Come Home

This chapter is for you. Not the skeptic, not the comfortable, not the reader who came looking for an argument to win. You, the one who just spent all of this recognizing your own church, your own years, your own story in one system after another, and felt it land harder than you expected. I know that feeling. I lived inside more than one of these systems myself, which is the only reason I have any right to say what comes next.

I want you to understand what this site actually is, because it is not a research project. It is a letter, handed down. Everything in my life came down to me in packets that were never opened, a gown, a nativity, a phrase on a bumper sticker, whole systems I had spiritually agreed to somewhere along the way, sometimes intentionally, mostly not, and some my family had agreed to generations before I ever drew breathSo I went and investigated every single one of them, every agreement with my name or my bloodline on it, and I found out something I did not expect. Every one of them was wrong. Every single one. At the bottom of the research rabbit hole, past the catechisms and the Watchtowers and the seed offerings and the secret knowledge, there was not another system waiting. There was Jesus Himself, standing there the whole time, never once having left my side while I dug. He revealed His full self to me at exactly that moment, and now, because I know, I am obligated and eternally honored to do the one thing no one did for me. I am handing this down. This letter is what was never handed down to me by mine, written down so it can be handed to you in place of what was never handed down to you by yours. The chain of unopened packets ends here. This one comes to you already open.

I have to tell you what my prayer answer was when I asked Him what all of this was for, because it reframed everything. He took me to a verse in Amos I had never once heard preached in any building I ever sat in. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. A famine of the Word. I finally understood what I had been living in my whole religious life, and what you may be living in right now. I was never starving because the food did not exist. I was starving in a famine that men manufactured, sitting in buildings where the Word of God was owned, filtered, rationed, translated into formulas and traditions and pre-chewed interpretations, everything except handed to me whole. I spent years starving to death in a building that served breakfast. The famine was never God withholding. It was gatekeepers standing between the field and the hungry.

Because here is the staggering truth: the Word has been freely available to you and to me since the moment the veil in the temple tore from top to bottom. From that instant, access to God stopped running through a priesthood and a curtain, and the gospel started moving outward and never stopped. It has been preached on every continent, in every country, in every language family on the face of the earth, to every people group regardless of what inherited religion their bloodline was handed. It survived everything sent against it. Rome outlawed it, and Diocletian ordered every copy burned, and believers hand-copied it in catacombs by lamplight anyway. The empire that tried to erase it ended up printing it. Through the long centuries when it was chained to pulpits and locked in a language the people could not read, men rose up who would not accept the famine. Wycliffe translated it into English and they hated him so much for it that they dug up his bones decades after he died and burned them. Tyndale translated it and was strangled and burned at the stake, and his last prayer from the fire was Lord, open the King of England's eyes, and within a century that same king's name was printed on the Bible sitting in English homes. The first book ever pressed on Gutenberg's machine was the Bible. It has outlived every empire that banned it, every fire set to it, every scholar who declared it dead, and every counterfeit built beside it, and today it is the most translated, most distributed, most attacked and most alive book in human history. Through all of it, He made sure that nothing in all of human history ever actually touched His Word. Not one enemy in two thousand years has managed to destroy it or improve on it. Because Satan cannot create anything. He never could. All he has ever been able to do is distort what God already made, which is why every system here had to build beside the Word, on top of the Word, around the Word, but could never once replace it. The original is still right here, in your hands, uncorrupted, the same words spoken by the Word made flesh Himself.

But here is the part of that famine verse I cannot stop thinking about, the part that makes this urgent instead of merely beautiful. Amos was not only describing my past. He was warning about a day still coming. Read the very next verse. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find it. Seek it and not find itRead that again, because we are already halfway there. Even now, with the Word more available than at any moment in human history, we clearly lack the knowledge of it, because in every system here, we did not actually know the Word. We knew their explanation of it. Their doctrine, their theology, their movement's version, while the Book itself sat closed on the nightstand. The famine of understanding is already here. What Amos warns about is the day the access itself goes with itBecause there is a moment coming, and all of this has been walking you toward it, when the ones who kept offering you the truth will be gone in an instant. The crazy Jesus freak who would not stop posting repent in every Facebook group. The street preacher you crossed the road to avoid. The coworker who would not shut up about Him. People like me, writing things like this, reaching back for you. Gone, all at once, in the same blink. The people left behind will go looking for exactly those voices, running to and fro, wandering from sea to sea, desperate for one person who can tell them the truth they were offered a hundred times, and they will not find them, because they put their headphones on every single time it came near.

That is the famine Amos saw. Not a shortage of Bibles. A world full of Bibles and not one voice left to open them with you.

The warning is not that truth is hard to find today. The warning is that a day is coming when it cannot be found at all, and it arrives at the exact moment it is finally wanted. Do not let the moment you finally start seeking be the moment after the seeking stops working.

That is the last thing I will ask you to sit with as this site closes. The One who spoke those words is not a historical figure you are reading about. He is a living Person you are going to stand in front of, eye to eye, whether that is today or in fifty years. It is going to be Him. Whether we like it or not, whether we are ready or not, it is going to be Him. He made sure His Word reached you in time. All of this, this letter, is just one more hand it passed through on its way to yours. The famine is over the moment you open it.

There is a unique kind of grief that comes when you discover you were sincerely wrong, not rebellious, not indifferent, not mocking God, but wrong while believing the whole time you were faithfully following Him. That grief does not stay contained to you either. It reaches for every person you love who is still standing exactly where you used to stand, and there are days it sits in my throat like a stone I cannot swallow, because I cannot make any of them see what I see now, no matter how much I want to reach through the screen or across the table and pull them out myself. That kind of realization rarely arrives all at once, for you or for them. It comes quietly, almost imperceptibly, like a thread being pulled from a garment you have worn your entire life. At first, you notice only one loose strand. Then another. Before long, the questions you once dismissed become impossible to ignore, and the beliefs that once felt immovable begin to unravel beneath the weight of honest examination. I am praying that is happening in you right now, reading this. I am praying it is happening in them too, even on the days I cannot see it yet.

You were not foolish for believing what you believed. You were sincere, and you were deceived, and those two things can be true about a person at the exact same time. What matters now is not how you got here. What matters is that Jesus is calling you home, and He is not calling you to a system, a church, a movement, or a tradition. He is calling you to Himself. Only Himself. John 10:3-4 says the sheep hear the shepherd's voice, and he calls his own by name, and they follow him, because they know his voice. You have spent years listening to voices that borrowed His name and answered to something else. This is Him. This has always been Him, calling you by name the entire time you were chasing everything else.

There is a parable Jesus told that says everything this site has been building toward. A son takes his inheritance early, which in that culture was the same as telling his father he wished he were already dead, and he wastes all of it on a life that promised freedom and delivered emptiness. When he finally comes to his senses, starving and ashamed, he heads home rehearsing an apology, ready to be received as a servant instead of a son, because that is all he thinks he has earned.bBut Luke 15:20 says that while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, and was filled with compassion, and ran to him, and threw his arms around him. The father did not wait at the door with his arms crossed. He ran. He did not make the son finish his rehearsed speech. He interrupted it with an embrace. That is who has been calling you this whole time. Every system this site exposed sold you a way to earn your way back to Him, more faith, more ritual, more secret knowledge, more submission, more performance. Every single one of them lied to you, not because effort is bad, but because the Father was never waiting for your performance. He was watching the road for you specifically. He is watching it right now.

So here is the only thing left to do. Stop defending the system. Stop performing for it. Tell God the truth, right where you are, in this chair, on this page, with no one watching but Him. Tell Him what you were taught, and tell Him you see it now for what it was. Tell Him you cannot save yourself and you are done trying to. You do not need perfect words. He is not grading your sentences. He is reading your heart, and He has been calling your name since before you were born. If you want the words, here they are.

Jesus, I believe You are who You say You are. I believe You died for my sins and that God raised You from the dead. I confess You are Lord, and I believe it in my heart. I am done chasing everything I was handed instead of You. I am turning to You now. Thank You for never giving up on me. Amen.

If you just prayed that and meant it, heaven is not being quiet about it right now. Luke 15:10 says there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. You are not the same person you were a paragraph ago, and you never have to go back to what you just walked out of. Find a Bible and start reading it for yourself, without anyone standing between you and the page. Find people who actually know Him and tell them what you just did. The door was open the whole time.