183 The Kairos Split: Life Before and After the Shoulder Tap

The Fault Line

Jan 10, 2026

Good morning friends,

It occured to me on a prayer call the other night, that I hadn’t shared my testimony in a while and several folks on the call wanted to hear it. So, i’ve decided to do the same here on Substack. Some of you who have been reading my work for a while already know parts of my testimony. You’re not missing much if you skip this read.

My life has a fault line running straight through it. The epicenter was a garage with a desk and a cot, in South Florida, on the night of October 3rd, 2024. On one side of that line is a man I used to be. On the other side is the man I am now. They share a name, a history, a face. But they are not the same person. One was a tourist passing through. The other is a citizen of a different country, learning its language and customs while still having to navigate the old one.

This is the story of that rupture. Not a conversion. A collision.

PART ONE: THE BEFORE – A Tourist in a Godless Cosmos

Before the fault line, I believed in a god. Note the lowercase ‘g’. He was a concept. A logical necessity. The Ultimate First Cause, the Cosmic Architect. I pictured a brilliant, hyper-intelligent engineer who had designed the unfathomable machine of the universe, set its laws in motion, and then, respectfully, moved on to other projects. He was powerful, but profoundly preoccupied. My prayers, on the rare occasions I offered them, were formal memos sent into the void. I addressed them to “To Whom It May Concern” in the cosmic bureaucracy, never expecting a reply, let alone a personal one.

I was spiritual, not religious. To me, that wasn’t a cop-out; it was a point of integrity. “Religion” was a costume party. It was old people, facing the diminishing returns of life, hedging their eternal bets. It was younger people preserving family tradition, a Sunday ritual of moral politeness, philanthropic tax deductions, and tastefully faith-adjacent social media posts. I saw the scandals, the hypocrisy, the hidden lives. I wanted no part of the branding. I figured I could be a good person, maybe even a better one without the organizational baggage. Why wear the jersey if you didn’t have to play for the team?

My world was a game of life. A complex, often brutal board game with obscure rules that shifted with the winds of the season. My goal was simple: learn the rules, play smart, accumulate points (success, status, security), and try to win more turns than I lost. God, if He was out there, was the game’s original designer. He wasn’t a player. He certainly wasn’t a coach. He’d built the board and then left the room. My strategy was my own.

Then, the board flipped over.

It began with my mother. I drove to Florida for what was supposed to be a two-week administrative trip: organize her meds, set up doctor appointments, fix a few things around the house. She had the list: Alzheimer’s, diabetes, hypertension. A slow fade, I thought but manageable from Pennsylvania while I continued my game of life.

Within weeks, the slow fade became a violent collapse. One stroke. Then another. Then a third. The world shrank to the sterile, fluorescent dimensions of emergency rooms and hospital corridors. The air tasted of antiseptic and dread. My life, my business, my clients, my plans became a distant echo, manageable obligations became a mountain of burdens to carry. I was a man trying to hold up a collapsing house with my bare hands on my chafed shoulders, my fingers bleeding, my muscles screaming. The primary emotion wasn’t sadness. It was rage. A white-hot, directionless fury. Who was there to be angry at? The universe? The faulty biology? Myself? I was running on no sleep, no food, and pure, undiluted adrenaline. I was preparing for her death while wrestling with the utter senselessness of it all.

I was the picture of competent crisis management on the outside. Seeming to hold it together for the benefit of the family. Inside, I was the shell of an angry ghost.

PART TWO: THE RUPTURE – The Night the Floor Became the Ceiling

On the night of October 3rd, bone-weary and soul-hollow, I finally carved out a moment for a shower. Just a few minutes under hot water to try and wash off the clinging film of hospital and despair. I was a machine powering down, hoping for a few hours of blank, dreamless sleep.

That’s when the knowing hit.

It wasn’t a vision. No angels, no beams of light. It wasn’t a voice, audible or internal. It was a knowing. A tap on the shoulder of my spirit so concrete, so undeniable, it felt physical. A presence entered the room or rather, the presence that had always been in the room made itself known.

God. The One who created it all. Was here. Had been here.

The realization was not gentle. It was an avalanche. It was the catastrophic collapse of every assumption I had ever held.

The Threefold Unmaking:

1. The Collapse of Distance: The core revelation was spatial, but in reverse. It wasn’t that God had drawn near. It was the devastating, beautiful understanding that He had never been far. The distance was always on my end. I had been living my entire life in a brightly lit room, convinced I was in the dark, as a solo orchestrator of my destiny. Every secret thought, every hidden rage, every silent moment of pride or shame, it had all been seen, known, and held in a conscious, intimate attention. Omniscience ceased to be a theological bullet point and became the air I was suddenly breathing. I had never been alone. Not for a second.

2. The Announcement of Personhood: This was not a force, energy or ideological principle. This was a Who. With a will. With a plan. With a specific, undivided attention on me, Shashue, in that garage, in that specific moment of unraveling. The Cosmic Architect was personal. He knew my name. He knew it before my mother did.

3. The Divine Claim & My Bankruptcy: And then, the message. Not in words, but in a meaning that implanted itself whole into my understanding: “Your business, your plans, your sense of control, that is your idol. Your mother’s life, her dignity in her decline, that is now your sacred trust. This is the exchange. This is the starting line.”

It was a royal decree, delivered with an ironclad love. My life’s central pursuit, my work, my ambition, my self-built identity, was gently and firmly dethroned. In its place was a single, non-negotiable assignment: care for my mother as if it were my only and highest calling.

In that same instant, my rage, my “why me?” frustration, my entire economy of self-reliance was exposed as worthless currency. I wasn’t a capable man weathering a storm. I was a beggar who had been fed every day of his life by a hand he had refused to see. My apology that night wasn’t for a list of sins. It was for the foundational sin: living 50-plus years as a rebellious son in my Father’s fully-stocked house.

I prayed that night like a drowning man. There were no elegant words. It was gasp, and surrender, and promise, and weeping. It was the end of one world and the violent, glorious birth of another.

PART THREE: THE AFTER – Rehabilitation in the 3 A.M. Classroom

For the next six months, He set the schedule. 3 a.m. Sharp. Every morning. Like clockwork, I’d wake, not from anxiety, but from a gentle, un-ignorable nudge. I’d sit in the dark and pray until dawn broke. This was not punishment. This was rehabilitation. The world’s soundtrack, the phone, the emails, the noise of ambition, was switched off. In that sacred silence, two processes began:

Unlearning: The values I had built my life on began to lose their shine. Hustle, status, accumulation, personal legacy, they looked like plastic dollar general toys. Props on an empty stage. I saw them for what they were: frantic attempts to etch my own name on a world that was dying when my name had already been written in a ledger in an eternal kingdom I didn’t know existed. The game was over. I had been playing the wrong one.

Relearning Perception: My vision changed. A moment of patience with my confused mother wasn’t just “being a good son.” It was participation in a divine kindness. A sunset wasn’t just a pretty end to the day; it was a deliberate, loving brushstroke on a canvas meant for me. The world stopped being a random series of events and began to reveal itself as a coherent, authored Story. My task was no longer to write my own script, but to find my line in His.

I became a secret agent. I isolated. Not from shame, but because I knew I was different. The old person was gone. I quietly dismantled the machinery of my former life, handing off clients, shutting down projects, letting go until the only item on my to-do list was the one He had given me: care for my mom in a way that pleased Him. Not from duty. From devotion.

When I eventually began to venture out, to a church, to prayer groups, people mistook me for a veteran, a tenured professional Christian. They’d hear me speak about dependence, about hearing God, about the weight of grace, and assume I’d been walking this path for decades. When they learned the truth, that my faith was only months old, they’d stare. My moment hadn’t been a gradual warming. It was a lightning strike. A kairos, a divine rupture in the timeline of my life.

PART FOUR: THE TENSION – In the World, But Profoundly Not Of It

This is the daily reality of the After. Being “not of the world” isn’t about physical escape. It’s about a gravitational shift.

Engagement vs. Identity: I still live here. I pay taxes. I have conversations. I follow the rules. But my identity is no longer anchored to any of it. Success and failure are now weather patterns, they pass over me. They don’t define the climate of my soul. My definition, my worth, my name, comes from that 3 a.m. room.

The Rotated Motivation: I used to act to build a brand, career, social standing, self-image. Now, I am learning to act from a place of response. Is this a prompt? Is this a need placed before me? Is this a clear “nudge” I’m learning to recognize as the Spirit? The core question has rotated from “What’s in this for me?” to a simpler, stranger one: “Is this mine to do?”

The Solitude and The Solidarity: There is a loneliness to it. You speak a different native tongue in your heart. You feel like an anthropologist, observing your former culture with a new, dispassionate clarity. But this solitude is coupled with a connection so profound it makes previous relationships feel like surface chatter. The communion in the silent, dark hours is more real, more substantial, than any crowded room.

The Tourist Who Found His Citizenship

October 3rd, 2024, was the day I stopped being a tourist on Earth. I discovered, in the most visceral way possible, that I held citizenship in a different, interlocking Kingdom. I still have to function in the earthly city, take out the trash, navigate traffic, file paperwork. But my passport, my loyalty, my marching orders, and my King come from elsewhere.

The man I was before that night is a ghost to me now. The man I am after is only beginning to understand what true solidity feels like. It feels like being known. It feels like being given a single, clear task in the midst of chaos and knowing it all works out because His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. It feels like a 3 a.m. whisper in the dark that is more real than the noisiest day.

I don’t know why He chose that night, or why He chose me and my particular mess, to tap me on the shoulder. Maybe it was the faithful prayers of my mother and her “church” folks, rising to His office in heaven. Maybe it was a grace I still don’t fully understand. I just know the fault line is real. Everything is now measured as Before or After.

And the After is a life of listening, waiting for the next nudge, urge, intention, late-night call and obedience.

That is all and thank you for reading.

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