas, as I folded my hands, curled my knees in and bowed my head, asking Jesus to save me from my sins. Even as a child, I knew Jesus was real. I knew He loved me.

As I grew up, I stayed very involved in church and youth ministry. I loved serving, teaching, praying with people, and helping lead retreats. On the outside, my life looked strong. I was driven, disciplined, and high-achieving. I eventually pursued pharmacy, built a successful career, and kept moving forward toward the next accomplishment.

But what I didn’t realize was that somewhere along the way, I had learned how to work for God without really walking closely with Him.

I was working from my own strength rather than from His.

I knew who Jesus was. I even knew how to invite Him into difficult moments. But I had not learned how to fully surrender my life daily and walk with Him in dependence.

After my first marriage ended because of infidelity, something inside me broke deeply. My worth took a huge hit, and instead of bringing that pain honestly to Jesus, I tried to manage it through striving, control, relationships, and performance. I spent years trying to hold myself together externally while internally becoming more disconnected from God’s peace and direction.

The Surrender Question

Eventually I met the man who is now my husband. I truly believed this relationship was from the Lord. He loved God, loved his children, and challenged me intellectually and spiritually in ways I had long hoped for.

But before we were married, the Lord asked me a question in prayer that I will never forget:

“Are you willing to give up this relationship if I ask you to?”

I wrestled with that question for two weeks.

Not because I doubted whether I loved God, but because I realized how much hope I had quietly placed in this relationship. I believed this marriage would finally become the thing that made life feel stable, safe, and whole.

Finally, through tears, I told the Lord yes. Yes, I would surrender the relationship if He asked me to.

Peace came and with it a promise: “this relationship won’t be easy, but it will be rewarding.”

Looking back now, I realize the Lord was not simply asking for obedience. He was exposing how easily we can place our hope in good things instead of in Him.

What I Believed About Myself

Early in our marriage, hidden alcoholism and deep struggles surfaced, and suddenly the life I thought would be stable and beautiful became incredibly painful. There were seasons of grief, fear, confusion, and deep loneliness.

There is a kind of loneliness where you cannot even feel where your own heart has gone. And in that season, the Lord began exposing something much deeper in me.

A mentor once asked me a question that completely changed my life:

“What is it that you believe about yourself that allowed you to remain in this?”

At first, I didn’t understand the question. He clarified that as the daughter of the most high king this was not the life I was to be living. The Lord had something better; why did I allow the path to go this way instead of God’s way?

over time, the Lord revealed that much of my identity had quietly become rooted in performance. I believed my value came from succeeding, fixing problems, being needed, looking strong, and holding everything together.

And underneath all of it was this painful reality: I had slowly stopped trusting in the goodness of God.

I had stopped praying boldly. Stopped resting. Stopped depending on Him. Stopped truly believing He would meet me.

For years, after first learning about the infidelity, I had been living more out of self-sufficiency than surrender.

I was running. Hard and fast. Weekly travel often took me away from my family, and it was starting to tax my marriage and my children. But I didn’t see a way out of it because all I ever had known was proving myself and making my family proud.

But Jesus, in His mercy, met me there anyway.

Not by immediately removing the pain, but by sitting with me in it and slowly inviting me to release the vice grip that I held on the things that I thought mattered most.

Some of the most transformative moments of my life were not dramatic miracles. They were quiet mornings with Jesus. Mornings where He reminded me that before I was productive, successful, helpful, or impressive, I was simply loved.

The Lord began teaching me that intimacy with Him mattered more than anything I could accomplish for Him.

There was a season where He repeatedly brought me back to one lesson: surrender.

Not surrender once. Daily surrender. Surrendering my plans. My striving. My need to prove myself.

Even surrendering the things I had unknowingly placed above Him. Like my marriage, my career, my image.

Because honestly, in hindsight, what is there that I could possibly prove that was not already proved on the cross by Jesus Christ when he conquered everything for me?!

Yet still in my humanity I fall back into this pattern of wanting to prove myself.

Under the Tree

During one particularly difficult season, I had a vision while praying with Jesus that I still carry deeply in my heart.

In the vision, we walked together through a meadow until we came to a tree. Jesus invited me to sit and rest beneath it. Rest has never come naturally to me. I have spent most of my life moving, producing, striving, and achieving.

But eventually I sat down, and after a while I laid my head in His lap and looked up into the branches above us.

The tree was covered in deep magenta fruit and leaves shaped like the letter C.

I asked Jesus, “What is this?”

And He answered: “This is the fruit of Christ.”

I remember feeling confused because I thought only of the fruit of the Spirit. But not long afterward during church, we turned to Philippians 1:11: “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ…”

And suddenly the vision made sense. I quickly drew a picture of the tree in the margin of my Bible.

Jesus was showing me that a fruitful life is not produced by human striving. It is produced by abiding in Him.

By remaining with Him. By sitting beneath the tree before trying to go bear fruit on my own.

This imagery is new to me just within the last year and so I am still unpacking. All there is to know and understand about the fruit of the righteousness of Jesus Christ and how to walk that out every day but I’m so grateful for this vision and this hope that he has given me that I don’t need to depend on myself. I need to depend on Him.

Now, my mornings look very different than they used to. I sit with Jesus. I pray. I listen. I let Him remind me who I am before the demands of the day begin speaking.

And I still don’t do this perfectly. I still catch myself drifting, and some days even running, back toward performance and pressure. achievement and accomplishment. Proof that I am valued and loved. But now I know better. I know the truth of my value. It’s not in my performance. It’s not in my marriage. It’s not in my work. It’s not in my parenting. It’s simply in being a daughter of the Most High King.

Jesus has shown me that human effort can accomplish many things outwardly, but only abiding in Him produces the fruit of righteousness.

Every day the Lord calls me to put my hope in him to hold everything together in the palm of his hands rather than in my own striving and self-sufficiency. Every day is an invitation for me to surrender to Jesus Christ.

And after more than three decades of knowing His name, I can honestly say the greatest freedom I’ve ever found is not in achievement, success, or having an easy life.

It is in sitting with Jesus under the tree of the fruit of righteousness, and finally believing that His love is enough.

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Another Virus. Another Panic. Here's Your Counter-Move.

Thomas M. Hamilton — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:15:46 GMT

"And by the river upon the bank thereof, on this side and on that side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit thereof be consumed: it shall bring forth new fruit according to his months, because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary: and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine." — Ezekiel 47:12

Before We Start: Why This Cycle Matters

Forget the headlines for a second. Those are just the surface. The surface changes every cycle, but the cycle itself doesn’t.

What we are looking at is the same machine that ran in 2020, restarting in 2026. Same playbook with the same pressure tactics. And they’ll expect you to respond the same way you did the first time.

Six years ago, a generation of Christians got handed a test, and a lot of us failed it. I get it. We were scared. And the people trusted to be brave on our behalf went quiet. Pulpits emptied out and discernment got traded for compliance.

The trust broke. With everyone. Institutions. Media. Big pharma. Public health. Even the people on stage who used to sound like shepherds started sounding like spokesmen.

That trust is still broken. And here comes the next round.

“For nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light.” — Luke 8:17

That verse aged well, didn’t it?

Yeah.

Let me show you the rest.

What’s Actually Happening

What it is: A hantavirus outbreak that started on a cruise ship in the Atlantic, person-to-person transmission, WHO emergency declaration. An Ebola outbreak in Congo, nearly 500 suspected cases. Two viruses. Two emergency declarations. One news cycle. Both are real. Both are serious.

Why it matters: Real viruses exist. People get sick and die. That part is not the lie.

The lie is what gets built on top of it. The lie is the machinery that takes a real public health event and turns it into a coercion engine. The lie is the predictable, scripted, six-act performance that follows every emergency declaration like clockwork. Headline. Variant. Press conference. Compliance ask. Public shaming of dissenters. Repeat.

You already know the script. So do I. So does anyone who lived through 2020 with their eyes open. The script is not the virus, it’s what runs on top of the virus.

The Last Time We Ran This Script

What happened: In 2020, the entire Western world got handed a respiratory virus and a unified institutional response. A new pharmaceutical product rolled out faster than any in history, sold under a brand-new acronym most people had never heard before. mRNA. Three letters that became a referendum on whether you were a good citizen.

The question was never really medical. The question was social. Are you with us or are you a problem?

And the church, by and large, blinked.

Why it matters: This is not me re-litigating the medicine. I am not a doctor. I am not telling you what to do with your body. What I am telling you is what happened culturally and spiritually inside the body of Christ, because that part is documented and that part is mine to talk about.

Pastors who had spent twenty years preaching from Luke 21 about the end times suddenly couldn’t find their voice when the test arrived. Congregations got split down the middle. Families stopped talking. Christians reported other Christians to the authorities for holding house services. The institutional church traded its prophetic voice for a seat at the public health table, and the seat turned out to be a folding chair in the hallway.

The shepherds went corporate. The sheep went silent. The wolves took notes.

And here is the part that should keep you up at night. The wolves are now planning the sequel.

The Fear Engine

What it is: Fear is a marketing strategy. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is Marketing 101 (ask me how I know). Every advertising professor in America teaches it. Fear bypasses the rational brain and goes straight to the amygdala. Fear sells insurance. Fear sells alarm systems. Fear sells political candidates. Fear sells pharmaceuticals.

Fear, when wielded at scale by institutions with media reach, sells compliance.

Why it matters: Read Revelation with fresh eyes sometime. The end-times machinery does not work by force first. It works by fear first. People do not take a mark on their hand because soldiers held them down. They take it because they want to buy bread, and they are scared, and the alternative is being cut out of the system.

“And he causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark.” — Revelation 13:16-17

That passage does not describe a future event. That passage describes a mechanism. The mechanism is already running. The mechanism is fear plus access plus social pressure. The mechanism was rehearsed in 2020.

It is being rehearsed again right now.

What the Church Did Last Time

What happened: Let’s not kid ourselves. The church got tested last time and a lot of us failed.

I am not pointing fingers from a high place. I am pointing at myself first. I watched friends, family, brothers and sisters in Christ make decisions out of fear that they would not have made out of faith. I watched pulpits go quiet. I watched discernment get traded for compliance. I watched people I love stop asking questions because asking questions had a social cost.

And the worst part. A lot of us knew. We felt the wrongness in our gut and we shoved it down because the pressure was loud and the alternative felt lonely.

Ouch.

Why it matters: Because the same pressure is loading up again. Same script. Same machine. And the question is not whether the test is coming. The test is coming. The question is whether we have done the work to be ready this time.

“He who covers his sins will not prosper, but whoever confesses and forsakes them will have mercy.” — Proverbs 28:13

Confession first. Then preparation.

Daniel Didn’t Flinch

What happened: Daniel had every reason to comply.

He was a young man hauled into a foreign empire, stripped of his name, surrounded by a system designed to assimilate him. The king’s table was set. The king’s food was provided. The king’s program was generous, even. Three years of training, the best of everything, a guaranteed position when it was done.

All he had to do was eat what they served.

“But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s delicacies, nor with the wine which he drank; therefore he requested of the chief of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself.” — Daniel 1:8

Notice the language. Purposed in his heart. He did not wait until the food was in front of him to decide. He decided before the pressure came.

Why it matters: That is the whole game. The pressure to comply is not always loud. Sometimes it is a plate set in front of you with an expectation attached. And the only way you survive the pressure is to have made the decision before the plate showed up.

Daniel asked for vegetables and water for ten days. And at the end of it, he and his friends looked better than the ones eating the king’s food.

The provision was already there. The provision was in the field. The provision came from the God who made the soil before there was an empire.

What A.W. Tozer Said

“The fear of God is the fear that expels all other fears.”

That is the spine of the whole thing. When you fear God rightly, the news loses its grip. The headlines lose their hook. The script can run all day and you just keep doing what you were called to do. Pray. Work. Love. Prepare. Trust.

The opposite of panic is not denial, it is reverence.

The Counter-Move: Five Things You Do Instead of Panic

Moving on. Here is where the rubber meets the road. The next time the cycle starts, and it will start again, probably before this article gets a week old, here is your move.

1. Get Quiet Before You Get Loud

Don’t react to the headline. Read it, set it down, pray about it, talk to your spouse, sleep on it. Decision-making in panic mode is decision-making the enemy can predict. Stillness is a weapon.

2. Return to the Land

If you have got space, grow something. Garlic, onion, peppers, herbs. Even a windowsill counts. The garden teaches you that God’s provision was already here before the panic showed up, and it will be here after.

3. Build Your Own Medicine Cabinet

This is where the tonics come in. Two recipes I make in my own kitchen. Not medical treatments. Folk preparations my family has used for years.

Tonic 1, Upper Respiratory Support. Local raw unfiltered honey, fresh garlic, fresh onion, habaneros, bell peppers, raw apple cider vinegar with the mother, and 100% pineapple juice. Layer everything in a clean mason jar. Submerge in the vinegar. Seal and shake daily for two weeks. Strain. Pour in honey and pineapple juice. Mix and refrigerate. One teaspoon with a wooden spoon at the first sign of a sore throat or sniffles.

Tonic 2, General Immune and Fever Support. Local raw honey, fresh turmeric root, fresh ginger root, fresh garlic, fresh onion, cayenne pepper, fresh lemon juice, and raw apple cider vinegar with the mother. Same mason jar method. Same two-week soak. Same wooden spoon dose. This one is the daily preventative.

Sourcing matters as much as the ingredients. Local. Raw. Garden-grown wherever possible. Aldi or Mexican grocery if you have to buy. Skip the chains.

4. Know Your Sources

Stop letting algorithms pick your information diet. Build a short list of people you actually trust. Pastors, writers, farmers, doctors who haven’t bent. Check in with them when the noise gets loud. Discernment is a muscle. Use it or lose it.

5. Stay in Scripture, Not Just in the News

If you are spending more time on headlines than in the Word, the headlines are going to start sounding like prophecy. They are not. Scripture is the lens. Everything else gets read through it, not the other way around.

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What Charles Spurgeon Knew

“Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.”

The fear cycle is not free. It costs you something every time you run through it. Your sleep. Your peace. Your ability to think clearly. Your relationship with the people around you. Your trust in your own discernment.

God did not give you the spirit of fear. He gave you power, love, and a sound mind. That is not a slogan. That is a promise. And the panic playbook is designed to talk you out of it.

Don’t let it.

Prepared, Not Panicked

A guest section by

One lesson I took away from the last several years is that fear creates impulsive decision-making.

People stop thinking long-term and begin reacting emotionally to whatever is directly in front of them. We saw it in the panic buying, the empty shelves, the social pressure, and the breakdown of rational conversation. Fear shortens perspective. It pushes people into survival mode.

I do not want to live through that cycle again.

And I do not believe Christians are called to operate from a constant state of fear and reaction.

Instead of becoming panic buyers, I believe we should become prepared buyers. That requires slowing down now, before pressure builds, and honestly evaluating what is best for our families.

What do you actually use regularly? What foods nourish your body well? What products could you realistically source locally? What skills would make your household less dependent during unstable times?

Wisdom often looks far less dramatic than panic. It looks like planning before everyone else starts scrambling.

Returning to the Basics

For many people, practical preparation may include learning how to grow some of your own food and herbs. But I think it is important to approach this realistically instead of romantically.

Before planting an enormous garden, first assess what you truly eat on a regular basis. There is little sense in wasting time, money, energy, and valuable garden space growing foods your family does not even enjoy eating.

Start with what you already use. Tomatoes. Peppers. Garlic. Herbs for cooking. Leafy greens. Potatoes. Onions.

Build from your actual life.

Learn what grows well in your climate. Learn how to preserve excess food. Learn one skill at a time instead of trying to transform your entire lifestyle overnight.

A garden does not have to be perfect to be valuable. Even a few herbs growing near the kitchen window reconnect you to something many people have lost: the understanding that provision does not begin at the grocery store. There is something deeply grounding about watching food grow slowly from the soil God created.

Knowing Where Your Food Comes From

The same principle applies to meat and other staples.

This is a good time to learn where your food actually comes from and who produces it. Find local beef cattle farmers, chicken farmers, egg producers, and small family farms in your area. Build relationships with real people instead of relying entirely on large systems that can become unstable very quickly.

Local farmers markets are one of the best places to begin. They teach you what actually grows well in your region, what foods are seasonal in your area, and who is producing food locally. They also reconnect people with something we have largely lost in modern culture: knowing the people who grow your food.

Some families may even decide to learn how to raise meat chickens themselves if they have the space, resources, and ability to do so.

We have also tried to become more intentional about where we source food when possible. One resource I personally use is Azure Standard for many organic and bulk items. It has been a helpful option for finding cleaner foods, pantry staples, and products that can sometimes be difficult to source locally depending on where you live.

Of course, every family’s situation, budget, and access will look different. The goal is not perfection, it’s about becoming more thoughtful, informed, and less dependent on systems most of us never questioned before.

Again, this does not need to come from fear. It can come from stewardship.

There is a difference between panic and preparedness. One is reactive. The other is thoughtful. One is driven by anxiety. The other is built slowly through wisdom and intentional choices over time.

Relearning What Previous Generations Knew

I also believe Christians should begin relearning many of the natural health practices previous generations understood well.

Start studying herbs and foods that naturally support the immune system. Learn which plants and foods have antibacterial, antimicrobial, antifungal, or anti-inflammatory properties. Learn how nutrition affects the body’s ability to heal and function properly.

There are many plants with beneficial properties that people walk past every day without recognizing. Some may already be growing wild in your own yard. Dandelion is a perfect example. What many people consider a weed often contains valuable nutritional and supportive properties.

Learn how to properly identify plants and herbs. Learn what can be cultivated safely. Learn how to dry and store herbs correctly. Learn what grows naturally in your region.

These are skills many previous generations considered normal household knowledge.

Modern medicine absolutely has its place, and I am thankful for it. However many people have completely lost touch with the idea that God created a world filled with nourishment and support for the body long before modern pharmaceutical systems existed.

Garlic. Ginger. Turmeric. Honey. Fermented foods. Nutrient-dense whole foods.

These are not trends. Many of these practices existed long before our modern systems did. Wisdom was often passed from kitchen tables and gardens before it was packaged in bottles.

Spiritual Preparation Matters More

At the same time, practical preparation without spiritual preparation will never be enough.

One thing I believe the Church desperately needs right now is a return to serious Bible study and prayer. Not simply reading a quick verse in passing and moving on with the day, but truly sitting with Scripture, studying context, praying deeply, and learning to recognize God’s voice over the constant noise of culture and media.

And that requires intentionally allocating time for it on a daily basis.

Discernment is rarely built accidentally. It is developed quietly over time through consistency and discipline. Through choosing, day after day, to sit with God before sitting endlessly with headlines, social media, fear, and noise.

Discernment does not suddenly appear during a crisis. It is developed quietly over time.

Day after day. Prayer after prayer. Chapter after chapter.

The people who remain grounded during chaotic seasons are usually the people who built deep roots long before the storm arrived.

Praying for What Matters

Prayer matters deeply right now as well.

Pray intentionally for your family. Pray for your workplace. Pray for your church. Pray for your schools. Pray for your government, even when you disagree with it.

As a teacher, I still see the effects of the last school shutdowns on students today. Many young people are still struggling academically, emotionally, socially, and spiritually from the instability and isolation they experienced.

That damage did not simply disappear when schools reopened.

Some students lost structure. Some lost motivation. Some lost years of confidence and social development. And many adults are still recovering too.

I never want to walk blindly into that kind of devastation again without prayer, discernment, wisdom, and serious thought about how we respond moving forward.

Slowing Down Enough to Think Clearly

Preparation is not panic. Wisdom is not fear. Thoughtful stewardship is not extremism.

Sometimes it simply means slowing down enough to think clearly, pray consistently, study deeply, and make decisions before pressure and fear begin making them for you.

Many of us learned difficult lessons the last time fear swept through society. We watched how quickly panic affected communities, churches, schools, families, and decision-making. We watched how isolation, pressure, and confusion impacted people emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

We will not walk into the next season blind and caught off guard again.

This time, we can choose to respond differently. More grounded. More prayerful. More thoughtful. More rooted in truth than fear.

Wisdom over fear. Preparation over panic. Rooted in prayer. —

Christian Hotline & Prayer Support

If anything in this article surfaced something heavier — fear you have been carrying, decisions you regret, isolation that has gone on too long — you do not have to sit with it alone.

Call your pastor. Call a Christian friend. Reach out to a counselor who shares your faith.

American Association of Christian Counselors — find a counselor near you: aacc.net
Focus on the Family Counseling Line — 1-855-771-HELP (4357), free one-time consultation
Your local church — that’s what it’s there for

The body of Christ is a body for a reason. Use it.

Call to Action

The next cycle is coming. Probably soon. You have two choices. React the way the script wants you to. Or get ahead of it now.

Start small. Make one tonic this weekend. Plant something. Open your Bible to Daniel 1 and read the whole chapter. Call one Christian friend you have drifted from and pray with them on the phone. Find one local farmer at the next farmers market and introduce yourself.

That is it. Five things you can do this week that the panic playbook cannot touch.

The Big Picture

Here is what you are looking at.

The same machine that ran in 2020 is loading up again in 2026. Same script. Same fear engine. They are not hiding it. They are publishing emergency declarations on a schedule and running the play in the open because they think you forgot.

You did not forget.

And this time, the Lord is asking something different of you. Preparation. Spiritual preparation first. Practical preparation second.

That is the counter-move.

Stay awake.

Another virus. Another panic. Same Lord. Same provision. Same call to stay awake.

— Thomas

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Books recommended for this article:

Herbal Medicine for Preppers, Homesteaders and Permaculture People by Judson Carroll — a practical guide rooted in Christian Appalachian herbal tradition, written for the kind of household this article is talking about.

Rosemary Gladstar’s Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health — the classic 175-recipe reference for teas, tonics, salves, and tinctures. Not written from a Christian perspective, but the practical content is gold for anyone building a home apothecary.

Note: Nothing in this article is medical advice. The tonics described are traditional folk preparations from food-grade ingredients. Consult your physician for medical concerns.

Randy Kay's Near-Death Testimony: Thirty Minutes and Forty-Nine Seconds in Heaven

Thomas M. Hamilton — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:01:21 GMT

’s testimony has been around. If you’ve spent any time in his corner of the internet, you’ve probably already heard some version of it.

I’m running it here anyway, in his own words, because the written version sometimes reads differently than the interviews. When a man writes his own story instead of telling it across a table, the pacing changes. And sometimes, the pauses land where they need to be.

A few things stood out to me on this read.

The seven-year-old in the cancer ward, praying for a teenage orderly who was afraid of him. The bottle of tears poured into the river (read more below), and the woman at the easel finally finishing what she started on earth.

Small moments. But it’s these moments most testimonies skip past on the way to the big reveal.

Thirty minutes and forty-nine seconds. Then fourteen years of silence before he said a word about it publicly.

That second part might be the most interesting thing in the whole piece.

Read it slow. Over to .

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Thirty Minutes and Forty-Nine Seconds

It started with a swollen calf I refused to take seriously. Three days later an ER physician glanced at my chart and called me a walking dead man. Pulmonary emboli. Septic shock. MRSA in the blood. By the time I lay in the hospital bed, the body the doctors fought for had already begun letting go of me.

There was a tug at my gown. Then I was rising. I looked down on a still face I recognized but no longer wore, and a light folded around me that did not burn. Two words came inside it, soft as a breath.

Trust me

Before I could answer, a thought arrived ahead of my mouth.

So this is love.

Not a feeling. A person. He stood beside me. Middle Eastern, weathered, eyes that had been waiting for me a long time. And he walked me back through the rooms of my life the way you walk a friend through a house you built for them.

A small boy who used to talk to God before he learned to be embarrassed. A college student talking himself out of belief. An agnostic adult mistaking the silence for peace. At every turn He showed me Himself, quiet and near, refusing to leave. He showed me a stretch of highway where I had business surviving. An angel had stood between me and the wreckage and said only, God is with you. I had remembered the crash. I had forgotten the sentence.

Then He showed me a small boy, maybe seven, in a hospital where I had worked as a teenage orderly. I had been afraid of him then. Afraid of his cancer. Afraid of how thin his arms were. He looked up at me and told me he would pray for me. He died not long after. And I watched, forty years late, as that single prayer rose intact before the Father, and the answer to it was the Man now standing at my side. He had saved me because a dying child had asked Him to.

He took me higher. The Throne Room rose before us, and visions of the last days unspooled like maps I have written about elsewhere. Then, mercifully, He turned me toward the country of the living.

Heaven thrives. That is the verb. Not rests, not waits, but thrives. Flowers I had no names for sang as they bloomed again, never tiring of opening. Colors fell across each other in gradients no earthly painter has ever mixed. Trees stretched upward as I watched, putting on years between heartbreaks. Through all of it ran a river so alive it seemed to be laughing.

He held up a small bottle and told me it held my tears. Every one of them, kept. He poured it into the River of Life and asked me to drink. I knelt and drank water threaded with my own grief, and joy struck me like a tide. Every wasted year. Every wound I had carried like a coat. He was not erasing them. He was turning them.

He showed me a woman at an easel, painting something that stopped me where I stood. She was not a gifted artist on earth, He said. Here, her gift is finished. Everyone’s was. Every buried dream. Every clipped wing. All of it finally permitted to become what it was meant to be.

Beyond her stood brilliant abodes built in geometrics earth has never tried. Above all of it, the Throne Room itself.

I cannot describe the Father. He was larger than several buildings stacked, His hair white as falling water, and the light pouring from His face was greater than a thousand suns laid end to end, so I never saw His features. The Holy Spirit moved through everything like wind made visible to the spirit eyes. From the earth below, climbing in long unbroken streams, came the prayers of the saints. Flowing crystal. Flowing color. The Father breathed them in and breathed them back out as decrees.

I saw children who had died in the womb, or too young, running in the grass with angels. I saw mothers who would meet them one day. I saw old men praying in upstairs rooms a thousand miles below, and I watched their words arrive.

I begged to stay. He told me no.

Thirty minutes and forty-nine seconds. A body that had forgotten how to want me pulled me back into pain and fluorescent light and the ridiculous beep of a monitor insisting I was alive.

I kept it all quiet for fourteen years. Then a storm rolled in over Carlsbad State Beach, and the Voice that had once whispered Trust Me spoke two new words.

It is time.

I have been telling the story ever since.

If Randy's testimony stayed with you, Heaven Encounters goes deeper into everything this short piece couldn't hold.

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The One Thing Jesus Refused on the Cross (And Why You Keep Saying Yes to It)

Thomas M. Hamilton — Sat, 16 May 2026 14:02:23 GMT

It’s a Friday night. I’m tired, my dog’s snoring against my foot, and there’s a half-empty cup of lukewarm coffee judging me from across the desk. I’ve been wrestling with some serious spiritual warfare lately and, by golly, I’m worn out.

So my brain does what brains do — it goes shopping for relief.

For some, that might be a drink. Or a scroll. Perhaps a nibble of something we shouldn’t eat. Whatever’s quick and convenient. Whatever takes the edge off without making us actually deal with the edge.

Sound familiar? Yeah. I thought so.

Let’s talk about it.

The Drink Jesus Turned Down

There’s a moment in the Gospel of Mark I’ve always thought about.

Jesus is on the cross. Roman soldiers — and according to Jewish tradition, some women acting in mercy — offer Him a drink. Wine mixed with myrrh. A primitive anesthetic. Something to dull the worst of it.

It was a common kindness. Crucifixion was unimaginable. The drink wasn’t even a temptation, really — it was compassion.

He refused it.

“Then they gave Him wine mingled with myrrh to drink, but He did not take it.” — Mark 15:23 (NKJV)

Read that twice. Let it sit.

The Son of God, hanging on a Roman cross, offered relief — and He waved it away.

Why? Because relief wasn’t the point. The mission was.

That single moment — the wine and myrrh, untouched — is one of the most overlooked scenes in the entire Passion. And honestly? Most of us are out here drinking the cup He refused.

The Little Cup of Wine and Myrrh in Your Hand Right Now

Let’s not kid ourselves. We all have one.

Yours might be a glass of something. A bowl of something. An app that’s a black hole for your evening leading you into a scroll session that turns into three hours and a tension headache.

Here’s the thing — sin doesn’t usually show up in a black cloak with a pitchfork. It shows up with a soothing voice and a peppermint candy.

Have you ever told yourself any of these?

“I just need to unwind.”
“This helps me relax.”
“God understands the stress I’m under.”

Ouch. Me too.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?” — Jeremiah 17:9 (NKJV)

Your heart will dress up compromise as coping faster than you can say “self-care.” It’ll hand you the wine and myrrh and tell you it’s medicine.

Why this matters: if you can’t tell the difference between rest and escape, you’ll keep drinking from a cup that’s slowly numbing the part of you that needs to feel God most.

When Virtue Becomes the Excuse

Here’s the trickier version of the trap.

Sometimes we don’t cross the line because it looks evil. We cross it because we’ve convinced ourselves the reason is good.

“I needed the break.” “I deserved it.” “I’ve earned this.” “God knows what I’ve been carrying.”

Paul saw this exact mindset coming from a mile away:

“All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful; all things are lawful for me, but not all things edify.” — 1 Corinthians 10:23 (NKJV)

Translation? Just because something isn’t a flashing red sin doesn’t mean it’s doing your soul any favors.

And before I start sounding holier-than-thou, let me say it plainly — I’m typing this with my own hypocrisy showing. I’ve used “I deserve it” as a permission slip more times than I want to admit.

C.S. Lewis nailed it: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

If we keep numbing the pain, we keep missing the megaphone.

Why this matters: the relief that quiets the noise also quiets the voice you need to hear the most.

Your Brain Is Cheering for the Wine and Myrrh

Quick detour into the science, because it actually backs Scripture up.

Your brain has a reward system. Dopamine. When you do something that brings fast pleasure or fast pain-relief, dopamine fires off and your brain takes a note: “Do that again.”

A few favorite dopamine deliverables:

Alcohol
Marijuana
Scrolling
Pornography
Sugar
Online shopping at 1am

(That last one stings, doesn’t it?)

The National Institute on Drug Abuse explains that dopamine reinforcement is one of the engines of habit formation and addiction. What starts as occasional relief gets a frequent flyer card. Then a permanent address.

Long before MRI machines existed, Solomon was watching the same thing play out in his own life:

“I searched in my heart how to gratify my flesh with wine, while guiding my heart with wisdom… till I might see what was good for the sons of men to do under Heaven all the days of their lives.” — Ecclesiastes 2:3 (NKJV)

He was the richest, wisest man in the room. He had access to every cup of wine and myrrh you can imagine. His conclusion? Vanity.

Why this matters: your brain is wired for the shortcut. Your soul is wired for the cross. Those two are usually pulling in opposite directions.

Why He Refused

Back to that moment on the cross.

Jesus didn’t refuse the drink because suffering is noble. He didn’t refuse it to make a point about toughness. He refused it because dulling the moment would have dulled the mission.

He came to fully bear what we couldn’t bear. The wine and myrrh would’ve shortened the road to the end of Himself. He took the long way on purpose.

Why this matters: every time you reach for the easy cup, you’re skipping the very thing God might be using to bring you to the end of yourself — which happens to be where He actually meets you.

The Tightrope We’re All Walking

Photo by Sean Benesh on Unsplash

Faith is a tightrope across a canyon. The wire is thin. The wind is real. The other side is glorious.

You don’t fall because of one bad step. You fall because of a hundred little tilts you stopped correcting.

The wine and myrrh isn’t usually one big gulp. It’s a thousand little sips, each one labeled “just this once.”

Compromise erodes conviction quietly. You don’t notice until you look up one day and realize the rope is somewhere behind you and the canyon is below.

Why this matters: balance isn’t a one-time decision. It’s the next sip you don’t take.

A Door of Hope

There is something deeply transformative about a room full of alcoholics sharing their shame, pain, and struggles with addiction. The Church could learn a thing or two from their radical honesty.

There is also something beautiful about honest disciples who choose not to pretend and instead bring their hidden vices into the light. To live by grace means to acknowledge our whole lives, both good and bad.

Yet, most of Christianity still lives in a performance culture. Sin, vice, and addiction are sicknesses that need the healing touch of Jesus. I am reminded of Jesus’ words: “For the joy set before me, I endured the cross.” He also said, “Now is the judgment of this world.” The Greek word for judgment is krisis, a word used in ancient Greek to mean “the turning point in a disease,” akin to when a fever breaks.

Sin is a sickness of the soul. When we are dealing with vice or hidden sin, we need healing. When those things are brought to light, they lose their power in the presence of truth. This requires radical honesty, transparency and trust. In other words it requires repentance.

We are only as sick as our secrets. This is why James encourages us to confess our sins to one another, that we may be healed. In Greek, the word healed here is iaomai, and it speaks of the healing of our whole being.

God knows our whole life’s saga. He knows all the skeletons in our closet, our sin, shame, vices, and dishonesty. He calls us to trust that even in these things, He loves us. Jesus did not come for the super-spiritual; He came for the sick, the weak in faith, the addicted, the broken, and those weary of this world.

The scriptures tell us He is the Great Physician. He is the only one who can heal your hidden places. We must be willing and honest. As the scriptures say “He resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” As it has been said, “It is all grace.” We just need to open the door and let the light of grace heal our darkest places.

“And there I will give her her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.” — Hosea 2:15 (ESV)

References: Hebrews 12:2, John 12:31, James 5:16, James 4:6

We are only as sick as our secrets. That line right there is the door. The application section below is just what you do once you walk through it.

Let’s get practical.

Five Ways to Set the Cup Down

Name your wine and myrrh out loud. You can’t fight what you won’t admit. Whatever it is — say it plainly to God before bed tonight.
Add a 24-hour delay. When the urge hits, wait a day before acting on it. Most cravings die in less time than you think.
Replace, don’t just resist. A walk. A psalm. A call to a friend who loves Jesus more than they love your comfort. Empty hands grab the cup again.
Get one person in your corner. Accountability isn’t shame — it’s oxygen. Pick someone you’d be embarrassed to disappoint, and tell them the truth.
Sit with the discomfort for five minutes. Just five. Don’t reach for anything. Let the silence do its work. That’s where God often shows up.

You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be honest enough to put the cup down once.

Christian Hotline & Prayer Support

If you’re struggling tonight and the cup is closer than the cross feels — please reach out. You’re not weak for needing help. You’re human.

Christian Hotline: 1-800-633-3446
National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: 988
SAMHSA Helpline: 1-800-662-4357

References

Mark 15:23 (NKJV) — “Then they gave Him wine mingled with myrrh to drink, but He did not take it.”
Matthew 27:34 (NKJV) — Parallel account of the offered drink, “wine mingled with gall.”
Jeremiah 17:9 (NKJV)
1 Corinthians 10:23 (NKJV)
Ecclesiastes 2:3 (NKJV)
1 John 1:9 (NKJV)
Hosea 2:15 (ESV)

On the wine mingled with myrrh

The drink offered to Jesus on the cross was a customary act of mercy. Jewish tradition records that “the noble women of Jerusalem” prepared a stupefying drink — wine mixed with a bitter substance such as myrrh or frankincense — and offered it to those being executed in order to dull their senses. See Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a. The parallel account in Matthew 27:34 describes the mixture as “wine mingled with gall,” reflecting the bitter character of the additive. For word study on the Greek terms, see Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words (Thomas Nelson, 1996), entries on “wine” and “myrrh.”

Quoted authors

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (HarperOne, 2001 edition), Chapter 6, p. 91. Originally published 1940.

Dopamine, the reward system, and habit formation

National Institute on Drug Abuse, “Drugs and the Brain.” Available at: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/drugs-brain

Anna Lembke, MD, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (Dutton, 2021).

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Saved by a Signature

Thomas M. Hamilton — Wed, 13 May 2026 00:01:21 GMT

got baptized the day before his sixteenth birthday. It wasn’t exactly a spectacular moment. No one in his family was particularly religious. They weren’t hostile to Christianity, they just hadn’t given it much thought. He got baptized because his Eagle Scout application required a pastor’s signature, his mom knew a former neighbor who happened to pastor a small church, and that pastor — after signing the paperwork — gently suggested that showing up for a service now and then probably wouldn’t kill him.

So he showed up. Once, then again, then enough times that the water eventually followed. Decades later, he’s still showing up — through college drift and marriage and church committees and a church split he’d rather forget, through dark seasons at work and the loss of loved ones and a pregnant wife with cancer, through a corporate career and into a retirement he’s now spending on the faith he spent most of his life half-living.

He’s also still laughing. Mostly at himself.

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The Backstory

I didn’t grow up in a Christian household. Our family didn’t reject Christianity; we just didn’t think about it. But when I was completing my Eagle Scout rank in Boy Scouts (as it was known then), I needed to have a pastor sign my application (as was the requirement then). My Mom knew of a former neighbor who was pastoring a small church, so we met with him. He agreed to sign off but gently suggested that showing up for church once in a while wouldn’t hurt me.

I did show up, more than once, and I got baptized the day before my 16th birthday.

My faith ebbed and flowed, feeling distant in college, and rising in importance when I got married. (Coincidentally, my wife got married the same day.) We attended church regularly and I did church leadership things like serving on committees and chairing boards. I even helped launch a new church following a nasty church split, which I regrettably contributed to in outsize ways.

Through the years, I professed Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Yet I continually acted in ways that didn’t reflect Jesus’ call on my life. I kept trying to do better, but I kept falling short.

I figured I had two choices. I could condemn myself for never measuring up to God’s standards and give up on my faith (i.e. “Satan’s plan”). Or I could diminish my sense of failure by making fun of it, trusting God to show me the right path. I chose the latter.

Serious Stuff

It’s not that I don’t think faith is serious stuff. After all, we’re talking about the dire prospect of an eternity separated from God. The stakes are high. It’s important that we get them right. And it’s important that we help others get them right.

Nor has everything in my life included a laugh track. I’ve experienced pain and discouragement of some dark years at work, the loss of loved ones, and a particularly unpleasant episode of a pregnant wife with cancer.

But the passage of time has allowed me to see how God was present, guiding me through those dark times. I can now rejoice in what was so painful in that moment. And I thank God for providing a healthy wife and grown children who are now almost as funny as I think I am.

What’s So Funny?

I think it’s funny how I try to complicate my faith. I find it funny that I try to add layers of activities and performance to make God’s free gift of salvation feel like something I caused to happen. I think it’s funny that I stress about minor things such as what people think of me, whether my work is good enough, or why drivers refuse to use turn signals.

If we really believe that Jesus is the Christ, then why do we keep acting as if he isn’t sufficient for us? (Sorry, I just stopped making this about me and brought you into the conversation. If you don’t do these things, then feel free to ignore the question.)

So, I think the way we approach faith is funny. (There I go again, indicting you, too.) I also believe humor connects people and is a God-given way to express joy. The Psalmist even says God laughs (Psalm 37:13). And if Paul and Silas can pray and sing hymns in prison (Acts 16:25), then I can rejoice, even if people insist on being horrible drivers.

Current State

This has all brought me to today, which is the best time in my life so far. I completed my corporate career and have embraced retirement as an amazing opportunity to finally get serious (albeit, humorously) about my faith. For all the years when I didn’t live according to what I believed, I am humbled to now have the time and freedom from my (mostly self-imposed) constraints to grow through serious reading and study. And, when I’m not making it about performance, I am learning to obey, submit, and abide.

Encouraging others to pursue faith in retirement is the focus of my Substack, “Repenting of Work.” I also write devotions for two workplace ministries, serve on our church’s outreach committee, and travel every year with a team to a partner church in Mexico City.

But the most impactful ministry is volunteering with a Christian recovery program, coming alongside a man who has faced addictions, incarceration, and homelessness. He is leaning on his faith to allow God to carry him to a new life. His grace and resilience are teaching me far more than any encouragement I might offer him. His example is guiding me from my worry and striving to finding joy in God. (He, too, is almost as funny as I am.)

So, in summary, I was distant from Jesus, then accepted Jesus, and now relish this season of spiritual growth. But I still often act like I’m in control, despite evidence to the contrary.

And I think that’s kind of funny.

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Three Threads Are Converging. Christians Should Be Watching.

Thomas M. Hamilton — Sat, 09 May 2026 13:00:30 GMT

Forget gray aliens. Forget Roswell. Forget every late-night documentary you’ve half-watched for the last thirty years.

What dropped yesterday is different.

Christians already know this. They know deception. They have read the Word, and recognize the shape of a story being staged.

The Pentagon released a fresh batch of previously classified UAP files. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said it’s time the American people see for themselves. Republicans called it transparency. NASA applauded the openness. What does all this mean? Are we finally going to see other life out there? Nooooopppeeee.

Scripture already warned us about this. What we’re watching for is not little green men.

For thirty years, Christians have been told the spiritual battle is fought in one place — the pulpit, the family, personal sin. All of that is true. None of it is the whole truth. The battle is also being waged in three places most believers are not watching.

A particle accelerator buried under the Swiss-French border, smashing matter at energies that have never existed in our world, openly asking whether other dimensions might leak through.

A software company that watches every American’s tax records, immigration status, license plate, and medical file — named after the seeing-stones from a wizard’s tower, with a chairman who has written that democracy itself is the problem.

A government disclosure project that just delivered its first major release today, promising the truth about beings from beyond — at the exact moment church history’s clearest teachers warned would come.

Three threads. One pattern. A warning older than all of it.

Let me walk you through it.

WHAT YESTERDAY ACTUALLY MEANS

What happened: The Pentagon released a new tranche of UAP files. Trump directed it back in February. The files include Apollo mission photos and transcripts. The framing, from the White House to the Pentagon to the cooperating press, is one word — transparency.

The actual content? Vague and speculative. No bombshells or alien bodies. No confirmed non-human technology. Even the experts cited in the news coverage’s are warning people not to read into the videos what isn’t there.

But the narrative is enormous. The story is that we are entering a new era of truth.

Why it matters: Read what Paul wrote almost two thousand years ago, and ask whether it sounds like our moment.

“The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie.” (2 Thessalonians 2:9-11)

Read it again. Lying wonders. Strong delusion. They should believe the lie.

Deception in the last days does not show up in a black robe and red horns. It shows up wearing a press badge and announcing transparency. It looks like progress. It feels like a question finally being answered. The lie does not whisper. The lie holds a podium.

Yesterday’s release is not the deception itself. Today’s release is a doorway. The question is what walks through it.

CERN AND THE BOTTOMLESS PIT

What it is: CERN is the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. They run the Large Hadron Collider, which is a 17-mile underground ring where scientists smash protons together at energies our planet has never naturally seen. Their stated goal is to understand the building blocks of reality.

Their unstated goal — actually, in some cases, openly stated — is to test whether other dimensions exist and whether particles can pass between them. Their own physicists have written publicly about gravitons potentially escaping our three dimensions of space. They named one experiment after Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction. They placed a literal statue of him at the entrance.

This is not conspiracy. This is on their website.

Why it matters: John saw something almost two thousand years ago that no one in the first century could have invented or imagined.

“Then the fifth angel sounded: And I saw a star fallen from heaven to the earth. To him was given the key to the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit, and smoke arose out of the pit like the smoke of a great furnace.” (Revelation 9:1-2)

A pit. A key. A door. Something opens, and what was below comes up.

Now to be careful. CERN is not literally Revelation 9. Scripture is not a Twitter thread, and end-times prophecy is not a press release. But the pattern matters. When men in lab coats build the largest machine in human history to probe whatever lies beyond the dimensions God set, and when they openly admit they are looking for doors — Christians should not shrug. We should pay attention.

The serpent’s first lie was that knowledge had no cost. “You will be like God.” That lie has not retired. It has just gotten bigger budgets.

And while we’re at it…take a look at their logo. What does this remind you of??? Take your time…let it sink in.

PALANTIR AND THE EYE THAT SEES EVERYTHING

What it is: Palantir is a $400 billion software company funded originally by the CIA’s venture arm. Its two main products — Gotham and Foundry — sit inside ICE, the IRS, the Pentagon, the Navy, the LAPD, the NYPD, and the Israeli Defense Forces. They process tax records, immigration files, license plate reads, medical fraud flags, watch lists, and military targeting.

The company is named after the palantíri — the seeing-stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings that let their holders watch everything, everywhere, all at once. In the books, every one of those stones gets corrupted. Every single one. Saruman looks into one and switches sides. Denethor looks into one and burns himself alive.

They named the company after cursed seeing-stones, and then they sold the surveillance.

Why it matters: There is one Eye that was always meant to see all things, and it does not belong to a software company.

“The eyes of the Lord are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.” (Proverbs 15:3)

That verse describes a holy authority. God watches because He is just and because He loves what He has made. His seeing carries mercy in it. His seeing carries judgment in it.

What Palantir has built is a shadow of that authority — the seeing without the holiness, the watching without the love. A counterfeit always tells you what the real thing was for. When men construct machines to do what only God was meant to do, they are not innovating. They are imitating. And every imitation of a divine prerogative in scripture ends the same way.

The infrastructure is not future. It is built. It has logos. It has investors. And it is owned by men who have publicly written that democracy is too slow, that some cultures are regressive, and that postwar denazification was a mistake.

That last sentence is not slander. It is from their own published manifesto. They posted it on the internet and went to bed. Take a look for yourself 👇

WHY THESE THREE THREADS MATTER NOW

What’s happening: These three things — disclosure, dimensional probing, and total surveillance — have always existed in pieces. What is new is the convergence. They are arriving in the same season, on the same news cycles, in the same year.

A government promising the truth about beings from beyond.

A laboratory openly experimenting on the boundary between dimensions.

A corporation watching every soul in the country and writing manifestos that read like Curtis Yarvin in a tie.

Paul’s warning to the Thessalonians fits this hour with uncomfortable precision.

“For when they say, ‘Peace and safety!’ then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman. And they shall not escape.” (1 Thessalonians 5:3)

The marketing of every one of these threads is peace and safety. CERN promises us safer energy and deeper knowledge. Palantir promises us safer borders and smarter policing. Disclosure promises us the comfort of finally knowing.

That is the slogan. Scripture told us the slogan two thousand years ago.

C. S. Lewis saw the trap. He wrote in The Screwtape Letters that the two great errors about the demonic are equal and opposite — to disbelieve in devils altogether, or to believe in them with an excessive and unhealthy fascination. The modern Christian, raised on cessationist instinct and a thinned-out gospel, often falls into the first error. The conspiracy-soaked Christian falls into the second.

Charles Spurgeon framed the alternative cleanly. “Discernment is not a matter of simply telling the difference between right and wrong; rather, it is telling the difference between right and almost right.”

That is the discipline of this hour. Right, and almost right. Truth, and a story shaped like truth. Transparency, and a doorway dressed as transparency.

WHAT WE ARE BEING ASKED TO DO

This is where most articles end. A list of headlines, a Bible verse, a vague encouragement to think about it.

Scripture is not vague. Scripture has a script.

Repent. Not because UAPs proved God exists, and not because CERN is opening a portal — those are conclusions you cannot draw from a press release. Repent because we have been distracted, and the distraction has cost us. We have outsourced our discernment to news anchors, our prayer life to podcasts, our spiritual attention to whatever the algorithm fed us this morning. The first call of every prophet in scripture is the same. Return.

Discern. Stop reacting. Start watching. The stories you are told this week — about disclosure, about transparency, about safety — are stories. Test them against the Word. Test them against the patterns scripture gave us. Test them against the fruit of the people telling them. “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God.” (1 John 4:1, NKJV)

Pray. For your own clarity. For your family. For your pastor. For the men and women in laboratories and government offices who do not know what they are participating in. The deception is not held back by clever posts. It is held back by the prayers of saints who refuse to fall asleep.

CHRISTIAN HOTLINE & PRAYER SUPPORT

If this article has stirred something in you — fear, conviction, grief, or a quiet sense that you have been spiritually asleep — do not sit with it alone.

Reach out to a local Bible-believing pastor. A real one. One who preaches the Word and prays with his people.
Find a praying friend. Not a comments section. A person.
Call a Christian crisis line if you are in distress. Focus on the Family’s counseling line is one option: 1-855-771-HELP (4357).
Open the Word. Start with 2 Thessalonians 2 and Revelation 9. Read them slowly. Pray as you read.

You were not made to face this hour alone. The Body of Christ exists for moments exactly like this one.

THE BIG PICTURE

Here is what you are looking at.

A government quietly executing a long-promised disclosure project, on the same calendar as a particle laboratory openly probing dimensions God set as boundaries, on the same calendar as a surveillance company building the eyes of a system scripture warned about — and a press corps treating all of it as ordinary news.

It is not ordinary. It may not be the end. It is not for me to say, and it is not for you to say. But it is a pattern. And patterns in scripture are never accidents. The hour calls for the same thing every dark hour in church history has called for — sober minds, open Bibles, bent knees, and a refusal to be entertained into sleep.

“Therefore let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch and be sober.” (1 Thessalonians 5:6)

Stay awake.

— Thomas M. Hamilton

If this piece sharpened your discernment, share it with one believer who needs to hear it. Forwarding faithful writing is one of the simplest acts of stewardship a Christian can offer in this hour.

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Skip the Candle. Honor Her Calling.

Thomas M. Hamilton — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:22:13 GMT

Every Mother’s Day, the same conveyor belt of gifts rolls out across America. More than likely, a candle she’ll forget to light. Or perhaps a card she’ll keep in a drawer for nine years.

That’s nice…but the mom you’re shopping for — the one who writes — is not sitting around hoping for another mug. She’s up at five in the morning with a notebook before the kids wake up.

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Most writer-moms are stuck because nobody taught them the boring, practical, business side of being a writer. So here is what I am offering today:

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Two Mothers. Two Losses. One Unshakable Faith

Thomas M. Hamilton — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:01:05 GMT

What follows are the testimonies of two women who walked through the kind of loss most mothers pray they will never know. Our prayer is that you find your strength again in their words, whatever valley you are walking through today.

There is a question every grieving Christian woman eventually asks in private, even if she would never say it out loud.

What did I do to deserve this?

asked it in a quiet house in 1990-something, after a brain tumor took her husband Howard at thirty-eight and left her a widow with three small children and two miscarriages already buried. probably asked it in Las Vegas, after the third of her babies — Bryanna, twenty-two weeks, ten days short of viability — was delivered into a silence that no mother should have to learn.

Both women were carried into grief they did not choose, and held there longer than they thought they could survive. One nearly lost her faith. The other nearly lost her marriage. Both, for a long time, did not believe what was coming next was even possible.

These are their stories.

The Christian Author's Email & Sales Playbook

Thomas M. Hamilton — Sun, 03 May 2026 01:55:52 GMT

Christian authors usually struggle because they don’t know how to sell without feeling pushy — so they choose to hold back. Then their book sits quietly while the people who need it scroll right past.

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I Buried My 13-Year-Old Grandson. I Still Believe God Is Good

Thomas M. Hamilton — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 23:00:58 GMT

| Testimony Series | Tuesdays | 7 PM | CST |

Anyone who has lost someone they weren't ready to lose knows the question that comes next. Where was God? For , the question came when his oldest grandson died at 13. It's been more than a decade. He still grieves. So does his whole family. But somehow, through all of it, he still says the words most of us choke on — God is good. All the time. He gives, and He takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Much like Job in Scripture, Steve almost felt like he lost everything. That subtle weight of grief that presses on your chest is unbearable at times. I know the feeling all too well. And if you’ve experienced grief like this, here you will find common ground as you read these words.

This is his story.

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For many, coming to a trusting loyalty—faith—in our Master, Jesus, is an “I was blind, but now I see” experience. They were completely lost and knew it, and then suddenly understood the truth: there is a Redeemer.

For me, it was more like a parent showing their child the Big Dipper. The child had always seen the stars and knew from conversations that the Big Dipper was there—they knew it was there, but now it has come into focus—and they can never not see it.

I was born into a Christian home, and at the very young age of five, my mother walked me through the Gospel. Having been raised around it, I knew it was there—but now it made sense, and I rested in its truth.

Over the years, that childlike faith germinated, was tested, and became firm. As a young adult, I questioned it, tested it, studied it, and truly made it my own.

Eight years after high school, after a stint in the oil field industry and law enforcement, with a beautiful wife and two children in tow, I moved across the country to attend Columbia Bible College & Seminary—now called Columbia International University.

During my time there, I studied Bible and Theology, completed three years of Koine Greek, and focused on education, teaching, and Christian counseling. During this time, we also welcomed our third child—my son—into the world. While attending school, my wife and I also worked with junior high, high school, and college-aged young people who were seeking and growing in their faith.

In the 35 years that followed, I moved through full-time vocational ministry, owned a small IT company, and eventually worked my way up to become a healthcare IT executive. I served in a faith-based hospital system, where I had the privilege of living out my faith and serving those who worked with and for me.

During those years:

I had fantastic, godly men pour into my life.
I formed lifelong friendships—and lost some friendships that shook me to the core of my being.
I experienced encouraging success, and I made terrible mistakes.
I saw God use me in meaningful ways, and I experienced seasons where He led me into the wilderness (think Moses).
I watched my sister leave this world—from cancer—seemingly before her time.
My wife and I watched our parents live full lives and then cross over into the presence of our Master, Jesus.

And then, I lost my oldest grandson when he was 13 years old.

I have never grieved so deeply. It has been over a decade, and I still grieve. We all do. But that experience has made our family stronger.

I didn’t understand—and in many ways, I still don’t. But even there, through it all, I knew this:

God is good. All the time.
He gives, and He takes away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord.

I am retired now and live alongside a lake in East Texas. I’m enjoying a slower pace of life alongside my beautiful bride of 48 years—serving in my local church, spending time with my children and grandchildren, wetting a fishing hook on a regular basis, and doing some writing.

I don’t know if I’m any good at writing. Historically, I’ve been more of a speaker than a writer. But slowing life down—both living more fully in the moment and taking time to reflect on the past—has brought out a bit more of the melancholy in me.

I write from the heart. I try to write like I speak. And I often write as if I’m talking to my young adult grandchildren—attempting to pass along what little wisdom God has graciously given me, with a heart full of love for them and pride in who they are becoming.

My heart aches for all our young people today. They face temptations and worry we could never have imagined. I pray for them—and for their parents—that through all the noise of this world, they would see the truth.

I pray they find comfort in the God who lives outside of it all, who sees it all, and who is in control of all things. That they would be strong and courageous, and that they would keep their eyes on Jesus — the Logos who entered it all and dwelt among us, the Author and Finisher of their faith—because in the end, He is the One who makes sense of it all.

Thank you for reading! For more Testimonies like this, subscribe to have them sent straight to your inbox.

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FlipFolio - Your PDF Deserves Better Than a Download Button

Thomas M. Hamilton — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 23:01:32 GMT

Your New Web Tool

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From New Age Deception to Jesus Christ: A Radical Salvation Testimony

Thomas M. Hamilton — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:01:05 GMT

Sound is not just a medium for music or speech; it is a god-like force of command. Long before had the theological vocabulary to describe it, he understood sound as a tool that could manipulate atmospheres, direct attention, and reshape the human experience. His journey began as a disillusioned waiter in Richmond, seeking a “scientific” spiritual reality, a system where principles could be tested and results were tangible.

This quest led him to become a “vibrational architect,” building a life on the belief that the universe was an expression of energy. However, he discovered that a life built on the mechanics of the “void” eventually faces a collapse that only a strong foundation can withstand.

This is his story. Read on.

Abba Father God, I have been found—by Your grace—when I was an enemy of Yours. It is true that Your right hand will find out all Your enemies. You have known me from before the beginning, and have chosen me to be a son of Yours. Thank You for knowing me more deeply than the depths of my sin, and showing Your beauty, Your goodness, and Your great love to me. It is my hope that You may give me the grace to share through this testimony Your Majesty and Your splendor, to give hope to those who are far off and to those who have children that may seem too far gone, and, to encourage those who are secured in Your salvation to press on and receive the fullness of what You have paid the price for them to have in this life as they look toward their eternal future with You.

Help me now with the words that You have prepared for me to speak to testify to and glorify You in this unique way, which is my story that You have written, a living epistle. In Jesus name. Amen.

Before Jesus

Early Life

I have always liked sound.

Whether it was coming from pots and pans banged on in my parents’ kitchen, or from the instruments at my grandma‘s house, or from my own lungs and mouth.

In a way, sound was the closest thing to a god I could perceive. Sound had the ability to command and direct people’s attention, change the atmosphere of a room, and shape the experiences of those within earshot.

I didn’t have language for any of this when I was three, living in Pennsylvania and falling asleep on Sunday mornings in first-baptist church.

(And honestly, I didn’t have language for this until just now).

My sister came along when I was six, and we moved to Virginia.

I never quite felt that I ever “belonged” at my new elementary school. Whether or not the other kids actually accepted me or not, I do not know—but I did not feel accepted.

One boy in particular made sure to keep me in my place. Year after year it was the kind of abusive dynamic of wanting to be the “cool kid“ he was, but yet, he was far from a good role model—his family was very broken, full of violence, with an older brother into drugs and girls.

This boy introduced me to fireworks and porn before I was in 4th grade. He made sure I knew that graduating elementary school would mean all my friends would vanish and I would be completely alone, unliked by anyone.

I accepted that as reality, and middle school became the breeding ground for a cocktail of insecurity, shame, sexual desire, and self-expression through music.

Highschool and College

By the time I graduated highschool, I had my own band, a girlfriend of three years, and a one-night stand with a coworker ten years older than me (which my girlfriend didn’t know about).

My body-count only went up in college, and I saw it as a victory—I had defeated my elementary enemy; I could get any girl I wanted and people paid attention to me.

But I was bored.

College degree-programs outlined destinies which were not mine. Waiting tables at restaurants was unsustainable. Life in general seemed shallow and meaningless.

Then I became aware of “the unknown reality”.

I was in the season of smoking marijuana, taking LSD, mushrooms, DMT, and going to concerts when a particular book came into my life that seemed to be a portal into an entirely other reality.

After reading that book, it was as if the entire universe had begun conspiring together to show me quote-unquote “the way” forward:

I discovered people online talking about metaphysical realities, consciousness, manifesting and creating your own reality. I was intrigued by the possibility that spiritual things could be scientific in nature—the spiritual principals could be tested, and would either produce real results, or not.

Best of all, it seemed, was that none of it was dependent on believing in an invisible man in the sky who seemed to only exist in the imaginations of crusty old white men whose lives were powerless, pathetic, and nothing worth imitating.

I started experimenting, and I saw real results.

After a taste of what might be possible, I asked myself one day: “what can I do that doesn’t require a four-year degree, that will make me good money, but I enjoy doing, that I’m good at doing, I can get better at doing, and will give me the time to make music?”

Almost immediately, it was as if someone walked in the room and loudly whispered in my ear the word “massage.”

My response in that moment was not “does this spirit confess the Jesus Christ has come the flesh,” as 1 John 4 gives instruction to do.

My response was “GREAT IDEA!”

The next thing I knew, the whole universe was conspiring together to make sure I got into massage school.

The day that I stepped into the classroom, though, it felt as if someone had thrown me into a cosmic prison, locked the door, and walked away laughing.

The universe was no longer beautiful, and it was only conspiring to bring me fear and isolation and trauma.

Prodigal Journey

My massage school teacher became my spiritual and business mentor. She hired me to work at her studio as soon as I graduated.

I began practicing yoga during that time. It was a gateway drug into the world of esoteric spirituality, alternative healing, and astonishingly hot women in astonishingly tight pants doing astonishing things with their bodies.

I thought I was in heaven—making music, making $1500/week working less than 25 hours a week as a twenty-two year old, and making hot women’s bodies feel great.

That mentor? She sexually abused me—a supposedly lesbian woman, literally twice my age at that time. (Yes, that happens).

That job? I got myself fired (because having a sexual abuser as your boss makes for rough workplace dynamics).

I got in my car, packed what I needed, and ran.

The car I drove and lived in was a “shadow black” Kia Soul. Yes, really. A shadow black soul.

I had been to Hawaii once already, to Oahu. I wanted to go back, but I wanted to see what was between Virginia and Hawaii before returning. And yet, I was terrified of actually leaving “all I’d ever known” (Richmond, Virginia) behind.

I stayed in Richmond for several months—jobless and functionally homeless—long enough for me to spend all of what I had saved for my trip… before I ever left for my trip.

It was then that I met a girl at a yoga festival who would become a long-distance girlfriend and a catalyst for seeking out the truth of the nature of relationship itself.

There was no difference to me—nothing special or “set apart”—in what I experienced with her as compared to what I experienced with other women who were not my girlfriend. I felt just as sexually-engaged on an energetic level with whomever directed that kind of attention my way.

What was the point of being in a relationship with just one person?

My shadow-black soul got me all the way to California where I set up camp in the redwoods just outside the Bay Area. I went to kundalini yoga classes multiple times a week and ecstatic dance events on the weekends (read: astonishingly hot women in white yoga pants!..).

One night, I woke up to the sound of three men shouting in Spanish.

There is no reason anyone else should have been near where I was camped in my car in the woods, especially at 2:00am.

I still don’t know exactly what they were saying, but what I do know is that they were praying.

Every few words, there would be an exclamation of something along the lines of “LA SANGRE DE JESUCRISTO.” (That’s “the blood of Jesus Christ” in Spanish).

This went on every night for about a week.

Eventually, I listed my shadow-black soul on craigslist and sold it the day I hopped on a plane to fly to Maui. I landed at a retreat hosted by my newest spiritual idol, and figured I would just stay on the island after the retreat ended.

This particular guru lived in Boulder, Colorado at the time, and the way I saw it, if Boulder was spiritual enough for him, it was probably a great place to be. I went to lunch on Maui at what was supposed to be an authentic Hawaiian restaurant, but it happened to be plastered from floor to ceiling in Denver Broncos memorabilia.

Weird, right?

I’m sure you can guess where I ended up after the retreat ended…

When I got to Boulder, it was the middle of winter. All I had was my backpack, a suitcase, and a hope and a prayer(?) that everything would work out. The Rocky Mountains are not a great place to be homeless during the winter.

On my Uber ride from Denver to Boulder, I remember being in a kind of haze of consciousness. It was like I was entering some other kind of dimensional realm that was completely disorienting. My driver, without really having spoken much with me, suddenly says “This is Lucifer’s world. Be careful out here.”

Whether or not this driver was an angel of the Lord or not, I have no way of knowing. But what he said proved to be very true.

When I got to town, I asked the guru-bro if I could stay at his mountainside mansion. He said no.

I spent one of my first nights in Boulder at a 24-hour deli because after visiting the homeless shelter, I was so repulsed by what I felt to be “the most disgusting energy I have ever been around in my life that I couldn’t believe ‘the universe’ would ever allow me to be anywhere near it.”

Somehow, I ended up staying with another person in the community (read: “cult”). During that time, I was able to get my massage therapy license in Colorado, begin working, and come up with enough money to rent an apartment for myself and my then-girlfriend.

(Cohabitating outside of marriage is a bad idea, by the way).

Over the course of the next few years, I would go one to somehow move into my own apartment with enough space for a massage table, decor, and my own bodywork practice.

How I Met Jesus

The deep things of satan

What started out as skillful, physiological, deep-tissue, therapeutic massage practice had grown into a kind of somatic sorcery.

Through my own investigations into the nature of reality and the teachings of my various spiritual mentors (including a **second bodywork mentor—a gay man—who also sexually abused me), I had experientially proven to myself that all I actually was at the most core level of my existence was “Nothing.”

It seemed as though Reality was fundamentally this Nothingness, manifesting itself in various forms of architectural expression of energy, and since that Nothingness was “me” and I was “it,” I was therefore in connection with everything because everything was Nothing and Nothing was Me.

I hope that made sense…

Human bodies qualified as one architectural expression of the Nothing/Void. If that was true, I figured it should’ve been possible to heal the human body not only through physical touch, but through the cohering of the architectural discrepancies locked within the somatic realm of the body.

My theory was that all I had to do was locate within the Void the energy signature of a client, and then restructure “their” energy into its most coherent state. The result should have affected the physical body, along with the entirety of the realms connected to that body (business, romantic relationship, community, physical health, mental health, etc).

Remember: to me, the possibility that spiritual things could be scientific meant that they were testable—the principles would either produce results in reality or they would not.

I started experimenting, and I saw serious results.

This kids-toy is the best way I can describe what would happen:

Whether someone would walk into my studio or get on a zoom call with me, the unique signature of their incoherent energy structures would impact the coherence of the singular underlying fabric of the Void—just like the hand in the picture impacts the singular “fabric” of the pins.

All I would do—somehow—was push back against the energy architectures until the whole field became coherent again. I called it vibrational architecture work.

Astonishingly, the clients’ physical bodies would respond physically, exactly according to what I was energetically pushing on—even when they were on the other side of the world talking to me on a zoom call.

If I “pushed their elbow up”, their physical elbow would shoot up—without me ever saying anything verbally or otherwise about what I was working on or doing.

Even more astonishingly, the experience had by women during this process was extremely sexual, and the experience had by men during this process was like jumping into an ice cold lake while drinking a gallon of coffee and finishing the most effective workout of their lives.

I thought I was in heaven—I thought I had discovered the truth of reality, I was making music and DJing, making thousands of dollars working only a few hours a week, and turning-on hot women with my energy.

And what better place to drink a fully matured cocktail of insecurity, shame, sexual desire, music, and spiritual power than on a beach in Hawaii!?…

I became fully set on moving there.

Enter: Jesus

Isaiah 65 mentioned what might as well be a personal biography of me encountering the Lord:

“I was sought by those who did not ask for me; I was found by those who did not seek me. I said, “here I am, here I am,” to a nation that was not called by my name.”

My YouTube algorithm started pushing Christian sermons to me. You know how algorithms work—they give you more of what you were interested in.

I was not interested in Jesus or Christianity.

Then He started setting my mind up with trains-of-thought that would always end in devastating revelations of Him saying “now you know how I feel.”

These revelations of “now I know how Jesus feels” were often so sudden and so painful that one time, I physically fell off my bike while riding to work, sobbed on the sidewalk for 10 minutes with people asking me if I was okay and being unable to respond, before I could get back up and keep riding.

Then, He told me one day “You’re going to be a preacher for my people.“ I laughed out loud as I was paying for my snacks at Whole Foods.

When I walked outside and sat down on the curb to eat, I looked over, and right next to me was what might as well have been someone’s grandmother’s 18th-century King James Bible, stuffed full with sticky notes and colored markups and tattered pages.

I knew someone had left that there for me—not accidentally. Deliberately.

I did not pick it up. I got away from that Whole Foods as fast as I possibly could.

Then, I began to start feeling incredibly disgusting on the inside. Trapped. Enslaved. Hopeless.

Up until that point I had never read the Bible for myself, yet only one genuine desire existed in my heart at that time. It continued to be an overflow out of my mouth:

“I want to be clean, washed whiter than snow. God, please plant me in good soil.”

Then He used the poem.

A while before Jesus began showing up in my world, I had written this poem.

The first part of the poem said “the word is sound is structure.” In an instant, I remembered this poem, along with a ton of Bible verses I had never read for myself, and flashes of revelation:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and was God…”
“The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…”
“His [Jesus’] name is ‘the Word of God’…”
The Word is Sound is Structure…
The structure of a building is upheld by a foundation, which must have extraordinary structural integrity so as to not collapse under the weight of the building.
“There is only one foundation laid which can be laid, that is Jesus Christ…”
“God upholds the whole universe by the word of His power…”
So, if a building is upheld by a foundation which must be structurally sound and integrous so as not to collapse, and the whole universe itself is upheld by the Word of God which is not necessarily only a sound but is also sound in the structural sense, then the Word of God must be the most eternally-perfect spiritual-architectural Reality that exists—otherwise the universe would collapse.
Oh my goodness! JESUS is the solution to the problems I’m trying to solve in my clients lives with all this energy work! I’m over here doing all this vibrational architecture work without Him, but He is the eternally perfect structurally Reality!
I choose JESUS!

Immediately after this, I opened a Bible I had subsequently gone and bought after the Whole Foods incident, and found myself staring at this verse which I had never even known existed:

“Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.” — 2 Timothy 1:13 ESV

Structure?! Sound?! Words?! All in one bible verse?!

JESUS! I’m so in.

The Descent

Then He put this film in front of me:

It turns out that this film is simultaneously a visual retelling of the story of the prodigal son (with extraordinary cinematography, by the way) alongside a narrative style documentary on the realities of sexual sin and shame.

Oh.

The film just so happens to portray a son who was given a handmade violin by his father, with whom he plays music.

Mmhm...

The son senses an alluring presence coming from an island off the coast of their family residence.

Gotcha…

The son walks off the edge of a cliff into the ocean, shattering the violin on the rocks.

Yup.

He wakes up on the island, which looks an awful lot like Hawaii, and pursues a woman wearing white garments.

Oh wonderful…

He ends up discovering the true nature of the woman and the island—desolate wastelands—and becomes enslaved to a demonic being, held captive in a cave until his father comes to rescue him, restores their relationship, and gives him a new handmade violin.

Fantastic!…

I watched the film in my apartment-turned-bodywork-studio with a sense of horror and hope.

It was painfully clear I was watching my own near-future play out on screen before it came to pass. It was a promise that I was in the process of being rescued from the captivity I had been in.

(And yes, I also would meet a girl in Hawaii… in a natural, secret spring that only locals knew about… which I only would come to discover by “following my energy” without knowing what I would find at the end of the road it would lead me down).

I Met My Wife

Two weeks before I would leave Boulder for Hawaii, I went to a friend’s party. Let’s just say… their parties were known to get spicy.

I had been asked to serve tea at the party with my fancy gong-fu teaware, and to make a DJ-set for the party. When I arrived to set up, there was one other girl there helping to set up. Her name was Kallan. We each thought the other was a total weirdo and minded our own business.

At some point during the party, I was sitting at my tea table cross legged on my meditation cushion (yea, I was that guy) pouring tea for friends. As I was pouring the tea, I looked up to see Kallan talking with another mutual friend, a musician. This friend was telling Kallan about her new song she had just written, and was going to go turn off my DJ set to put on her new song.

As soon as this girl went to stand up—teapot still in hand, still pouring tea into someone’s cup—I looked straight at her and simply said “NO.” with a velocity and magnitude that sent literal shockwaves through the party while I calmly finished pouring the tea.

Now, if you know anything about new-age communities, you know “No” is basically blasphemy.

The host of the party looked at me and said “Hey maaan…!? What’s with the spiky energy maaan…!? You can’t just throw shrapnel at everyone like that maaan! Tone it DOWN, bro!”

The musician friend spiraled off into a tirade of emotional chaos and required a mediator to speak with me after being so triggered.

Kallan smiled and said to herself “…now who is that?” before taking me aside for herself in the kitchen to give me an oracle card reading and get to know me.

“A man that actually says ‘No’ and means it with everything in him!? Yes, please!”

In the following days, she went on to discover my website, my work, and booked a “coherence session” with me. We later went on a hike and spent as much time as we could together before I left for Hawaii. She would even help me pack my apartment into a storage unit the day I left.

There was something tangibly different about this girl.

I felt differently about her, and I don’t mean that in just the emotional sense of “feeling.” I mean, there was a distinct difference in the structural dynamic of relationship between her and I, and that structural dynamic was tangible to me. I could “feel” it.

I even told the friend who had hosted the party at which we met, “I think I… love this girl. Like she could be my wife or something.”

I had never used those words in my life, and perhaps this would be the answer to the my question about the nature of the reality of relationship.

Hawaii (a 3rd time)

I left Boulder. Once I arrived on the island of Kauai, I was faced with what I can only describe as “initiations”—tests to see if I was “worthy of being on the island,” like something straight out of King Arthur Legend of the Sword.

I kept in contact with Kallan, and we talked on the phone almost every day. Something peculiar had happened, though. One day when I picked up the phone, it felt like she had never existed.

It turned out that she had gone to a music festival and consciously, willingly, completely become demon possessed—a whole other story you can read here in her testimony.

I asked her “what happened to the girl that I fell in love with?” She responded with “oh, I killed her.”

I do not have words for the depth of disturbance that statement provoked in me—a combination of grief, rage, desire for vengeance, and a sense of “not on my watch.”

As time went on, we were not able to stay together. My being so insistent that Jesus Christ was the answer to everything and her being demon possessed didn’t exactly set us up for success.

Within a few short weeks, we were no longer “together,” and things were moving along for me. I started working with a business coach of my own who was impressed with how swiftly I was growing. I enrolled my first $12k client and reached my goal of making $20k/month. I started DJing local ecstatic dance events which received rave reviews from attendees like I was the best thing that had ever happened to their community.

One night after DJing, I drove to the northern-most part of the island to go for a swim in a natural pool by the side of the road.

As I got into the pool, I walked through what felt like a dimensional portal.

As soon as I entered the pool, I watched as (in the spirit) a dragon slid down the side of the mountain and brought its head to the edge of the pool I was standing in. The head alone was probably thirty or forty feet wide.

It had a whole conversation with me in a snake/dragon language I can only describe as being a demonic version of “tongues.”

When I got back to the car, my battery was dead, and I had to sleep in the car there by the pool.

Shortly thereafter, my island-girlfriend told me that a friend of hers wanted to talk with me. It turned out that he wanted to accuse me of stealing money out of his tip jar after a “sound healing” he had hosted.

It was one of the most ridiculous conversations I’ve ever experienced.

Here I was—having made $20,000 in my business that month—being accused by an old guy with a pony tail of stealing a handful of cash from his tip jar (with two witnesses that also supposedly saw me do it).

The longer the conversation went on, though, the more I began to recognize who was speaking to me through this man—it was the same dragon I had encountered at the pool.

At some point, this guy tried tell me he had a message for me from my “higher-self,” to which I replied, “Jesus Christ is the highest Self that is, was, and is to exist. I don’t care who you think you’ve heard from, but I reject your words, and this accusation. The Lord Jesus Christ has the final say about you and me and this whole situation.”

Everything really went downhill from there.

In the days and weeks following, all of my money dried up. I was experiencing spiritual attacks that were far above my pay-grade. I almost drowned in a rip tide. I was being literally dragged around the island by forces I had no concept of, and certainly no control over.

It was then that it became very clear to me: I need to be rescued.

I didn’t need spiritual powers. I didn’t need money. I didn’t need friends. I didn’t need self-help.

I needed a Savior, and if there was one, His name was Jesus Christ and He is who He says He is—not who I’ve thought He was.

With no idea how to “get saved,” I looked up a few churches, called one to ask if they had a Bible I could have, and started reading. I got some bread and wine and took communion for the first time in my life. I called them back and asked if they would baptize me. They did, and after the baptism, they invited me to their annual youth retreat that weekend in the mountains.

I wasn’t sure, but I said yes and drove up there.

Back to Boulder

When I got to Hawaii, I had given myself three months to see what would happen. If after three months things weren’t progressing in a good way, I was going to leave.

After that retreat was over, I had only a little time left within my three month window, and it was clear I would be leaving—I had no money, my entire business had started collapsing, and the island I was on actively wanted to kill me.

A friend was merciful enough to buy me a plane ticket back to Boulder.

When I landed in Colorado, I found myself in a familiar situation, although now in an entirely different kingdom. Here i was landing in Denver Airport with nothing but a backpack and a suitcase, and a whole bunch of trust and hope that things would work out.

For a couple months, I stayed on friends couches and bounced around within the community. New Years came, and I was invited to an intention-setting party, hosted by my same friend who threw the party where I met Kallan.

Guess who was at that New Year’s party that I was still on bad terms with?

Kallan walked in, and somehow, after an entire afternoon of making sure we absolutely did not speak with one another, I couldn’t believe I ended up apologizing for treating her badly. I still couldn’t sense “the girl I had fallen in love with” but I considered the possibility that maybe I was just missing something and she was actually just fine.

Later that January, I decided to go to a Jesus-conference in Texas.

I got convicted about all kind of things, including trying to mix Jesus up with all of my old ways of navigating life. That trip helped me get it through to myself—I’m going all in on Jesus Christ, even if I had no idea how to navigate life in his kingdom yet.

At that conference, I encountered the presence of God in such a tangible way that gave me a baseline of what the “vibrational architecture” of God’s presence and kingdom is like.

When I returned to Boulder from that conference, I thought I would give Kallan one last chance.

We met up one evening, and my plan was to compare the experiential difference between being in God’s presence at that conference and being with Kallan and the presence of whatever had happened to her.

Well… it felt like the difference between being saturated in a comforting warm oil and being blasted by lightning bolts from a 5G cell phone tower.

I texted her afterwards and said “do not contact me ever again.” She didn’t respond.

On my walk home, the Lord said to me audibly “Your wife will be a Christian.” I was relieved—praise God I will have an equally yoked wife!

What I didn’t realize was that what He was actually saying was, “Kallan is your wife, and she will be a Christian.”

Eventually, I ran out of options with couch-hopping. I didn’t know what else to do, so I posted on a local Facebook group offering to help anybody with projects they needed help with—I had a lot of spare time on my hands.

One gal reached out who needed help sorting through a mass of legal papers. She was a single mom with several grown children, flipping houses, and navigating a nasty decade-long divorce and custody battle.

I went over and helped her with a few things around the house. I mentioned I was looking for housing, and she apologized because she had just signed a lease to a new tenant for her fully furnished basement apartment—otherwise, she would have been happy to let me stay there.

Within a couple days, she called me back and told me that the tenant had canceled. The gal told me I was welcome to stay there for a couple months if I wanted to, and even have bodywork clients come there.

When she showed me the basement apartment, I was completely in awe. Not only was it beautiful, fully furnished, and equipped with a full kitchen, but she had a massage table set up in its living room.

In the bedroom, there was a giant painting of Noah and the Ark after the flood with the verses from Genesis about God keeping His promise.

What?!

I asked her about the painting, and she told me that as she was preparing for me to come stay there, she thought about taking it down, but “Spirit” told her to leave it up for me.

To my knowledge, this woman was neither a professing Christian nor one by lifestyle.

After a month or so of staying there, I got a text out of the blue. Kallan messaged me wondering if she could ask me a question.

I knew something had happened. This girl was not the kind of person to contact someone who had told her “do not contact me ever again.”

I said “sure, what’s your question?” She responded with “what does your instagram bio— ‘Christ is King’—mean to you?”

I FaceTimed her immediately and said “Tell me what happened!”

It turns out that Jesus encountered her in the middle of a witchcraft ritual for her business. She asked me again what ‘Christ is king’ meant to me and I said “Jesus is the only thing that’s Real.”

We ended up praying together a basic salvation prayer. She got completely delivered from the demon and the Lord opened her eyes to the reality of everything she had been participating in.

After Jesus

Shortly thereafter, the world shut down for Covid.

Both of our housing situations disintegrated, though for different reasons: the gal I was staying with had her kids come home from Hawaii (of all places) and they would need the basement apartment for themselves. Kallan’s housemates were actively practicing witchcraft and being in that house a moment longer made her physically sick to her stomach — God forbid she be quarantined with them!

After a series of very strange events, we found ourselves relocated in a retirement village in Arkansas where her grandma had a lake house. The Lord did a major overhaul on us while we stayed there.

I got it in my head that we really needed to find a church community. Both Kallan and I had just been so steeped in darkness and I figured there had to be a community of people out there somewhere who knew how to do this whole “Christian” thing way better than either of us.

“Follow Me”

After about five months in Arkansas, the Lord told us to “Follow Him.” We had no idea what that could possibly mean besides what we had done already — got saved and become Christians.

It turns out that He meant literally “go where He goes and stay where He stays.”

After a number of prayerful conversations (read: arguments) with the Lord, we got in a rental car and started driving — no plan, no jobs, and no destination other than “keeping in step with His Presence.”

That simple command led us throughout the continental United States over the course of the following 3.5 years. He provided everything we needed along the way — food, shelter, money, gas, clothes, you name it.

Matthew 6:33 is legit.

We were led to a handful of different churches throughout our travels, looking for a place to call “home.” The reasons we were led to those churches, however, were often far different than what we thought.

What we found in the churches wasn’t the One who saved us. We found spiritual constructs systematically designed to destroy the life of the child of God and hinder the life of the Spirit who dwells in them. Most people we met who professed “20+ years walking in the Lord” were actually just one-year olds who had repeated a pattern of disobedience twenty times over.

It was confusing and heartbreaking. The place that I assumed would be “safe” actually turned out to be one of the most spiritually dangerous places on the planet, often times worse than the darkness we had been saved out of (because where we came from, they are actually honest about who they serve and what they are doing).

One of the biggest gifts God gave us during these wilderness years was to understand that the safest place in the world to be is in His Hand, in His Will, regardless of what that looked like on the outside circumstantially.

We have found this to be true not only with regard to physical location, but true with regard to every dimension of our lives. The safest place to be in our finances, relationships, food choices, time usage, thoughts, technology usage, etc is in His Hand, in His Will, regardless of what that looks like on the outside.

Two such examples:

Wedding Ring Stewardship

First, for various reasons (like COVID, and yet-to-be-healed family relationships, and having just forsaken our entire occult community) my wife and I got married privately. When it came time to have a public ceremony, I had no money to buy my wife a ring.

We received a significant sum of money when we were in Portland, Oregon, and we prayed about how to spend each dollar of it. When we got down to the last couple hundred dollars with no other foreseeable income, I asked Him “Have I stewarded this money You gave us well?”

He said “No.”

I got super uncomfortable and said “Lord, please help me not be afraid of Your rebuke.” And He said “You will be afraid of my rebuke.” I said “Okay 🥵… how haven’t I stewarded this money well?”

His response: “You haven’t bought your wife a wedding ring yet.”

I was both relieved, astonished, and in awe.

He followed that up with: “As a steward, you have just as little right to withhold carelessly as you do to spend carelessly what I give you to steward.”

That was significant: it was better for me to trust and obey God in spending the last of what we had on a wedding ring than it was to “do something wise in my own eyes” with it.

Our Jeep’s New Heart

Second: During this same time in Portland, Oregon, we were able to buy a (literally) miraculous Jeep Grand Cherokee at the leading of the Lord (which you can read about on my publication).

The engine ended up dying and needing to be replaced. We had no jobs or reliable income at the time—certainly not enough to replace an engine.

One day while the engine was dead, I tried to go DoorDashing in a friend’s car because I was completely freaked out about finances. Instead of DoorDashing (because the app wouldn’t work), I ended up making sandwiches for the homeless in Portland with some supplies we had just received from another friend.

So, I ended up “Doorless-Dashing” all morning to the homeless, made no money, and returned to the house both elated to have been walking in the Lord’s presence all morning, and also completely pissed off and confounded that I had absolutely no income or money to fix our situation.

When I returned to where we were staying, my wife suggested we go pray (separately, because I was super heated). She came in 3 minutes later crying.

When I asked what was happening, she showed me her phone, and a friend had just sent us $6,000 on PayPal—the exact amount we needed to replace the engine.

When we asked our friend why she had sent that money to us, she said that she had finally just closed on selling her London apartment-flat, and she had asked God what to do with the money that came in. He told her to set so much aside, give so much to her church, and specifically “send $6,000 to Andrew and Kallan.”

Arbitrarily increasing one’s standard of giving is not the standard of what to do when God blesses you financially. Asking Him—first—what to do with the money is, I believe, the standard. He knows why He allowed the money to come into your life, and He knows who needs to receive anything of what He has provided in your life.

Now, I said earlier God provided everything we needed along the way. That also included the provision of His correction.

Homelessness

Instead of allowing me to run to the false safety of a religious system engineered to sustain my orphanhood, He allowed me to go through a season of “legitimate” homelessness—separated from my wife, staying in a shelter, walking the streets, attending various Christian-led recovery style groups.

Through that season, He did a work in my heart that no other person, place, thing, book, sermon, psychologist could do to help me understand who He is and His love for me as my Father. Those circumstances were His surgeons scalpel, perfectly shaped to my unique heart’s trouble.

He then opened the door for me to begin driving semi-trucks.

One day while I was driving through the mid-west, I was scanning through radio stations — something I never did.

It just so happened to land on a Christian station where a sermon was playing.

Immediately, the totality of my attention was drawn to the words which were being spoken as I recognized the Holy Spirit speaking through this particular man, more loudly than I’d ever heard before.

I made a mental note of who the speaker was and the church they were from, and kept driving.

Becoming a Father

At some point while out over the road, I got a text from my wife. She said the Lord told her that when I came home from work for the final time (like, when I had put my two weeks in), that we would conceive our first child. He told her that I had some things I needed to work through with Him and that she should tell me now so that I was prepared when it happened.

Boy, did I have some things to work through!

“You are giving me a child while we are living in a Jeep, functionally homeless?”

“What kind of a plan is this — making my wife pregnant after I have no job? This is irresponsible of You.”

“Don’t I get a say in this?”

Sure enough—with no credit to either her or I in trying to help God fulfill His promises—I put in my two weeks notice, came home, and the next month, everything was different. Kallan was pregnant. That whole pregnancy is a story of its own, but one thing I will share here:

God is the God of the 11th hour.

When my wife was about 7.5 months pregnant, we were still camping in the Jeep which God had provided us. We were having a rough day, tormented about housing (another whole story), and she yell-prayed at Him “WHY ARE YOU AN 11TH HOUR GOD!? WHY CAN’T YOU BE A… 3RD HOUR GOD OR SOMETHING!”

His response?

“Because I am.”

Classic.

In that moment, I had the idea: “if You are who You say You are—and You are the 11th hour God—then that means You will deliver us into some sort of housing in the 11th hour of this pregnancy.”

For your reference, the technical 11th hour of a 9 month pregnancy is at 8.25 months — or 33 weeks.

Guess what happened on the very last day of the 33rd week? We were given housing within the community of the bible school which belonged to the church of the man which I had heard preaching on the radio while truck driving.

Among other stories at that church, my wife and I met a friend whose huge family (11 kids) relocated regularly at the leading of the Holy Spirit. Not only had they most recently lived on the Hawaiian island of Kauai back while I had been there being chased around by dragons, but they were active members and friends with the pastor at the church who baptized me in the ocean and invited me to their youth retreat in the mountains.

…yea…

The Lord Bless You!

I could go on about how God gave us our second child while living in the Jeep again after being persecuted by the leadership of this bible college, brought my wife and I back to Virginia where I’m from, reconciled me with my family-of-origin, delivered us into an actual house when we had no ability to do so, re-established me as a licensed massage therapist and a business coach, and all the ridiculous ways He has continued to exalt Himself over the systems of the world in our lives and their various gods and dominions…

But this article is huge enough as it is, and I’ve got to go be with my family!

I hope this has been a blessing and an encouragement to you and your faith. If you would like to stay in touch and hear more stories from the wilderness or what its like to have a business established by God Himself, you can subscribe to TELOSITY at telosity.substack.com.

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I Searched For Belonging and Found Christ.

Thomas M. Hamilton — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:02:05 GMT

For years, poured herself into the lives of others, convinced that if she could just mend their broken pieces, her own would finally fit together. It didn’t look like a burden at first; it felt like a calling—a noble purpose of being the one who cared more. But beneath that “purpose” was a decades-long struggle of playing God, an exhausting attempt to cure others.

The patterns were relentless: different faces and situations, but always the same ending of frustration and depletion. She lived as a “mom” to those who should have been partners, giving until she realized that no amount of fixing could fill the emptiness inside.

Her faith was a collection of stories and religious “backdrops” where nothing felt right; she knew the language of God, but He remained a distant figure to be acknowledged rather than a Savior to be relied upon. She was caught in a cycle of toggling who sat on the throne of her life, defaulting to her own “illusion of control.”

She kept trying to work harder and fix more, hoping that if she finally “got it right,” she would find the place where she truly belonged. Yet, no matter how many times she started over on those “wide roads,” she ended up in the same place: tired, confused, and still searching for a narrow road she couldn’t quite find on her own.

This is her story. Read on.

When Nothing Felt Like Home

I grew up knowing there was a God to some extent. With a backdrop of the first 11 years in the Catholic faith, then until I was 18 in the Methodist church.

Nothing felt right, even looking back, I couldn’t find my place, I couldn’t find the people I belonged with.

School was difficult for me—from comprehension skills to the bullying that happened faithfully until I graduated. Wrong kind of faith. Painful bullying and watching others be bullied as well.

What’s wrong with me? Somewhere in these years kids started telling me I didn’t look like my parents. What does that mean? So I went home and asked my parents why don’t I look like you guys like other kids look like their parents—hair and eye color, height, etc

My parents sat down with me to tell me how special I was, how they adopted me as a baby and my sibling, too. We have separate biological parents.

As a child this brought much confusion, fear of abandonment, almost made sense why I was being rejected and treated harshly by others in school, at least in my child like thinking it did.

I began running, rebelling from the simplest forms of obedience that authoritative figures had in place to keep me safe.

I was born in the north and we moved as far south as you can imagine in my 6th grade year due to my dad’s job relocating us. This was trauma to me at the time since no family would be conveniently near, so now no family gatherings on the weekends and surviving the mean kids at school. Sure some family would come annually to visit and I treasured those seasons but began living in a fantasy world to avoid where my feet actually stood.

Alcohol was prevalent in the dynamic of my home growing up yet I believed it was normal. My parents loved me that was about the only thing I knew held true. No matter what I did or didn’t do, they never left.

Due to my extreme running and my parents not knowing what to do, I was placed in an adolescent unit in my mid teens. Today it was the best thing that could have happened to me at the time. I was literally walking through many doors that could have led to death.

Teachers, my parents and the team I had for medical care while in this adolescent unit never stopped believing or loving me. I think this is the first place I truly learned and embraced structure. I knew what to expect from one hour to the next, one day to the next.

Upon discharge, I was now on medication diagnosed with a mental disorder that over time I allowed to become a part of my identity. The dots never connected, I could possibly be affected by the drinking in the dynamics of my home or watching other loved ones drink as well. I had to know to some extent the alcohol was affecting me because I would worry if I saw a loved one drinking, they would die. I did not know the fine line of social drinking and a loved one possibly having a problem.

By the grace of God, when I was discharged after a little over 3 months, I graduated high school. Oh I was so excited to be done with those 12 years that I hadn’t thought about what next. I had no desire to go to college, why would I expose myself to such meanness in another school. I had already established a few toxic friendships ones that led me into substance abuse, a season of a lot of wrong doings on multiple wide roads, and yes eventually smoking cigarettes…not alcohol though I knew the toxicity of drinking or that’s what my irrational belief was.

Trying to Fix What Was Never Mine to Fix

I ended up in a relationship that harvested from deception and a false belief I could “save” this person just like my other loved one, growing up. We married as the years went on I knew I was not meant to be in this marriage and as he did me wrong, I did him wrong, that was the life I lived. After 20 years, in a reactive, irrational moment I had what was a glimpse of what I believed the grass would be greener, so I left leaving this person literally at the doors of homelessness.

It took me a long time to leave because my parents through my childish perception never left one another, never divorced, so to me this was living out to the fullest until death do we part. Even though, neither encouraged me to leave but definitely knew I wasn’t happy, being a mom to a man who should be my husband was becoming exhausting in addition to now shifting from things against authority to a full fledged work a holic!

I couldn’t fix him, so the greener grass became, the person I can fix must still be out there. I moved in with someone I had met in the rooms of an outpatient facility, when that didn’t work, I bounced back into living with a friend I grew up with but hadn’t seen in 20 years.

This was a season that would change me forever. A long 9 month journey of feeling trapped in a scene from the movie I Can Only Imagine. Losing everything and still believing I could “fix” this person at all costs! Finally, after leaving this season, ending up back at home with my parents, I realized I had trauma that is difficult to articulate into words but it was all from my once again trying to save a loved one from alcohol. Alcohol was to blame not anyone else, not even myself. Why don’t “they” just avoid the alcohol section of the grocery store? Ignorance is bliss.

When Everything Finally Fell Apart

I was done—done with men, done with getting attached to fur babies, and done with my ways. I was tired of trying to fix others. I knew I couldn’t! I was tired of trying to measure up to air brushed women, the manipulation, deception, and trying to measure up to my bar of perfectionism, it all came crumbling down. I definitely didn’t have what it took to not only fix others but could not control their behaviors yet over decades of playing God actually believed I could cure them all and herd them all into my liking—my definition of love. My prayer was Dear God, no more men, no more fur babies and once my debt is paid off I want to die. The irony in this prayer is I wasn’t working, I had been removed from the workforce due to medical issues for about a year and a half with no hope of returning, so I am not sure how I was going to pay my debts off much less die since I had never been consciously suicidal.

I started serving at an animal shelter just to get out of the home. Didn’t exactly line up with “MY” prayer..lol. With the black and white personality I had lived with for so long, I poured myself into this service opportunity truly believing this simple prayer would come to pass if I just took it one day at a time. Not so much. The short version a person came in fostered a blue heeler I had gotten close to, then in the same day there was a knock at my parents front door. A lady stood there with a red heeler and a blue heeler on a leash. A lady who had only lived 9 homes up for over 2 decades I never knew existed.

Here husband had told her of my attachment to the blue heeler, so she asked me to walk with them almost daily. We had many talks and it was great to see the blue heeler I had grown so close to so often. I knew this was God but what I didn’t know would come next was astounding, everything against my prayer, His goodness was starting to come to pass.

I was invited to her home to “meet” a friend of theirs who had just come out of a difficult season himself. For at least, 2 weeks I declined, I avoided with an extreme! Then one day, we were talking on our walk and today I believe she started the conversation knowing it wouldn’t end before we were at the end of my parents driveway but hers instead. Ugh, God what are you doing? Don’t You remember my prayer?

I proceeded to lie to myself to muster up enough courage in the self conscious and unworthy me. I can leave, this is a one time meeting. We talked for 5 hours at their kitchen table with the blue heeler close in between both of us. He talked so much about the Lord in what he had just went through. It left me silently thinking about my prayer and just maybe I was missing something but not trusting I kept this to myself. I went home and started to change the direction of my prayer just a little—Lord show me the goodness from the season I just came out of? Something at the time I thought didn’t carry weight to make myself feel “safe,” and not exposed nor vulnerable.

A friendship formed, what’s wrong with this man, he doesn’t see me like I see myself. One night I picked him up from work and we talked well I listened for quite some time once again about this God who has done so much for him. Hmmm, 🤔

Since I wasn’t in the Lord’s word, a lot of times I would ask him to “break it down in lamest terms,” today realizing I was trying to say personalize it while I wasn’t willing to be exposed I had the expectation of him to expose himself—which against how I thought it would end, he actually did.

Finding Who She Was in Christ

I went home into my room, sat on the bed, Lord I think I need to delete the whole prayer I once said. I need to be in Your word too or something of Yours and not of me. There sat a Bible and Jesus Calling book. I would read. It seemed like I wasn’t getting anything, like those once struggles with comprehension skills were failing me, again…but they weren’t.

I woke up one day and was sitting out back and the same tree that had been there for over 20 years looked as if it had come to life, those perceptions of fear had gained clarity not mine but of His.

Our friendship grew…I was still struggling with the illusion of control, fixing others, and at the time my addiction to cigarettes. I went down a few more wide roads, praise God for parents who kept on loving me even if it was through tough love, I was able to seek the narrow road once, again. Things appeared lighter. Ugh, I now knew I had feelings for this person beyond a friendship love.

We both had our seasons over the course of two years where we would go from the 99 to the 1 and the Lord with His faithfulness would always pull me back in.

My friend knew how I felt about him. In my eyes we were playing house. I had given up on anything more than a friendship yet in that giving up was settling for less if that makes sense. One thing is for sure, we were best friends and this was different to my past.

Still reading the Lord’s word and excited to share what He would show me, one day I asked my friend, “When the day comes for you to marry, what will happen to our friendship?” The response I received was beyond insanity, women don’t play well together is what I said.

We kept living life, trying to find our way, then one Sunday night my friend said so what about getting married? I initially had my back to my friend as I was listening to worship music Matthew West My Name Is and journaling. I didn’t realize he was asking me to marry him. I dropped my pen, the music went off, and I looked at him and said ask me again tomorrow…lol. This was on a Sunday night. We had “in my mind,” never been on a date, held hands or reflected any type of affection in this direction towards one another—no kissing, lovey dovey names for one another, really nothing except he would work, I would make sure our little room had its rent paid and the home was clean, like I said playing house. Outside of the home, others saw us as friends.

I laid there the whole night watching a digital clock on a microwave minute by minute thinking surely he won’t ask me again on Monday. God, are these walls talking to him? Lol

Monday morning 5 a.m., I lay there and as he was getting ready for work came over and gave me a kiss and told me he loved me before he left out the door. Holy Mac n cheese Lord I think he is being serious. Lunch time came and the question arose again. Yes, I said I just want you to know though this has to be until death due we part and I don’t do deception. I will not go through a divorce and I will not give you a divorce.

He said I want this to be a marriage where we fall under God’s authority. Now I had no clue what that meant, no clue at all. I asked God to show me, teach me to love the way He wants me too. By the way, we also have that same blue heeler that was in the beginning of our story now all ours, the link the Lord used to bring two broken people together in His kingdom.

We married…I found the rooms of recovery and realized pieces of my story were already being told by so many. The Lord led me to recovery, this was the first decision I had made for myself in decades outside of finally getting connected with a church family that based on my past seemed too good to be real. The love was authentic and without motive. They wanted to help me and they wanted to love me, love us!

This is when the most pivotal turning point of my life happened with the power of forgiveness. I was married to a man I loved for about a year. I am out driving and out of left field I sense the Lord asking me to forgive this person from 4 years ago. Baffled and shaking as this was 4 years later, Lord I have moved on. I can’t go back to that environment. The Lord told me, I will never put you in harm’s way. Okay, Lord I don’t know the how but I am willing.

There’s no blueprint to this journey but in my Yes to Him my trust with the Lord grew. I also knew putting aside my fleshes confusion showed me God has a plan and a time for everything. In this Yes, He showed me it wasn’t all about forgiving the other person as much as it was forgiving myself for putting myself in such harms way. He began to renew my worth from the damages of my self destructive behavior trying to play God. He showed me my value didn’t come from anyone else, it wasn’t a pass or fail and it definitely wasn’t measured on money.

About two weeks in, somehow I knew there was true forgiveness towards myself and the other. A lightness, freeing, like walking on clouds, where He was illuminating His life all around me. Then the same night of the first day, I recognized this breakthrough, I received a phone call. A person’s name on my caller i.d. I hadn’t seen in 4 years. A loved one of this person. I listened as she told me her loved one was found deceased on the living room floor. I can’t explain how grateful I was in the moment to have walked through the Yes to forgiveness. God’s timing is always on time! I went to bed and at 3 a.m. sat straight up from a sound sleep to a voice I heard so clearly. The voice of this person saying “I made it!” There is more of God to this journey I will focus on one day in a separate article. Just know from this synapse of Yes, God healed me and He healed the other. I also was able to love my husband more without fear from that season. The forgiveness helped me tremendously with the grief. The Lord brought such great clarity where chaos and trauma once resided.

I started asking questions I had been carrying from reading the Lord’s word. I knew I was right where the Lord wanted me; everything was lining up from the heart healings He was doing through me in recovery and the church family.

One morning we had an argument is my guess, I don’t really remember but what I do remember is disengaging, reaching out to a person in our church family, one of authority and dumped…when I stopped to breathe (lol) this person said something I could have never seen coming and drew questions to my walk with the Lord. “I think what you are looking for can’t be found in your husband nor another.” What in Earth does that mean?

I was asked to pray about being water baptized. I said okay, I was baptized though as a baby. Just pray about it… sometimes as an adult it’s a personal decision where as an infant the parents do it as a form of commitment to the Lord. It was also suggested, I start reading the book of John. I was missing Jesus in my walk!!

So on March 25th, 2018 I was water baptized and turned my life over to Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.

Did I? I believed I did until my earthly father passed away and in a season where significant levels of anxiety returned with the grief the Lord revealed to me during a step study how I saw Jesus as Lord but would toggle who or what would sit on the throne as my Savior.

Upon this awareness and yearning more of the Lord and learning what it looks like to have Him as both Lord and Savior I felt convicted to be water baptized again on Easter Sunday in 2025.

Today, I can honestly say it’s a day to day choice to keep Him on both and when my life gets wacky doodle, I stop and pause…Lord, am I placing anything but You on the throne as my Lord and Savior?

LIFE SCRIPTURE

“This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!”

‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭5‬:‭17‬ ‭NLT‬‬

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Broken Marriages. Silent Years. And a Faith That Wouldn’t Die

Thomas M. Hamilton — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 23:00:54 GMT

We often expect stories of faith to follow a predictable, polished arc: a moment of crisis, a sudden realization, and a tidy resolution wrapped in a bow. We want the “happily ever after” where every problem is solved.

But for , the reality of faith was far less decorative. It didn’t always arrive as a sudden burst of light; sometimes, it was forged in a long stretch of silence and sustained through survival. For those currently navigating a “heavy season” or dealing with the echoes of trauma, faith isn’t a package of hope—it is a tool for staying alive when the world feels like it is falling apart.

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Faith as a Survival Mechanism, Not an Instant Remedy

There is a common misconception that walking away from faith is always an act of rebellion. In Harold’s case, it was often a byproduct of trying to survive. When his parents’ marriage collapsed, the foundation of his childhood world went with it. Leaving his Protestant upbringing behind wasn’t a defiant statement; it was the reflexive movement of a child trying to pick up the scattered pieces of his life.

In the years that followed, Harold tried to build something stable on his own terms. He married and, in an effort to support his first wife’s son, he became Lutheran so the boy could attend a specific school. It seemed like the right thing to do, yet that marriage crumbled after only two years of alcoholism and abuse. Once again, what was supposed to be steady fell apart. In these moments, faith wasn’t a “cure” for the pain, but the very thing that kept him breathing.

The Divine Navigation Through Deception

One of the most jarring truths of the spiritual journey is that God can use broken, and even deceptive, situations to lead someone toward a destination they didn’t know they needed. The same year Harold’s first marriage ended, he met the woman who would become his second wife. While the relationship initially seemed hopeful, it was eventually revealed to be built on a lie.

He spent two decades navigating a home life defined by constant instability, a reality that only later made sense through the lens of his wife’s diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder and narcissism. Yet, there is an irony at the heart of this wreckage: this woman, who provided years of emotional strain, was the one who brought him into the Catholic Church. Out of a partnership characterized by long-term pain, his faith became the one thing he could be grateful for. It is a strange, holy paradox to find a life-sustaining spiritual home through a source that was otherwise destructive.

The “Someday” Trap and God’s Patient Silence

It is easy to push spiritual matters into the indefinite future, assuming God will wait for a more convenient time. For over a decade, faith was absent from Harold’s life, replaced by the quiet promise that he would “come back to it someday.”

“Maybe you’ve said that before. He probably thought the same thing. But ‘someday’ turned into a long stretch of silence…”

During those years of silence, it might have seemed like the Divine had moved on. But God does not leave the room just because we’ve stopped acknowledging He is there. Even when Harold stepped away, the Presence remained.

Persistence Without a “Quick Fix”

We live in a culture that demands instant results, but real faith often involves enduring decades of instability without a clean conclusion. Harold chose to stay for twenty years.

Perhaps the hardest part of this testimony is acknowledging that the pain is not yet a memory—it is a present reality. His son, now 27, grew up in that environment of narcissism and instability and still lives there today, carrying the weight of a situation that has no easy resolution. A true testimony doesn’t require a neat ending to be valid. It is a record of surviving:

Broken marriages
Alcoholism and abuse
The confusion of deceptive relationships
Years of emotional and mental strain

Conclusion: Building Something Real on Sand

The most powerful realization Harold came to is that God does not wait for someone to have their life in order before showing up. Even when the foundation of life looks like shifting sand, it is possible to build something real. Faith isn’t always a victory shout; sometimes, it is just the thing that keeps someone breathing when everything else feels heavy. It is the anchor that holds even when the ground beneath it is soft.

As you look at your own circumstances, where might you be overlooking a steady presence in your current heavy season?

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When Grief Becomes Your God: Counter-Intuitive Lessons from the Journey to Grace

Thomas M. Hamilton — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:01:36 GMT

We are taught to look for idols in the loud places—the glitter of wealth, the roar of a crowd, or the desperate heat of an addiction. But learned, both through life and his work as a journalist, that the most dangerous stories are often the ones left untold— usually the idols that sit subtlety in the corner of the room, shaping identity without ever raising their voice.

His own quiet idol took root in Madisonville, Tennessee, when he was five years old and cancer entered their home. It wasn’t the softened version people talk about; it was raw and uncomfortable—the sharp, metallic smell of hospitals, the sight of hair falling out in clumps, and skin marked by radiation. At the same time, his parents’ marriage was unraveling in the background, loud and messy, while he clung to a simple, childlike faith he found at nine years old in a small country church.

Then December 25, 1993 came, and everything changed. His mother died on Christmas morning. He was eleven years old, and that date became an anchor he would carry for years. For nearly two decades, he ran—and grief became the most real thing in his life, slowly taking the place that belonged to God.

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Grief Can Function as an Idol

It sounds strange at first—calling grief an idol—but an idol is anything that takes ownership of identity and dictates how life is seen. When tragedy becomes the primary lens through which someone views their past, present, and future, it takes on a role it was never meant to have.

His wasn’t loud. It didn’t demand attention. It just sat there—heavy, constant, present in every room he walked into.

Grief.

Recognizing that was the turning point, because it forced him to see that the weight he carried wasn’t just loss—it had become something he was living under. Until it was named, it couldn’t be dealt with, and once it was named, it became clear that it didn’t belong in the place it had taken.

Escapism is a Cage, Not a Cure

When the noise inside gets too loud, the instinct is to quiet it, and for him, that started early. He began drinking at thirteen, not out of rebellion, but out of a need to soften something he didn’t know how to process.

For years, life looked normal on the outside. He worked as a small-town newspaper reporter, stayed productive, and kept things moving forward in a way that would convince most people he was doing just fine. But internally, everything was unraveling, and by his mid-20s, he was divorced and weighed nearly 300 pounds—carrying far more than just physical weight.

The escape never led him anywhere new. It simply kept him circling the same pain, proving something most people don’t realize at first: what feels like relief in the moment often becomes the very thing that keeps you stuck.

Why His Career Was Just the Vehicle, Not the Driver

At 28, something shifted through what seemed like an ordinary conversation. A roommate’s friend came home on leave from the Navy and shared stories about travel, the ocean, and a life that felt bigger than the one he was living. That was enough to spark change.

He spent two years losing weight, rebuilding discipline, and eventually joined the Navy, convinced he had finally found purpose. Looking back now, he sees it differently. The Navy wasn’t his purpose—it was the vehicle that carried him toward it.

Through deployments, long watches, and moves to places like Hawaii, Colorado, Jacksonville, and Pensacola, God used those seasons to slowly bring him back. What felt like forward momentum was actually something deeper and more personal than he realized at the time.

Identity is Built on Redemption, Not Damage

The real shift didn’t happen in a single moment; it unfolded through life itself. It came through the struggle with infertility, through the eventual birth of his son, and through the steady influence of a pastor in Colorado who took the time to disciple him rather than just preach at him.

Over time, he stopped defining himself by what had broken him—the loss, the years of running, the drinking, the weight of everything he had carried—and began to understand something different. Identity isn’t built on damage. It’s built on redemption.

His story was no longer about the boy who lost his mother on Christmas morning. It became about the man who was found by a Father who had never left him.

The Beauty of the Full Circle

Today, he leads Operation Mustard Seed, a mission rooted in Matthew 17:20—a verse his mother loved. There’s something deeply intentional about that, as if God took the very thing that once carried so much pain and turned it into something meaningful.

He now uses that story to reach others, especially those in military life, where silence is common and struggles are often hidden behind strength. What once felt like a wound has become something that connects, speaks, and points others toward hope.

Conclusion: The Invitation to Follow

With five years left before retirement and a move to Norfolk ahead, the full picture is still unfolding. But for the first time, he isn’t trying to control it. He has learned to trust the One leading it.

His focus is simple now—be a present father, a faithful husband, and a light for others who are still carrying the same kind of quiet weight he once did.

Because in the end, God has a way of reaching into the very thing that tried to destroy someone and turning it into the very thing that leads them back to Him.

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Your Book Might Be Getting Ignored… Here’s Why

Thomas M. Hamilton — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 23:35:19 GMT

Many Christian authors miss this entirely. The book cover. And I’m not just saying that…Across multiple publishing platforms and design studies:

Most readers admit they’ve skipped books because of poor covers
Over half say the cover directly influenced their decision to click or buy
And professional cover redesigns consistently show double-digit increases in clicks and sales

So this isn’t theory. People window shop before they ever commit. They’re scanning covers, making snap decisions in seconds. It doesn’t matter how strong the message is if they never click. “Don’t judge a book by its cover?” Yeah… that sounds nice. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

Even major publishers A/B test covers before release because of how much it impacts sales.

SOURCE - CLICK HERE

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Every design is put together by hand, based on your book, your message, and your audience.

We offer this as a donation-based service because we genuinely want to help Christian authors get their work out there without the high upfront cost.

That said, to cover Stripe fees, processing, and taxes, we ask that donations be $20 or more. This keeps us from operating at a loss and allows us to keep offering this—at a low price—to others. Each request is limited to two designs so we can give proper time and attention to every project.

And just so you don’t feel like you’re sending money into the oblivion…I’ve included a screen recording showing a mock up of how we build each design so you can see the process for yourself before committing.

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Your Book Might Be Getting Ignored… Here’s Why

Thomas M. Hamilton — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:17:59 GMT

Many Christian authors miss this entirely. The book cover. And I’m not just saying that…Across multiple publishing platforms and design studies:

Most readers admit they’ve skipped books because of poor covers
Over half say the cover directly influenced their decision to click or buy
And professional cover redesigns consistently show double-digit increases in clicks and sales

Even major publishers A/B test covers before release because of how much it impacts sales.

SOURCE - CLICK HERE

Ready to design the cover art for your next book? We want to hear your idea!

The Narrow Path Collective & The Christian Substack Bookstore now offer premium book cover designs.

And no, this isn’t AI slop where you type a prompt and hope for the best…
We actually build these using licensed assets from Canva Pro and Envato—the same tools used by professional designers.

Every design is put together by hand, based on your book, your message, and your audience.

We offer this as a donation-based service because we genuinely want to help Christian authors get their work out there without the high upfront cost.

Also, here are a few photos as examples of the high quality visuals we use! 👇 👇 👇

Ready to get started with your idea? Send us a message!

You’ll have a say in the process, and we’ll keep working until it actually feels right for your book.

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Yeah...Jesus Would Probably Flip Your Table & He Wouldn't Join Your Ministry.

Thomas M. Hamilton — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:21:54 GMT

I’ve been dealing with some severe spiritual warfare lately and I’ll be frank, I’ve needed some assistance. Just someone to genuinely care. So I reached out to a deliverance ministry here on Substack. The result? A waste of time.

Here’s why: a complete lack of compassion.

I’ve never paid for deliverance, but I was feeling low. So I figured, why not? Let’s give it a shot.

I came forward — even willing to pay. I poured out my past trauma to them, through a Substack message. In response, they asked for my phone number. Here is the text message I received from them:

Sounds like they’re being helpful, right? I thought so too. That is, until they never even bothered to schedule anything, reach out to me after this message (which I responded to) — or follow up at all. Ouch. That was a gut punch.

Now, maybe you’re thinking, “Okay… they were probably just busy.” That’s fair. I thought the same thing at first. But after waiting days—almost a full week—with no response… and then seeing them actively posting about a “new book” here on Substack? Yeah… that told me everything I needed to know.

In a nutshell, this ministry pretty much told me, “you’re not worth caring for.” The silence told me everything. And it’s these sort of ministries that are making the Body of Christ look terrible. Since when did deliverance become “optional?” Does anyone honestly believe Jesus would have treated deliverance as an option? That was a rhetorical question. The answer is obviously no.

Let’s talk more about it.

Let’s Not Confuse Business with Ministry

I haven’t even begun to talk about how they shouldn’t have been charging money for deliverance in the first place. So let me clarify, I’m not turning this article into one of those “money is evil” rants… that’s not what I’m saying at all. There is nothing wrong with having subscriptions, paid content, or even building a business around your work. If you’re putting in real time, effort, and value — that’s honest work. Scripture actually supports that:

“The laborer is worthy of his wages.” — Luke 10:7

And again:

“He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much…” — Luke 16:10

Good, honest business? That’s not the problem. Providing value and being paid for your work? Completely fine. But let’s not blur the line.

There’s a difference between:
👉 charging for your time, your teaching, your content
and
👉 charging for what only God can do

Because the Bible never—at any point—gives permission to charge people for healing, deliverance, or the power of God. In fact, it says the opposite:

“Freely you have received, freely give.” — Matthew 10:8

Jesus never said:
“Cast out demons… but offer premium sessions.”

When someone starts putting a price tag on deliverance—whether they dress it up as a “session,” a “program,” or a “spiritual breakthrough package,” we need to call it what it is: a business, not a ministry.

He Would Flip Your Table

Credit: Istock — BibleArtLibrary

I wont sugar coat it. If Jesus walked into some of these “deliverance ministries” today…He wouldn’t be impressed. And, He wouldn’t sit quietly.

How do I know this? The Holy Bible. We’ve read this before. Jesus walks into the temple in Jerusalem, sees people buying and selling in a place meant for prayer… and what does He do? He flips the tables. They were turning something sacred into a business. The same thing is happening today.

When deliverance has:

a price
a schedule
a checkout page

..it’s not ministry. It’s a transaction happening in a place it shouldn’t.

“My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” (Matthew 21:13)

So according to Scripture, this is misusing what belongs to God…
and putting barriers in front of people who are trying to reach Him. When someone is told—or even subtly made to feel—that freedom is on the other side of a payment…that’s a barrier. It may not be a physical one, but it’s a real one.

If your ministry requires someone to pay to receive deliverance, you’ve built a table Jesus never told you to set up. And I wouldn’t be so confident He’d leave it standing.

The Lack of Compassion is Troubling

No one is going to have compassion like Jesus. That I understand. But let’s take a step back and look at this. Is this the sort of ministry Jesus would be running? I don’t think so. I think Jesus would find the lack of empathy concerning.

So let’s ask ourselves:

“Would Jesus overturn this?”

And if there’s even a part of you that hesitates on that answer…that’s worth paying attention to.

Let’s not be like these “Christian” grifters.

Conclusion

Please—seriously—don’t pay for deliverance. I came close to making that mistake myself. That’s exactly why I wrote this… so you don’t get pulled into the same trap.

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