AFTER THE AWAKENING: Installment 3

Installment 3, Chapters 7-9

Apr 12, 2026

Good morning and hello friends,

This article is one installment of a multipart series. Be sure to check out my site for previous segments of this series. It will make more sense if you read them in order.

The first installment contained Chapters 1-3. This one contains Chapters 7-9.

Chapter 7: The Whisper in the Driveway

(Source: “181 The Whisper in the Driveway”)

I write a lot about obedience. About being a faithful servant. About seeking, knocking, asking. My daily prayers are full of these words. “Lord, make me obedient. Help me hear You. Silence the noise so I can catch Your whisper.”

I’m learning God hears those prayers. And He answers them.

The hard part is recognizing the answer when it’s standing in your driveway.

For almost two years, a man has been delivering food to my mom. Good food. Organically grown in his family’s garden, cooked with care. He’s a Haitian brother with a broken back, literal, chronic pain that shows in his eyes, in the careful way he moves and even speaks. The routine was simple: he’d pull up, I’d meet him at the car, he’d hand me the bags, and he’d drive off. A transaction. A kindness, but a distant one. I still don’t know his name.

I’d prayed for this man. For his pain. For his family. It was on my list.

Then, this weekend, something shifted. For the first time in almost two years, he didn’t stay in the car. He got out. Came inside. Sat down with my mom and talked. I offered him water. We made small talk. But he mostly spoke with mom. Clearly they know each other. I asked about his back, his family. It was a good moment, human and kind.

It wasn’t until the middle of the night, in the heavy quiet, that it hit me. The whisper I’d missed.

It wasn’t a thunderclap. It was a gentle, persistent nudge I’d rationalized away: Ask the man with the broken back if you can pray with him.

I hadn’t refused. I hadn’t heard. There’s a difference. My disobedience wasn’t willful rebellion; it was a failure of spiritual hearing. Fifty-plus years of my own brokenness, my own internal noise, had dulled my ability to distinguish God’s whisper from my own thoughts.

I got out of bed and dropped to my knees. Not out of dramatic piety, but out of a sudden, crushing clarity. I confessed. I repented. Not for malice, but for deafness. I’d missed the mark.

But here’s the part that’s churning on my mind this morning: my missed mark wasn’t just about me and God. It was about that man with the broken back.

My prayer had been for his healing, for his relief. And God, in His wild grace, had presented an opportunity for me to be part of that answer. To lay a hand on his shoulder in that living room and ask for God’s peace to meet him in his pain. To connect the dots between his faithful service and God’s faithful love.

My disobedience, my simple, unwitting failure to hear, robbed him of a blessing. It left a prayer unanswered, a connection unmade, a moment of grace unshared.

I’d always thought of obedience as a vertical thing. Between me and God. A command to follow for my own good.

I was wrong.

More often than not, my obedience is the answer to someone else’s prayer. My faithfulness is the channel through which God’s healing reaches another person’s broken place. When I fail to listen, to act, I’m not just letting God down. I’m leaving a brother in pain without the comfort God wanted to give him through my hands, my words, my prayer.

The man with the broken back will come again next week. God willing, I will not offer just water. I will ask, “Can I pray with you?” If he can’t get out of the car, I’ll pray with him right there in the driveway.

This is the terrifying, beautiful weight of it: Our lives are not siloed. My obedience isn’t just for me. It’s for the man with the broken back. For the lonely neighbor. For the friend who hasn’t heard a kind word in weeks.

God’s whispers are often assignments in disguise. He answers our prayers for others by whispering to us. And when we miss it, the world is subtly poorer for it.

So my prayer is changing. It’s less “Make me obedient for me,” and more “Make me hear for them.” Don’t let my deafness be the source of another’s continued pain. Let my awakened ears be the answer to a cry I may never even hear.

Our disobedience, be it intentional rebellion or unwitting deafness to God, perpetuates the pain and suffering that Adam’s sin introduced to this world back in those first days.

A Moment in the Workshop

Is there someone in your routine, a delivery person, a neighbor, a coworker, whom you have reduced to a transaction? Someone God may have placed in your path not just for their service to you, but for your service to them? What would it cost you to ask their name? To ask how they are really doing? To offer to pray?

Chapter 8: Detours and Destination

(Source: “155 Thirty Years Old, Sixty Years Worn”)

How submarine service taught me to trust God’s detours when I didn’t “make the cut.”

As a sailor on a fast attack submarine, I spent years picking up spec ops personnel from one place to drop them off in another place. Over time, the cab driver and passenger become friends.

You see the weight of their path etched deep: the 30-year-old man wears the mileage of a 60-year-old on his face. The cost to their families? Heavy, expensive, and real. I’ve seen this reality many times in both family and friends that walked those same paths. Younger cousins that now look like my older uncles.

For years in my twenties and thirties, shame clung to me like a second uniform, haunted by not making the cut. As a civilian, I overcompensated in odd and extreme ways: triathlons, marathons, and other odd sports. My friends would scratch their heads as they watched my training schedules conflict with their social calendars.

“Why couldn’t I earn that patch? Why wasn’t I chosen?” Questions that ran across my mind for many years as a young man.

Then came a recent conversation with one of my old passengers. Sitting across from him, discussing life afterward, I finally understood: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

All decisions and paths have costs and consequences. As mere humans, we often don’t know the full measure of these things until long after the decisions have been made. What I didn’t understand in those early days is that God had other plans for me, a purpose hidden in the path that I thought led me to a closed door. My path would be different. I don’t believe in regrets when it comes to these types of things. I also don’t think there is a right and wrong. I think the person we are, that we become, is comprised of a collection of all these decisions, paths, costs, and their associated consequences.

That sailor’s weathered face now speaks a deep truth to me: without saying a word, I can get a sense of what his path costs him. He has since found his calling and is now doing his Father’s work full time on the west coast with a supportive community. The disappointment I carried all those years wasn’t failure. It was preparation for what He wanted for me.

I no longer grieve the path not taken. Because the One who called me into the silent depths also called me out of them. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” My service mattered. My waiting mattered. His plan, though I didn’t know it then, always mattered.

Sometimes, there are seasons in our lives that seem like one loss after another. A season of losing things you think are the most important.

But in time, we look in our rearview mirror and understand: these were not actual seasons of losses, but rather detours and course corrections toward the path and calling that was originally designed and destined for us, by our Father.

A Moment in the Workshop

What is the “closed door” in your past that still stings? The promotion you didn’t get, the relationship that ended, the path you were denied? Can you hold it up to the light of where you are now and ask: “Was this a failure, or was this a detour?” You may not have the full answer yet. But can you trust that the Driver knows the route, even when the passenger cannot see the map?

Chapter 9: The Wednesday Miracle

(Source: “The Wednesday Miracle”)

As I write these notes, the morning dew blankets the driveway while the birds sing out loud, perched in the mango tree in mom’s front yard.

Today’s mind ramblings are not particularly theological. But maybe something for you dog humans out there. I am going to bore you about Wiggles’ diet.

She has been on a raw diet her whole life. A mixture of bone, muscle meat, organ meat, and three percent fiber. She has an order of preference. When you watch her eat, from her favorite to her least favorite, you would think she had fingers. No matter how much you mix the bowl up, she manages to separate each component with meticulous precision.

She grabs the bone meat first. Then the muscle meat. Then the organ meat. As for the fiber, well, she flat out hates it. She has never liked her vegetables. She gets the fiber on Tuesdays or Wednesdays.

For her whole life, this is what it looked like. She gets the full dish on Tuesday. She eats everything except the veggies. Meal time the next day, Wednesday, I put out the dish with nothing but the fiber she left the previous day. She sniffs it. Walks over to me and gives me that look: “What’s your problem, dude? Where’s the meat?” She walks away, and I put the veggies back in the fridge. Meal time Thursday comes around. I put out the dish with nothing but the fiber she left the previous days. By this time, she has not eaten in a few days, so she reluctantly eats her portion of fiber for the week.

So, this has been the routine for about five years. There are things I used to do occasionally to hack her wiring. I would puree the veggies with ground beef and some bone broth. But considering our current situation and time constraints, daddy no longer has time for these types of theatrics. So for the last two years, she basically fasts for two days before she will eat her fiber for the week.

Well, that is how it has always been. Until this week.

This week, I put her dish down with her portion of fiber. I sat and watched her eat. As expected, the bone meat went first. Followed by the muscle meat, the organ meat. It was at this point I was expecting her to walk away. But she did not. She went straight over to the fiber and gobbled it all down without hesitation.

After five years, what has changed, I wondered.

She finished her whole meal, walked over to me, nudged my knee with her head, and walked off into her cozy space at the head of the driveway.

Was this a one-time display of gratitude and consideration for my time? Or has she simply just given up trying to outmaneuver me?

I find myself simply watching. Waiting. I look forward to seeing what happens next week. Will this new pattern of behavior take root? Or was it a fluke, a momentary lapse in her lifelong campaign of vegetable resistance?

This small, strange shift in my dog’s behavior has me thinking about patterns, and our relationship to them. We are creatures of habit. We build our lives, our faith, our understanding of God on the predictability of certain things. The sun rises. The script with my mother works. Wiggles leaves her veggies. These patterns create a sense of order, a framework we can lean on. We come to expect certain behaviors, from our pets, from our families, from ourselves, even from God.

Then, without warning, the pattern breaks.

The temptation is to immediately search for the why. To diagnose, to explain, to fit the anomaly back into a box of understanding. Did I change the brand? No. Did the fiber taste different? Not that I can tell. Is she feeling unwell? She seems perfectly normal, vibrant even. The why eludes me.

And in that space of not knowing, I am left with a simple choice. Do I fret over the cause, or do I just observe the change? Do I accept that, for now, the reason is hidden from me?

This feels like a tiny, furry parable for my own walk. How often do I pray for a change in a stubborn pattern in my own life, in my mother’s condition, in the world’s madness? And when a shift, however small, finally occurs, do I receive it with simple gratitude? Or do I immediately begin dissecting it, questioning its legitimacy, doubting its permanence, demanding to know the why before I dare to celebrate the what?

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven,” writes the Preacher in Ecclesiastes. There is a time for the old pattern, and a time for it to end. A time for the fasting from the veggies, and a time to eat them without complaint. Our mistake is believing we are the timekeepers. We think we understand the seasons of our own hearts, let alone the seasons of another creature, let alone the seasons of God’s movement.

Wiggles does not owe me an explanation. Her change, whether permanent or temporary, is a gift. It is one less point of friction in a day already full of them. It is a small, silent mercy. My job is not to interrogate it. My job is to notice it, to be thankful for it, and to keep providing the meal.

How much more is this true with God? He shifts a circumstance. He softens a heart. He provides an unexpected peace in a long-standing turmoil. And my first instinct is rarely quiet thanks. It is often a suspicious, “Why now? How? What’s the catch? Will this last?” I am like the servant who receives a talent and immediately buries it out of fear, instead of putting it to work with joy.

“Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” Perhaps we should also be slow to analyze. Quick to observe, yes. Quick to give thanks, absolutely. But slow to demand the full schematic of every change. Some mysteries are not for us to solve. They are for us to witness, and in the witnessing, to learn trust.

Maybe Wiggles’ change is her own small act of surrender. A giving up of a futile fight. Maybe she finally understands the pattern leads to hunger, and acceptance leads to peace. Maybe she is just growing up. I do not know.

But her silent compliance, her simple completion of the meal, feels like a sermon. It speaks of a grace that operates without my understanding. A change that happens in the hidden places of will and habit, unseen by me until the result appears in the bowl. It reminds me that most of God’s work in me happens just like this. Unseen. Quiet. A gradual rewiring of desire. A slow turning of the will. And one day, I find myself doing the thing I swore I never would, loving the person I thought I could not, bearing the burden I was sure would break me. And I look back and cannot pinpoint the moment it changed. I only know the pattern is different.

So I will watch next week. I will place the bowl. I will observe. If she eats the fiber again, I will take it as a small, ongoing grace. If she returns to her old ways, I will continue the routine, the patient, stubborn offering of what is good for her, whether she recognizes it or not. My love for her is not contingent on her eating her vegetables. My care for her is not validated by her compliance. I provide the good thing because I am her provider. Her response is her own.

Is that not a picture of the Father’s love for us? He provides the daily bread, the sustenance we need. Our response, grateful acceptance, petulant refusal, slow resignation, is our own. His faithfulness is the constant. Our understanding is the variable.

For now, I am just a man, standing in a driveway, grateful for a clean bowl and a mystery. The birds are still singing. The dew is burning off. My mother is content. And the dog, for this week at least, has eaten all her vegetables.

A Moment in the Workshop

What is the “fiber” in your life, the thing God keeps offering that you keep refusing? The discipline you resist. The relationship you avoid. The surrender you negotiate around. And is there a place where the pattern has quietly, unexpectedly broken? Where you find yourself doing the thing you swore you never would? Do not interrogate it. Just notice it. Give thanks. And keep placing the bowl.

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PART III: DISMANTLING THE MACHINERY

(The Detox)

Focus: Identifying and dismantling the human systems, political, religious, cultural, and internal, that would co-opt the raw encounter with God to process it into something manageable.

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Part III Introduction: Detox

You have survived the earthquake. You have learned to find God in the dish soap and the driveway. You have begun the slow, sacred work of integration, putting one foot in front of the other on the narrow path while the world carries on with its wide highway.

Now comes the danger you did not expect.

I saw it playing out the other morning, scrolling through my feed. Two brothers in Christ, both of whom love Jesus deeply, I have no doubt about that, were going at it in a comment thread. One was making a case. The other was defending a position. It was civil enough, but you could feel the invisible walls between them. They affiliated with different Christian clubs. Different tribes. Different flags.

And I saw, in that small digital conversation, the same pattern playing out on the grand stage of human history. A pattern as old as Babel. It is the pattern of us, as image-bearers, trying to put God in a box. We try to package Him. To make Him scalable, predictable, manageable. We do it to facilitate prophecy, to create His government on our terms, to control the masses, to retain power. The list of reasons is practically inexhaustible. We build machinery around the wildfire of the Spirit. And then we mistake the machinery for the fire.

The enemy you face in this section is not the world. It is not the secular culture, the political machine, or the entertainment industry. Those threats are obvious. The danger in this section is subtler, more intimate, and far more insidious. It wears a cross around its neck. It quotes Scripture. It smells like church coffee.

The danger is the human system that would take your raw, fiery, first-love encounter with the living God and process it into something manageable. Something institutional. Something that looks righteous on the outside but is, in the words of Jesus, a whitewashed tomb.

I know this danger intimately, because I spent fifty years on one side of the empty coin, and nearly walked straight into the trap on the other side the moment I came to faith.

The Two Sides of the Empty Coin

For most of my adult life, before I surrendered to Christ, I firmly identified with a very specific label: “Spiritual But Not Religious.” SBNR. I wore it like a medal of honor. It felt enlightened. It felt free. It felt safe from the hypocrisy I saw on the nightly news.

I believed in a grand creator, a cosmic force, an energy, a vague benevolence behind it all. But I kept it at a polite distance. This “god” was not a person to know. He was a concept to acknowledge. A first cause. The ultimate watchmaker who wound the universe and stepped away.

My spirituality was a custom-built suit. I tailored it to fit the life I wanted. A little yoga for peace. A little meditation for focus. The karma principle for ethics. Be good, get good. Vision boards for manifestation. Psychics for readings. My drugs of choice were acid, mushrooms, and LSD. Sex was fair game between consenting adults. Sin was subjective, if it did not make me feel bad and did not directly hurt anyone, it was not sin. The central theme of my personal philosophy was me. Me, me, I, and more me.

I was, as I look back now, practicing a religion of one. The doctrine was self-fulfillment. The sacrament was my own satisfaction. The only judgment that mattered was my own. I had traded the narrow gate for a wide-open field where I got to be my own shepherd. And I called this freedom.

Then God broke into that field on October 3rd, 2024. And my entire self-built spirituality collapsed like a house of cards in a hurricane.

But in coming to the foot of the cross, I began to see the other side of the coin with painful clarity. The side just as far from the heart of God, but dressed in the right clothes. The “Religious But Not Spiritual” crowd.

These folks do not claim that title. They would be offended by it. They go to church. They know the stories, David and Goliath, Moses and the Red Sea, the Virgin Birth, the resurrection. They post the verses. They celebrate the holidays. Their social calendar looks like a faithful walk. From the outside, they check all the boxes. They have the language down. They know when to stand, when to sit, when to say “Amen.”

But here is the fatal crack: they have no personal relationship with the Father. They have religion without the relationship. They have the form of godliness but deny its power, just as 2 Timothy 3:5 warns. They know about God. They do not know God. The Bible is a textbook, not a love letter. Prayer is a ritual, not a conversation. Church is a social club, not a gathering of the redeemed.

Both paths, the Spiritual But Not Religious and the Religious But Not Spiritual, are sophisticated forms of the same rebellion. It is the rebellion of Eden. “You will be like God.” You will be the author of your own truth. You will be the curator of your own experience. You will be the manager of your own sanctification. The SBNR person does it by rejecting structure and creating their own god. The RBNS person does it by embracing the structure and forgetting the God it was meant to point to. Both are attempts to keep control.

The Pattern in the Stone

But the problem goes deeper than individuals. It is etched into the very architecture of organized belief. When I began to look at the history of Christianity, not as a theologian, but as a man with pattern-recognition skills forged by decades in the tech industry, I saw the same five fault lines running through every institution that has ever tried to contain the wildfire of the Spirit.

Pattern One: The Hand That Holds the Lens. This is the master pattern. It is the transfer of final authority from God to a human system. For the Pharisee, it was the “traditions of the elders.” Jesus called them out directly: “You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8 ESV). The institutional church formalized this transfer, placing the teaching office above the individual believer’s Spirit-guided reading. The modern evangelical shouts “sola scriptura!” yet in practice, authority often simply shifts from a pope in Rome to a pope in a pulpit. In each case, a human system inserts itself as the necessary, authoritative lens. The result is a controllable faith. A manageable God.

Pattern Two: The Badge We Wear. When the internal, invisible work of the heart is hard to measure, we default to external markers. Phylacteries and fringes for the Pharisee. Latin Mass and rosary beads for the Catholic. WWJD bracelets and voting records for the evangelical. Faith slowly becomes evidenced not by the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5:22-23), but by your cultural tastes, your media diet, your tribal membership. We trade the surgery of the Spirit for a costume.

Pattern Three: The Kingdom We Build. This is the most dangerous seduction. It confuses the Kingdom of God with an earthly project of influence and control. The Pharisee’s “kingdom” was preserving his religious system. The institutional church, after Constantine, became temporal power itself, the Pope crowned emperors and raised armies. The modern evangelical movement often pursues political power to build a “Christian nation,” counting success in legislation passed rather than lives quietly transformed. We forget Jesus’s clear statement to Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36 ESV). Our servants fight in the culture wars, forgetting we are ambassadors, not conquerors.

Pattern Four: The Wall We Build. Identity built on badges needs an “other” to define itself against. The Pharisee’s prayer was the model: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men” (Luke 18:11 ESV). His righteousness was a relative measure. The institutional church defined itself against heretics and schismatics. The modern evangelical often defines itself against “the world”, liberals, atheists, Hollywood, intellectuals. This pattern rebuilds the very walls Christ died to tear down: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28 ESV).

Pattern Five: The Ledger We Keep. At the root, this is the ancient, core error. It is preferring a law we can measure to a God we cannot control. The Pharisee replaced a dynamic relationship with the living God with a manageable system of rituals and rules. The institutional church created systems of penance and indulgences, grace as a commodity. The evangelical can fall into the same trap with different vocabulary: “Accept Jesus” becomes a one-time transaction, then the focus shifts to a checklist of disciplines. The vibrant, moment-by-moment, dependent walk with Christ hardens into a report card. We choose the ledger over the Lord.

Four different worlds, a Jewish sect, a global church, a revivalist movement, a political ideology. But the same five scars on ancient stone.

Here is the hard truth: this pattern is not a Christian pattern. It is a human one. It is the relentless pull of our flesh toward control, pride, belonging, and self-justification. It is our attempt, since Eden, to be like God on our own terms. It is our insistence on putting the uncontainable God in a box of our own design.

And Jesus Christ did not come to give us a better version of this box. He came to shatter it. He taught “as one who had authority, and not as their scribes” (Matthew 7:29 ESV). He cared for the inside of the cup, not just the outside. He refused Satan’s offer of all the kingdoms of the world. He washed feet. He rode a donkey, not a warhorse. He demolished the walls of “other” by speaking to the Samaritan woman and healing the Roman centurion’s servant. And He offered rest from the exhausting ledger: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28 ESV).

He is the Pattern-Breaker. And He is calling us to Himself. Not to a club. Not to a system. To a Person.

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