Narrow Path Collective: Testimony

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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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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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.

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.

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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

TESTIMONY SONG

LOVE MOVED FIRST BY CASTING CROWNS

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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?

📚 Worth Your Time

This week, I want to point you to several books from within our own community.

Author:

Book: Bethan’s Identity

👉 Take a look here

And More Here!

Authors and their Amazon links:

— Click Here

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Call to Repentance

If you’ve been trying to earn your way into heaven, it’s time to stop striving and start surrendering. Today can be the day everything changes.
The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 6:2, “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”
Don’t wait for a better moment. Turn from your sin, believe in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross, and receive the gift of eternal life.
He is calling—respond to Him today.

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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.

Read on.

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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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A Cassette Tape, a Pastor’s Visit, and a Tornado

Thomas M. Hamilton — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:01:09 GMT

God always has some “funny ways” of building a calling. That was ’s case. Tt started with a cassette tape, and later an EF-4 tornado that changed the direction of his life. These moments would later reveal that God had been preparing him for a higher calling.

He was fortunate enough to grow up in a Christian home, so Church wasn’t foreign to him. In fact, it wasn’t optional in his parents’ house. Every Sunday morning and Wednesday night. It didn’t take long before he started asking questions about salvation at just seven years old. Like many kids raised in Church, Matt had heard the words before—sin, grace, forgiveness—but hearing them and understanding them are two very different things. The real turning point came in the most unexpected place: a first-grade classroom, after getting in trouble for something that had never happened before.

That moment gave him a reference point for something he had only heard talked about until then: sin. After that, the Gospel suddenly made sense.

This is his story. Read on.

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It Started With a Cassette Tape

Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash

I was blessed to be raised in a Christian home. We were at church every Sunday and Wednesday. At the age of 7 (1st Grade), I remember asking questions about salvation for the first time. My parents had Christian music playing on a cassette tape in my room at night (yes, I am that old). I remember hearing words like “grace” in one of the songs, and I did not understand what it meant. That began the conversations within our home. My pastor came to my house at least 4 times to share the gospel and help me understand my need for salvation. However, it was not until I got in trouble one day at school for talking that I understood my sin and need for a Savior. I was the kid who never got in trouble at school, never had my name written on the board. When that happened (and I faced the consequences at home as well), I had a reference point for sin. The next time my pastor came over, it clicked. I understood why Jesus came and my need to repent and receive His forgiveness. That night, now over 30 years ago, I gave my life to Christ.

When God Changed the Plan

I continued to grow up in a Christian home, and as I entered high school, I began to feel God’s call to ministry. I was scared. I did not know what that meant. But God kept giving me opportunities to lead in my youth group, even though I was younger than most of them. I felt like Gideon, very much intimidated, and very sure that I was not the type of man God would call for something like this. But I had a youth pastor who believed in me and gave me opportunities to lead and serve. As I entered college, I began to find a variety of ways to serve in the local church to see where God was leading me. But it was not until an EF-4 tornado wiped out much of our college campus that God’s plan for my life began to be set in motion. That Summer, I had intended to work with students on our campus at a Summer-long youth camp. After the tornado, the camp was cancelled. Someone from my home church called me and asked me to come serve with the K-5th Graders in our church daycare and lead a Bible study program for them all Summer. I accepted, and I have never looked back.

I worked that Summer program for 3 years. During the school year, I served with that same age group in the church I attended while in college. As I moved on to seminary, I continued to serve K-5th Grade, in my local church and through a Summer day camp for 2 more Summers. A mentor, while I was in seminary, wisely asked me if I saw a pattern forming. He recognized that God was calling me into Children’s ministry. As I graduated from seminary, a job opened up in my home church. For the first time, they were hiring a dedicated Children’s pastor, birth through 5th Grade. I applied and was hired, and I have been honored to serve here at FBC Martin, TN, for the last 13 years.

More Than Just Kids

In this role, I quickly realized that Children’s Ministry is Family Ministry. It is as much about ministering to the parents as it is the kids. 18 years later, I am still serving and teaching kids on a weekly basis. But my heart has grown for the parents and the families I minister to. My passion is family discipleship. I want parents to know that while they are the primary influence in their kids’ lives, we are here to join with them and help as much as we can. I tell parents I am your resource. If there is anything you need, please let me know. You are not on this journey alone. It is my heart’s desire to equip parents to do all they can to ensure their kids are ready to face a dark world once they leave home. How can we make sure our kids are still following Christ into their college years?

I am grateful for the Lord’s salvation. I am thankful for the calling God placed on my life. I am grateful that He led me to Substack last Fall, and that I now have the opportunity to reach and equip parents in other places as well. I praise God that He put me in a Christian home with parents who cared about my future, who wanted me to be faithfully following Him in my adult years. It is because of their leadership, guidance, and support that I am where I am today. Maybe that is why I am so passionate about this now. I pray the same will be true for my own 3 kids and for all the kids God has put in my path to minister to over the last 18 years and in the years to come.

Conclusion

Looking back now, it’s clear that God was leading Matt toward the place he would eventually serve. Today, his passion has grown beyond the classroom. His heart is for families, because he has seen firsthand how powerful it is when parents take seriously the role God has given them in their children’s lives.

From a cassette tape in a child’s bedroom to a calling in ministry, Matt continues to live out what God intended for him.

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A Life of Multiple Trials—What I Learned While Being Healed in Heaven

Thomas M. Hamilton — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:10:12 GMT

What happens when life doesn’t just knock you down once… but keeps swinging?

can tell you. She is the modern day female Job. Afflicted with many trials but staying faithful to God. Just like the old story goes in the Bible (See Job in the Old Testament).

Resilience became her companion when it wasn’t an option. A thing she had to master and overcome, and it didn’t come lightly. Her story consists of hardships, difficulties, questioning God, and wondering what she would do next.

But somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, something unexpected happened. An experience that she will never forget, a near death experience, when her heart stopped.

This story involves:

Accidents.
Medical Crisis
Job loss.
Bills you can’t pay.
And nights you sit in silence wondering

If you’ve ever looked at a family and thought, How are they still standing after all of that? Then you want to read this.

Sometimes the trials that feel like they’re destroying us… are actually the ones God uses to prepare your heart for Heaven.

Before We Continue…

If you want to read more of her story, or stories similar to hers, order Routed To Heaven!

AND, please join us on Substack Live, 3/11 at 1pm Pacific/2pm Mountain/3pm Central/4pm Eastern to hear more.

I called them the Job Families in an article that I wrote for ‘Leadership Journal’ that Christianity Today formerly published. The article recommended words and actions for pastors and leaders who serve families that seem to experience numerous trials.

I could relate. All within fifteen years, struggles included (but were not limited to) my firstborn birthed eleven weeks early due to preeclampsia (they told my family they could save our little two pounder but not me), my second baby born full term (but blue and not breathing), a spouse becoming permanently disabled and addicted to opiates, a car accident (causing two years of my own disability and chronic ongoing pain), a few dips into self-medicating, dealing with a predatory lender who purchased our mortgage and sought to own the whole block, job loss, moving into a travel trailer where we survived with two kids and two large dogs at several relative’s mercy, multiple bankruptcies, public assistance and more. Later came much more than I thought I could ever bear–I cannot speak of it all publicly.

I wrote the article because I sensed my own friend’s and ministry leader’s inner battle, even as they provided what help they could. “Do we say ‘hang in there, sister. The Lord is still near?’” (insert pat, pat, pat on shoulder here, plus a big ‘ole hug).

What could I even say to myself? I felt like I was drowning.

Always somewhat involved in serving, when I decided to make healthier choices for my children and me and work diligently on my healing, God plopped me into leading more ministry than I ever thought possible.

Although life in the last several years has greatly settled, God planned more. A year and a half ago, He vaulted me up to Heaven when I died from an allergic reaction. And He changed my world.

In front of me wavered a gold cloud, with people behind it. Soft, short grass made my toes feel like they wore the most comfortable slippers ever. I experienced a show of kaleidoscope panels celebrating Him and me. The colors were unlike any I had ever seen. Rays of light danced, and I saw prayers from earth shooting up like fireworks in the form of light rays vaulted from slingshots. Jesus spoke to me in a beautiful, heart-melting baritone. Later, He told me that we walked and talked even more, but that He would reserve some of those memories for a specific purpose.

After standing in Heaven with Him, I realized how much He individualized my experience. I never tunneled up–I am claustrophobic. And He held me on the way back down. I arrived to a muted but commanding stillness–quietness I later learned was holy silence. He speaks more to me in silence because on earth, I am a busy person and can mimic the Energizer Bunny at times. He wanted to ensure that I absorbed the most important piece–His words.

More memories keep returning as He promised–He waited to reveal some as I wrote ‘Routed to Heaven.’ Then I thought we were done, but He continues to tell me new ones as I now write the Study Guide.

One recent memory that made me weep with awe and joy was what He shared about my time in a Job Family: ‘My daughter, you suffered continual trials because you are especially chosen.’

Wait, what? Multiple verses tumbled through my head. You know, those ones that say, ‘He caused…’ or ‘He brought…?’ Ones I had always read as ‘Satan really did this, but He obviously allowed it. Errr – He must have had a reason!’

‘You were chosen for my impact. Because of your faith, trials, your choice to work hard on your healing and because you then obeyed and stepped into the roles I created for you, you have impacted thousands with my words, your stories and your experienced wisdom. You brought hope, healing and Heaven to my people and will continue. You honor me.’

How humbled and honored am I!

Conclusion

Looking back over the many years of hardship, it would be easy to see only the pain. Yet the story did not end in despair.

Through every hardship, Julie continued to press forward in faith, even when the path ahead felt uncertain.

Standing in Heaven, experiencing the presence of Christ, she was given a perspective she had never known before. What once felt like relentless suffering was reframed as something far more meaningful. The trials she endured were not meaningless. They were part of a calling—one that allowed her story, her faith, and her perseverance to touch the lives of thousands.

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I Lived as a Homosexual for 40 Years—Here’s Why I Chose Celibacy

Thomas M. Hamilton — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:56:41 GMT

Welcome to our Testimony Series! Tuesdays. 8 PM. CST.

All the words below belong to a dear friend of mine. I didn’t write them. I just care enough to share them. Take a few minutes and read it all the way through. This is one of the most powerful stories I’ve had the privilege to share. It hit me personally considering I’m a former porn addict. My past struggle doesn’t place me above John, or below him. His former lifestyle and my former addiction both point to the same truth: we all needed rescue.

One thousand years may very well be as one day in God’s calendar, but based on how the last fifty-nine of mine played out (in years), I don’t have a moment to lose before I spend the remainder of my God-given days sharing His love in a deeply personal, and radically profound way. Impacting lives in a spiritual way often means walking alongside people whose stories and perspectives we may not fully understand or even agree with. It begins with an open heart, one that is willing enough to listen, learn, and to allow everyone involved to find meaning and value in one another’s journey. That’s why Thomas and I are here – to share the experiences of our broken and redemption-filled lives.

Despite the obvious truths of our coming from vastly different backgrounds, upbringings, lifestyles, and mindsets, our paths mysteriously converged into the arms of the same merciful and loving Father, just at different times and under different circumstances. With lives fueled from painful life lessons, I believe our results produced sage material for these very raw testimonies, with simply one goal - offering all the praise and glory to the Only One Who made it possible - Jesus Christ, The Risen Son of God. For now, I begin this personal journey down our contemplative collaboration the same way I intend to leave it – with the following words – God uses ALL His people—every size, every color, every shape, and every background—to further His glorious Kingdom. Though some may be quick to dismiss those they don’t understand, each person has a role to play. It is our duty to recognize that truth and make room for it to unfold.

What Most People Get Wrong About the Homosexual Life

Before I go any further, let’s lay it all out on the table. I realize that for many people, their only knowledge of the gay lifestyle has been derived from the lenses of controversy, social media outcry, outlandish caricatures of city Pride celebrations, and the growing number of people engulfed in gender dysphoria. People rarely consider the presence of a silent minority who live in garage door communities; they save money for modest vacations, volunteer for worthy organizations, and tend their yards wearing atrociously boring attire - just like you do. As one who was deeply entranced in the gay community for almost four decades, I can wholly relate to opinions held by those outside the community, towards those within. I can also say firsthand, I remember yearning for the simpler days when one could easily identify themselves in any one of the four “LGBT” letters. Today, it’s abundantly clear that this ever-expanding acronym will not stop until it swallows the entire alphabet in its path, and no doubt, will advance its way towards adding special characters and “to the power of” mathematical exponentials to its moniker. I peacefully, and gratefully, leave that identity crisis to the ones best suited to do so. While anyone can extract the worst from the four above-mentioned lenses and bind that perception to the gay community as a whole, realize, they’re doing a tremendous disservice to an entire populus, many of whom are simply fighting with every fiber of their being to make it through a lifetime of mire you cannot possibly relate to, just like you have done, and just like I had painfully done.

I have very fond memories of the love, support, and encouragement provided by so many beautiful Christians who met me right where I was – confused, hurt, and seeking purpose. They were the ones I joyfully acknowledge had a pivotal role in bringing me to Jesus Christ, and ultimately, to where I am today.

Coming Out: The Cost of Being a Homosexual Son

I remember the day I came out to my mom. It was like yesterday. I told her to take all the time she needed to consume what I’d told her, and I would still be there. After all, it took me years to come to terms with this reality myself, so I certainly didn’t expect her to come to terms in just one shocking conversation. A week later, she called me and said two things I will never forget. “I appreciate how you allowed me the time to adjust to what you told me. It made all the difference. And you’re the same son I’ve always loved.” She also told me that she’d always known. So did my grandmother. My father was an entirely different story. I ended up having to re-live the delivery of that conversation after my mom prepped him beforehand. While the image of the “perfect son” still lived in my mom’s head, I was dead in my father’s. I moved frequently around the country for my job, and calling my parents was a weekly occurrence. Upon hearing my voice, my dad would skip the conversation entirely and say, “Lemme get your mom.” His and my relationship would never be the same.

The Christmas before I told them, I was home visiting my parents. Understand, I had been carrying an undisclosed secret from everyone in the world, including myself. It was affecting my entire life - my sleep, appetite, social life, work, motivation; it even magnified my fear of public speaking. Panic attacks were a normal occurrence. Midnight after I’d returned to my parents from visiting my college roommate, I looked into the bathroom mirror, and I told myself I had two choices. I would either: (1) kill myself after I flew back to Boston, or (2) I would dig further into this potential life I’d been avoiding and face the fact that I might be gay. At the time, suicide was a more viable option as the prospect of revealing to my parents that they’d never become grandparents was too great a burden for me to bear, not to mention the sheer embarrassment they’d feel amongst their tight circle of friends. I calculated that a dead “straight” son was much better than a living “gay” one. Ultimately both my sisters would take their lives for their own reasons, so the pressure to succeed had always been on me for years. Ensuring my parents’ life efforts with their children were not entirely in vain, I took it upon myself to overcompensate in every area of my life. The self-induced pressure was excruciating. I lived in that darkness for nearly four decades.

I want to take a moment to point out something that may not be as obvious to everyone else as it was to me. Before I “came out” to my family, the question I often asked myself was this-” Why in God’s green earth would ANYONE, WILLINGLY, HAPPILY accept, seek, or DESIRE a life of hiding, subjecting oneself to ridicule, alienation, embarrassment and REJECTION from those I rely upon for EMOTIONAL SUSTENANCE - all for the EFFIN sake of “choosing” the gay LIFESTYLE?” Rhetorical question. No one in their right and sane mind would consciously “choose” to live this way.

I’d known since I was five, but I buried those thoughts early, and I buried them deep. Or so I thought. There were constant reminders along the way. Speed Racer and Luke Skywalker didn’t exactly help me in keeping those thoughts at bay, but I was convinced for years it was a phase I’d eventually grow out of. For those who are wondering, I was not molested, and I was not sexually compromised as a child. I spent years wondering to myself what my close male childhood friends ever saw in the “Hustler” magazines they’d sneak into my basement and salivate over at my birthday parties when I was a kid. I’d always been the odd man out, but I never understood why until I turned 22.

The Real-World Consequences of Being Openly Homosexual

In the years to follow my coming out in 1992, I would begin to experience some of the things my parents were afraid I’d encounter:

I was thrown out of my Greenwich apartment in the middle of winter after the owner surmised I was gay. I only had three days to find a new place. It was freezing cold and pelting rain as my buddies and I drove the rental truck from her driveway, “You’re from the devil! You’re from the devil!” she screamed as she shook one pointer finger.
After working a straight 72-hour shift, I returned to the parking lot to find the word “FAG” poorly spray-painted across my driver’s side door with a brake fluid-filled water pistol.
I was passed over promotions in positions I was long and well-qualified for, but ultimately didn’t fit in with the image of the good old boys.
Another amazing job offer was rescinded a few days after I’d received it; the company learned that I was mid-way into a divorce (with a man). They found another candidate that had more “closely matched their needs.”
After tithing a considerable amount of money to a church I was passionate about, I was encouraged by the Lead Pastor to find another church home following my own admission of my relationship with my then partner of two years.
After nearly a decade of donating blood, I was rejected for having crossed the wrong “X”. No, it wasn’t AIDS or HIV, I was just ‘gay’ and that was enough.

I share all that background because it provides valuable insight to the spiritual journey ahead, which, like my sexuality, would remain hidden another 15 years before I’d discover it.

When God Confronted My Homosexual Identity

In February 2000, I was in the process of selling my first home. A promotion had relocated me from sunny Phoenix to frigid downtown Chicago the weekend of Valentine’s Day. Yeah, great timing wasn’t always my strongest suit. I’d also been deeply rooted in my first significant same-sex relationship with a guy I met the previous October. We discussed at great length, the feasibility of him upending his job, family, and personal life to follow me. We also shared two enormous dogs. It was not a small undertaking. He agreed to make the sacrifice but stayed behind until he tied things down with his job. My life was about to dramatically change in ways my imagination could never have been conceived.

A few weeks into my new assignment, I remember kneeling on the floor next to my hotel bed with a Bible in my hand. It wasn’t even mine; I found it inside the nightstand drawer. I wasn’t sure why I was kneeling, but someone told me if you opened a Bible with your eyes closed and pointed to a random page, the scripture you pointed to would provide some instruction. This was just another one of my desperate attempts to seek relief from the anxiety I felt waiting for my house to sell. To this day, I’m not sure whether to curse that person or hug them for telling me about Bible roulette. I literally, just now, made that up - “Bible Roulette.” I’m sure it exists somewhere, but I would quickly learn, this “game” was just as dangerous to me as its shooting counterpart. My finger unmistakably landed directly on top of Leviticus 18:22 (“You shall not lie with a man as with a woman. It is an abomination”). And so began a tumultuous 25-year journey into questioning my entire life’s existence.

That day on the floor would be three years shy from my having any formal inkling to inviting Jesus Christ into my life. The next year’s 2001 attacks on our country would fill the Moody Church on La Salle Drive to the brim. I know it shook me enough to attend. That Sunday still stands out in my mind. I hadn’t been so moved to even enter a church since accompanying my grandmother from the age of nine to twelve, and that was sporadic at best. I invited “Lee”, one of the church ushers to join me for dinner one night after work. I had some questions for him. We met at a diner a few blocks away where Lee asked me over dinner if I was saved. I wasn’t sure how to answer his question. I’d traveled with so much baggage from my childhood and the years prior. I really had no way to answer his question with any level of intelligence.

I managed to ask Lee “the question” that had been plaguing me since that day of Bible roulette. I asked him what the church, and God, would think if I was gay. Without quoting damning scripture, he responded with, “Here, I’ve got something for you.” He handed me a brand-new Bible and a wallet card depicting Jesus Christ holding up an exhausted man gripping a mallet in his hand, trails of blood spilled like a river on the ground below them. I remember feeling horrified by the picture, until I understood its meaning. Jesus was holding ME right after I’d driven the nails into His body. That image stayed with me for a very long time. Looking back on that night, it’s easy for me to see that Lee held the future of my Christian faith in his hands. A single turn in one direction opened my heart to consider who God was; a turn in the other and it could have frightened me away indefinitely. My dinner with Lee also helped to serve up one of the most spiritually supernatural events I will probably ever have in my life.

It was Saturday, July 13, 2003, 10:45AM. I know this because you don’t forget where you were when an event like this happens. I was on board a packed Boeing 767 bound for my home in Louisville, KY from Austin, TX. following a business trip. With only one store open, I purchased Rick Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life” assuming it was a self-help book on life/career changes. If I had known about the actual subject matter, I wouldn’t have purchased it. As we reached a smooth 30,000 feet, I was already into Chapter 7 reciting the prayer of acceptance. I was finally making that familiar invitation for Jesus Christ to come into my life. It was as genuine of a prayer I had ever recited. I poured my heart out in that prayer. When I was done, I looked up to find nothing special happening. At the very least, I’d hoped for our hitting a semi-violent air pocket to confirm God’s existence. When that didn’t happen, I returned to reading.

About 30 seconds later, I stopped reading and slammed the book into my lap. It was at that very second my entire life would change forever. I followed up to my initial prayer of surrender with this newly inspired one- “God, if you are so % omnipotent, and you can be everywhere at any time, you need to come onto this airplane, no I DEMAND You COME INTO this airplane and tell me that what you heard from my lips was absolutely sincere – I KNOW it was sincere, but I need to know YOU know it was sincere, and that You heard it from my lips.” That was my exact prayer, verbatim, less the colorful profanity I wedged between the “so” and “omnipotent.” Before I ever had the chance to finish whispering those words from my mouth, I distinctly “heard” a voice in my head. It was clearly audible; it was unforgettable, and it was NOT the pilots’. The Voice gently, but firmly, commanded me, “Look to your right”. I swear this on the life of every single pet I have ever owned. I looked to my RIGHT and I saw a woman only two rows back reading the following book, as clear as day for me to see:

I was in shock. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, let alone “hearing” a Voice in my head. I started to laugh at the absurdity of it. The laughter quickly turned to what I could only define as instant reverence. I realized what had just happened. HE happened. I felt an intense wave of tears coming. I held them back as tightly as I could. My 6’6” frame was wedged like a sardine between two strangers. It was too much for me to control. I leaned over, covered my face, and cried. My shoulders were shaking; my nose was running like a toddler’s. I know my neighbors must have thought I was having an emotional breakdown. I was certain I was getting attention from other passengers nearby, but I didn’t care. I wept from the sheer shock and joy that Someone so majestic would take the time to create even a single, fleeting moment to reveal His presence, to ME. That’s the moment I understood how small I was in the world, and just how gigantic He was. I still have difficulty articulating the pure essence of that moment. I just knew I wasn’t worthy of what I dared ask Him that morning. I wasn’t.

I also don’t believe in coincidence. This flight was sold out with over 300 people aboard. Consider the infinitesimal probability that of the three-hundred passengers, it only took ONE who was (1) close enough to my seat for me to see them (2) sitting BEHIND ME, reading a book titled (3) “Answered Prayers” (4) which I only would have seen if some random “intuition” prompted me to turn my head in her direction. I knew immediately it was God on that airplane. There’s absolutely no question in that moment it was God. It only made the road ahead even more challenging for me.

I remember the next five months or so feeling like I was in the middle of a honeymoon. Nothing phased me. I had witnessed what no one I knew ever did. I wanted to go to church. I got baptized. I started to pray. And for the first time in my life, I started to read the Bible. That’s when the real work started. I had conveniently buried the memory of “Bible roulette” in my subconscious for four years, and it shot up like a cannon. It scared me. I then skipped over to Revelation 22:15 where I was lumped in with dogs, sorcerers, murderers, idolaters, and anyone who practiced lying. I didn’t perceive myself as any of those mentioned, so I thought I might be safe. I continued reading other books from the Bible, where I carefully sidestepped any uncomfortable scripture that might spoil my newfound experience with God.

A few years later, I would meet another person that would change my life forever. I met “Andrew” in 2005, the same week Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. That should have been its own sign of providence for my life. It was love at first sight. We were together for 16 years. We got married after it was passed into law. The first nine years of that relationship happily obliterated every insignificant experience that followed my break-up in 2001. Every Christmas, Andrew and I would receive a card from his grandfather, a retired Southern Baptist preacher, along with a check for $15. His heart-warming card was filled with the standard wishes of strong health and good cheer, accompanied by every biblical scripture damning us both to eternal suffering. By our third Christmas, I had the lineup memorized: Leviticus 18:22, Leviticus 20:13, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, 1 Timothy 1:1. And Genesis 19. That one always induced inspiring mental gymnastics as we debated the relationship between homosexuality vs. hospitality.

It was challenging to see the spiritual realities awaiting me from behind the veils of normalcy. Andrew and I both had successful careers. I served on the Staff Parish Committee at my church for two years. I was later hired as a department head for that same church for another two years. I led our weekly “Tuesday Night Dinner” in prayer with 300+ in attendance. I organized church fundraisers and volunteer events for packing school lunches and the annual 5K. I was a certified Stephens Minister at my church. I delivered my “Answered Prayers” testimony to over 1,000 people one Sunday at my church. I was shifting minds and opening doors for others in the gay community to find a safe and loving place to worship. Before my official starting date, I told my Pastor, my then boss, that he could still back out if he wanted to. I didn’t want him to take the heat to hire me. He said, “You’ve been made for this type of ministry. You let me fight the battles, and you just do what we hired you to do.” One member of the hiring committee pointed to the door I’d just left through after my interview - “THAT is exactly the type of leader and passion for Christ I want my kids to see here at this church.” After I was hired, twelve families left the church and their money along with it. I can recall feeling intense hurt, not just for the rejection, but the wounds my church would be assuming on my behalf.

May of 2014 arrived and the bottom of my world dropped like a rusted floor of a haunted amusement park ride. The last seven years of our relationship obliterated any identity of self that ever mattered to me. The fact I am even here to write about my life is a miracle in itself. It’s nothing short of God’s will and purpose I am here. If my number wasn’t organically called after my countless bouts of reckless behavior, I came infinitely close to meeting the same destiny as my siblings. My divorce was finalized December 2021. I would never “really” come around until the summer of 2025. The number “11” has always held profound meaning for me. It shows up. A lot. I’d never thought it would signify the number of years I would endure the most excruciating pain I would ever experience.

God forged me through the fires, and I faced a lot of them. Last year this time, I purchased black opaque blinds for all the windows of my home for the purpose of perpetually blocking the view (and the light) of my once beautiful yard that was instantly decimated by a category 4 hurricane and a tornado at 4am, only to be met with the evil fleecing of $18K in my savings by a contractor who made the storms look weak in comparison. That was the last car of a very “long black train” that lasted eleven horrendous years of my life. Last November 2025, I had a second meeting with God. He was the same One I’d met on that airplane from Austin. Only this time, we knew each other intimately. And we were about to become even closer.

That one Saturday morning last year in November I was at work when a supernatural series of events took place over a four-hour period that could only have been orchestrated by God Himself. He showed up in my office. I know now that I had been preparing for that day for a long time. I’d been doing the “wash on, wash off” moves from “Karate Kid” for decades, and I applied them to that day when everything finally came together for me:

I could no longer live a life filtering scripture by what I could live with and live without.
I couldn’t wait to read the Bible. It would finally have more fingerprints than dust.
I swore I would get to know all the ins and outs of Him.
I wanted nothing less than a personal relationship with Him, not just what I read about.
I accepted the Bible as “inerrant,” a word I had been running from for 22 years.
I made a life-long vow I intend to keep.

Celibacy was something I’d marinated on for years. Innately, I began that journey a year ago, February 21, 2025. I formally declared this vow to Jesus Christ this past November. I knew it was the right “decision” because it wasn’t a decision - it was a response to the Holy Spirit. I’d been searching for years how I could forge an intimately deeper relationship with Jesus Christ.

For me, it was a very clear element to my reaching that goal, even if only by a fraction. Not borne out of malice, spite, nor any sense of incel behavior, my vow was a truly narrowing down to the marrow of what a genuine commitment to Jesus Christ would mean for me. Initially, I’d approached it from the standpoint of “giving up something” which was such a core identify trait for me. By the time of its inception, it was nothing short of an enormous spiritual gain.

While I conscientiously strive not to attach any sense of self-identity to it, I remain continually aware of it. I often find myself contemplating it, not unlike a person’s frequent gaze upon an engagement ring, overjoyed in with Whom the bond exists. My celibacy is a continual and beautiful reminder of God’s unfailing love, grace, and mercy in my life. When I think about the tremendous sacrifice Jesus made on that cross on my behalf, on ALL our of behalf, bearing the small one I carry only pales in comparison. Matthew 16:24 often comes to mind for me:

“Then Jesus told his disciples, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”

Jesus, I will follow you wherever You lead me.

Yes, “God uses ALL His people—every size, every color, every shape, and every background—to further His glorious Kingdom. Though some may be quick to dismiss those they don’t understand, each person has a role to play. It is our duty to recognize that truth and make room for it to unfold.”

And now, we are back to the beginning of the journey. There’s so much more to go.

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I Mocked God… Until the Hospital Room Turned Into a Tunnel of Light

Thomas M. Hamilton — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:49:48 GMT

What if the moment you thought you were dying… was actually the moment you finally met the God you swore you didn’t believe in?

Be honest. Have you ever thought something like this?

Jesus wasn’t real
God doesn’t exist
Heaven is a fairy tale for adults
Sky Daddy
The Bible is just made up stories

had similar thoughts. She didn’t grow up knowing or chasing Jesus. In fact, she mocked and questioned Him, and even disassociated herself from anything that looked like church. But, she somehow found herself flat on a hospital bed with her blood pressure screaming toward disaster. Perplexed and bewildered, she started drifting somewhere she couldn’t explain.

This is a story about a woman who almost died three days after giving birth… and came back knowing, without a single doubt—that God is real.

Trust me. You need to read this one.

If you’re walking this battle and need a safe space to talk, pray, or find encouragement—join our Subscriber Chat on Substack.

We pray, talk honestly, and remind each other that freedom in Christ is possible.

The First Crack in the Old Life

’s life didn’t flip upside down slowly. It happened in 2018. One moment she was a tired mom in her late twenties who didn’t really believe in God. The next moment, she was staring straight into eternity.

Before that year, she would’ve told you God was a crutch. Something people leaned on because they didn’t want to face their own mess. Sure, she had a short season in church as a young teenager, but that didn’t end well. With an abusive mother at home, church felt like an escape at first. Then things got strange.

At twelve years old, she began having prophetic dreams and visions. Instead of being guided gently, she was treated like a problem to solve. Some thought she had demons. Others asked her deep prophetic questions she didn’t even understand. She was a child. She was scared, confused, and hurt.

So she shut it all down. She told God she wanted nothing to do with any of it. And as she grew into her late teens and early twenties, she mocked Christianity instead. If God was real, why would He let her walk through that?

The First Signs Something Is Happening

Then came her third son. Born out of wedlock. And three or four days after giving birth, something felt off.

It started with exhaustion. The kind that wraps around you like a heavy blanket and whispers, just stay here. When her children’s father came in to wake her after a long nap, she didn’t want to move. A strange thought drifted through her mind:

What if I just died here? I’d finally feel at peace.

That wasn’t normal but she brushed it aside and stood up.

The headache hit first. It was sharp and crushing. When she walked into the next room, the light was unbearable. She couldn’t open her eyes, and that’s when she knew something was wrong.

Machines, Monitors, and Uncertainty

At the hospital, her blood pressure read in the 180s over 130s. Postpartum pre-eclampsia. A rare and deadly condition. The cure for regular pre-eclampsia is delivering the baby. But postpartum? It can turn fatal fast.

Machines malfunctioned and nurses scrambled. Medication pushed through an IV. A doctor rushed in, threw on a gown, and said plainly, “We need to treat you now or you could have a stroke, seizure, and die.”

Normally, Amber would have resisted and questioned everything. But this time she didn’t argue. There was a knowing that she just has to let go. Surrender.

They moved her into a dark, windowless room. It had grey walls and a heavy air. The doctor suggested the baby’s father go home with the newborn. Before he left, Amber made an odd request for someone who didn’t believe.

“Ask your family to pray for me.”

She didn’t even fully understand why she said it. But she believes now that those prayers mattered.

Somewhere between the IV drips and the dim lighting, she began drifting.

The Pull Toward the Light

In the corner of the room, she saw them. Loved ones who had passed and bright beings filled with light. Peace rolled off them like waves. She knew right away they were angels. The love and peace they carried was nothing she had ever experienced before.

Then all of a sudden, a dramatic shift happened.

She was pulled into what she can only describe as a wormhole. Cloaked figures lined up, kneeling, placing something down—prayers? judgments? offerings? She didn’t know. But the angels were with her. And then a presence she recognized without ever studying it.

Mother Mary.

A radiant light. She had no physical face, there was just a knowing. And she heard, “I am with you. I am in you.”

Amber had no Catholic background. No deep theology about angels, yet there she was.

She was shown two realms. One was dark and heavy–filled with shadowed shapes that carried an unmistakable weight. She thought, I’m not going there.

Then beauty. Colors she had never seen before. Vibrant, alive, and beyond earthly comparison. The only thing she could recognize was a glowing blue butterfly.

There weren’t normal human emotions there. It was more like pure understanding. A thought flickered through her: Maybe I do want to live. I have children.

Instantly, she saw flashes:

Birthdays.
Conversations.
Moments with her sons, young and older.
Future glimpses.

She laughed softly and thought, If this is all I get, I’m content.

Then she was there, in the light. It wasn’t just brightness—it was unconditional love. She didn’t have thoughts, identity, or a body. It was all total, tangible, and complete love. Just love. And it was Overwhelming…but also felt completely safe. She knew this was God. It had to be.

She doesn’t know how long she was there. Time didn’t exist. She only knew she didn’t want to leave.

The Subtle Start of a New Chapter

Then suddenly—back in her body. The angels remained. She could see the bleeding in her brain, and somehow they showed her how to heal. She followed their instruction without overthinking it.

When she fully came back, she knew two things:

God is real.
And she had a purpose.

Her life changed overnight. She couldn’t deny what she experienced. But she didn’t shout it from the rooftops at first. It felt almost too wild to explain.

She went searching instead.

She wandered through spiritual paths, even into New Age ideas for a season. But she says God never left her. Emmanuel. Yeshua. Jesus. Always drawing her back.

Finally, in 2023, she was baptized. This time not out of fear or confusion—but by choice. She gave her heart fully to Jesus Christ. And the transformation continues. She understands now that perfection isn’t the goal. Belonging is. She believes she is a daughter of God. Part of a royal family she once mocked. Her story isn’t about being flawless. It’s about being found. No matter how far someone feels from God, she believes He is still reaching. Still sending messengers and still whispering life back into hearts that think they’re done.

She is living proof.

And she prays her story blesses someone who feels just one breath away from giving up.

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Grace Has a Face — And I Married Her: Meet The Woman Who Loved Me When I Was Unlovable

Thomas M. Hamilton — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:00:09 GMT

They say it takes two years to really know someone. I believe that. My wife learned that the hard way… and I hate that she had to.

But hang on. This isn’t a pity party. Stay with me because it gets better.

My wife is the definition of God’s grace. I’m not exaggerating. She has seen me at rock bottom. The worst versions of me:

The angry one.
The distant one.
The one who didn’t even like himself.

When I came into this relationship, I was a wreck. Addicted and numb. Drinking too much, chasing porn, and running from pain. I was a man hollowed out by my own choices — carrying shame like it was part of my identity.

I didn’t have hope or direction. I was slowly starving myself of self-worth and calling it normal.

And then I met my wife, .

From a Simple Steakhouse to the Side of the Road

My wife and I had our first date at a local steakhouse. Nothing fancy. Just simple food and two simple people who don’t care much for stiff etiquette.

She was nervous. I could see it in the way she talked and moved. I still remember it. But I was patient with her because I know that feeling. I’ve wrestled with anxiety myself. When you recognize it in someone else, you handle it gently.

And somehow… we just clicked.

The conversation flowed. The awkward silences never really came. Being with her felt easy and safe. Like I didn’t have to perform. She felt like my person. The one who would understand me without me having to explain everything. I can’t fully describe it without sounding dramatic, but there was this quiet nudge in my spirit that night. A calm certainty.

That’s your wife.

When Everything Fell Apart, She Leaned In

Now, lets fast forward 2 months later. We’re dating. Everything is going just fine, until one night.

Make a long story short, I was the passenger in an automobile accident (I wrote about it in the article linked above) and abandoned by the driver at the scene of the accident. My older sibling and wife found me laying on the side of the road at the crash scene along with a Good Samaritan who found me first.

I still remember what she said to me when I was laying there in agony.

“I love you.” She said it for the first time.

Two months in. I’m an alcoholic. I’m laying on the side of the road with a broken and dislocated hip (yes, my left hip is titanium now), I’m helpless, low, literally at my bottom …and she chose to love me anyway.

From this point on, I’d love to say everything was honky dory. It was not. In fact, things got even worse. I was still trying to live a somewhat secular life, even after that. Still far from God (even though He rescued me from that wreck), addicted to porn, and addicted to alcohol. My wife picked me up. She carried me, emotionally and spiritually.

That same year, 2020, I lost my older sibling to suicide. Yep, the one who found me at the wreck…geez that’s hard to type out.

She was with me through that, every..single..step of the way. I remember just absolutely breaking down one night. Almost like the weight of the grief made me collapse. My wife picked me up. She carried me, emotionally and spiritually.

And it doesn’t end there. It gets worse.

One month later. Exactly one month later, I was fired from my job. This completely devastated me. I was hopeless. They had no empathy for me. Wouldn’t even approve unemployment. But my wife—My wife luckily had a job at the time. My wife picked me up. She carried me, emotionally and spiritually.

Just when I thought the bottom couldn’t drop any lower… it did.

After getting fired in November 2020, I wasn’t even able to jump back into the job hunt. I had a hip replacement surgery already scheduled for January 2021. Not optional. If I wanted to walk without pain for the rest of my life, it had to happen.

So I was stuck.

Two more months at home. No job and in pain. Waiting for surgery. Limping around frustrated and restless. It wasn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows. I was short-tempered. Bitter some days and quiet on others.

And through all of it… she stayed steady. She didn’t just love me when I was strong. She loved me when I was stuck.

My wife picked me up. She carried me, emotionally and spiritually.

Grace in Human Form

So what’s the point of me telling you all this?

At the beginning, I said my wife is the epitome of God’s grace. That’s not romantic exaggeration. Let me explain.

There’s a psychological principle called unconditional positive regard. It’s the idea that real love isn’t dependent on performance. It isn’t based on whether you’re impressive, successful, emotionally stable, or easy to deal with.

It’s love that says, “I see you fully… and I’m not leaving.”

Most relationships don’t operate that way. Most are transactional at some level. You perform well, I stay. You meet my needs, I feel secure. You fall apart too long, I reconsider.

That’s human nature. We are wired for self-protection. When chaos enters, people distance themselves. When someone becomes a burden, resentment can grow. When pain lasts longer than expected, commitment weakens.

Psychologists also talk about attachment under stress. Stress reveals everything. It exposes insecurity, magnifies cracks, and forces a choice: withdraw… or lean in.

When I was at my lowest — addicted, grieving, unemployed, bitter, physically broken — my wife leaned in. That’s not normal instinct. That’s covenant love.

And here’s where it gets spiritual:

The Bible says in Romans 5:8 that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

While we were still a mess. That’s grace. Grace is staying when someone is hard to stay for. Jesus didn’t love us because we were lovable, He loved us knowing we would fail Him. And He still chose the cross.

My wife’s love mirrored that in a way that shook me.

She saw the worst versions of me:

The insecure one.
The addicted one.
The grieving one.
The angry one.
The unemployed one pacing around the house in sweatpants with a titanium hip and a bad attitude.

And she didn’t withdraw. She stayed.

Psychology calls that secure attachment — when someone becomes a safe base even during instability. Spiritually, I call it grace in human form. Her love confronted me. With steadiness. And, steady love does something powerful to a broken man. It makes you want to rise and overcome.

Here’s another psychological truth: people tend to become what they believe they are. If you treat a man like he’s disposable, he’ll live like he is. If you treat him like he’s redeemable, something inside him starts to fight again.

She treated me like I was redeemable.

That kind of love doesn’t excuse sin. It doesn’t ignore problems. But, it refuses to define a person by their lowest chapter.

And that’s exactly what Christ does.

He doesn’t leave us in the ditch or say, “Call Me when you’re better.” He binds wounds and restores dignity to call us to something higher.

My wife did that for me. And I didn’t deserve it.

But grace, by definition, is unearned. And that’s why I say she is the epitome of God’s grace.

Because I met Jesus in a lot of ways during those years…

But I saw Him clearly in the woman who refused to walk away.

I love you , you’re my everything.

1 Corinthians 13:4–7:

“Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

A hidden note I left for my wife in our home:

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Alcohol Was My God

Thomas M. Hamilton — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:21:21 GMT

Drinking starts as fun, but eventually leads into a trap.

You remember the loud laughs, cold drinks, and that invincible feeling that told us everything was fine. Yeah, that was a lie. Alcohol didn’t ruin us right away, but it did become the ground we stood on as everything else started to fade.

Sure–stress faded, anxiety left, and you built liquid confidence. But, eventually that stops working, and what used to be fun, isn’t so fun anymore. The excitement turns the habit into a necessity. And when something becomes habit forming, you start to depend on it.

What we once thought was freedom was actually escaping. An escape from ourselves.

Eventually, drinking wasn’t celebrating anymore. We were drinking to feel okay. And every time we reached for that glass (or bottle), something subtle but real was happening. It was slowly eroding our souls, one drink at a time.

Read on.

Thomas

Drinking started for me back in high school. If you were willing to look hard enough, it wasn’t exactly difficult to find. The people I spent time with weren’t shining examples of restraint either, so the whole environment kind of nudged things along. Plus peer pressure, and suddenly drinking just felt like the normal thing to do. Eventually you give in, mostly because you want to fit in and be seen as one of the cool ones.

And to be honest, at first it was fun. I won’t pretend otherwise. Some of my favorite memories involve sitting around a card table with friends, laughing way too loud, trading sarcastic jabs, and pretending we didn’t have a care in the world.

But as the years went on, especially into my mid and late twenties, something changed. Drinking stopped being fun and quietly became routine. Then routine became a dependency. It got to the point where I felt like I needed it just to feel normal. A few beers a night turned into the standard and beer basically replaced water.

Somewhere along the way, what started as a habit slowly turned into a god… and I didn’t even notice it happening.

January 2020.

I won’t go deeper into that night here. Instead, I’m linking an article I wrote about it before. That night is why I don’t drink anymore. It’s why I have a titanium hip. And most importantly, it’s why I follow Jesus more closely today.

👇 👇 👇

Kristen:

I didn’t wake up one day and decide alcohol was my god.

That realization came quietly and uncomfortably. It was the night I noticed how automatic it had become.

A hard day? Drink.

A heavy feeling? Drink.

Lonely? Drink.

Celebrating? Drink.

I wasn’t doing it to party anymore. I was doing it to cope. What scared me wasn’t how often I drank, it was how quickly I reached for it. Before prayer, before sitting with my feelings, before asking God what He wanted me to learn in the moment. Alcohol became the thing I trusted to take the edge off life, and it worked. .until it didn’t.

It numbed the pain, but it also numbed my discernment.

It quieted my thoughts, but it also silenced God’s voice.

I told myself I had control but anything you need to function already has power over you. That’s when it hit me, this wasn’t just a habit, it was a substitute. I wasn’t worshiping alcohol with words, but with dependence, routine, and escape. I used to give it access to parts of me that were meant to be surrendered to God. Here’s the part I want to be honest about: God didn’t shame me. He didn’t yank it out of my hand in anger. He showed me, gently, that I was asking alcohol to do what only He could do. I stopped running from the discomfort. I started sitting with it, praying instead of pouring, and journaling instead of numbing. Healing didn’t happen overnight, but freedom started the moment I told the truth. Alcohol was never my peace — God always was, I just had to let Him be.

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Final Thoughts

Looking back now, it feels obvious. At the time, we were both completely oblivious to the wreckage we were causing our souls.

Addictions are a h*** of a thing. They slide in quietly, pull up a chair, and convince you they belong there. It promises comfort, relief, and control (masquerades as something pleasant, who does that remind you of?)… and for a while they even deliver. Until one day you realize the thing you leaned on is now the thing you can’t stand without.

And that realization is humbling, but also the start to real freedom.

Because the moment you tell the truth, the illusion starts to break. You stop pretending it’s harmless.

And, let’s not forget this: God isn’t waiting on the other side of that confession with disappointment. He’s waiting with open arms and patience you don’t feel like you deserve.

So turn from your sin. Run back to God. Come back home.

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Running From Home, Running From God

Thomas M. Hamilton — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:00:19 GMT

didn’t wake up one day and decide to stop obeying God. It was more subtle than that. Slowly and surely he became distant and eventually so far away from God that opposing Him just seemed like the right thing to do. Or so he thought.

Mick grew up in faith but only learned how to hide his secret sins well.

For years, his life looked like it was getting better. But inside, he was lying—to his wife, to himself, and eventually to God. He thought as long as he kept things buried, grace would cover it.

He found out the hard way, he was wrong.

Read on.

A Childhood That Taught Me Extremes

childhood wasn’t normal. His parents divorced when he was seven. He’s 34 now, and the truth behind that split has never really been owned—but affairs on both sides seem to be the quiet truth.

After the divorce, he lived between two extremes.

At his mom’s house, Christianity meant fear. Everything was going to send you to hell. Music. TV. Anything outside church walls. Scripture wasn’t explained—it was weaponized. He learned to fear God, but never to know Him.

At his dad’s house, there were no rules at all. Women came and went. His dad married and divorced again, and during that time Mick and his brother were exposed to things young boys never should be. There was no discipline or boundaries.

Later, his stepfather became verbally abusive and controlling, eventually physical with his mom. Mick stayed grounded constantly, forced to work landscaping jobs, carrying a pressure that doesn’t show up on paper. By ninth grade, something in him had already started to crack.

By sixteen, the adults had given up. Mick moved in with his dad. That’s when lust stopped being a temptation and became a lifestyle. His father openly encouraged cheating—love one woman, keep the rest on the side, just don’t get caught. Mick believed him.

Around the same time, he fell in with the wrong crowd and dove into the death metal scene. He didn’t deny Christ existed, just decided to oppose Him.

Running Hard and Falling Fast

At seventeen, Mick joined the Army to escape home. A teenage kid, alone, with no moral compass and full access to alcohol—he was headed somewhere dark fast.

By eighteen, he’d deployed. When he came back, sleep disappeared. So he drank, and he drank a lot.

During that season, he entered a toxic relationship filled with cheating and instability. She got pregnant. He married her trying to “do the right thing.”

That collapsed quickly.

After a brutal fight, she took a bottle of birth control pills and miscarried. Mick watched. That left him numb, angry, and absolutely empty. Shortly after, she left him and he hasn’t seen her since. That was 2012.

The next few years were divorce papers, heavy drinking, and sleeping around nonstop.

In 2013, Mick met the woman who is now his wife—while still married. He didn’t tell her but they started a relationship anyway, fueled by alcohol and desire.

At work, he excelled and made rank fast. He looked successful. But, he was doing what most men do: escapism. Trying to stay busy while burying the deep issues down inside. The uncomfortable truth? He was unstable and spiraling.

A Life Built on Lies

When she found out about his marriage, she stayed. But that made the problems multiply. He finalized his divorce and married her the same week. The marriage began already bleeding.

Mick was drinking a fifth of whiskey most nights. Entire chunks of those years are gone from his memory. He disappeared for nights, lying effortlessly about where he’d been. And, two things made that easy:

His father normalized cheating.
A childhood of constant punishment taught him how to lie convincingly.

Eventually, it all blew up.

His wife found him passed out drunk, phone open to another woman. When confronted, Mick snapped. It turned physical—not hitting, but terrifying. She tried to run and he tried to stop her. A neighbor intervened and the police were called. They both went to jail.

The Army found out.

During a no-contact order, Mick moved in with another woman and went right back to the same ol patterns: drinking and cheating. When the order expired, his wife reached out and said she wanted a divorce.

For the first time in his life, Mick said something different.

“We need God.”

The Lie That Finally Broke Me

They went to church and met with a pastor. Mick prayed a sinner’s prayer. There was visible change—but massive lies stayed buried. He told himself some sins were “between him and God.” That lie kept him comfortable.

He deployed again.

When he came home, things were calm—for a while. Then he called the woman he’d lived with during the no-contact order. She told him she’d been pregnant and he had disappeared. She had an abortion.

It wrecked him. He drank again. Stayed the night. Lied again.

They moved to Alaska. Outwardly, life improved.

Years passed. He stayed faithful physically. They attended a charismatic church that didn’t preach the gospel. They served in youth ministry. Their first child was born in 2019.

Then COVID shut everything down.

At home, Mick and his wife began reading the Bible—slowly, verse by verse. For the first time, Mick actually saw Scripture and conviction followed. The gospel finally made sense.

During a book study, they came to one question:

“Is there any sin you need to confess?”

Mick looked his wife in the eyes and said, “No.”

The moment the word left his mouth, fear hit him like a freight train. The reality of hell became real. He saw himself clearly, saved in name only. Spiritually dead and a liar.

The Walk Home

At the park later that day, pushing his daughter on a swing, Mick knew his testimony was a lie. He knew salvation was worth more than hiding and he knew the truth had to come out.

That walk home is when Mick knows he was saved.

That night, he confessed everything. It took days. His wife was shattered. Years of deception spilled into the light. It hurt deeply—and it healed deeply.

She stayed. At first, for their daughter. Then God healed her heart. She even apologized to Mick for staying only for the child—something he never deserved.

Nothing Left to Hide

Today, six years later, they have four daughters.

Nothing is hidden or feared. Their story has helped others—because of how honest and open they are about it.

Mick isn’t the man he was and he’s finally free.

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I Had Faith Around Me—But Never In Me

Thomas M. Hamilton — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:02:48 GMT

He grew up in a conservative American home.
Faith was around, but it stayed in the background—like a dusty family photo no one really looked at anymore.

He was confirmed in the Lutheran church, went through the motions, and learned the right Christian words. But…. belief never really took root.

There were no heroes to imitate or deep sense of meaning to chase. So, he escaped instead—sports, video games, and distractions that made the days move faster.

But College? Well that cracked something new open.

Philosophy. Political science. Big ideas. Big questions.
For the first time, his mind felt alive. He flirted with the idea of becoming a professor—someone who could explain the world to others.

But that path felt risky. Unstable and too uncertain.

So he chose the safer option.
A Job, mortgage, and a marriage.
A respectable life. The perfect American dream, right?

Wrong. Underneath it all, there was an unsettling reality knew he was about to butt heads with.

Read on.

The Descent

Everything looked successful.
But, in real life he was quietly unraveling.

He hadn’t really grown up—at least not where it counted. Debt piled up and responsibility felt heavy. That’s when entertainment became an addiction and avoidance became a habit. And, under the weight of all this, his marriage was quietly suffering a heavy strain that he had avoided.

Just when you thought that was already enough to handle, then came infertility.

Eventually, they were blessed with two children through a donor. A miracle, honestly. But instead of confidence, fatherhood exposed something painful.

He felt completely unequipped.

Leading a family felt like being handed the controls of a plane mid-flight with no training manual. This is when anxiety came in and took over.

So, he searched for answers everywhere except God:

Old philosophy books.
Self-help shelves.
Leadership podcasts.
Even the occult.

Nothing worked.

The Breaking Point

Then RSV hit the house.

Sick kids, crying, and chaos.

PAUSE HERE – For those with children, you know exactly how stressful this can become. Moving on…

And instead of stepping up, he froze.

Anxiety locked his body in place. He couldn’t even bring himself to be near his own children. That realization cut deeper than fear—it exposed how empty he really was.

In desperation, he turned on a podcast.
Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau.

Then Pageau said something that landed like a brick to the chest:

The crucifixion is “the foundation of the world.”

“Well that’s terrifying to think about,” he thought to himself.

If that were true… then everything rested on something he didn’t understand—and certainly hadn’t submitted to.

Out of options, he stepped into the shower, dropped to his knees, and prayed to a Messiah he wasn’t even sure he believed in.

Just a simple promise:
If You save me, I’ll give You my life.

He felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. He didn’t feel changed in that moment, but he survived the day.

The Slow, Quiet Transformation

A few days later, something happened! A nudge that led him to go to church.

This time was different.

The songs actually made sense….and the sermon? Landed.
It felt like someone finally turned the volume up on a frequency that had always been there and over the next few months, everything shifted:

Responsibility replaced avoidance.
Old habits got cut loose.
Love started showing up in practical ways.

He grew hungry to know God and spent hours disappeared into theology and scripture. The same mind that once chased empty ideas was being retrained.

In July, he was baptized. Still no thunder. But a few days later, driving home from work, something happened. A wave of peace & love overwhelmed him. It was unmistakable.

Grace he didn’t earn.
Mercy he didn’t deserve.

The New Reality

Life didn’t become perfect—but it became anchored.

His marriage grew stronger, prayer became normal, and the family moved onto a piece of land that felt like provision, not coincidence.

Even social media—once an escape—got exposed for what it was. Another place to hide. So he walked away.

That old intellectual hunger didn’t disappear. It found its right place.

Scripture no longer felt like a collection of disconnected stories, but a single, intentional design—layered with structure, rhythm, and meaning. What once seemed random now felt held together.

Where he used to see emptiness, he now sees intention and order.
God’s fingerprints woven through everything.

And his purpose?

It isn’t complicated. It’s simply to learn what is true, live honestly, and pass it on to others.

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When Repentance Finally Cost Me Everything

Thomas M. Hamilton — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:03:35 GMT

This testimony doesn’t fit neatly into church-shaped boxes. And honestly, it never has. It isn’t clean, quick, or inspirational in the way people expect. It’s long, layered, and took decades to understand.

For most of his life, he thought his biggest problem was sin.

Lust, alcohol, anger and bad decisions stacked on top of worse ones.

Compounding sin and suffering if you will…

But what he didn’t realize—until decades later—was that sin was just the smoke. The real fire was a lot deeper and he didn’t trust God enough to sit with pain. So he did what men always try to do: fix themselves.

With women, distraction, numbing, and rebellion. It worked just well enough to keep him stuck….and comfortable…until he wasn’t.

This is ’s story. And trust me, you want to stick around to read this one.

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A Childhood That Looked Fine From the Street

Photo by Frederik Löwer on Unsplash

He was born into instability. Divorce came early. Then remarriage. Then divorce again. For a brief stretch—just a couple of years—life looked normal. With bike rides, playing ball in the street, and friends sleeping over. From the outside, everything passed with flying colors if you had to take the child upbringing examination test.

But behind the curtains? Yea, no. It definitely wasn't.

His mother drank heavily and relied on prescription drugs to manage depression and mood swings. Eventually, his brother was sent away to live with his father in Florida. That loss hit hard. Not long after, his mother overdosed and was hospitalized. While there, she had an affair. The marriage ended. Whatever sense of safety existed vanished.

Around that same time, he lost his dog—the one constant source of comfort he had. He was told the dog would be kept by friends and that he could visit anytime. Instead, it was gotten rid of. That moment mattered more than people realize. Something hardened in him after that. Permanently.

School fell apart. Grades tanked. Rebellion followed. Smoking. Drinking. Anything that dulled the noise inside. Moves piled up. Another remarriage. More instability. Eventually, he was expelled from high school. At sixteen, he was thrown out of the house and stayed with friends, drifting.

By nineteen, his girlfriend was pregnant. They married out of obligation more than wisdom. A child was born. Responsibility arrived. Addiction stayed.

Alcohol had teeth. Porn had claws. Lust was constant. Even after his newborn daughter landed in the hospital days after birth, he stopped at home first—to indulge. Drinking wasn’t daily, but when it happened, it went too far. Anger followed.

The Night That Almost Ended Everything

One night, drunk and enraged, he decided his brother deserved to die. He put a .45 in his waistband, drove to his brother’s house, and planned to shoot him without a word. Only one thing stopped it—his brother wasn’t home.

The next morning, the weight of what almost happened crushed him. He knew he was out of control. He didn’t know much about God, but he knew people said God could save. So he prayed the only way he knew how and surrendered everything, desperate for help.

What followed was intense zeal:

Scripture.
Discipline.
Cutting off anything that felt worldly.
Pornographic books burned in a barrel—though even then, part of him resisted.
Reading the Bible like a man dying of thirst.

Trying to Obey Without Being Healed

Still, the battle with lust never fully ended. Short victories came and falls followed. Shame lingered and all he heard was the usual Christian explanations, but nothing brought lasting freedom.

His wife didn’t share his seriousness about faith. She attended church, but his hunger for holiness created distance between them. He wasn’t interested in being a “good Christian.” He wanted to be true before God. That gap became a fracture.

Church life didn’t help. A non-denominational church he trusted became controlling and fear-driven. Anxiety grew unbearable, God felt dangerous, and eventually he walked away from faith altogether just to survive.

When Numbing Becomes a Skill

Years later, an anxiety attack dragged him back. He tried again. Fought again. Even vowed purity—and kept it for six months, his longest stretch of victory. When he fell, it broke him. He decided he simply wasn’t cut out to be a man of God.

His marriage collapsed. Both numbed themselves—him with alcohol and lust, her with her own escapes. Violence was gone, but numbness replaced it. Eventually, he left, convinced it had to end. He sought comfort elsewhere and entered an emotional affair. The night he drove to that woman’s house, dread settled over him like a warning. He ignored it.

Marriages Built on Pain Instead of Trust

Twelve years of misery followed. A second marriage born in rebellion produced suffering he wouldn’t wish on anyone. Still, he learned—about compassion, brokenness, and how religious platitudes fail wounded people. God remained faithful through discipline and mercy alike.

That marriage ended too and loneliness followed. The addiction deepened and he demanded God give him a woman—or else. Be careful what you ask for…because he got it. One appeared immediately and the pattern repeated:

Infatuation.
Alcohol.
Five years of slow decay.

Even marriage couldn’t fix what was broken….then everything collapsed.

The Moment Bargaining Stopped

One evening, sitting alone, he stopped bargaining with God. Stopped asking for fixes. He looked honestly at thirty years of rebellion and confessed all of it—every shortcut, every half-hearted repentance, every attempt to heal pain with counterfeit love.

That night was surrender.

He finally understood: you can’t ask God to fix what He never ordained. Healing comes through obedience. And obedience, when you’re broken, hurts.

God answered.

Things shifted quickly. Direction became clear. Strength came to walk away. Healing followed obedience, not the other way around.

Today, he stands free from addiction for over eighteen months. Surrounded by faithful people. Still human. Still learning. But no longer enslaved.

What remains true is simple:

Obedience costs less than rebellion.
God stays faithful even when we don’t.
Mercy doesn’t expire.
And it’s never too late to rebuild—if you’re willing to tear down what was built on the wrong foundation.

Grace met him late.

And, it met him fully.

I dont use buy me a coffee….sorry??

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When the Smartest Person I Knew Went Silent: A Brother’s Testimony After Veteran Suicide

Thomas M. Hamilton — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:31:12 GMT

(Disclaimer: there were many held back tears while typing this article)

Here’s the truth…I’ve been putting this off for a while.

It’s been sitting in my drafts for 4 months. Why? I don’t want to bring up the memories again.

But, grief is random. It comes when you least expect it. Especially at times when you want it to go away. And, writing seems to be a healthy outlet for me.

It was just a random Wednesday night. Nothing out of the ordinary. I didn’t expect my world to be flipped upside down….but it did. A memory that will always stick with me. A hole in my heart that will never mend. What am I talking about?

Sibling Loss. But not just sibling loss. Suicide loss.

There’s no polite way to talk about losing a sibling to suicide—especially when that sibling is the one you always thought would outlive everybody because he just knew stuff. My brother Brian wasn’t just smart; the man was basically a walking Google search bar. Ask him about cars, history, mechanical engineering, which bolt should go where, or what country had the best coffee—he’d have an answer before you finished the question.

And then one day… silence.

This is getting really hard to type….bear with me please.

What I am about to share with you is my testimony of surviving sibling loss to suicide, navigating the kind of grief that doesn’t sit politely in the corner, and clinging to faith when faith was the only thing left standing.

If you read this far….please…check on your siblings. I beg you. Even if you aren’t on good terms with them. Make amends and forgive.

I don’t say this to make anyone feel guilty but to warn them: time is short and you never know the last time you will speak to your brother/sister/step sibling.

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Brian: The Adventurous Navy Engineer With a Laugh You Couldn’t Ignore

Brian served in the United States Navy as a mechanical engineer. He traveled the world—literally. Half the time I didn’t know what continent he was on, but I remember him sending pictures of mountains, boats, sunsets, or some tiny street vendor you’d only find if you got lost… which he was good at doing.

He loved muscle cars… the louder the better. He loved kayaking and anything that involved being outside where the rest of us were complaining about the heat, bugs, or humidity. Not him. He’d just laugh and say something sarcastic like, “Nature builds character.”

He was hilarious. Sharp. Quick. The kind of guy that could make a funeral director laugh. And he didn’t just know things—he understood them. Veteran life. Engineering. People. Life. You could hand him a broken engine or a broken moment and he’d figure it out.

Which is why October 28, 2020 never made sense.

The Day Everything Changed

Surviving a sibling’s suicide is like having the ground snatched from under you and being expected to keep walking. You don’t get to prepare and its devastating.

Veteran suicide is a wound that hits differently. You know they carried things silently. I don’t have a clue what my brother was holding and I never will.

You know the military trains them to “push through,” and they fight battles long after coming home. But knowing doesn’t soften anything.

I don’t even remember the full conversation of that day. I just remember the weight. The kind that sits on your chest and dares you to breathe.

I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. My wife, Kali, was cooking when I received the phone call from my Father.

“Hey Mark, please come to the hospital. Your brother shot himself and he’s not going to make it.”

I’ll never forget that. I didn’t even know what to say to my Father. I was in such shock and denial.

“I’m on my way Dad!” I quickly exclaimed to him. I bolted to the kitchen and informed my wife what happened. I quickly ran out of the house. I hopped in my truck and peeled out of the drive way.

Looking back now, I didn’t really know what to think in that moment other than hurry up and get to the hospital.

I was in denial. I didn’t want to accept what had just happened.

“Brian? Really? He would never do that,” I thought to myself.

But humans have this tendency to try and block things when something extremely traumatic has just dropped on them.

At The Hospital

My family and I waited in a holding room adjacent to the ER at our local hospital.

I’ll never forget when the doctors walked in. They spoke to my parents directly, “what you’re about to see is not normal.”

Not normal? What did they mean by that?

My father…immediately wept. But not like an adult crying. He cried like a child. I didn’t see my father anymore. I saw a hurt little boy who needed comfort.

One of the doctors laid a hand on his shoulder and escorted him and my Mother to the ICU.

I didn’t like this. Not at all.

In The Room

Eventually, the doctors came for me and my younger siblings. The walk was long…..too long. I was nervous more than anything. What was I about to see?

As we approached the door I became extremely anxious. I didn’t know what to expect.

We walked in…and I saw everything.

My brother was lifeless. Only kept alive by machines pumping air into his lungs. He was brain dead. His body just barely hanging on. The compression from the gun shot made his head swell like a balloon. A towel was draped over him so it would be less gruesome.

Like my father, I wept immediately.

I kept crying, “my brother, my brother, my brother.” That’s all I could get out. I knew he was gone. Forever. Never to return.

The nurse informed us that he would only be alive for hours. So, my family and I waited. We sat there and held his hand, prayed, kissed his forehead, and whispered our love to him.

Eventually he became cold to the touch and we knew the time was near.

The machines started buzzing like crazy and his blood pressure spiked. We knew this was it.

We all watched as my brother took his final breath. And that was that. His chest didn’t move anymore. He was still. Lifeless.

My brother was dead.

We all walked up to him, kissed his forehead, and said our goodbyes.

That was the last day I saw my brother. October 28, 2020.

Walking Through Grief When the Road Doesn’t Make Sense

People talk about “healing” like it’s a straight line. Spoiler: it’s not. It’s more like a Kentucky back road—unexpected turns, bumps, potholes, and one random chicken crossing for no reason.

Some days, the memories feel like warm sunlight. Other days, they hit like a wave you didn’t see coming.

Losing a veteran sibling to suicide brings layers most people don’t understand:

The guilt you can’t explain
The questions you can’t answer
The “what ifs” that try to move in like unwanted roommates
The tension between honoring their service and grieving their pain

But faith kept showing up. Just real steady—like a quiet hand on your shoulder reminding you that grief is real, but God is still God.

Give As You Feel Led

The Faith That Carried Us

There’s a verse people quote a lot in grief:
“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted…”
But when your heart is actually broken, that hits different.

We held on to faith because we didn’t have anything else.

Just faith.

And maybe that’s the point.

We learned this:
God does His best work in the space where we admit we have nothing left to bring. Grief didn’t push God away—it pulled Him closer. Tears became prayers. Silence became worship. Confusion became surrender.

And slowly—even if awkwardly—hope came back.

Why I Share This Story

Surviving the suicide of a sibling is lonely. Losing a veteran brother adds a whole different ache. And yet, I know there’s someone reading this who’s standing exactly where I stood the day the world spun off its hinges.

So hear me clearly:

You are not weird for hurting this long.
Or weak for missing them this much.
You are not faithless for asking God questions.
And you are not alone.

My brother Brian is more than his last day.
Your loved one is too.

Veteran suicide awareness matters because behind every uniform is a soul carrying weight we can’t always see. Sharing our testimonies matters because they remind someone else, “Hey, you’re going to get through this—even if right now you don’t believe it.”

Dear Reader If You Made It This Far…..

You’re probably wondering something a lot of people are scared to say out loud:

“Do people who die by suicide go to Heaven?”

I used to wrestle with that question too. It’s the kind of thought that sits in the back of your mind like a weight you don’t want to pick up… but you carry it anyway.

Here’s what I can tell you.

When my brother died, he had a Bible beside him. Right there next to him. And I can’t tell you what prayers he whispered or what battles he was fighting in those final moments… but I can tell you this:

Anyone who genuinely reaches for Jesus—even in their weakest, darkest, most desperate moment—is not turned away.

Jesus doesn’t say, “Come to Me… but only if you’re doing well.”
He doesn’t say, “I’ll save you… unless you’re struggling.”
He says:

“Whoever comes to Me I will never cast out.”

That verse hits differently when you’re grieving someone you love.

So if you’re sitting there with that question beating around in your chest, take comfort in something Jesus Himself taught:

Didn’t He leave the ninety-nine for the one?

Think about that.
He didn’t wait for the lost sheep to fix itself.

He went after it.
He carried it home.

If Jesus chases ordinary sinners like us, why wouldn’t He run after someone who was hurting so deeply they couldn’t see a way forward?

I believe Jesus met my brother in that moment of desperation.
I believe grace is bigger than the battles we can’t see.
And I believe the Shepherd doesn’t stop being a Shepherd just because the valley is dark.

So if you’re wondering about your loved one… take heart.

Let Jesus handle the part you can’t. He’s far more merciful, patient, and tender than we usually give Him credit for.

I have hope.

You should too.

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Rest In Peace Brian. I Miss You Dearly.

She Met Jesus at Five—and Spent Years Being Told to Let Him Go

Thomas M. Hamilton — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 14:21:09 GMT

met Jesus in a kitchen at five years old… and spent the rest of her childhood learning what it meant to cling to Him when everything else fell apart.

Beatings. Rejection. Spiritual confusion. Families that promised love but demanded she deny Christ. Again and again, the world tried to take Him from her—but every time she cried out, Jesus stayed. And, It wasn’t always easy answers or instant resolution. It was protection, provision, and a quiet faith that refused to die.

This isn’t a story about a perfect life.
It’s about a faithful God who never let go—no matter how dark the room became.

And it raises a hard, honest question for all of us:

If God can clothe the lilies and feed the birds… can He be trusted with a life like this?
“Consider the lilies of the field…” (Matthew 6:28–30)

Stick with me. This testimony has something to say to anyone who’s ever wondered if God really sees them.

A Faith That Started Early

Her oldest sister led her in the sinner’s prayer at home, standing in the kitchen. Even at that young age (five years old), she knew she needed Jesus. There was already a hunger in her heart for something more—something she wasn’t receiving at home.

Her home life was emotionally neglectful and abusive. There was physical abuse as well. Her stepfather was Jewish and emotionally abusive, often enabling the harm instead of stopping it. From early on, she felt different—like the black sheep, the outcast. While others around her accepted ideas like evolution without question, she didn’t. She didn’t have a solid Christian foundation at home—only what she could gather from others—but even then, Jesus seemed to keep her protected. She believes now that He spared her from even worse harm.

When False Faith Didn’t Sit Right

Around age six or seven, she spent time with neighbors who were Catholic. They taught her the rosary and introduced her to Catholicism. She routinely visited those neighbors. Once, she visited their new church, when nobody was in it except the two families. Something felt deeply wrong to her. Even as a child, she knew this wasn’t the Christianity of Jesus. She recognizes now that it was the Lord warning her spirit.

Fast forward to age nine, during Christmas, she was simply standing in a room where her parents kept the Christmas presents. That moment led to her first severe beating. She was beaten brutally. In the middle of it, she cried out to Jesus to protect her. And somehow, every time, the abuse stopped short of becoming even worse. As the beatings continued over time, she would cry out to Jesus again and again because the pain was unbearable—and He continued to protect her.

Around the same period, she visited relatives in Georgia on her stepfather’s side of the family, who were Jewish. Her stepfather’s mother’s husband confronted her harshly when she spoke about Jesus, demanding, “Were you there?” He aggressively challenged her faith, even though she was only seven. She didn’t know how to defend herself with words—only with what she felt in her spirit. Her parents stood by and did nothing, later telling her she wasn’t allowed to defend her faith.

Despite everything, she always knew Jesus was with her. Whenever she had the chance, she went to church. She always went to the altar. She explored different churches over the years, but the message often felt watered down.

(Pictured below, a poem that kept going throughout her childhood)

Drifting, Doubting, and Wanting Belonging

Around age eighteen or nineteen, she went through a deep crisis of faith. High school had led her into poor decisions. She was using the home computer one day, and when her mother discovered it and demanded the password (which was written down & kept in a kitchen drawer), she refused. This resulted in a brutal beating—worse than before. She fought back only to survive, genuinely afraid she might be killed.

Afterward, her mother kicked her out with nothing. No belongings. No glasses. No backpack. Just the clothes she was wearing. She stayed with a classmate and his family for a time. His mother was involved in astrology and predictions, though she didn’t understand then that it was demonic.

Later, she moved in with another family—a Jewish family who were also Freemasons, though she didn’t know what that meant at the time. She wanted a family more than anything—more than even Jesus. On the outside, they looked perfect. Siblings. Structure. Everything she had longed for. But God eventually revealed that the dysfunction ran deep. The mother rejected Jesus as the Son of God. The father was born Jewish, and both were involved in Masonic orders.

Desperate to belong, she even considered joining the Freemasons. The family offered to adopt her—but with one condition: she would have to reject Jesus Christ. At this point, she was far from God, even involved in the Gay-Straight Alliance club. She is nowhere near that now, but it shows how far she had drifted.

The Prayer God Refused to Ignore

She prayed a desperate prayer:
“God, if You’re really real, keep me. But if You’re not, let me go.”

She spent months wrestling, praying, and thinking. God never let her go.

When she finally told the family she could not reject Jesus—that she could not stop believing in Him—they turned against her. After she moved out, they tried to destroy her reputation and dragged her name through the mud.

She returned to church again, trying to reconcile her relationship with Jesus, but still felt empty—until she realized the Bible itself is the true doctrine, not church tradition.

Over the years, her family has been homeless five times. Yet every single time, God provided—food, shelter, money, gift cards, free meals from strangers. They never gave up on their faith, and God never failed to provide exactly what was needed.

We can learn from her testimony, that we should always trust in God’s provision. As it is written:

Matthew 6:28–30

“And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field… will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?”

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Christian Hotline & Prayer Support

If you’re struggling or need someone to pray with you, please reach out.

National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Dial 988
Focus on the Family Prayer Line: 1-877-771-4357
The 700 Club Prayer Line: 1-800-700-7000
Billy Graham Evangelistic Association: 1-888-388-2683
Chatnow (24/7 Christian Chat & Prayer):

https://chatnow.org

You are not alone. Someone is ready to listen and pray with you right now.

Call to Repentance

If you’ve been trying to earn your way into heaven, it’s time to stop striving and start surrendering. Today can be the day everything changes. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 6:2, “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” Don’t wait for a better moment. Turn from your sin, believe in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross, and receive the gift of eternal life. He is calling—respond to Him today.

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If this message spoke to your heart, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it with someone you love—and make sure to subscribe so you never miss more biblical truth, encouragement, and hope. Let’s walk this journey of faith together.

Jesus Came to Me, and I Said Yes

Thomas M. Hamilton — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 20:53:00 GMT

Welcome friend,

I’m Mark, and this space is for the wanderers, the worn out, and the ones still wrestling with God at 2 a.m. I don’t have all the answers, but I know the One who does—and I’m learning to trust Him more.

If this message meets you where you are, stick around. Subscribe, share, or simply pray with me as we walk this narrow road together.

And, if you feel led to support my ministry, be sure to buy the next coffee! God Bless!

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“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.” – Luke 19:10 (ESV)

A Punk Kid Searching for Truth

was just nineteen years old, living in Southern California in 1984. He dyed his hair, blasted Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees on repeat, and tuned in to KROQ out of Pasadena. Christianity wasn’t on his radar. In fact, anything that looked “normal” wasn’t.

But deep down, he was hungry for truth—he just didn’t know where to find it. The world told him to live fast and die free, but every party, every high, and every philosophy left him emptier than before.

He carried invisible wounds. A priest had molested him when he was in second grade, and that pain followed him for years like a shadow that never faded. “I don’t want your world and your pain anymore,” he thought one night. He was done.

A Candlefish in the Darkness

One afternoon, Robert grabbed the mail and tossed it on the counter. A new issue of National Geographic caught his eye. Inside were photos of glowing deep-sea creatures—tiny flickers of light in total darkness.

He whispered, “Wow… candlefish.”

Something about that image stuck with him: life surrounded by darkness, yet carrying light from within.

Later, those glowing fish would remind him of Jesus’ words in John 8:12:

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

Heaven and Hell Collide

Photo by Arto Marttinen on Unsplash

Back in his room, Robert had Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen spinning on his record player. He wasn’t really paying attention—until the lyrics from “The Yo Yo Man” stopped him cold:

“You know when heaven and hell collide, there are no in-betweens.”

It was like lightning struck his soul.

All this time, Robert had convinced himself he could stay neutral—neither for God nor against Him. But that lyric shattered his illusion. Jesus’ words echoed in his heart:

“He who is not with Me is against Me.” – Matthew 12:30

There are no in-betweens.

A Cousin Transformed

Robert’s cousin Cliff had recently become a Christian. Down at Lake Elsinore one weekend, Robert noticed something strange. He used to “see” people’s auras through his New Age practices, but Cliff’s was different now—not red, not gold—just clean.

That word hit him hard: clean.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” – 2 Corinthians 5:17

God was quietly stirring Robert’s heart.

The Voice That Changed Everything

A few weeks later, Robert stood in his room, ready to perform his usual morning “intentions.” But he stopped.

“What do I even want?” he muttered. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Then, as he turned toward the crucifix on his wall, something supernatural happened. He heard a voice—not out loud, but undeniable inside his spirit:

“I am not a teacher. I am not a prophet. I am the Son of God.
I alone defeated death. I showed my power in the Resurrection.
Robert, if you will follow Me, you will be with Me forever.”

He froze.

All he could say was, “I don’t know where to go!”

But he knew this much—he had to ask Jesus to show him the way.

June 18, 1985 — The Night He Said Yes

Two weeks later, Robert found himself at a small Bible study in a tile warehouse in West Covina. The group was led by a man named Guido, and that night, surrounded by humble people and folding chairs, the presence of God met him there.

Robert said yes.

He accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior—and nothing was ever the same again.

The Same Jesus Still Knocks

Forty years later, Robert still remembers that moment vividly. Not because of the warehouse or the people—but because Jesus came to him when he least deserved it and most needed it.

And that same Jesus stands at your door today.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him.” – Revelation 3:20

You can’t stay neutral. Heaven and hell have already collided. The choice is yours.

What This Teaches Us

Robert’s story reminds us that Jesus still comes to people in the middle of their mess. He doesn’t wait for us to get clean first—He makes us clean. His light shines even in the darkest places, and His love breaks through any wall we build around our pain.

Call to Repentance

If you’ve been trying to earn your way into heaven, it’s time to stop striving and start surrendering. Today can be the day everything changes. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 6:2, “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” Don’t wait for a better moment. Turn from your sin, believe in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross, and receive the gift of eternal life. He is calling—respond to Him today.

Call to Action

If this message spoke to your heart, don’t keep it to yourself. Share it with someone you love—and make sure to subscribe so you never miss more biblical truth, encouragement, and hope. Let’s walk this journey of faith together.

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