From New Age Deception to Jesus Christ: A Radical Salvation Testimony
Psychedelics, spiritual deception, and the terrifying reality that led Andrew to true salvation.
Sound is not just a medium for music or speech; it is a god-like force of command. Long before Andrew 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.
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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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