It has now been just under 9 months since I have last seen my wife Tori and grade-school kids Victor and Mia.
I have probably paid the full price for what I have done. But, I’ll get to that.
Recap
To save you reading the last 8 emotionally-drenched, meandering posts, I’ll give a summary of what has happened. I’ve visited and revisited it so many times that this will probably be the last time I bring these past events up again:
- I had adopted a perverse form of Christianity that hybridized Stoicism and Nihilism. My wife adopted it, and our children were slowly adopting it via lifestyle imprinting. This was our greatest sin, but more on that later.
- She went passively twice a week to a local church with the kids, and I went once a week. We weren’t that involved. There wasn’t much spirituality in the home, but plenty of intellectual pursuits.
- On 2024-09-08, a petty argument escalated, and I lost my temper farther than I realized I could, and physically hurt her. She then called the police. I went to that church, and I was arrested there.
- After spending a night in jail, I was given a no contact order against her alone, meaning I couldn’t go back to my apartment for any reason. In all legal capacities, my children were and have been in no way part of this.
- I use the term “legal capacities”. They’re 100% affected, but not technically in the eyes of the law.
- Over the next two weeks, I was in a mad scramble to get a car and back to work.
- During that time, by 2024-09-13, she avoided the immediate risk of the DHS being involved by fleeing. The church we went to sent me a legally-unprovable-they-were-involved email that unhelpfully told me she was no longer in the city of Des Moines.
- I became closely connected with Des Moines Fellowship church (a church that fellowships in Des Moines, if the title wasn’t obvious). They helped move everything I had to our family’s storage unit.
- I was sentenced with a deferred judgment and the no contact order terms were set until the earlier of 2029-10-30 or whenever she requests an Iowa judge to have it lifted.
- A deferred judgment basically means I pled guilty, but it will be expunged and never have legally happened if I stay out of trouble until I’m off probation.
- The 2029 date is the standard no contact order extension when someone completely disappears and doesn’t talk to anyone. If she had had a 4-minute conversation with a DHS caseworker or prosecuting attorney, it would have been set earlier or lifted altogether.
- The DHS case was closed around mid-November.
- Through a legal butterfly effect, I lost my insurance license, which means I couldn’t be an insurance agent anymore.
- I’ve now endured not seeing my family through the holidays and three of our birthdays, with Tori’s coming up this month.
- I will probably be off probation sometime in September.
- Depending on how things go, Iowa Code 710.1(5) could cause severe trouble for her, but I’ll get to that.
My Thoughts: What Happened
I have had plenty of time to think, pray, and realign my life. I now see clearly what went wrong. As a full disclaimer, if you’re not a Christian, my basis of morality will be too alien for you to understand.
God is a jealous God, and doesn’t like to place Himself alongside other gods (Exodus 20:5). The entire concept of spiritual sanctification among His people (e.g., not mixing fabrics, no tattoos, uncleanness for going to the tabernacle) is because He doesn’t stand for our designs to sit parallel to His ways as if they were equal and equivalent.
This entire broken family arrangement has arisen because my wife and I had jointly delivered “strange fire” to the service of God (Leviticus 10). We had developed a highly intellectual and morally accommodating relationship with every stray philosophy or idea we came across. Even though we had seen what God could do, all the way back in early 2017, we separately pursued what was right in our own eyes.
While we genuinely avoided the truly grotesque and perverse, the endless pursuit of novelty drove us both into a flavor of media-based idolatry that wasn’t appropriate for children of God. We abandoned our first love (Revelation 2:4), and were sending our children down the path that would repeat our idolatry. Much of what I have written has created a subliminal depiction of this benign heresy.
But, like any heresy or false doctrine, it devolved over time into a toxic presence in our home. We both withdrew into our respective asocial worlds, seeking answers over human connection and truth over goodness.
September of last year was a consequence of what we both had been ignoring. Without mincing words, the sin we both practiced, in our respective domains, was false teaching.
I can’t even tell my wife these things, which is part of the payment for my sins. Tori, assuming she hasn’t already, will have to reap a uniquely different arrangement for her end of the rebellion. My only hope is that God gives her guidance and correction, since the complete lack of information I’ve received indicates she probably isn’t even reading this.
My Thoughts: Looking Forward
Due to the scope of what Tori has done, her jōhatsu status with my children may cause trouble for her, depending on the permutations of possibility:
- A. If she wishes to ever talk with me again, she’ll need to contact the Iowa judge:
- BEST LIKELY CASE: a motion is submitted (to dismiss or quit or something), and it’ll be rubber-stamped that we can talk again. Legal problem over. We can talk again.
- WORST LIKELY CASE: the DHS gets involved for some unspecified reason. This isn’t likely, but could happen.
- B. If she decides to avoid the judge and never talk with me until 2029-10-30:
- BEST LIKELY CASE: she and the kids carve out a life away from me, the government doesn’t know until 4.5 more years from now, and she and the kids can make moves to engage with me again at their discretion after that. This is not a likely scenario due to the length of time.
- WORST LIKELY CASE: some legal event triggers (e.g., hospitalization, auto accident, police encounter), and the DHS case regarding her is reopened or appended with another, much worse case.
If the DHS were to be involved, the following would likely happen:
- She’ll be charged with a kidnapping felony and spend at least a few days in jail.
- The kids will be pulled through the foster system until I prove I can take care of them. Alternately, they would drag them through the system long enough to give custody to one of our extended family.
- She’ll get visitation rights for a short time until full parental rights are restored. The longer this persists, the more scrutiny the DHS will deliver against her.
- The felony becomes a deferred judgment or sentencing, and she gets probation. After probation, her legal problems are over.
I miss my kids and Tori, but I also want to do what serves in the best possible interests of everyone:
- I will not submit a missing person report or request a case opened to get my kids back. It guarantees trouble for Tori, while her decisions could potentially sidestep that trouble.
- For those of you saying I need to exercise my rights because my kids need a father, you’re missing a key detail: children must have a father, and a mother, and for their father and mother to get their crap together and talk things out to parent them together. It’s God’s institution, not man’s, and I’m violating that by trying to act against Tori. God loves Victor and Mia more than I do, and He works a plan irrespective of our decisions.
- There is literally no precedent in the Bible to justify me acting against the interests of Tori. If anything, there is plenty to say that your version of morality may need realignment (e.g., Romans 12:17).
- I’m aware it may risk my parental rights in the process, but I intend to set them down out of love for the family altogether. How much more has Christ given up His rights and privileges for me?
- I’m done trying to find legally viable answers:
- It won’t make any difference whether I’m off probation or not. My probation officer’s job description doesn’t involve her or my kids unless I do something crime-related, and they’re not helpful because that would qualify as “legal advice”.
- The only way I can act in any legal capacity would be under family law. I’ve been advised that I’d have to file for divorce to get that started because both children are biologically ours. See #1 for why I’m not going to do that.
- God is in control over this entire situation.
- Irrespective of where they are, He is a father to the fatherless (Psalm 68:5), even when the context is strange.
- God has been favorably permitting them to subsist and survive, wherever they are. My situation is vastly unusual, and it requires both a tremendous amount of discipline and well-placed “coincidences” to permit this to happen. Time will tell if He is turning her over to her desires or protecting them.
- Even with zero indication of the wellbeing of the three of them, it’s not my place to deliver any form of justice:
- We all deserve death, but God forestalls that judgment in the hopes that we come to know of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, with the purpose of us repenting. There is tremendous grace in this alone.
- If Tori is pursuing Him, she has not reached out to anyone because she is under severe hardship. Anything I do in that domain will add unfair harshness to her experiences.
- If Tori is not pursuing Him, I must trust His timing. In our sins, God has a way of warning us verbally, then giving us at least one very close call, and then finally brings the logical consequences of our actions after we’ve shown we don’t want to turn from our actions. How am I doing anything right by trying to speed up God’s schedule?
On her end, she must do at least one of two things to serve the best interests of our children:
- Given how the DHS does things, contact a trustworthy family member to take care of the kids in the event that a caseworker doesn’t trust either her or me. My dad is the safest bet, unless she believes her overall nonsocial mom or stroke-addled dad are better with parenting them unsupervised.
- Wait for me to get more financially situated before re-emerging, irrespective of my probation status, to ensure the DHS feels safe with either of us as parents.
Until anything changes at all, this is the last I will speak of this. Life moves on, even when people die or go inexplicably missing, and holding to a memory is a futile exercise of false hope. The idea of a memory lasting forever is a volatile lie, and the smaller features already have disappeared or changed from when I last saw them. This will only persist until the people I knew no longer exist. Even figuratively, they will have changed, especially my children, if I’m fortunate to see them again this side of eternity.
My Thoughts: Myself
If I find viable work in the next few months, I have probably hit the bottom of the consequences I’m facing from this event. I’ve done everything within my power to protect our estate, but time will tell if God feels like taking away our possessions as well. The finite can never contend with the infinite.
I have nothing left but the ripples that came from it. I’m no longer the same person, but can’t even apologize until Tori and I have a conversation. Given that I haven’t heard from her and nobody has updated me on how they are doing, God will likely have to grow her spiritually before I see them again.
This experience has been burning off tremendous amounts of shame. In most places in life, there’s an “action” item that can represent as a focal point for all our efforts. It is God’s wisdom and goodness to force us out of that circumstance by experiencing something truly beyond our control. The more talented we are, the more clever He has to be to find something that can incapacitate us while also not crushing our spirit to dust.
2014 and 2025 are shaping up to be similar journeys for me. The accountant died back then, and the philosopher has died recently. However, God has provided some clear distinctions:
- The first time, I supplied further mania and anxiety to my already unhinged state. This time, I’ve found unabounding peace.
- Back then, I lost my sense of identity and rebuilt it as “the Philosopher Accountant”. This time, I’ve lost my sense of identity but no longer feel compelled to maintain it, since that’s God’s job.
- My career fell apart and I had no idea what to do, which left me devastated. This time, I have an equal obliviousness of the future, but have found joy in the daily experiences around me.
I’m grateful in some ways that Tori probably doesn’t read this, because it could be misconstrued by my saying that the peace and closure of my soul is worth the trauma I’ve endured. If I had to live the rest of my life like this, I’d be better off than what I had had. Without the gains to the soul or the presence of the Holy Spirit, this all sounds like spiritual Stockholm Syndrome, but I can definitely see now that this state of hyper-dependence is how we were originally designed to exist.
And, knowing God’s track record, the more I suffer by His plan, the stronger I grow, so further losses will have their effect in the way He wishes. It’s a far greater experience than the death I deserve, back when my values were spiritual Stockholm Syndrome.
Still Seeking Goodness
Last time, I discussed that Goodness was the best of the Transcendentals to aspire to: you either gain Beauty and Truth in the quest for Goodness, or they’re not worth the effort alone.
But, I left you with a mystery that I hadn’t answered yet. What, exactly, is this goodness?
I can say, with some degree of confidence, that I’ve found it now.
However, I can also say, with some degree of confidence, that I don’t understand it enough to share it yet.
My method has been very simple. Every day, I have made a commitment to perform the following, in no particular order:
- Listen to 2-6 worship music songs, to the degree my emotions can withstand it
- Spend time in prayer, to the degree my patience can handle it
- Read at least a few chapters of the Bible, at least until I find a new inspiration or connection
In due time, maybe a few more months, I think I’ll be ready to talk about goodness. Right now, I can’t do that information justice.
What I’m Doing Now
I’m presently unemployed right now, and waiting for where God sends me next.
My writing is on hold until my soul is ready to more accurately parse goodness. However, I am consolidating existing content right now for the sake of brevity in preparation for that readiness.
I’m still waiting for my wife to reappear with our two children, but she may have some growing to do before I see her again.
I’m taking time to heal from everything that has happened this past year: a lost wife and children, lost job and career aspirations, stress-induced personality changes, and everything else that comes with all of those things.
For the first time in my life, I’m trusting God, which means my most significant task right now is to learn patience and peace in my ever-changing uncertainties. The to-do list gets rather small when you’re both unsure what tomorrow brings and fine with the uncertainty.