As I learned how to be a better person and paid off more of my childhood emotional debts, I started discovering that there wasn’t much hope in finding answers within the standard American Church social framework: most of their answers were simply generically-branded repackaging of what the rest of the world already did in other domains.
Around late 2016, I turned my attention to spiritual matters on my own, and made the first version of many of the essays that presently exist on this site. The reception I received was relatively ambivalent from the Christians I shared my ideas with.
During the COVID-19 pandemonium of 2020, almost every church decided to honor a politicized command over any spiritually-motivated directive:
- All large-scale venues were instructed to shut down without any provocation or justification, with meetings of about 20 people or less.
- Restaurants adapted better than they did with app-based delivery services.
- Most service workers generally kept going by requiring customers/clients to wait in their car or perform at least some work over the phone or internet.
- Churches never moved from the venue-based model, and most of them simply shuttered their doors for months.
That experience, most particularly with the churches I affiliated with at the time, drove me to complete disgust and despair. I shook the dust off my feet from the entire Western Church unless God directly sent the right church across my path (Matthew 10:14). The American Church was clearly fast asleep, and I was a traumatized victim of their neglect for spiritual matters God had entrusted them to maintain.
Around mid-2020, I made a personal commitment to find answers to everything that was going on, and that led to my Gained InSite essays. I saw it all as back-end yak shaving of “What Is” for God’s “What Ought To Be”.
Of particular note, I had become frustrated at the incessant hands-off escapism wrought by Rapture theology, so I sought to more intimately understand the political system He wanted for us. Once I realized Revelation 20 had at least a partially literalist interpretation, I produced a summary of what Jesus’ Millennial Kingdom would look like.
After that essay, I fell into a severe depression because it was the combined synthesis of several facts:
- I came to understand at least some of the minutiae of the upcoming sociopolitical society under Jesus’ command, irrespective of my accuracy about the Millennium itself.
- Around that time, I also read the Acts of the Apostles and several historical records about the Church at the time, which showed that same loving society on a smaller scale.
- I pulled away from the research and looked at the society we live in now, which is a dismal portrayal of anything close to what the Bible indicates is the right way to live.
I had come to be homesick for a lifestyle and nationality I hadn’t attained, mixed with a contempt for the Church completely missing that trajectory over the past 2,000 years. At the time, my spirit was completely broken from the cowardice of people locking themselves in their home over a fear of a disease that killed fewer people than car accidents or gluttony.
Why obsess about 70 years being cut to 40 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?
I knew I had to take action.
Next: Taking Action