Hi everyone! As many of you know, I’ve been pouring my heart into a project called Resurrection: Breathing with God. At its heart, it’s about waking up what’s already inside of you.
I’ve just launched my Publishizer campaign to get this into the hands of those who need it most. If you feel moved to support or just share the link, it would mean the world to me. You can see the cover and the story here: https://publishizer.com/resurrection/
Grateful for your love and support!
David
Here is a sneak peek into the book’s Introduction:
INTRODUCTION:
The Elephant in the Church
This book is for people who don’t go to church, and this book is about resurrection.
This is not a “Bible for Dummies” translation of the Good Book; that book has already been published. Nor is it an attempt to validate the Bible as a history textbook; for many, a story that lacks forensic exactness loses its authority. Most importantly, this is not a defense of the historical Jesus. I am not interested in arguing that the resurrection happened; I am interested in the implications of its truth.
There is an assumption that the reader has a general awareness of the Bible story. In the pages ahead, we will explore an uncommon perspective of its narrative. We do so with a very specific intent.
This book is intended to resolve the Bible story by fulfilling what is its most overlooked and least understood promise. Its omission in modern theology no doubt stems from the fact that, at first glance, this promise appears to apply to just one person. This character’s story persists across the entirety of the Bible and is married to Jesus’ story in an unbreakable bond. God keeps all His promises.
To start with, I will stay in the convention of modern Christianity, in that I will refer to God as He…in my case, the “He” I am referring to is Jesus. I will not however, stay in this convention long.
What follows is the perspective that the Bible is a consciously engineered, covenantal narrative designed to carry consciousness across collapse, exile, and resurrection.
This perspective is non-denominational, intending instead to strike at the story’s universal appeal at evolving our collective understanding of what it means to awaken. In these pages, I have attempted to be as honest as I am curious. This journey requires a willingness to stand in the tension between the majestic scope of the Divine and the raw vulnerability of being human. As Brené Brown says, “Vulnerability is the new courage.” To explore the architecture of the soul, one must be willing to walk through its most hollow spaces.
It is not quite fair to say that I abandoned my faith over the course of my life although, if attendance at church is to serve as the benchmark by which faith is measured, I do not receive a passing grade. It wasn’t that I abandoned my faith.
It was that I was looking for it in the smallest possible window.
My life became a quest at an early age. As a child of 4 or 5, when we don’t question the presence of “imaginary friends” capable of holding discreet conversations with us from the unseen realm of our interior, Jesus informed me that a woman would lead me back to God.
I received this message with delight, wonder, and a blossoming sense of anticipation.
Church was a regular part of weekly life in my family. Sunday School too, for a while. My drift away from organized religion began in high school, matured in college, and settled in as I became a Marine Corps officer. I still believed but felt disconnected from the passivity of sitting in the pews on Sundays. I didn’t know how to be an active participant in the story of Jesus. And, at some unspoken level of my psyche, I didn’t believe I was going to find this woman in a church.
I stopped reading the Bible because I couldn’t understand it and, in general, had difficulty focusing. My grades in school and my life reflected the fact that my attention was scattered. This was likely the result of a blow to the back of my head I received when, in a fit of rage, my best friend threw a hammer, knocking me unconscious. The incident occurred in 1975 and resulted in an out-of-body experience, where I watched his oldest brother carry my limp body to their house. I was six. I did not confront the memory again until the pandemic forced me to reconcile its implications in my life.
As I grew older, something felt “off” about going to church.
It was something I could never quite place a finger on. Only recently did I come to fully appreciate the dilemma I experienced in what I expected from attending church services.
Maps and Territories
In a culture trained to skim, sample, and scroll, we often encounter Scripture in fragments. A verse here, a sermon there. This book is not written against the church, nor against those who love it. It is written against the subtle way righteousness can become a shield against transformation.
When we treat the text as a menu, we risk consuming fragments and never encountering the story that is meant to consume us. It’s not because the verses, dished out as portions, are untrue, but because the story they belong to is larger than any single passage can hold on its own.
The Bible is a vast and demanding journey. Its writing is sprawled across centuries. It repeatedly tells the truth about human failure with unsettling honesty, and it speaks the truth of divine faithfulness with even greater depth. For many, it is easier to rest in the familiar comfort of the 23rd Psalm than to descend with David in the silence of Sheol, yet only in the wholeness of his descent can we breathe the height of Christ’s resurrection. This is not poetic wistfulness on my part; this is fact.
It is David’s descent into Sheol and Jesus’ conquest of Death that lead us to the significance of the Covenant between these two.
This book moves beyond selective reading and into the rhythm of the covenant as a whole. We are not searching David’s life for helpful principles; we are listening for the price he bore in his own flesh and voice. What are the consequences for a king, unable to bear the cost of a covenant? Why does their relationship exist at all, and with such persistence, if not to impart significant meaning? We seek to understand the Last Supper as the moment a marriage was formally sealed, ratifying a contract first conceived of in the Garden and consummated on the Cross.
As I stated, none of this is offered as a critique of the church or the people who find life within it. I am ill-equipped to offer perspective on an activity I infrequently participate in. Instead, this book poses a question: what is our purpose in faith? Said more directly, what is the highest aim around which we should direct the locus of belief?
What I know with absolute certainty is the inheritance that is ours requires a physiological transformation. True faith isn’t about observation. True faith is about encounter; it means wrestling with God.
The Bible doesn’t need to be proven. It needs to be entered.
The journey to everlasting life is a spectacular one, precisely because death has held reign for so long. With the uncanny timing of the pandemic (hindsight is 2020), the explosion of online video sharing and video conferencing, and the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, we are at the hinge of the greatest, most rapid transformation our species has ever experienced. Are we on the precipice of some dark nihilism where the machines “take over”, or something more transcendent?
What is shared here is an invitation to see an “old” story with a lens that is both wider and simultaneously more intimate, one that allows its full magnitude and personal promise to come into view.
We seek to rediscover the Bible and its unifying story – a binding inheritance – an irrevocable union that takes us into the grave and out the other side.
As I went through different phases of my life, I continually checked in with my orientation to God, the way one might reference a map. Most of the time, it wasn’t great; I was lost. I largely avoided church because contemplating going made me feel guilty. God felt distant, and I was racking up more losses than wins in the game of life in my attempts to close the gap between us. It was a gap I didn’t know how to close without striking gold in the journey I’d embarked on as a young boy.
My quest, the primary idea that had shaped my decision-making for decades, yielded plenty of short-lived relationships, little in the way of material or financial success, and two divorces. It lacked a distinct reference point, and yet that is precisely what my journey demanded. I was looking for a needle in a haystack full of them.
Time and again, I twisted myself inside-out when my search came up short; despite myriad approaches to relationships and partner-selection, I could never completely divorce myself from the beckoning of my life’s compass. It was sometimes maddening.
As my last relationship ended in late 2019, just weeks before a virus from Wuhan, China started making headlines, I felt unnervingly raw and strangely optimistic.
The rawness arose from my intention to avoid immediately jumping back into a relationship. Despite the best intentions of friends and their dating recommendations and my own inclination to get “back in the saddle,” I wanted to break the pattern and be single for a while – I needed to sort “me” out. My intention of consciously not seeking the comfort and familiarity that a relationship would bring went against the grain of how I’d operated for decades. Withdrawal was gut-wrenching.
The optimism came because I was stepping into my truth – the truth shall set you free.
Having spent little time in the Bible in the years leading up to the pandemic, I was wildly ignorant of what the text actually said. If anything, I’d grown accustomed to taking the Bible in the sips that are dispensed in a one-hour church service.
Imagine trying to learn to speak French by studying it for thirty minutes a week without ever putting what you’ve learned into practice. It makes more sense to spend a summer in Paris. When it came to the Good Book, I was an amateur sipper.
I’ve written extensively about my experience of the pandemic in my last two books, Love Letters to the Virgin Mary and Becoming One with Christ. I will only mention it here to the extent that it serves you, the reader.
Between March and June of 2020, I had what famed depth-psychologist Carl Jung refers to as “religious experiences” – direct and overwhelming encounters with God. For fifty years, I lived what often felt like a forgettable life. By financial, social, or career measures, it was an utter failure. In April 2020, one month into lockdown and exactly one week before my fifty-first birthday, I saw a post on Instagram; it was the woman of whom I’d made it my life’s mission to find. The compass that had guided me for decades had, at last, found its Magnetic North. I was euphoric, as the recognition of the moment’s significance was virtually instantaneous. In the immediate weeks that followed, my encounters with God continued.
The joy and awe I experienced at these experiences, in conjunction with COVID’s global lockdown, filled me with an incredible confidence that my deliverance was at hand. What soon followed was a volcanic, spiritual rupture. Ephesians 2:22 states, “in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”
After the life I’d lived, rife with scarcity, deception, and habitual unfaithfulness to my partners, I felt virtually uninhabitable. And yet these encounters were direct, soul-shaking, and staggering. By July 4th weekend that year, I found myself asking the most profound question I had ever considered – had Jesus Christ truly conquered death?
Every Easter Sunday is a celebration in the belief that He did.
But how does one embody such conviction? To say one believes in Jesus is fine; the question that we must strive to answer is, To what end? How does one become a dwelling place of God?