Chapter Nine
My Personal Story
There are times in life that we get called upon to practice what we preach. It is these moments that truly define us.
Are we what we say we are or are we a fake.
A sham.
Recently I was put to the test. Without going into too much detail I will put it simply as this, I married the wrong woman or as irony would have it maybe I married the perfect woman.
At the time I got married 10 years ago I didn’t have a close relationship with God. I had been raised as a Christian. I believed in God, but I had no real relationship with God.
Life was about me and what I wanted from it in order to feel good. It was enough for me to think God was satisfied with me, “as is” because I was a good person and I didn’t do bad things.
Like I said, I married the wrong woman and yet the chaotic and oppressive hell that woman put me through and the situations forced upon me created in me the desire to know God out of the most basic need of a human to survive. It’s often been noted that wars are a great catalyst for people to get in touch with God because the fear of death is its own driving force in terms of securing down what is needed to be eternally understood, in the same way going through emotional hell can work much the same result as I in many ways am living proof of that.
In my quest to survive and just keep breathing for the sake of my children I formed a deep relationship with my Heavenly Father. It wasn’t a spontaneous love affair on my part, but rather it came out of the hard won experience of discovering just who it is that loves me the most and that hands down is God.
As I said I married the wrong woman, but the results of being exposed to her brand of hell tell me in some ways that I married the right one. So many things would never have come to be if I hadn’t married the woman that I did.
I would not be the author of nearly 25 works of exciting Christian fiction that span a vast range of genres and who, according to many fans of mine are some of the best fictional writings that they have ever read, whether Christian or secular based.
Writing for me truly is one of the greatest passions of my life and the advent of its coming to be was because I needed a way of escape from the situation I was stuck in. In a way writing saved my life as it reminded me of my purpose and value as a person even as everything else about me was daily deconstructed by a woman who never had any good intentions towards me even though I tried to love her and make her happy over and over and over again.
Maybe if you’re reading this you know from a similar experience what it’s like to be joined with someone who can best be described as a pathological soul vampire. If you do identify with this then I hope that you are on the other side of that relationship now and healing.
For so much of my relationship with the woman it was my writing that helped to affirm for me that I truly was an exceptional person and one of great value in the Kingdom of God, even when I was often led to think something very different about myself and told that I wasn’t very special at all and that the only good thing about me in my wife’s opinion was my ability to consistently bring home a paycheck in order for her to live the life that she both desired and was never satisfied with.
My other great passion in life is everything to do with my children. They simply put are the biggest reason for why I see it as being vitally important for me to continue existing. As long as I can help them or even father new lives into existence, then I have a concrete reason for being in existence.
I am truly not a self-centered person. It’s both a positive attribute and a character fallacy as I have a tendency to drain myself of energy on behalf of others and not care for my own needs as I should.
These primary passions and a few other secondary ones were all eventually put to the test as my marriage devolved into deeper chaos brought on by the reality that in order to continue surviving I finally learned to stop feeding the beast that was materialized into human flesh in the form of my wife.
She is a woman as scary as any monster out of a children’s bedtime story could only be, perhaps even more so for her ability to appear as completely normal to the majority of mankind on a daily basis. This attribute of hers I find the creepiest of all, along with the reality of how many years it took me to see what I do now in relation to her constant emotional abuse of me.
Truly, I am blessed to be alive and that’s as much as I’m willing to say about that. I do have the intent someday to write a book on passive aggressive covert female narcissism as I have certainly experienced my fair share of it up close and personal.
For now though I am simply focused on trying to heal and pick up the pieces of one woman’s epic burnout that has destroyed a family and without God’s intervention has the ability yet to ruin each of my children’s lives and in turn even worse yet potentially make them into creatures such as her that feed on other people’s life force of energy because they have none of their own and no ability to generate it for themselves. This anxious hell I experience on behalf of my children is what my life has devolved into on a daily basis.
That said, even in the midst of hell I can truly say to everyone that God will walk right alongside of you even in the midst of it, even if He won’t remove you from the circumstances of having to go through it.
In terms of the positives of the situation I am living through there are many. I have learned so much both about myself and other people.
I have gained faith to a degree that I never had before and yet I’m personally weaker and yet reversely God is stronger in my life than ever. The reality of my new relationship with God has made me to be a more balanced person and far more self-aware than I ever was before.
One of the attributes of a narcissist is that literally everything and I mean everything they have ever told you, whether it was about their life, what they thought, or what they believed in, everything – was a lie.
I hate lies. It is this reality of having to rebuild life in the chaos resulting from 10 years spent living a lie that perhaps drives me more than anything else to expose the truth in whatever way I can in terms of whatever situation I find it being lied about and the flat earth debate controversy is one of them.
This journey of discovering these positives and contending for the truth has at times cost me the greatest passions of my life.
Out of fatigue and other strictures brought on by my wife, I gave up writing for a while. I died a little inside when that happened.
In many ways I felt like I had betrayed God, only to find out later that it was less a betrayal of God and more of an act of giving up on myself.
In some ways I thought my gift of writing would be removed from me for forever, only it doesn’t work like that. A gift given by God once given is never taken away.
The journey to discover that though, was a very dark tunnel indeed and yet I am through with that leg of the journey and I writing again and loving it. Praise be to God!
The continuing hell of the moment for me though is that while I am finally separated from my worst predator I am now also after a lengthy legal battle not in full custody of my children. Simply put, I failed in court to unmask the dragon that my wife is on the inside and she it turn won an academy award for best actress.
The start of legal issues began when one day my wife simply left and took our four children with her. I didn’t know where my kids were for over two weeks.
I had an emergency custody hearing granted to me by the court and it was by doing this that I was finally able to secure where my children were and have the ability to see them. Over the next six months and two custody hearings that followed my wife did her level best to invoke an image of me in the court’s opinion as that of being a complete whack job.
One of the things she insisted upon at the first hearing was that I undergo psychological testing as it was her claiming that I was the crazy one. I consented to the testing and passed with flying colors of complete normality in terms of being a living, breathing human with a heart in his chest.
Sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter if you do what’s asked of you to show others who you are at heart, because, like checking off items on a list my wife one by one twisted out of perspective and used anything she could dredge up from our 10 years of being together to make me look like I was unfit to be a parent, while I in return lied about nothing and didn’t respond with any of the same gutter tactics that were being employed against me.
I stuck to the facts and spoke the truth on every matter as it was brought up and truly within the courtroom setting it was a matter of “he said / she said” and though my lawyer was able to corner her on multiple occasions and point out how she had lied previously under testimony it seems in the grand scheme of things that it has done my case no good.
One of the items as might be imagined that I had leveled off against me like a loaded gun by her lawyer was, “So you believe that the earth is flat?”
Response, “Yes, I do.”
That may seem a simple enough answer in retrospect, but I assure you that when you’re in a courtroom setting fighting for the lives of your children that is no simple answer to give.
Why?
Because it makes you look crazy in the eyes of the broader public is why and in some degree questions like that and others attributed to a final ruling by the judge granting my wife with a greater amount of custody of the children than was afforded to me, along with a tiebreaker advantage in terms of health and education decisions in regards to the children.
I am not happy at all with the results of where telling the truth has got me. In fact, my guts are practically eaten out by it both literally and physically.
My children are in the hands of a demoness that views them more like ants meant to do her every bidding than children that I would gladly sacrifice my life for. Did I make the wrong decision in court to answer as I did?
The answer is no.
Lying is never permissible. If everything was to go down again I would still testify that, “Yes, I believe the Earth is flat.”
Why?
Because in the most literal sense of it, I have been tested by God to see where my allegiances are. When I gave up writing to suit the whims of my wife, I gave up on myself for a time.
When I testified to the truth as I’ve come to see it and have outlined previously in great detail in this book I actively chose my relationship with God over the love I have for my children. I fulfilled what Jesus said in Matthew 10:37 “…… The person who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.”
I neither lied in court nor did I forsake my faith, and yes, it is now a part of my faith in God in believing that the earth is flat, and this is primarily derived as such because the word of God simply says so if you read it and take it at face value, which is the only way God’s words were ever meant to be taken.
This is the simple truth of my reality and as a result, my answer in court had to be as simple as, “Yes, I believe the Earth is flat.”
Now to the judge’s credit, she actually spoke up and asked my wife’s lawyer, “You actually want to say that he’s unfit to be a parent because he believes the earth is flat?”
I don’t remember the exact response of my wife’s lawyer, but it could be summed up in one word, “Absolutely!”
So to the reader of this book, yes, believing that the earth is flat and then telling others about it can very well lead to you being called crazy. Worse yet seemingly is the potential to lose what you value most in life out of taking such a stance.
I take encouragement in and encourage others to as well in the promise made by Jesus Christ in Matthew 10:39, “anyone finding his life will lose it and anyone losing his life because of Me will find it.”
Another flat earth believer and author, Rob Skiba, who I don’t know personally, shared his own trials of waking up one day and gradually coming to the conclusion that almost everything he believed about the shape of the earth and the mechanics of its motion was a lie and that the Earth is flat or at least something very close to it and not going anywhere. He’s the author of several biblically-based books and makes a living off of his books along with guest presentations on various topics that pertain to his books.
He has his own YouTube channel and in one video he openly shared how Christians, many of them ones he considered to be his friends, literally turned their backs on him when he started talking about a flat earth. His book sales plummeted seemingly overnight.
The cost for pursuing the truth was very high for him, just as it has been for me and I don’t think we are just two isolated stories.
I don’t know what the background of the situation was, but one flat Earth YouTube channel, My Perspective, just disappeared overnight for months. The channel is back now, but without countless videos that one after the other proved through the use of perspective that a spinning ball simply doesn’t have any basis in either reality or the geometric walls of perspective that every artist uses to invoke artistry and this earth that we live on is truly a work of artistry.
Many of this channel’s former videos are in backup playlists made by fans of his work and I encourage you to seek them out. Many people talk a lot about the topic of a flat earth, but the number of those who conclusively prove a point with every video released by either mathematical principles, the use of the laws of perspective, or other discernible and reproducible principles is a bit more rare.
As I said I don’t know why his channel went down without any explanation, but I can say that there is an incredible amount of heat even threats of severity of all kinds leveled against the flat earth believing community. One channel owner showed results of how YouTube itself deleted or lost 3 million flat earth search results in a 12 hour span in 2017.
The reality of this quest for the truth of what the earth is actually shaped like is no longer just a movement comprised of a few hundred or even thousands. Millions of people worldwide are waking up and throwing out old lies that simply won’t do anymore and yes the cost of doing that can be very high.
Believing that the earth is flat can and indeed will make things difficult if not hellish for you, but if you are a lover of the truth, if you believe that the Word of God, the Bible, is true, then you have no other choice.
This book that I’ve written to help convince others of the truth that I have found has hopefully accomplished two things. I hope that it has eliminated ignorance.
Secondly, I hope it’s made the case for why a Christian has no other choice but to believe a flat earth picture of our created construct because there is no other valid interpretation that differs from what the words of God say on the topic.
My duty as a believer in Jesus Christ is not to conform to the ways of the world, but rather it is my duty to shine the light of the truth that is alive in me with everyone who will listen. What you do with what you hear is on your head.
Ridicule me, belittle me, troll me with nasty insults, threaten me, or perhaps agree with me – regardless, your decision is on your head so make it good, because one way or another you’re going to have to wear it. Whether it’s a crown of disgusting refuse or a crown of honor the decision is in your hands and the journey to further discovery that now lies ahead of you is one best suited with a close relationship with God firmly in place first, because your chances of surviving without Him helping you are virtually none.
There are many deceptions that take place in this world and the deceptions about this world itself are no less varied, but there is one truth above all others and that is Jesus Christ and what He did for all of us who walk this earth.
In terms of the flat earth debate, I can think of no greater situational occurrence of a testimony for the need of faith than a flat world in line with God’s own spoken word to testify as to how incredibly important it is to be made right with your Creator through the redeeming blood of Jesus Christ and perhaps therein lies the reason for why the god of this world, Satan, has lied about the true realities of earth in a more grandiose fashion then seemingly everything else he lies about to humans.
My encouragement to all readers is to stop conforming to what others believe and seek out the reality of what it is it you should be believing and the way to do this is to get right with God today and when you lift that relationship with Him in terms of value higher than all others in your life then the path forward will become much more clearer to you. None of us that put all of our trust in God will be disappointed in the end, because my God is not a liar and while my day in an earthly court in contention for the livelihood and happiness of my children may be over, my case remains open in the courts of heaven, even as I have a faith in God that just won’t die, even as I have a Savior in Jesus Christ in whom and through whom all things have been made possible to me.
The costs of having faith in God are high, but paid out only in a few brief mortal moments, while the realities of God’s joy washing over you because of the righteous decisions you make in this physical life bound within a matrix of time will play out over all of eternity.
The big picture can be hard to see in the moment of turmoil’s greatest angst, but God is faithful and able to deliver both them who put their trust and expectations in Him and I pray that He will help all of you who are seeking the truth even as He has been my friend through the midst of choosing Him above all else.