What I Did
On Star Wars Day, I think I’ll share a buzzkill of an update. May not only the Fourth be with you, but also the Fifth (of vodka), the Sixth (of man), the Seventh (of God), and maybe an Eighth (if you’re into marijuana).
I am awaiting God’s deliverance, on His timing. A cascade of events has taken me from a position of sufficient family wellness into the chaos of prolonged unemployment, creeping into 8 months of not knowing whether Tori, Victor, or Mia are alive or dead.
I made a list of parachurch organizations and a glossary on TheoLogos, but my new development of what I’ve learned has halted all new creative ventures.
What I Learned
By any measure, this situation has been God’s providence to rip every hardened scab off my heart.
Why do I say God’s providence? I say it because I have finally been able to internalize the hope that represents itself within Hebrews 12:4-13.
- God is clearly disciplining me, and any scope of hardship Tori is experiencing is certainly the same thing.
- We could attribute hatred or resentment against the bringers of that hardship all we want, but there is a God who has permitted everything in its time and place, and we all await the largest court case in existence someday that will show things for what they really are.
- If we juxtapose my previous point that the universe was literally designed for God’s relationship with man, the only thing we can conclude is that God is clever enough to place every hardship for a divinely established meaning.
- Of course, the whole “why do bad things happen to good people?” inevitably bubbles up, and I’ll flip the script by saying that death for anyone who will be with God is the ultimate self-interested action anyone can experience. Jim Elliot had an easier life than his family: he just had to show up to get martyred!
A Recapitulation
This prolonged state of mandated inaction has forced me to wait on the sidelines for what may transpire:
- First, I was forced to honor the no contact order while I waited for the court to make its determination. Frontier Church was willing to assist Tori, but has used the declaration that I’d be trespassing to prevent me from even talking to them in person.
- Then, I was forced to do nothing while Des Moines Fellowship assisted in moving everything out of the abandoned apartment, which I’m still thoroughly grateful for.
- I was then forced to wait while I worked for any news to re-emerge about my family.
- I have now been forced to wait for a job to materialize, with my only responsibility being to constantly apply everywhere.
- I’m still waiting for probation to end, which should happen sometime around September.
- Even then, I’ll have to wait for Tori to approach a judge, unless she wants to wait until October 2029 to interact with me again.
- In my own research, I’ve found that Tori incurs increasing legal trouble if she doesn’t give me access to my kids, and my hope is that she’ll get the NCO cleared before anything worse happens. If she doesn’t get this done soon, the DHS may yet become involved again.
- Any action I could choose to take toward my family could create more problems. This includes reporting any crime, divorcing Tori, putting in a missing persons report for my kids, and contacting HHS/DHS. Jesus had to bless the peacemakers because sometimes they would bear extra burdens for their efforts.
- Of course, this is only what I wait for right now, and I may have to wait longer for things I can’t know about right now.
This unpleasant and cynically-framed reality I live in isn’t without its hope, though.
We don’t typically see our own transformations, since we are so familiar with ourselves and we usually need others to tell us. However, in my situation, these trials have been so heavy, so alien, and so directly leveled against my greatest flaws in my character that I’ve been able to personally witness a few changes shifting inside my mind.
I decided to make a list composed entirely of every radically unlikely thing that happened in my life, irrespective of good or bad, to see if I could find a pattern to God’s madness. I’ve now seen that He has been working to deconstruct my idols:
- I’ve never cared much for money, but He destroyed that part of me when my accounting career crashed and burned. Left alone, I may have become someone very wealthy and insulated from the hardship that could have grown me.
- My aspirations for power fell apart when I worked as a manager and saw the realities of what power brought. Left alone, it may have made me far more religious, and I may have built some weird Christian cult like the Rosicrucians.
- The desire for pleasure was filled thoroughly in the past few years with more video games than one should rightly have (mostly bought at a discount).
- The desire for honor, though, has pervaded throughout, and every single part of my present situation is God’s public effort to bring me to a dramatically farther level of dishonor than I’ve ever experienced before, which has all been necessary to destroy my Christian Stoicism.
And, in all this, I am now becoming grateful. This would have made Mia and Victor into deeper and worse sinners than me if this hadn’t been stopped. I can only presume that God is doing His work on Tori in the meantime to deconstruct her false gods as well, though it’s part of my dishonor to not even know that information.
The themes represented within my brokenness have yielded a unique pattern, with a new set of discoveries that underpin them.
- At first, last November, I explored inward into our relationship, specifically on narcissism. I addressed the solution as the somewhat tired Christian idea that “Jesus heals all hearts who come to Him”, but it wasn’t a particularly clear image. It also defied the normal, natural sequence of how I understood nature, what with an “unfixable” mind being so destitute in its form that not even God could pull that soul from the abyss.
- As of March, I indicated how Stoicism and Christianity don’t work together. Christian Stoicism is, effectively, a derived form of Stoicism that attaches a new layer of meaning onto an otherwise intrinsically defective value system for living well. However, it didn’t address the metaphysical emptiness left over.
- Last month, I saw the meaning of God written into the universe, and found nihilism and Christianity are diametrically opposed. This is because the universe is not some abstract thing that sits away from God, but is instead a thing God made, God permeates, and created man within that universe specifically for a relationship with Him. To be nihilistic in that frame is to deny God’s very presence or design. But, it doesn’t address what ought to be the case.
These reconstructions bring me to another discovery I’m sharing today, which changes everything I’ve lived for.
Transcendentals in Practice
Philosophers debate endlessly about the “transcendentals”: things that are surpassing all other things.
In particular, there are three major ones, but technically four depending who you ask:
- True things – stuff that isn’t untrue
- Beautiful things – stuff that is of aesthetic value
- Good things – stuff that is not bad
- Unified things – stuff that harmonizes together, though this is a bit harder to pin down
I have been an endless philosopher preoccupied with truth, and my wife has been a highly gifted artist preoccupied with beauty. Of course, we both haven’t liked to call ourselves a philosopher or an artist, but that’s what it means to be a true philosopher or artist: you’re so high-falutin’ that you fit into a class beyond the class!
Categorically, if we analyze this further, we could classify the transcendentals in the following ad-hoc diagram I made, with groupings of each:
So, to elucidate, let’s walk through some examples of each category:
- True and Beautiful, but not Good – a lot of art, many Hollywood movies
- True, but not Good or Beautiful – blueprints to make hand grenades
- Beautiful, but not Good or True – the devil himself
- Good, True, and Beautiful – the transformation of an abusive husband into a man of God, and the forgiveness of his wife to finalize the moral redemption
- Good and True, but not Beautiful – [um, maybe some Hallmark movies? get back to later]
- Good and Beautiful, but not True – [perhaps some popular Christian movies? fill in later]
- Good, but not Beautiful or True – [some lamer Christian movies out there I guess? need to find more]
As you can see, this categorically farts out, and we have some holes in the model:
This is because of two possible things:
- I’m not being creative enough here.
- My model is bad.
Transcendentals in Order
Now, if I was a top-tier manager or analyst, I’d find a way to make the model work somehow. It’s my model, after all, and the theories are supposed to bend to my whim!
But, over here in reality, the model is wrong. Here’s what it’s supposed to look like:
In effect, everything that is good is automatically also true and beautiful. However, things can be any permutation of true or beautiful without goodness involved whatsoever.
Of course, the knee-jerk intuition is to say, “Well, that’s fine, but we can still use true or beautiful things for good, right?”
Well, yes, but that is in many ways the long pathway to it:
- I could definitely scour the internet for every form of postmodern art, then find a way to compose a gallery of good things within that realm. That, however, would be a colossal waste of time.
- Instead, I could fixate on good art, then work my way outward to finding it wherever it sits. Postmodern art would be a scant list in there, but the focus on goodness first would instantly winnow all the non-good art out.
And, herein, lies yet another paradox of discovering this truth, which is the emotional wall I’m wrestling with.
What I’m Feeling
I feel a tremendous sense of shame. Like I’ve stated before, Tori and I have both been endlessly scouring the foothills of Beauty and Truth respectively in the hopes of finding the Good, and we have utterly wasted our efforts in the process to climb that mountain.
It could be argued that my AdequateLife and TheoLogos represent some form of non-negotiable good, but what about NotaGenius, or Gained InSite, or Trendless Tech? All of those represented in my passions equally, since they were all preoccupied with “truth”, and the interests of what was “good” were sidestepped. It’s fortunate that I didn’t try to pursue more esoteric forms of truth, or I’d have been in trouble (on that subject, hello Mr. Gates and Mr. Soros, you can rest assured I will certainly not talk about your secret plans for immortality or belief in eventual communism).
My attempt to embody truth in everything I did has made me bitter, cynical, and if we’re using the Bible, unrighteous.
This means I’m not ready to even fix my essays. I was so eager to revise and rebuild every time in the past, but I now see that I must first develop more goodness within myself before I’m even worthy to fix my wayward creations.
And, further, I have also been the bringer of destruction to Tori, at least partially, or maybe it’s possible that she has had her own flavor of destruction she has wrought in search of beauty, I don’t really know.
My hope is that either I’ll serve as the leader to guide her into the new discoveries I’ve made when she’s ready to approach me, or that God provides a true pathway for reconciliation and healing. But, I’ve seen my inadequacy for the task, as well as her inadequacy if she’s the same woman I knew in September.
In all of this, my anxiety and frustration has abated enough that I’ve seen a few realities that give some comfort, but they all sit within the future.
Firstly, this situation isn’t really all that abnormal, and I’ve been blinded by the qualities of being autistic:
- If you take Facebook at face value, about 20% of the people look like they’re having a fantastic time, but if you get to know them, that number is closer to 2%.
- The nondisclosure due to shame makes it appear that only about 1% of the people you know are suffering, but it’s probably more accurate to say it’s closer to 10%.
- This fact has provoked me to invent the Ten-Scale Shame Rule: the proportion is a factor of 10 between an extremely honorable or shameful activity occurring versus being publicized.
- Therefore, most people don’t publicize their domestic violence issue caused from a rocky season of marriage, or their job loss. This makes me the minority who does something “shameful”, but it’s far more common than most people would ever say.
Secondly, our intelligence has been our undoing:
- I listened to this interview with the highest recorded IQ guy ever, and his idea that IQ or intelligence could be described as “depth of focus” really stuck with me.
- This wouldn’t have been as traumatic on me if I was a dimmer bulb.
- Given that Tori is on the same intelligence level as me, I can only conjecture what she’s enduring, and the thoroughness of her ghosting is both a testament to her skill and a long-term risk to our family’s well-being if certain government agencies were to generate an opinion on it.
While I still have a quest for “goodness” now as a component of pursuing a more direct relationship with God, I have an inkling until the next time I post anything:
- Learn gratitude (Hebrews 12:28). The science now caught up with the fact that gratitude literally stops anxiety.
- Present ourselves to God as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1). This means simply showing up. It doesn’t mean thinking through things, persevering through an All-American Underdog Grind Against The Superior Forces Until You Emerge, Bloodied And Triumphant™®. It means showing up after being prepared by God, and that’s it.
- It’s arguable (though I’m not sure) that the spiritual race is simply an expansion of these two things. All faithfulness and righteousness seems to derive from people who have expressed so much gratitude as they presented themselves in front of hardship that nothing else really mattered.
Thirdly, my newfound trust in God’s will means that this is guaranteed to impact someone positively, even if my permanent pages have dubious value, and there’s even a possibility that Tori herself is reading this and hearing what I have to say.
And fourth, I can say I’ve moved on. I’m not the same person, there’s no reason for me to hang with bated breath for an opportunity to apologize when I literally can’t do anything, and I can find peace in knowing that I will see my family eventually, whether in this life or the next.
What I’m Doing Now
I’m presently unemployed right now, but currently looking to pursue a driver role.
My writing is on hold until my soul is ready to more accurately parse goodness.
I’m taking time to heal from everything, both the recent series of unfortunate events, and the endless abuse I have subjected myself to in the pursuit of being American-Grade Ambitious.
I’m still waiting for most beautiful woman I’ve known to reappear with the two amazing children we share.
- If she does, she’ll have to summon the courage to directly reach out to the Polk County Clerk of Court, either by calling or walking in, to have the NCO removed.
- She would need to reach out to Des Moines Fellowship if she needed any support beyond whatever Frontier Church or her own connections would be able to help in.
For the first time in my life, I’m actually trusting God, which means my most significant task right now is to learn patience and peace in my ever-changing uncertainties. I’m not doing nothing these days, but the to-do list gets rather small when you’re not sure what tomorrow brings.