I kept growing as a person and paid off more of my childhood emotional debts. My goal was self-sufficiency.
However, I hadn’t been trusting God, so I paid off that debt with bitterness.
Distancing from the Church
Eventually, I started avoiding the formalized church institution. I came to believe most of the Church’s answers were generic-brand repackaging of the rest of the world’s domains.
While I had been writing essay-guides starting in 2014, I started making spiritually-focused essays around late 2016. However, I had received a relatively ambivalent reception from the Christians I shared my ideas with.
The rejection catalyst
During the COVID-19 pandemonium starting in 2020, almost every church decided to honor a politicized command over any spiritually-motivated directive:
- All large-scale venues had shut down without any provocation or justification, with meetings of no more than 20 people.
- Restaurants adapted better than the church did.
- Most service industries required customers/clients to wait in their car or perform at least some remote work.
- The churches, however, never moved from the venue-based model. Most of them simply shuttered their doors for months.
I felt overwhelming disgust and despair with that experience, and it congealed a few things for me.
- I became convinced the American Church was fast asleep.
- I, and many others, were a traumatized victim of their spiritual neglect.
- Out of anger, I shook the dust off my feet from the entire Western Church. I concluded they were a waste of time unless God directly sent the right church across my path.
- I personally committed to find answers and write essays about everything going on. I saw it as back-end yak shaving over “What Is” to empower God’s “What Ought To Be”.
Manifest sin
My sin was in both my impatience and anger:
- God works quietly and peaceably, hoping nobody will perish.
- I saw my way as a more expedient approach than God’s.
One particular frustration came from incessant escapism instilled through Rapture theology.
- This led me to more intimately understand the political system He wanted for us. I realized at the time that Revelation 20 had at least a partially literalist interpretation.
- I produced a summary of what Jesus’ Millennial Kingdom would look like.
Empowered resentment
I had no love, though. This creative foray drove me in my bitterness to severe depression through added understanding:
- I had come to understand at least some minutiae of the upcoming sociopolitical society under Christ.
- I was also familiar with the Acts of the Apostles and several historical records about the early Church. This showed that same loving society on a smaller scale.
- Within the context of my church experience, I saw nothing close to the Bible in it.
I became homesick for a lifestyle and nationality I hadn’t attained, mixed with contempt for the Church. I imagined the Church had failed abysmally for nearly 2,000 years.
Sin becoming action
The cowardice and complicit obedience of much of the Church left me crestfallen. We had just encountered a disease that killed fewer people than car accidents or gluttony. People were so afraid of it that they locked themselves in their home and violently assaulted their neighbors who didn’t.
- Why obsess about this short life cut shorter if you’ll live afterward without bodily pain?
- What happened to “pick up your shameful death object and follow me”?
- Where was the Church leadership in all of this?
I felt I had to take action, so I attempted multiple things, which all eventually failed.
Building a system
By this point, I had built out philosophical explanations of just about everything. I imagined I simply had to convert the ideas into feasible solutions and watch God make it happen.
First, I started trying to design a social network to update the Church to the modern era.
- Most church websites are still in the GeoCities era of website design. They have a static website as a billboard for in-person services.
- My natural gifting in computers would have lent well to this effort.
- I thought it could look like Gab, but with more features that accommodated the social network needs of various congregations.
I also incubated ideas toward working in a parachurch organization, making a not-for-profit organization, and many other odds and ends.
What I didn’t see, though, was that I had presumed God’s will within my own understanding. I was running as fast as I could while presuming God was supporting my efforts.
This all changed when God permitted more of the unknown to come knocking.