Middle schoolers love dirty words. A few weeks ago, I chaperoned a bunch of them on a trip to Tybee Island. Riding home with my best friend Andy (the middle school principal), the eighth-grade boys in the van started talking s***. Not in a disrespectful way. One of the boys just asked Andy if there’s ever a time when it’s appropriate to say that word. He used the word itself. Laughter exploded from the back of the van.

They were astonished when Andy and I both used the word ourselves to launch into a conversation about why we choose not to say “s***,” along with the other dirty words. This was not a trivial conversation. They were genuinely curious. They listened and asked questions. They wanted to know what kind of speech is appropriate for young men.

Andy has been a teacher for a long time and was also a Scoutmaster for many years. It was not his first rodeo. He launched into a story.

A Bold Recipe

At some point in the 80s or 90s, Steve Swenson, one of the teachers at Alleluia Community School, got fed up with the movies that were coming out because they made foul language and immorality look cool. I don’t know if you remember 80s and 90s movies, but a PG movie would include as many cuss words as the MPAA would allow. If they used the word “Jesus,” it was as a curse. And every year, they pushed the line a little farther.

Steve wanted to teach his students a lesson, so he decided to bake brownies. He gathered the highest quality ingredients and used the very best chocolate. Then he went out into the yard and picked up the littlest, tiniest bit of dog s*** that he could find, and mixed it into the brownie batter.

The next day at lunch, he had dozens of beautiful brownie squares sitting out on the lunch room table. The kids squealed as they came in and saw the treats, but Steve told them they had to wait until he told them a story. All the students gathered. Steve told them that he was so excited to offer them this delicious treat. He praised the quality of the chocolate and how tender they were when he cut them. They were quite possibly the best brownies that he’d ever made.

But he did want to warn them, however, that they had a little dog poop in them. Hardly any at all. You’d never be able to taste it. Then he said, “Alright kids, dig in.”

Nobody moved. There was whispering. Did he really put dog s*** in the brownies? Yes, he assured them, there really was just the littlest bit of poop in the brownies. But he’d baked it to perfection, so it was totally safe.

Still, nobody moved. Steve sprang his trap. The movies that were so popular were just like these brownies. They looked great. They had great acting and funny scripts. But the way that they used language was like putting poop in the brownies. No matter how good everything else about the movie was, the bad language ruined everything.

There’s Always a Better Word

I continued by telling the boys that using vulgar words is just plain lazy. A few years ago, I saw a post on social media from one of my favorite fundraising gurus that said something like, “Tell me why the F*** I should stop using four letter words.”

I don’t normally comment on things like that, but I felt inspired. I responded, “Because it’s lazy. You’re a better writer than that. Pick better words.” The reality is that I don’t know of any cases where the vulgar word is the best word. When used, they are stripped of any actual meaning at all and are just filler that gets a cheap reaction.

You see this a lot in media these days. I watched part of a comedy special on Netflix the other day, and from the very beginning it was f-bomb after f-bomb, this effing guy and that effing thing. I kept listening for a while, hoping it would get to some actual comedy. It didn’t. Foul language probably made up 10-15% of the words that he used. I turned it off. It was gross. I was disappointed.

And it’s not like I hate comedy. I love comedy. P. G. Wodehouse is my favorite comedic author, and his books are as clean as a whistle. And he’s the only author who has ever broken me. I was reading one of his books aloud to my wife, and his punch line was so funny that I couldn’t stop laughing for minutes. It was hilarious.

The English language has 170,000+ words, not including all the technical jargon or archaic forms. If you’re focused on the handful of words that will get a reaction because they’re considered dirty or impolite, you’re just missing out on the richness of our language.

A Heart Full of S***

Our conversation with the boys went deeper. A friend of the community is a practicing exorcist. I’ve participated in some of his exorcisms, and told a few stories about them. He gave a talk a few years ago about the awful, vulgar things that come out of the mouths of the possessed when the demons are talking.

I’ve seen it myself. The most vile things you can imagine come out of mouths that are twisted with rage and contempt. In that case, the possessed person is not directly responsible for the words that are coming out of their mouth. But what if we don’t have that excuse?

Jesus said, “For from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks. A good person brings forth good out of a store of goodness, but an evil person brings forth evil out of a store of evil. I tell you, on the day of judgment people will render an account for every careless word they speak. By your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matthew 12:34-37).

Vulgar and profane language is a symptom of what’s in our hearts. It’s a bringing forth of what we have stored inside. I’m not throwing stones here — notice I said “we.” There was a time back in my Hollywood days that I had a horrifically filthy mouth. I was the worst of the worst. And it really did reveal what was going on inside my mind and heart. My thought life was filled with dark and vulgar images. I was ruled by sinful desires. As a result, the words that came out of my mouth were dark and vulgar.

After my conversion, that changed dramatically. I did a word search in my private notes on my computer for the word s***. There were no instances. Zero. I didn’t find it one time in my thousands of files and over a million words that I’ve written during the past 15 years. I just don’t talk that way anymore.

Also, notice what Jesus said about being judged according to the words that come out of our mouths. For this reason, St. Paul wrote, “No foul language should come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for needed edification, that it may impart grace to those who hear." (Ephesians 4:29) When God looks at the transcript of our lives, how much of what we say will fit St. Paul's description? How much will need to be blacked out with a sharpie?

Feed the People

"Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God." (Matthew 4:4) God's word feeds us. In a mysterious way, since man is made in the image of God, our words feed one another, too.

How many people in the world are starving for a word of affirmation? Ravenous for a word of encouragement or comfort? How many languish because they need a word of affection? How many wander in darkness because they need a word of correction?

Our American love affair with freedom of speech has blinded us to the real purpose of language. Liberty should not be confused with license. We need to be free to use our speech to instruct, to affirm, to praise, to correct, to encourage, to comfort, to rejoice, to build up. All of those, and many more positive uses of speech, fall under the general category "to love."

But we shouldn't consider that a license to use our speech for evil ends. The power of our words should never be used to degrade, to lie, to steal, to offend, to calumniate... and all of the other ways that the Father of Lies corrupts the goodness of language. It takes some practice to avoid these corrupt forms, but it can be done. And everyone is the better for it.

The conversation that we had with the boys was a high calorie, stick to your ribs, kind of meal. We talked about what it means to be a man of virtue and self-control, disciplined in our speech. True, it did have a little s*** in it, but only enough so we could warn them not to eat the brownies.

This post originally appeared in Catholic Stand.

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Several years ago, I joined Mike Firmin and 16 stalwart Christian men for a retreat in Allendale, SC. Thanks to a generous friend of Mike’s, we get the run of the hunting lodge at a place called Milbury Plantation. Mike does this once a year for the men that he provides with spiritual direction, and it has become a blessed tradition. I’ve gone for at least a decade, though I’ve missed a few due to big life events like my wedding, the birth of a son, and the plague.

Milbury covers something like 12,000 acres along the South Carolina bank of the Savannah River. Several large ponds dot the landscape, filled with enormous bass and more than a few alligators. Mike joyously recounted the fishing trip that earned him the nickname, “alligator Mike,” which involved capturing a live 4 or 5-foot alligator with a fishing rig and bringing it back to the lodge to show off before releasing it back into the pond.

From slavery to freedom.

In the days before the Civil War, Milbury was a plantation with all the dark history that entails. The new owner turned it into a nature preserve. He also uses the lodge to host various retreats throughout the year. Mike gave him a bell inscribed with the scripture verse, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” At the beginning of every retreat, Mike tells the story of the bell and the plantation, and how the Lord has transformed it from a place of slavery into a place of freedom. This year, the retreat had the theme, “Behold, I make all things new.”

After a brief time of prayer, each man rang the bell with a prayer in his heart for some kind of freedom in his life. That year, I didn’t know what kind of freedom I needed, so I prayed in the days before the retreat that God would lead me to seek the kind of freedom that I needed the most.

When my turn came, I heard the Lord say, “freedom from fear,” and again, “freedom from fear of failure,” as I rang the bell. As I contemplated this word from the Lord afterward, I could see where that particular fear holds me in bondage.

I’ve had some spectacular failures in my life. Two business disasters from my twenties came to mind. One went belly up, and I got booted from the other by the partners. Numerous failed relationships and broken friendships. I’ve written a couple of books that have sold slightly more than 12 copies. I run some websites that might as well be nowhere.com. I do all my writing for fun and have no bitterness about that, but from a business standpoint, they might well be case studies of what not to do.

A new paradigm.

Our first retreat assignment was to prayerfully read through the Gospel of Mark over the course of the weekend. I started reading it on Friday night before bed, and John the Baptist jumped to my attention first thing. By the middle of chapter one, he got arrested. I tried to read on, but my attention kept going back to John’s imprisonment.

Then the Lord said, “Do you think that John the Baptist is a failure?” Whoah. By the world’s standards, obviously so. He lived in the desert as a vagabond. Not a homeowner. Never married. Gathered a bit of a following before making the most powerful person in his country angry. Arrested and then beheaded at an early age. From the world’s perspective, not much to see there.

God’s perspective is so different. Jesus said that John the Baptist was greater than anyone who came before him. That includes Abraham, Moses, King David, and Elijah. That’s pretty high praise coming from the mouth of the Son of God. In art, John the Baptist is always portrayed as being very near to Jesus as He sits at the right hand of the Father. He is eternally blessed.

Part of my problem is that my view of success is tied to externals. My house, my cars, my salary, my retirement nest egg… none are impressive by the standards of the world. John had a different standard for success… obedience to God. That obedience inspired him to confront Herod about his lawless marriage, and brought about his imprisonment and death. God was pleased with this obedience and highly exalted him. The prize he won is out of this world.

A message in the stars.

I got up and took a walk under the stars, which are pretty spectacular on a clear night at Milbury. It’s about 12 miles from the middle of nowhere. I looked up and marveled at the splendor of it all. “God, what do You really need from me? Nothing.” In a universe so vast, what possible contribution could I make that would have any lasting value? What difference does my success or failure make in the grand scheme of things?

In that still, cold night, God had a different message for me, one that transformed my thinking. “Do you see all of these stars? One day, they will all burn out to nothing. But you will still be with Me. I created you to be with Me for the rest of eternity.”

Whoah. To think that I’m more important to God, more durable, than the stars, is mind-boggling. And it’s not about what I do that matters. Success is simply fulfilling the reason for my existence… to spend the rest of eternity in a loving relationship with God.

The Bible, you must be.

The next day, I had an hour to sit and talk with Mike about all of this. At a certain point, he stopped and looked at me the way he did when he told me that God wanted me to write grants for the Food Bank 11 years ago.

He then told me that there are a lot of people out in the world who never go to church, who have never seen or read a bible, who don’t know about Jesus, or worse, only know some of the terrible lies about Christianity that are out there. For those people, I might be the only encounter with the Bible that they ever have. So I have to be the Bible.

He told me this right at the end of our session, so I was left with the question, “What does it mean to be the Bible?” Mike sometimes does this Yoda thing where he gives me more questions than answers. It’s good for me. It leads me to prayer.

I started to wrestle with the question of being the Bible. What is the Bible? It’s not a textbook. It’s not an encyclopedia with all the knowledge on all subjects. It’s not the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s not a book of myths or fairy tales, although some would label it so. So what is it?

Then it hit me. The Bible is a revelation. It reveals God’s unfailing, relentless, self-sacrificing, lavish, and merciful love for His people, His children. It’s the greatest love story ever told. And the best part is that the story applies to me! I’m a part of the story.

Success is being, not doing.

If I’m supposed to be the Bible, that means that I need to be a revelation of God’s love to the people around me. This will involve some doing because loving people requires some real effort. But the bigger thing is at the deeper level…. the level of being.

If God’s love is true, if the story I find in the Bible is true, it changes who I am. I’m no longer a child of darkness, but a child of the light. I’m different. Changed. “Behold, I make all things new.”

God’s perfect love casts out all fear, including fear of failure. I get to live as though my primary measure for success is whether I love God and the people He puts in my path every day. On top of that, He’ll give me the grace that I need to accomplish anything that He truly desires. He is more than wise and powerful enough to take care of all the rest.

If I can live this way, it’s good news. And everyone I meet will get to read it.

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Growing up in America during the 80’s and 90’s, the concept of “teenage rebellion” filled my thoughts. In movies and television shows, leading lords and ladies struggled to make their own way and find themselves. I think people of my generation learned to think of teenage rebellion as something natural, normal, and to be expected. They would be terribly scandalized by someone who said that the teenage tendency to reject their parents’ values and forge out on their own was both unnatural and foolish.

Looking back on my misspent youth, I see my pursuit of teenage rebellion as something unnatural and foolish. Like my bachelor’s degree in theater. I enjoyed studying theater at the time, but what good was it? All I had at the end was a worthless piece of paper and a pile of student loans that took me more than twenty years to pay off. I have never acted in a professional theater production.

The concept of “normal teenage rebellion” comes right from the tempter himself. Who else might be stirring up this rebellion than the old rebel himself? An angel of the utmost perfection, he rejected God’s authority and now revels in filth, degradation, and wretchedness.

Of course, Satan tries to incite children to rebel against their parents. He wants to remake man in his own disfigured image. He attempts to trick us into making the same mistakes that he made so that we will share in his eternal misery. Pretty nasty character, isn’t he?

A father’s point of view.

Now, I’m a parent, not a rebellious teenager. My own children are still young and think that I have hung the moon (unless I lose my temper). They will reach a point in their lives when they will recognize my brokenness and failures as a parent. Their response to that new knowledge makes all the difference.

Right now, I try really hard to be a good dad. I like to praise and enjoy time with my children, but I also know that I’m responsible for teaching my children good and evil. That means punishment. As a father of six small to medium children, I have come to realize that civilization is not contagious. It does not happen by accident. We are one generation from living in caves and hunting with stone tools. Parents hand civilization on to their children. They do this by parenting, which is mostly modeling correct behavior, but also includes explicit instruction and discipline.

I’m aware that I’m not going to do this perfectly. I also know that love covers a multitude of sins. And sometimes love means correcting bad behavior in a way that is unpleasant to my kids. A five-year-old doesn’t understand abstract reasoning. But he knows that yelling at his mother will earn him a spanking. He’ll understand the why of it when he gets older.

Who’s in your child’s corner?

Enter the tempter. The term “diabolos” comes from the Greek, which means “to divide.” One of the devil’s main tactics is to try to create division between people. And since rebellion is the sin that got Satan kicked out of heaven, it’s one of his favorite strategies.

No one on this planet is more deeply invested in my children’s long-term happiness than my wife and I. I have gotten up countless times to put them back to sleep in the middle of the night. I work very hard to provide them with good things. Not just the necessary things like food, shelter, and clothing, but also fun things like books, electronics, and art supplies. We want our children to be happy, holy, healthy, and hardworking.

It’s a challenge. It is often harder to get my kids to do something simple like cleaning their rooms than it would be for me to do it myself. My kids do not necessarily enjoy learning how to pick up after themselves, clear the dishes, and say their prayers.

And this is where the tempter can step in, sowing those seeds of division. He stirs up dissatisfaction in a child when their favorite electronic toy is taken away (someday I’ll tell you about the day when I announced that video games were OVER in our house). Or when the child isn’t allowed to do sleepovers (everyone else can do sleepovers). I have one teenage child so far, so I’m learning about a whole new set of problems.

The devil works to convince a child that the power imbalance is unfair, that it’s unjust, and that it’s ultimately destructive to their happiness. And I must admit that the temptations might hold a grain (or more than a grain) of truth when he’s talking about abusive parents. But even moderately dysfunctional parents (which is just about everyone) want their children to be happy and successful. They are just working with a broken set of tools.

God’s antidote to the devil’s temptation to unnatural rebellion.

St. Paul points out in Ephesians 6:2 that the commandment to honor your parents is the first one that includes a promise. God recognizes that obeying and honoring parents can be really difficult. So the commandment reads, Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

So I point out to my children that obedience to mommy and daddy is the path to happiness. Since they’re young, we’re starting with simple things. Things like getting their pajamas on the first time I ask them, or cleaning their room. And “STOP HITTING YOUR SISTER!”

I want them to know, especially as they get older, that I’m DAD. I have authority, and I use it, but for their benefit. And I want them to flourish as human beings. They need to know that I’m in their corner. And when the opportunity arises, I try to talk about rebellion and how it’s a temptation.

I want my kids to recognize that the temptation doesn’t make any sense. It works against their best interests. God will bless their honoring of the commandment, and so will I. Well-behaved, respectful children are a wonderful thing to behold. They also tend to be happier than their disrespectful, rebellious counterparts.

Expect good things from our children.

We parents don’t have to start with the expectation that our children are going to rebel against us. It’s not written in the stars. It isn’t natural, it’s sinful. God has planned a better way and blessed that better way. It is both natural and supernatural for children to respect their parents and have a good relationship with them.

Parents need to talk with their kids honestly about teenage rebellion and the fact that it is both stupid and sinful. Kids watch a lot of media these days, and they won’t find a lot of respect and honor for parents anywhere. You have to very carefully screen what kind of messages your kids are getting, because a lot of what’s out there tries to make sinful rebellion look cool and sexy.

It’s not. My happiest and most successful friends have great relationships with their parents. When they went off the rails into rebellion (like I did), they paid a price. Sometimes they paid a severe price. I want to have healthy, happy relationships with my children many, many years from now when I’m a grandfather, God willing. If we can avoid the snare of rebellion, we will accomplish that easily.

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For a parent with six small(ish) children, Mass can feel like a rodeo. I’ve got to lasso a bunch of wandering little minds and try to point their attention to the miracle happening right now on the altar! Some days are worse than others.

During a recent Sunday, my frustration peaked after about 45 minutes of serious calf wrangling. “God, what IS this?” I prayed at the top of my interior voice.

“I’m destroying your illusion of holiness.” God doesn’t mince words.

Whitewashing My Sepulcher

As I prayed through it after Communion, I came to understand it in two different senses. The first sense is this: I had a vision of what holiness was supposed to look like, and it was a vision that I wanted to see fulfilled at church. It looks like this: I sit up in the front pew with my kids, who behave perfectly, are quiet, still, and reverent. We are the “Sincere and Devout Big Catholic Family,” the exemplary model of a family at church.

Instead, what all the people behind me see is a father actively corralling a herd of wild buffalo, trying to keep them from scattering across the plain. I don’t have a bullwhip, but sometimes I want one.

God pointed out that my vision of holiness is akin to what He chastised the Pharisees for doing. I want the appearance of piety. The Pharisees did all the right things. They wore the right clothes, washed their hands at the proper time, and tithed their dill and mint. But these external things did not make them holy. In fact, it made them proud and hard-hearted, the very opposite of holy.

Having perfectly behaved children will not make me holy. Being admired for my children’s piety and attention will not improve my standing before God. It might actually lead to significant dangers if I allow it to become a near occasion of spiritual pride (or wrath, which is the more common problem).

Into the Muck

So what is holiness? This was the second point that God wanted to make, and by far the more important. The Gospel of the day was the story of the man born blind, who receives healing when Jesus smears mud on his eyes. Jesus performed the healing on the Sabbath, and the Scribes and Pharisees couldn’t get past the fact that He broke the Law.

I imagine Jesus, His hands filthy, smearing mud on the face of a desperate blind man. Healing occurred because Love played in the dirt when He wasn’t supposed to.

This is what holiness looks like.

Holiness isn’t sitting beatifically surrounded by glowing light as you contemplate God in silence. Well, maybe it looks like that sometimes. But God wanted me to see it as bringing the power of love into the mess and muck of life.

Jesus gives us the perfect example, but we can also look at the lives of the saints. So many of them jumped into the mire to care for people. St. Teresa of Calcutta, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Francis of Assisi. The list goes on and on. HolyMess. They bring God’s love into the mess of life.

Holiness is Possible

A few weeks after this revelation, I went on retreat with my spiritual director and eleven other men he directs. We do it at a hunting lodge on a magnificent 14,000-acre ranch in South Carolina.

Providentially, the theme of the retreat was “Holiness is Possible.” On Sunday of the retreat, I woke up with a scripture ringing in my mind and heart. “Without Me, you can do nothing.” (John 15:5) I looked up the verse and found that it is part of the True Vine discourse.

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and every one that does he prunes so that it bears more fruit. You are already pruned because of the word that I spoke to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.” (John 15:1-5)

God wanted to emphasize that holiness is not something that I can accomplish on my own, but this passage is about fruitfulness, not powerlessness. God wants me to be fruitful, He wants me to be holy. The Gospel reveals that the condition for this fruitfulness is abiding in Jesus and allowing Jesus to abide in me.

In my life, that looks something like Jesus spitting in the dirt and taking the mud and putting it on a blind man’s eyes. I can bring His love into the mess and the stress of life. I will get dirty. But I will bear fruit.

What is the fruit that God wants me to produce? It’s love. It’s joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. In a word, it’s holiness.

Burning with Love

While walking through the woods at the ranch, I came upon a striking scene. (A picture of it is at the top of the post.) On the left, you see the remnants of a conservation burn. The short trees are all brown from the heat and the ground is covered with black char. A plowed road runs away in front of me. On your right, you see golden knee-high grass surrounding untouched green trees.

The image of the burned-out forest is so striking because it’s the work of the vine grower at scale. Forest managers do controlled burns to make the forest more fruitful, more productive. A burn clears out the old dead things so that new life can come through the ground. At first, it looks terrible, but with time, it will come back lusher and more beautiful than ever.

Christ’s Passion was the ultimate controlled burn. Jesus allowed Himself to be tortured to death and put in the grave, knowing that resurrection Sunday was coming. He gives me a new example. He doesn’t want me to whitewash the tomb. He wants me to enter it.

The death of my impossible visions for what my family life should look like clears space for something new. The Holy Mess. Instead of looking at my children and seeing sinners that need correction and punishment, I should see blindness that needs to be healed. It doesn’t mean that I stop trying to clean up the mess, but that I do it with a joyful heart. With gentleness and generosity. And with more love for the person than for the rules.

The mess of family life isn’t an obstacle to God’s plan. It is the plan. God has chosen this particular mess to make me holy.

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Post first published on Catholic Stand. Republished with permission.

The word “robot” means “slave” or “forced labor.” Czech author and playwright Karel Čapek coined the term in his 1920 play R.U.R., which describes mechanical, android workers in a factory. (Čapek credits his brother for coming up with the word he made famous.)

Slavery as a human institution is evil. Human beings should never be held as property, bought and sold, and forced to do things against their will. It is evil.

Unfortunately, slavery is also extremely profitable. That’s why it’s still so common. One estimate I found says that 50 million people are living in slavery today worldwide, with more than a million right here in the United States.

I had a profound realization about slavery when reading two children’s books by illustrator David Macaulay. He created a series of books with delightfully detailed drawings showing how various human structures were built, including a castle and a Roman city.

It struck me that the Roman City was better built than the Medieval castle. The Roman design was much more complex and intricate, with working sewer systems, whereas the castle had open holes that dropped sewage into the moat. That’s just one example among many details where the Roman city was superior in both design and execution. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why.

Then I realized... slavery. Ancient Rome was built by slaves. The Roman Legions were raiding parties that went out into non-Roman lands, subdued the residents, and brought back slaves for the markets. In many cases, the slave markets followed the legions to immediately monetize the captured persons.

By the Medieval period, slavery had largely disappeared, replaced to some extent by serfs in agricultural settings, who had legally recognized personhood, as well as a good deal more freedom and protection. The armies of slaves who built the Roman cities were gone. The Medieval lord who wanted to build a castle had to pay skilled laborers to do the work, so they economized. They just couldn’t do things the same way because they didn’t have an unlimited supply of human labor.

Enter the Robot

The modern world only exceeded the Roman model because of machines. Mechanical force multipliers like the combustion engine and hydraulic systems changed everything. One man in a backhoe can dig more in a day than hundreds of slaves with shovels. Computers multiply that force one step further. Modern bulldozers use satellite positioning and precision electronics to take 3D models of the desired grade and make it a reality by controlling the height and pitch of the blade as it drives across a surface.

Robots are the next generation of force multipliers in the industrial world. Robots allow human beings to repeat work with a tireless precision unmatched by human beings. China is the world leader for installed industrial robots with more than 2,000,000 units installed, more than 5 times the 394,000 in the United States. It’s small wonder that the American manufacturing base can’t compete with that vastly larger army of robots. It’s simple math.

AI - The Intellectual Force Multiplier

Robots tackle manual labor, but humans thought that the acquisition and use of knowledge was our unique area of expertise. AI disrupts that. It’s a tool that can think for itself. Or maybe more precisely, it’s a robot that operates in the digital world, where bricks and mortar are replaced by ones and zeros. I can ask Claude a question and get a response that is the result of reading dozens of articles on the subject, faster than I can type the question. I can describe the new page that I want built for my website, and it will write the code in a few minutes.

I’ve been using AI in little ways for a few years now, starting with ChatGPT to help me do some programming, and Stable Diffusion to create images. You have to be careful if you’re using open source models to create images, because many specialize in pornography. With discretion and practice, I produced some images I used on blog posts, but it was more of a gimmick than a tool.

Over the last year, AI has changed. In February 2026, I installed Claude Code on my computer. I started with the free version, then upgraded to the $20 a month pro version, then the $100 Max version. I built a simple online game, Yourfirstbillion.com, and gave it to my 13-year-old son, along with access to Claude, to continue developing it. It’s still very simple, but it only took a couple of days, and it works. I’m now working on a couple of other side projects. It’s astounding.

I also use Claude to aid my creative writing, but as an editor, not a text generator. My wife is still my editor of choice, but she’s mildly busy with our newborn daughter, Sofia. Asking her for 15 minutes of focused attention on my writing is like asking for her foot. Claude gives me excellent comments, almost instantly. I don’t always listen to what Claude says, but I find it very useful.

Now is a Perfect Time to Panic!

I see two dominant perspectives on AI in the media.

The first is that AI + robots will replace all human workers and usher in a techno-utopia where no one will have to work, and yet all will still have all their needs met.

The second perspective is that AI + robots will replace all human workers and usher in a techno-dystopia where everyone will have to bow to their tech overlords in order to get their basic needs met, or face starvation and civil war.

Both of these perspectives start from the idea that AI will replace every human capacity at a level that exceeds human competence. The designers of AI have made this their express goal. The common definition of AGI is an AI system capable of performing any intellectual task that a human being can perform, at a human level or above, across all domains. That means their goal is to produce an AI that can replace EVERYONE.

This definition suggests that, once AGI is achieved, human beings have no further contributions to make to history, that most humans will be content to sit on the beach and drink coconut smoothies provided by their robot waiters. Or become living batteries for their robot overlords, like in the Matrix movies.

These two very different outcomes promote stark visions of the future, but there’s a reason for that. I think a lot of this is marketing talk: the speakers are trying to stir up either greed or fear. The leaders of the AI revolution have a vested interest in convincing the world that their product has a future value. Their market capitalization (which determines the cost of their next round of funding) depends on it. A product that can replace all human labor would be pretty valuable by any calculation, justifying nearly trillion-dollar valuations for companies that currently spend significantly more than they make. And I won’t try to deny that they have produced something very useful and valuable.

The problem is that the people building these systems don’t really understand human intelligence. They admit it. They can’t explain why my 11-year-old son can learn to drive a golf cart in a few weeks, when their machines require millions of hours of training.

Not Human Intelligence — Something Else

The thought leaders in the AI space are mostly secular materialists. They have a view of consciousness that says it is a fundamentally material and emergent phenomenon. What this means is that they think consciousness is a property that arises from the matter itself when sufficient complexity is present.

This view gives rise to their idea that, if they only make AI systems big enough and complex enough, consciousness will arise that will be on par with a human being. I actually think they expect it to be vastly superior to human beings. That’s what they’re banking on.

The Church teaches an understanding of the human that explicitly contradicts this claim. The Catechism 365 states, “The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the ‘form’ of the body: [Cf. Council of Vienne (1312): DS 902] i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”

The spiritual essence of a human being is not a property of the matter of their body, but rather a distinct part of their total being. The soul is that which separates me as a living person from the dead matter that will be buried at my funeral. It is the soul that is the seat of consciousness, the source of life itself. The essential unity of the spiritual and the material parts of the human being means that the workings of the soul are visible indirectly through the biological processes that occur in the brain and correspond to thought. But those biological processes do not cause thought. It’s like wind blowing through a wheat field. The wheat moves, but the wind causes the movement.

From this perspective, the question of machine consciousness is not a difference of degree, but of kind. A human being is not simply a sophisticated meat computer; it is a person. An AI is not a person; it is an extremely sophisticated computer system. AI does astounding work. But the sophistication of the algorithm does not change the fact that it is still just an algorithm. If I put the exact same input into an AI image generator, I will get the same result. The sophistication of the algorithm and the massive corpus of data might make a chatbot appear like it’s thinking, but really, it’s just calculating.

Who is Responsible?

I once saw a Mercedes-Benz plant manager give a talk about workforce development. He said, “Robots are tools. People use tools.” He was unabashed in his embrace of robots, but he knew that taking care of people made it possible to make exceptional automobiles.

AI and robotics have the potential to transform our world. Whether that will be for the better or for the worse will be up to people. If AI and robots bring about a broad flourishing of humankind, it will be because people choose to use them wisely. If a disaster occurs, then people will be responsible.

I see two reasons for hope and one reason for concern.

The first reason for hope is that the use of robots is not evil, the way human slavery is evil. We can create and deploy AI and robots to our hearts’ content without staining our souls with the crime of treating people like property. Robots, whether physical or digital, are not people. This means that robots can be used to build things that would be unimaginable without them.

The second reason for hope is that AI is not subject to concupiscence the way human beings are. It does not have the darkened intellect, the weakened will, and the disordered passions that make it so easy for human beings to do evil and so difficult for them to do what is good. It does as it’s programmed to do.

And that unquestioning obedience is the reason for my concern. While AI has no free will and is incapable of sin, it will do the will of sinners. AI and robots will carry out whatever orders or programming they’re given. If they are told to cure cancer, they may very well do it. If they are pointed at exterminating a nation, they will do that, too.

Will AI and robots be a blessing or a curse? The answer is yes. It all depends on the character of the man behind the curtain.

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Every week, I attend a bible study with several men who live in my neck of the woods. A while ago, my father-in-law (who also happens to be my next-door neighbor) mentioned how much he enjoyed fishing with dynamite.

Jerry worked for the Georgia Fisheries Department. They regularly collected, counted, and categorized the fish in lakes and rivers to examine the fish populations. One time, they needed to do a fish study on a section of river too big for their normal methods.

So they lined a portion of the riverbed with detonation cord and let ‘er rip. KABOOM! An enormous explosion ripped through a section of the river. All of the fish in the detonation zone floated to the surface. They had plenty of fish to count. Pretty much all of them.

Explosive bait.

I can’t get this visual out of my mind. A bunch of scientists sitting around waiting to push the big red button. They cover their ears and then, BLAMMO! Water and fish geyser into the air. Hundreds, if not thousands, of fish float to the surface of the water.

As a fisherman, I bet that St. Peter would have loved fishing with dynamite. Fishing in the first century took lots of time and energy. Late nights, stormy weather, mending nets. Heavy, weary work.

But when St. Peter became a fisher of men? That’s when he started to fish with dynamite. Starting with the descent of the Holy Spirit, St. Peter and the other Apostles acted with great power in the presence of the people, and thousands came to the faith.

St. Paul thought fishing with dynamite so important that he said, “…my message and my proclamation were not with persuasive [words of] wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.” The Greek word “dunamis,” which the New Testament uses for the word “power,’ actually inspired the name “dynamite.”

God can blow our socks off.

Now, I’m not opposed to the kind of intellectual evangelism that people like Bishop Robert Barron of Word on Fire Ministries do. I think he’s brilliant and I love listening to his teaching. But I really only began to appreciate his genius after my conversion.

Back in my atheist days, my heart had the rocky constitution of a hardened secular materialist. To come to a knowledge of God, I needed high explosives.

The dynamite that God chose to use was a direct personal revelation, followed by casting a bunch of demons out of me. I don’t think that this is the normal route to faith for most people, but it proved to be highly effective for me. (If you want to read more of that story, you can check out my book Demoniac.)

Retching out a bunch of foul black material in response to prayers forced me to admit that my worldview had to change. There are far stranger things in heaven and on earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy.

Manifesting God’s power.

Evangelists in our day and age need to be fishing with dynamite. Am I talking about performing miracles and casting out demons as a regular practice? Absolutely! Jesus did. The apostles did. The saints throughout the ages have done so as well. Why? Because people need a personal experience of God’s power to enkindle the fire of faith.

The Jews in the first century longed for the coming of the Messiah. Our culture doesn’t care at all. The Romans, Greeks, and most other cultures of Jesus’ day held strong religious beliefs that involved communal worship. They just worshipped the wrong gods. Our culture has a growing segment of people who believe that religion enslaves the mind and hinders true human freedom.

I became an atheist because my heart grew cold to the idea that God might exist. I couldn’t see past the suffering in the world to the Omniscient and Omnipotent God who holds everything in being. More than anything, I was completely unwilling to be convinced that God exists, and could have cared less about whether He loved me or not.

Experiencing God’s power directly changed everything for me. I had to confront the fact of my own religious experience, that I had encountered the God that I’d only read about in Catholic school.

Where’s the big red button?

There’s only one big problem. How does an evangelist learn to perform miracles?

I remember hearing a story about St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order. He visited Rome for an audience with the pope. Pope Innocent III proudly displayed the wealth and power at his disposal and told the saint, “As you can see, I can no longer say, “Silver and gold have I none.”

The saint responded, “Neither can you say, ‘ Arise and walk.’” Ouch. (To Innocent’s credit, he went on to support the founding of both the Dominican and the Franciscan orders… a bunch of demolition experts.)

St. Dominic performed many miracles that have been written down. I’m sure that many others are lost in history. It’s not about what he knew. It’s about Who he knew. “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” (John 14:13)

Miracles are not the manifestation of a superhuman ability like the Marvel movies that seem to be the only kind of movies that Hollywood knows how to make anymore. They are the fruit of a relationship with the Creator of all things. When I pray for someone’s healing, I don’t do anything to make healing happen. But sometimes healing takes place because God hears my prayer and does something amazing.

Get close to Jesus.

I’m convinced that the saints like St. Dominic don’t perform miracles because they are holy. They perform miracles because they firmly believe that God is holy. They believe that Jesus speaks the truth in the Gospels. Their own holiness results from this belief, as do all of the miracles to their credit.

If our evangelists want to break open the crate of dynamite and get to work, their main task is to grow in faith. That means that they have to start by believing some of the outrageous things that Jesus said. “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12). If you stop to ponder that, it means cleanse lepers, cast out demons, raise the dead. It also means loving a lot of sometimes unlovable characters, and irritating the people in charge.

This shouldn’t scare us. It should excite anyone who feels the call to be an evangelist. The call to evangelize comes with the keys to a heavenly storeroom full of Holy Spirit dynamite. Anyone else interested in hearing an earth-shattering Kaboom?

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Driving into town, I saw a woman take a wrong turn and drive onto the opposite side of a divided highway…. into oncoming traffic!! Thank the Lord, the road was mostly empty. But I was so alarmed for her safety that I started honking. “Look out! You’re going the wrong way,” I tried to shout with my horn.

I watched as she slowed to a crawl and drove back across the grass median onto the correct side of the highway. Relief flooded me as she escaped the obvious peril. While I don’t know that my honking was the only thing that brought the danger to her attention, I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t done anything to warn her.

With half of my journey remaining, I pondered the experience. Since I was on my way to give a talk about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the situation reminded me of the gift of prophecy.

A tough job.

In the Bible, prophets often get a pretty unpleasant job. In prophet after prophet, I read some variation on, “Repent of your sins and return to the Lord!” Now, in a situation when a person is driving into oncoming traffic, it’s obviously good to shout, “Turn around! You’re going the wrong way!”

But human beings aren’t that simple. Sometimes they freely choose to go the wrong way. Then they get really irritable when someone else tries to point out their error. John the Baptist’s life demonstrates that sometimes heads actually roll when the powerful are confronted with their sins.

Yet, my experience on the highway provides some insight into why the prophet gets involved. Sinning means choosing to take a road towards misery and suffering. If I see a person taking a road to ruin, it’s an act of charity and concern to try to alert them to the danger.

I think one of the reasons that this doesn’t always go well is a lack of love and being too “judgy”. If I approach someone who struggles with sin, feeling superior and looking down on them, it’s unlikely to go well. They’ll see my nasty attitude and immediately get defensive. I don’t blame them. I’d respond the same way. I HAVE responded the same way. No one likes to be confronted about sin by a preachy, self-righteous, know-it-all.

Don the mantle of humility.

But prophets have an extraordinary role that flows from their closeness to God. The prophet is not speaking for themselves, they are delivering a message from God. I saw an excellent example of this at a Knights of Columbus meeting. One of the new members was asked to give a little spiritual exhortation at the end of the meeting. He got up and very humbly said that he thinks he had a message from the Lord for us. For many years, the Knights did a Christmas raffle called the “Wheelbarrow of Cheer.” Basically, each knight contributes a bottle of wine or liquor to the wheelbarrow, and then the winner of the raffle gets the cheer.

So this good fellow told us that he thought the Lord wants us to know that, while most people can handle winning that much alcohol responsibly, there are probably more than a few who would use it to excess. The Lord wanted us to know that our time-honored fundraiser might be a near occasion of sin for some members of our parish.

Whoah! The other Knights applauded our brother for making such a bold yet charitable proclamation. He did it with such humility and gentleness that not a single feather got ruffled, but I think that every man present at the meeting agreed that we needed to do something different in the coming year. We want to help the parish to grow in faith, not put them in peril of sin.

The prophet as a watchman.

During our brother’s exhortation, he pointed out that he was just delivering a message. The way that we responded to the message was not his responsibility. We were still free to do what we wanted, but we needed to know what God wanted us to do with that freedom.

The prophet delivers messages. He doesn’t enforce consequences. As God’s watchman, he sounds the alarm when God inspires him. The prophet Ezekiel explains it this way:

The prophet Ezekiel heard the Lord say: “You, son of man—I have appointed you as a sentinel for the house of Israel; when you hear a word from my mouth, you must warn them for me. When I say to the wicked, “You wicked, you must die,” and you do not speak up to warn the wicked about their ways, they shall die in their sins, but I will hold you responsible for their blood. If, however, you warn the wicked to turn from their ways, but they do not, then they shall die in their sins, but you shall save your life.” Ezekiel 33:7-9

The prophet can deliver the message and move on with a clear conscience. The responsibility to turn from sin remains with the person receiving the message.

The prophet leads to life.

The passage from Ezekiel points out something else that is super important. God’s desire in sending a prophetic message is that people will turn from their sins and find life. It’s not just that God wants to punish sinners. He wants to SAVE sinners from their sin. Sin destroys… relationships, individuals, nations. Sin bears fruit in death. God wants to prevent that.

When Jesus said, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” (Matthew 7:1), that doesn’t mean that sin doesn’t matter. If sin didn’t matter, we wouldn’t need a Savior. But it does mean that we shouldn’t condemn others, because we are also sinners. If we have to warn people of the consequences of their sin, we should do so in humility and generosity of heart. As Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and do not sin anymore.” (John 8:11)

Jesus does not excuse her sin. But He also doesn’t beat her over the head with it. He came to save sinners, to find the lost and bring them back into the bosom of the Father. I do not doubt that this encounter with the Savior changed that woman’s life forever.

A watchman and more.

The role of the watchman, calling people on to greater holiness, helps protect the flock of God from the ravenous wolves of sin. The prophet truly fulfills this role when he is animated by the love of God and the love of neighbor.

The prophet Jonah gives a great example of what happens when a prophet lacks the love of neighbor. Jonah refuses God’s command to warn Nineveh of their sins and runs in the other direction. Then comes the storm, Jonah being cast overboard, and spending three days in the belly of the whale. After being spit back onto dry land, he goes to deliver God’s message but expresses his anger when the city repents. He wanted them to die in their sin. God chastises his prophet for refusing to love the more than 120,000 people in Nineveh.

Love must be at the heart of the prophet’s ministry. Just like my desire to warn the woman on the wrong side of the road, or my brother Knight’s desire to protect folks who struggle with alcohol abuse, it should be love that inspires the prophet to send forth the warning. Repent, believe the Gospel, for the visitation of the Lord is at hand. Turn from sin and follow the path that leads to life! THERE’S A TRUCK COMING RIGHT FOR YOU!

P.S. Prophecy is bigger than just warning sinners.

Prophets do more than warn people of the consequences of their sins. They also deliver encouragement in times of trial. God also uses them to reveal His plans and purposes to His people so that they can celebrate when the plans come to fulfillment. The role that a prophet can play is as big as God can imagine because they are delivering God’s word to His people.

But that’s a discussion for another day.

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I’ve been a homeowner for a few years now, and I’ve discovered something that I never really thought about when I was an apartment dweller. Stuff breaks.

If I shared the things that I’ve had to repair on this house (not to mention the three bedrooms and two bathrooms that I built with my own two hands), this article would look like a list of episodes for “This Old House.” It’s never-ending.

A couple years ago, my dryer stopped working. My then 11-year-old son discovered it. This was our conversation before school:

“Dad, my pants are still wet!”

“Well, put them back in and turn the dryer on. You’ve got time.” A few minutes pass.

“They’re still wet.”

“Stop complaining. Let me see them. Wow. They are still wet. And cold… Oh. No.”

I have six children. The tsunami of clothing that we produce on a weekly basis staggers the mind. A broken dryer is a CRISIS. Don’t panic.

“Go find some pants in the hamper that look clean. The dryer’s broken. I have to fix it.”

While my wife got the kids ready for school, I fiddled with the dryer enough to conclude that the heating element was broken and needed to be replaced. I snapped a photo of the serial number. I’d never fixed a dryer before, but ignorance is the normal starting point for learning a new skill.

At lunch, I ran to the local appliance repair shop and picked up a new heating element. I spent my remaining lunch break searching for videos about replacing dryer elements on YouTube. By the time I got home, I was ready for action.

I had removed the entire back of the dryer before I realized that I’d watched the wrong video. More research. The good news was that I found the right video. The bad news was that it was way harder to do than the wrong video. I reinstalled the back panel and flipped the machine around. With my model, I had to completely disassemble the dryer to replace the heating element, which was under the drum and behind the front panel.

It took me about three hours to take it apart and put it back together again. Dryers are actually pretty simple machines. I only had one leftover piece that I had to go back and install, which isn’t too bad. I also cleaned out enough lint to stuff a badger. Major fire hazard. The machine hummed back to life after I plugged it in. Thank the Lord!

God, what’s the plan?

I had to wonder about God’s plan in all this. My stuff just keeps breaking. Is entropy (the scientific term for things breaking and falling apart) really just the result of the Fall? Or is it part of “The Plan”?

Back in the Beginning, God settled Adam in the Garden of Eden to care for and cultivate it. (Gen 2:15). The word often used for this work assignment is “dominion”. The word dominion has come to imply domination and conjures images of clear-cut rainforests paved over to make parking lots for big-box retail stores. Or Isengard after Saruman cast his lot with Sauron.

But that’s the wrong way to think about it. It’s a vision of dominion that has been corrupted by the fall, but doesn’t reveal God’s original intent.

A well-maintained garden is often more beautiful than an unkempt wilderness. The attention of a gardener also makes the garden more fruitful than a plot of untilled earth.

There’s something of a mystery in this, because God created man for the garden as much as He created the garden for man. The work of man turns the wilderness into a garden, while at the same time, the work of gardening enables man to walk with God. Good work lifts both nature and man closer to their Creator.

Work was part of God’s plan from the beginning. Jesus shows us this reality by the fact that He spent 90% of His earthly life working as a craftsman. Here is the Incarnate Word, Who brought the ordered universe into being out of nothing (the rawest of raw materials), humbling himself to make chairs, tables, and household items out of bits of wood. He demonstrates that this work of human creation is not beneath the dignity of God, the Creator of all things. Instead, human creativity, human work, is like that primordial creative act in miniature.

Jesus teaches us that our labor is not an obstacle to holiness. Prayerfully united with Christ in His hidden life at Nazareth, it is the way to grow in holiness. Luke 2:40 shares that it was in this hidden life that Jesus grew in strength and wisdom. We can confidently follow His example.

When I exercise dominion on my little plot of land out in the country, I am transforming it from a wilderness into a garden where my family can flourish. My work provides them with shelter from the weather, hot food (I’ve fixed my stove on three separate occasions), clean and dry clothing, etc. I have also made the space more beautiful and orderly… except my tool shed, the last stronghold of the primordial chaos.

This kind of work is not about success or accomplishment. Rather, it is Love made concrete, tangible. My oldest son sleeps in a bunk bed that I made in a room that he helped build. He knows that I love him because of the work that I do for him. In fact, teaching him how to work is one of the most important things I do as a father. Good work will give him an opportunity to become more like Jesus.

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Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.

Originally published in the Southern Cross Magazine. Republished with permission.

The normally quiet nighttime hours on September 27th, 2024, weren’t particularly quiet. An unwelcome guest by the name of Hurricane Helene came knocking on the door. I woke up at 3:33 AM to gurgling in the bathroom, caused by accelerating winds forcing air down the roof vent. The Lord told me to pray for protection against tornadoes. I got down on my face and prayed.

The next morning, I learned that my in-laws next door prayed from 4-5 AM and my neighbors up the road prayed the Rosary from 5-6 AM. At some point during that time, the eye wall of the hurricane passed over us. I heard we got 10 inches of rain in 36 hours and had hundred-mile-an-hour winds.

By around 8:00 Friday morning, the winds calmed enough for us to look around. The devastation was unbelievable. Trees were down everywhere. Dozens crossed our little country road, in ones and twos, or whole stands laid down like bowling pins.

Thankfully, no one on our street was hurt, and only a couple of neighbors had tree damage on their houses. There were several near misses, like the pine laying two inches from my neighbor’s brand-new barn, or the 20-inch tree sitting five inches from another neighbor’s truck like he’d parked next to it. My close friend’s son woke up to a pine lying down next to him in bed.

Called to action

I sat down with my wife to pray morning prayer when I heard something: the song of a chainsaw roaring to life. It took a conscious effort to finish our prayers as more and more chainsaws joined the chorus. It was a primal call, to impose order on chaos, as the Holy Spirit did on the first day of creation.

We wrapped up our prayers, and I raced to my shed to get my chainsaw, a big Husqvarna Rancher 450 with a 20-inch bar. I filled the gas tank and the bar oil reservoir, checked the tension on the chain, and raced toward the sound of manliness.

I wasn’t disappointed. Most of my neighbors were out on the road ripping through thickets of pine and oak branches, sawing trunks into logs that could be moved. Our neighbor, Mr. Reeves, whose family name is on our road sign, showed up on his tractor wearing a yellow rain slicker and pajama bottoms. As men with chainsaws chopped up trees, he pushed logs to the side of the road.

It took over an hour to clear most of our road, and then we turned to driveways. My in-laws and some neighbors had the worst of it. I sawed up so many trees that I lost count.

At some point, my saw got dull. I could tell right away. Instead of chewing out fat chips of wood, it started spraying sawdust. The time it took to get through a tree doubled or tripled. It was time to shut it down. I didn’t have a fresh chain. I had to wait until I could put some bite back on those little metal teeth.

Cutting Teeth

I have an electric chain sharpener, but that isn’t much help when the electric grid is wiped out for 50 miles in every direction. I had to wait until we got a generator up and running. That took more than a couple of hours because pieces of the generator kept falling off.

Once the generator started humming, I got to work sharpening. The basic technique is simple. The sharpener has a clamp that holds the tooth so a grinding wheel can hit each tooth at precisely the right angle. The sharpener takes care of the geometry, but I had to be careful not to hold the grinder wheel on the tooth too long or push too hard because the steel will get hot and lose its temper. Just a second is enough. I could tell a tooth was done when the point caught the skin on my fingertip.

While I sharpened the chain tooth by tooth, my thoughts drifted to Proverbs 27:17. “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” I’ve heard this proverb interpreted as talking about swords meeting on the field of battle, but any Lord of the Rings fan can tell you that a sword doesn’t come off the battlefield sharper than it started. When the smoke clears, it is dull and notched, and sometimes broken into pieces. Narsil, anyone? (That’s the sword that Sauron broke into pieces and was later reforged for Aragorn.

Sharpening a blade doesn’t look anything like a battlefield. It takes care and attention. Focus and quiet. When iron sharpens iron, one piece of iron needs to be hard and abrasive, like a file or grindstone. But the sharper I want something, the less abrasive my sharpener will be. When I sharpen knives for leatherwork, I use a 4000-grit stone that feels as smooth as printer paper.

With a chainsaw, it’s easier to ruin the saw blade than to sharpen it. I have to focus on getting the correct angle, apply only the right amount of pressure, and avoid grinding off too much metal.

It’s also important to recognize that sharpening is not a cosmetic operation. Not that a sharp knife isn’t a beautiful thing, because it is. Rather, sharpening is ordered to some purpose beyond appearance. I sharpen a chainsaw so I can cut through trees like they’re made of sponge cake.

Soul Sharpening

So, what does it mean to say “one man sharpens another”? A sharp blade is fit for its purpose. A man that is sharp is fit for HIS purpose. What is a man’s purpose? To know, love, and serve God in this life, and spend eternity with Him in the next. To love our neighbor as we love ourselves. To cultivate and fill God’s creation.

To be sharpened by another man means to have my character shaped so that I am fit to fulfill my purpose. Conflict doesn’t sharpen. It dulls and damages. Care and attention, with just the right amount of abrasiveness, is what I need. Heavy reshaping of a man’s character might require more abrasiveness but in carefully measured doses. Too much abrasiveness too quickly, and the man being sharpened might lose his temper.

The sharpening of a man’s character can happen in many ways: a relationship between a father and son (which shapes and sharpens), a bible study, the confessional, spiritual direction, or a men’s group. Even being around men who give good examples of lives well lived can sharpen a man’s character and help him live God’s purpose for his life.

After looking at the devastation that Friday morning, I needed a little sharpening. I didn’t jump into action – I started wandering around looking for a cup of hot coffee in a world without electricity. The sound of those chainsaws roaring to life was like a fine abrasive, scraping against my dullness and bringing me back to the point. I was called to serve my neighbors. The sound of the Redneck Chainsaw Strikeforce launching into action shook me from my lethargy and helped me become a little more the man God created me to be.

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Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.

Article originally published in The Southern Cross, official magazine of the Diocese of Savannah, GA, under the title “Sharpening Character”. Reprinted with permission.

Another war. Lord, have mercy. I don’t know that I have enough information to weigh in on the newly minted war against Iran. I consider the news as trustworthy as it was during the first and second Gulf Wars, which is to say that believing the “public narrative” is worse than ignorance. But one headline jumped out at me that I do want to address. Armageddon.

It has been reported that complaints have been filed against a number of military officers for referring to the attack against Iran as the beginning of Armageddon and an important milestone in the timeline leading to Christ’s return in glory. If this is true, it will be used to cast “Christian Nationalism” in the role of the ignorant belligerent. “It’s Christians that are behind this war,” I already hear from people in the news.

There is a strain of Evangelical and Non-denominational theology that has been aggressively promoting the idea that “THIS IS THE END TIMES” across America for generations. I don’t want to throw stones, because one of these churches played a pivotal role in my return to the faith on my journey home to the Catholic Church.

Christ’s return in glory is a central part of our Catholic faith, there’s no denying it. It’s important enough that it made it into both the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds. Our Catholic faith directs our hope towards the eschaton: the final and complete triumph by God over death and evil. We believe that it will be fully accomplished at some particular time and will start at some particular place. We believe that the end times are a thing.

When is when?

But the question of when and where has bedeviled us for millennia. St. Paul talks about it in 1 Thessalonians 4:14-15: “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose, so too will God, through Jesus, bring with him those who have fallen asleep. Indeed, we tell you this, on the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will surely not precede those who have fallen asleep.”

St. Paul writes to a church that fully expects the Parousia, Christ’s triumphant return in glory, to come at any moment. It sounds to me as though he personally expected Christ to come before his own martyrdom at the hands of the Romans.

In the centuries that followed him, apocalyptic imagery in the Gospels, the Book of Revelation, and other books of the Bible, inspired countless pronouncements that “The end is NIGH!!” I’m sympathetic to people who believed that in the face of such threats as the Roman persecution of Christians, the sack of Rome by the Visigoths, Attila the Hun, and the Mongol Hordes.

The Protestant Reformation spawned a host of new “prophecies” that the second coming was just around the corner. America itself has produced more than a few end-time prophets in the past two centuries. The one thing that all of these pronouncements had in common, including any that might emanate from the current presidential administration, is that they were wrong. The world has not ended.

The mystery of the coming of the fullness of the kingdom is addressed directly by Jesus. After telling His disciples of all the signs that will signify the beginning of the end, He tells them, “But of that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone.” (Matthew 24:36) Even St. Thomas Aquinas wrestled with this passage, because it implies that Jesus does not possess the full omniscience of God the Father, which would make Him less than the Father. It also seems to contradict Jesus telling His disciples, “The Father and I are one.” (John 10:30)

St. Thomas resolves this by replying that Christ was essentially saying, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” He clarifies that Jesus was speaking out of His humanity, which was capable of growing in wisdom and knowledge, and not out of His Divinity, which possesses the fullness of knowledge from the Beginning.

More importantly, the reason for this mystery can be found in the next words of the passage, “Therefore, stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come. Be sure of this: if the master of the house had known the hour of the night when the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and not let his house be broken into. So too, you also must be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” (Matthew 24:42-44)

God doesn’t tell us when He’s going to come in glory because He doesn’t want us to put off repentance. If I knew that I was going to die on my 75th birthday, I’d be sorely tempted to wait until the 360th day of my 74th year of life to get down to the business of repenting. Instead, Jesus wants us to live as if our judgment could happen at any moment.

Prepare for your own judgment.

In the Catholic mind through the ages, the idea of the final judgment has rightly taken a back seat to the idea of the particular judgment. Each one of us will face Christ, one on one, and make an account for our actions. We will be judged on whether we lived our faith, turned from sin, and cared for the poor. God does not guarantee another day of life to any person or even any civilization. As the Psalms echo, man is like the grass of the field that springs up one day and withers the next.

So when the question is whether or not to drop a bomb on enemy territory, the idea of starting Armageddon should be the last thing on a commander’s mind. Far better to consider the souls of the soldiers and civilians that will be sent to their particular judgments. They’ll have to answer for that decision when they face their own judgment. Which will come like a thief in the night.

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Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.

Article first published at CatholicStand.com

A psychologist puts a marshmallow in front of a four-year-old and tells them they can eat the marshmallow. BUT! If they wait to eat the marshmallow until after the psychologist leaves and returns, they will get a second marshmallow. The psychologist then leaves the room for 15 minutes. Hilarity ensues.

This is the “Marshmallow Test”. A psychologist performed this experiment in the 70s with more than 500 kids. The children were filmed, and their responses to the marshmallow were hilarious. Some ate it right away before the adult even left the room. Some looked away from it the entire time. Others fiddled with it, smelling and touching and licking their marshmallow.

At the end of the study, about 2/3 of the children ate the marshmallow before the adult returned. And this is where it gets interesting. It was a longitudinal study, which means that they followed the children for the next two decades to see if any important conclusions could be drawn from their ability to exercise self-control at the age of four.

It turns out that they found dramatic differences between the one-marshmallow and the two-marshmallow groups. The kids who were able to wait had better academic performance in school, better-paying jobs, better athletic records… the list goes on and on.

My own Marshmallow.

The Lord just put me through a marshmallow test. On February 6th, our minivan went kaput. I had some hope of repairing it, but the engine was completely locked up and needed to be replaced. Not going to happen. We suddenly needed a new van.

I took this to prayer. “Lord, we need a new van.” The Lord responded by bringing two scriptures to mind. The first was the whole discourse about prayer, where Jesus tells us that our Father already knows what we need and that we should consider the lilies of the field. This scripture brought me comfort and peace.

The second scripture described King Saul as he waited for the prophet Samuel before going into battle with the Philistines. Samuel got delayed, and Saul got antsy. Saul took matters into his own hands and offered the sacrifice to God without Samuel. As he finished the sacrifice, Samuel showed up and told him that he ruined everything and that God was going to tear the kingdom from his hands because he couldn’t wait. This did not comfort me so much as instill the fear of the Lord.

The Lord then told me to wait for Him to provide a van for our family. I said ok. The fear of the Lord is a big help when doing something that the world might think is crazy… like waiting on God to provide a van. When you have five kids. I have FIVE kids.

Halfway there.

A week passed, then two. We borrowed vehicles from friends to get the family to church, and Mary was able to pick up groceries during her turn driving the carpool van. It was a little stressful, but I knew that I knew that God told me to wait.

The Food Bank sent out an email saying that there were some leftover items in a warehouse that is about to be demolished. Staff could take anything that they wanted. I drove over one afternoon and picked through it. There wasn’t much, but I did find a small desk fan that would replace the broken one that my son Joseph liked to use while sleeping.

I grabbed the fan and started walking to my truck. Then I started laughing. “Thanks, Lord! This fan is great. But I’ve been asking for a van. With a ‘V’! VVVVVVV. VVVVAN.” It lifted my spirits because it felt like Jesus had jokes.

Walking it out.

Three weeks passed. I had a conversation with my wife Mary about how hard this was for her. She was really stressed out about trying to find vehicles for her various needs, and when was I going to do something about it? I told her that I understood how hard it was and that I felt God had something good waiting for us at the end of the trial.

I also took it back to prayer. “Lord, this is serious. I need a van. What am I supposed to do?” The Lord responded very clearly, “Wait one more week.” I said, “You’re the boss,” and told Mary about it when I had a chance. She was comforted by what sounded like a real deadline before I could take some action.

In all of this, I was more peaceful than I had any right to be. I wasn’t looking at vans online, or fretting over finances. Waiting was difficult, but I’ve had some very good experiences waiting on the Lord. God brought me a wife out of a convent. He gave us a house next to my in-laws. A friend of mine once told me, “If you wait on the Lord, you get the best He has to offer delivered to your doorstep.”

Marshmallow Time.

On Friday, I got a call from a friend at church. She thought she had a line on a van and wanted to know if I would be able to meet the next day to take a look at it. The price would definitely fit in our budget. I said sure. Saturday was one week from the day that the Lord said, “Wait one more week.”

When I got to the Church, my friend showed up with her husband. They told me that the Lord told them in prayer that He wanted them to bless us with their 2014 Toyota Siena. We could pay whatever we could afford.

The van is in great shape. It’s a Toyota, so I know it will run well for years to come. I told them what I could pay cash. They said, “That works.” I picked up the van on Monday, after she purchased a late-model Rav4 that had the exact package that she was hoping to get. Someone traded it in sometime on Saturday.

The Second Marshmallow.

In the middle of this saga, I told my wife that I could go get a van. I’d already talked to my banker about the loan terms he could arrange for the purchase. But that’s not what the Lord wanted me to do. He wanted to give me a second marshmallow.

As happy as I am with the van(the first marshmallow), the second is even better. On top of the transportation, God has given me new faith, new hope, and new joy. He has shown Himself to be the God who knows my needs before I ask. He has demonstrated that I’m worth more to Him than many sparrows. The way He did this removed all doubt that He’s paying attention to my family and me and has our best interests in mind.

The van, the first marshmallow, is perishable. But the second marshmallow, the gift of faith, is imperishable. It also multiplies every time I share this story with anyone. You get to enjoy the second marshmallow, too.

Take a bite. Taste and see the sweetness of the Lord.

Epilogue

I originally wrote this post three years ago, when it happened. I wanted to share it now because I’m facing another marshmallow test. The Lord graciously added a sixth child to our family. Our eight-passenger Siena will still work, (and praise God that it still does) but it’s a bit of a squeeze. I’ve told the Lord that I think it’s time to upgrade to the 12-passenger van — affectionately known around here as a “breeder wagon.”

His response?

“Wait for it….”

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Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.

The coffee shop barista, noticing my quite pregnant wife, commented, “Congratulations on your baby! Is this your first?”

“No, it’s our seventh,” my wife replied. The barista’s eyes widened, replying simply, “Wow.”

“Wow” is right. I never dreamed that I’d be driving a minivan full to the brim. With five kids under 13, one in heaven, and one on the way, life has become much fuller than I ever imagined.

I remember as a kid thinking that the one big family I knew was weird. They were Catholic and had six kids. They drove a big station wagon that smelled of baby spit-up. It didn’t occur to me then that it was because they had an infant. I just thought that all big families smelled that way.

When I was an atheist living in Los Angeles, I had no idea what Catholicism taught about sexuality, nor did I care. After my return to the faith, I had a ravenous desire to learn what the Church taught about everything, including what it said about marriage and sex, because my approach didn’t work. That quest led me to Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. It rocked my world.

A Dark but Accurate Vision

Humanae Vitae is one of the most profoundly prophetic documents that I have encountered outside of the Bible. In it, Pope Paul VI explains the dual purposes of human sexuality: it’s for bringing a couple closer together and making babies. His key insight is that a couple cannot separate these two functions without destroying the essential nature of the sexual act. If you intentionally remove the unitive or the procreative aspect of sex, it becomes an act of violence or lust and is no longer an act of love. That means that using contraception is a mortal sin.

Humanae Vitae is prophetic because Pope Paul VI vividly describes the effects that a contraceptive mentality and the use of contraception would have on the relations between men and women and the family. He says that the permanency of marriage would fail through an increase in infidelity and divorce. Check. He describes the general lowering of moral standards that would result and the increasing objectification of women, who will come to be seen as instruments of sexual gratification rather than persons with inherent dignity. Double check. The most horrific consequence that he foresees is that various governments would begin to impose these contraceptive practices on the populace and interfere with the natural responsibilities of married couples. China’s former “One-Child Policy” comes immediately to mind. Some American states also have a dark history of compulsory sterilization for the “feeble-minded,” which arose from the same eugenics movement that gave us Planned Parenthood. Checkmate.

Writing in the ‘60s, Pope Paul VI wrote to a Catholic world that largely consisted of big families. Protestant churches began adopting and allowing contraception starting with the Anglican Church in 1930 at the Lambeth Conference, so many non-Catholic families were already smaller than was normal in previous centuries. By the time I grew up in the 1980s and ‘90s, big families were more and more rare, even within the Church. Now, when we tell a barista about our seventh child, she looks at us like we’ve sprouted another head.

What once was normal, having a big family, has become a statistical anomaly. An outlier. “You’re one of those.” When I married my wife, who herself was number five of six siblings, we had long conversations about having a marriage that is open to life. You can see from the photo at the top of this article how those conversations went.

A Storehouse Full of Treasure

I couldn’t be more grateful. My family is my treasure. Each of my children is unique. I’ve had people with a son and a daughter tell me, “We have one of each, so we’re done.” I can say with complete honesty that I also have one of each. One David. One Joseph. One Catherine. One Jonathan. One Veronica. One Chiara in heaven. And one Sofia, who is brand new. Each one is completely unique and unrepeatable. They are the only treasure I can take with me to heaven.

In Humanae Vitae, the pope did a great job with the moral argument against contraception, but he didn’t really focus on the positive argument for big families. He lived in a Catholic cultural milieu where big families were still normal and accepted. He wasn’t prepared for the age when the people say, “Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed” (Lk 23:29).

Contrary to that message, I have discovered that the hallmark of a big family is joy, the kind of joy that comes from radical openness to life and to God’s gifts. During Christmas, our school held its annual pageant. My kindergartner got to be a part of the bell choir and rang his bell with all his might. Our seventh-grade son acted out the 12 days of Christmas as the rest of his class played the song on Orff instruments. It filled me with such joy. I’d rather watch that than the Super Bowl. I could write a thousand other examples.

To be sure, having a big family isn’t easy. But neither is winning a gold medal at the Olympics. The good things in life are invariably arduous. Family is no different. More children invariably mean more opportunities to pick up my cross and carry it. Like when I had to clean up a massive pile of vomit on Christmas Eve while my wife was laying out presents. It wasn’t my first rodeo, so I was able to do it with a cheerful heart.

Heavenly Wisdom

It is also important to remember that children are a gift. It’s not like building a shed, where I can gather the materials and make it happen. I know many couples who have struggled for years to get pregnant, and it is a source of great suffering. For my part, choosing to be open to the gift is the thing.

We had a miscarriage last year, and it was brutally painful for our whole family. After that happened, I wrestled with God about being open to life again. It was scary. I worry about my wife, who is also older (though she would have you know that she is younger than I am), and has had four C-sections. It’s hard on her body. The Church does allow a married couple with serious reasons to avoid pregnancy by abstaining from intimacy. It is not a sin to not have sex.

But a scripture verse comes to mind. “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Being open to life is a willingness to lose my life so that I might discover life in its fullness. As I found the grace to say “Yes” to life again, I felt a knot untie in my chest. Peace returned.

Thanks in part to that “Yes,” I get to hold my new baby girl, Sofia. Holding a newborn baby is like sitting on the doorstep to heaven. It’s impossible to describe the depth of joy that she gives me.

Our new baby girl will multiply the joy in our house. My older kids are simply bananas about the new baby. We will make room, and our hearts will grow in new ways. I wouldn’t trade her, or any of my children, for the world.

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This article was first published in a slightly different form (before the baby) at The Southern Cross.

At once, a man from the tombs who had an unclean spirit met him. The man had been dwelling among the tombs, and no one could restrain him any longer, even with a chain. In fact, he had frequently been bound with shackles and chains, but the chains had been pulled apart by him and the shackles smashed, and no one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the hillsides he was always crying out and bruising himself with stones. (Mark 5: 2-5)

Nobody ever reads this part of the Gospel and says, “That guy! I want to be like that guy!”

Yet there I was. Stark naked on a stranger’s front lawn in the middle the night. Pounding my head into the ground to wake up Mother Earth, just like the voices told me. Thankfully, a quieter voice told me to do it on the grass instead of in the middle of the street so I wouldn’t hurt my forehead.

After I finished sucking the evil magic off my fiancé’s diamond engagement ring, I planted it in the ground, believing that an enormous bush covered with beautiful engagement rings would sprout from the spot. The quiet voice suggested that I put my clothes back on before I returned to my apartment.

Does this sound crazy? My fiancé thought so, too. When I woke her up to tell her that I had planted her ring as a seed of our love and she could find it if she followed the yellow brick road, she was not amused. She broke up with me via a restraining order.

I ended up in the hospital, and the doctors put me on sedatives that knocked me out for three days. They hoped to undo some of the damage that nine days without sleep had done to my mind, but despaired of my recovery. They thought my mind would never recover from a psychotic break so severe. Minds that broken don’t, and they were experts.

They were also wrong. Medical science couldn’t cure me because I had a problem that it doesn’t admit exists. I was not simply a madman. I was a demoniac.

You see, my fiancé dabbled in witchcraft and the occult. Tarot cards, crystals, books on witchcraft and new age spirituality littered our apartment, which, since I was an atheist, made no difference to me so long as we continued our mutual interests in sex and marijuana. I didn’t realize that my soul was slowly filling with legions of demons.

I know. I never would have believed it either. When I experienced a demon leaving my body with a wave of projectile vomiting and a sensation like being electrocuted, I was astonished.

Most scientists -- let’s face it, most people -- say that belief in demons is a relic of the dark ages. They don’t say this because they have proof that demons don’t exist. They say this because they just can’t find them. Demons are not something that you can measure with a ruler or thermometer. They don’t follow predictable rules like those in chemistry and physics, where Fe₂ O₃ = rust and E=mC². Demons are immaterial creatures, with a tendency to be uncooperative, if not downright. . . diabolical. When confronted with the question of demons, honest scientists will usually throw up their hands and say, “Umm, we really don’t know, but quite frankly the idea freaks us out, so we’d rather not talk about it.”

Don’t get me wrong. Science is great for understanding the physical universe, but it is illogical to claim that nothing exists except that which can be examined by current scientific tools. It’s kind of like saying that bacteria didn’t exist before scientists created the microscope. “We can’t find them” is not the same as saying, “They don’t exist.”

In my case, my problems weren’t simply biological, so I didn’t just need a doctor. I needed a Savior. A Deliverer.

Catching sight of Jesus from a distance, he ran up and prostrated himself before him, crying out in a loud voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me!” (He had been saying to him, “Unclean spirit, come out of the man!”) He asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “Legion is my name. There are many of us.” (Mark 5: 6-9)

I grew up Catholic, but I always put the stories from the Bible and the lives of the saints on roughly the same level as the science fiction and fantasy that I loved. Catholicism struck me as little more than a set of rules that I (kind of) believed and that kept me from doing a lot of the fun things that I saw my friends doing. Never did I imagine that it was all true and that God could speak. Then He spoke . . . to me.

I can almost hear you thinking, “This crazy guy wants me to believe that one of the voices in his head is God?” It’s hard to describe the difference between the voices I heard driving me to destruction in the depths of madness and the voice of God. Imagine the demonic as a loud, raunchy heavy metal concert chanting a litany of self-destruction. The voice of God is more like the sound of your dad whispering to you as you awaken from a horrible nightmare. It’s a voice that you recognize in the very depth of your being, even though you can’t remember ever hearing it before.

The diabolical choirs brought untold misery and destruction into my life. The voice of God brought peace, healing, and deliverance. He gave me hope, which had vanished in the whirlwind of insanity.

. . . the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine. The herd of about two thousand rushed down a steep bank into the sea, where they were drowned . . . (Mark 5: 13)

I wish my recovery had been this easy, but Jesus did not choose to cast out all the demons at once. Maybe there weren’t any pigs nearby. Or maybe He knew I wouldn’t have learned an essential lesson. It’s one thing to cast a demon out. It’s an entirely different thing to keep it out.

Instead of casting the legion into the swine, God threw me into the coliseum to do battle with one demon at a time. But He empowered me with His Holy Spirit and armed me with the name of Jesus. He gave me a love of prayer and Eucharistic adoration. He brought wise counselors to aid me in the fight. He raised me from the dead in the sacrament of confession, and gave me the infinite blessing of communion with Him in the Most Blessed Sacrament.

After God spoke to me in the middle of the night, I started a twelve-year war with the devil, during which I would cast out one demon only to have him return with back up, and the fight would get harder.

My whole life had to change. If I wanted to be free of the evil one, I had to learn to live a life of virtue. I became a professional beggar, raising money to feed the hungry. I married a woman who had spent three years in a convent. I joined a Christian community. I reconquered my soul from the devil’s control one demon, one vice, at a time. This battle will continue until the day I finally face my Savior, my Judge, my Redeemer.

. . . As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed pleaded to remain with him. But he would not permit him but told him instead, “Go home to your family and announce to them all that the Lord in his pity has done for you.” Then the man went off and began to proclaim in the Decapolis what Jesus had done for him; and all were amazed. (Mark 5: 18-20)

I’m alive today because of Jesus Christ. I am sane because His power is real. My healing was not simply a miracle. It was a succession of extraordinary miracles too numerous to count. I will share some of those stories with you, and I think you will be amazed. You might be skeptical. I’m pretty sure you’ll be entertained. I hope that what I have learned during my combat with the evil one will help you fight your spiritual battles. Learning to recognize the attacks of the evil one against you and how to respond using divine weapons might change your life.

This is the first chapter of Demoniac, the story of how Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that very true story, you can buy it in digital or paperback form on Amazon.

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Cold showers are awesome. Just kidding. I hate them. Who doesn’t? But I still took one every day for over a year. Every day.

I started in May 2024, which meant that the water was cool, not cold. In Georgia, a cool shower in August after yardwork was downright pleasant. Ahhhhhhh. By November, all pleasantness was gone. I could only keep going with the daily discipline by saying to myself, “I can make it until Christmas,” and then “I can make it until my birthday(in April).”

This all started when I heard a great podcast from one of my favorites, Dr. Kevin Majeres from Optimal Work, about how cold showers trigger the dynorphin effect. What is the dynorphin effect, you may ask? I did.

Dynorphins are neurotransmitters that have the opposite effect of endorphins. Endorphins are the feel-good chemicals that signal my brain to sit around and enjoy what’s going on, while dynorphins tell me, “RUN!!!” Imagine my emotional experience when I turn on the shower and accidentally get a blast of cold water on the back of my head. That “yikes, turn it off or move!!!” sensation is a flood of dynorphins telling me to flee.

The interesting thing is that the flow of different neurotransmitters in my brain are connected to one another. If I get a massive flood of dopamine (another neurotransmitter connected to the reward centers of my brain) from a drug high or scrolling through TikTok cat videos, it’s followed by a massive flood of dynorphins, which is my body’s signal that I need to stop and run away. Unfortunately for the addict, that dynorphin crash often triggers more addictive, dopamine-seeking behavior in order to compensate for the crash, which eventually causes a deeper crash and the proverbial downward spiral.

But a funny thing happens when I experience the dynorphin crash first and ride the wave through it. To compensate for the dynorphins, my brain releases endorphins (those feel-good chemicals). This is why people feel really good after a crushing workout, a long run, or surprisingly, a cold shower.

Dr. Majeres highly recommends cold showers as a way of increasing mental and emotional well-being because of the endorphin bounce that follows. He also sees it as a way I can train myself to embrace the little sufferings of life in pursuit of higher goals. It teaches me to do hard things.

Tripwires for The Fast

While I did experience the benefits Dr. Majeres described, I also noticed something else. I wanted to talk about it. Especially as the year dipped into the colder months, I wanted people to “Oooh” and “Ahhh” about my daily discipline. “You’re so hardcore, Nathan, I’m impressed,” I imagined them saying.

Of course, I knew that this was a temptation to spiritual pride, which is one of the chief dangers of ascetic practices. So grave is the danger that Jesus had to address it directly:

When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they may appear to others to be fasting. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you may not appear to others to be fasting, except to your Father who is hidden. And your Father who sees what is hidden will repay you (Matthew 6:16-18).

The tempter wanted to trip me up and put me in the hypocrite camp with those who do ascetic practices to impress others with their manly spirituality. I admit that my feet got tangled up more than once. Afterwards, I almost always thought to myself, “Why did I do that?”

While I deeply appreciate asceticism and the place it has in the spiritual life, this danger is ever present. If I choose a specific penance or path of suffering, the devil can rob me of any fruit by making me impressed with myself. Remember that the devil is a robber.

The Gift of a Cross

I continued my discipline of cold showers for about 15 months, until I wrecked my back in an unfortunate Jiu Jitsu accident. I pinched a nerve and ended up at the emergency room. I’ve never experienced that kind of pain before.

Almost six months later, the nerve is still pinched, but the pain has settled down to consistent one or two… enough that I notice it whenever I stand or move, but not so much that I can’t walk or can’t sleep.

Shortly after the injury, I complained to God as I was about to step into another cold shower. “I don’t want to do this any more.” This time, the Lord responded, “You’re done.” He didn’t want me to continue the cold showers any more. I was so relieved.

But then my injury did not go away. I’ve been to the orthopedist and done physical therapy. I’ve gotten prayers for healing dozens of times. But it’s still not better.

I don’t think I’m even remotely holy enough to have earned a “thorn in the flesh,” which St. Paul received to keep him from becoming elated (2 Cor 12:7). This is more garden-variety, “I’m a middle-aged man and did something stupid” kind of suffering. But it’s real, and it’s out of my control.

Accepting All Things from the Hand of God

When God told me I could stop doing cold showers, I had the profound sense that He was replacing a suffering that I had chosen with one that He had chosen. He saw the peril of spiritual pride and wanted to remove it. The medicine He prescribed was a dose of humility.

When I lost feeling in the outside of my left foot, it shattered the illusion of my invincibility. Right after the injury, I was appalled to discover that I couldn’t stand on my tiptoes anymore. I also couldn’t run. My leg just wouldn’t do it. Some of that functionality returned over time, but part of my foot still feels like it’s asleep.

God forced me to slow down. He also gave me a new window into the experience of people who endure chronic health problems. I had no idea. I always liked to think of myself as a compassionate person, but it took experiencing it from the inside to really understand. I also realize that my small suffering is a pale shadow of sufferings that others endure.

He has also given me the grace to see that He is at work in this suffering in a profound and beautiful way. His desire is to perfect my soul. My Father wants to see me flourish and become the man He created me to be. He sees my flaws and weakness, but more importantly He sees my potential. He sees the saint that I could become, if only I can persist in the obedience of faith.

Suffering is not God’s end game, but it is a crucial tool in His work of shaping souls. Some lessons can only be learned through trials, through difficulty, through sorrow.

The key that unlocks the fruitfulness of suffering is trust. Trust is the act of hope that says, “I am in (physical, emotional, spiritual, relational, psychological) pain, but God is at work and has a plan for me, even if I can’t see what He’s doing.” Sometimes I have to the hold onto that act of trust for just a short while, but sometimes it seems like the suffering will last forever. That’s when trust is most important.

While I do still think that asceticism is good and has it’s place in the spiritual life, I’ve come to the conclusion that it might not be necessary to seek out suffering. Life contains, by God’s providence, a multitude of sufferings large and small that God can use to shape my character into something beautiful. All He needs is my consent.

God’s goal with suffering is not punitive, but transformative. It’s redemptive. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17) Embracing the suffering God allows in my life is the way that I can take up my cross daily and follow Him. His goal for me suffering is that I might become a soul transformed by love, so that others might look upon my life and give glory to God, my Father in heaven.

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Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.

Some years ago, I worked at a call center for AT&T, one of the world’s largest companies. AT&T has millions upon millions of happy customers. I never got to talk to them, because they have no reason to call. I talked to the angry ones, and you know who they are because you’ve been that person.

You’re calling because $4,000 worth of calls to Mongolia showed up on your bill. Or you’re calling because a technician just showed up at your house to install internet that you didn’t order because you’ve never owned a computer. Maybe you’re calling because a month ago an AT&T truck dropped a 15-ton spool of fiber optic cable on your hydrangeas before disappearing without a trace.

You are furious with AT&T and planning to flog the poor sap that picks up that line. I was that poor sap.

Nathan vs. the volcano.

A woman in just such a state called burning with volcanic anger. The previous month, she had talked to an AT&T representative that sold her a new phone package with the promise that it would lower her monthly charges. Her bill normally ran about $45 bucks a month. Her first bill on the new plan came in at just a little over $90. She was nearly hysterical with rage.

I looked at her new plan and quickly realized that there was no conceivable way that her bill would ever be less than $15 more expensive than her old plan. She had been sold a bill of goods and that was that. I told her that I would issue a credit and put her old plan back on her account.

It didn’t satisfy her anger. She repeatedly asked me why the other representative had lied to her because she just felt so angry and betrayed. “WHY WOULD SHE LIE TO ME?” she exclaimed!!!!

“Because she needs Jesus,” popped out of my mouth.

Silence.

An explosion of laughter came through the line. “OH HONEY . . . DON’T WE ALL!!!!!” followed by about a minute of loud guffawing. She continued chuckling intermittently for the rest of the call, and as we closed up the call, she thanked me for blessing her socks off.

What do we really need?

I’ve told this story to a lot of people because it strikes at the heart of what sharing the Gospel is all about. We all need Jesus. Everybody. If we don’t have Jesus, like me back in the day, we really need Jesus. If we already have Jesus, like me now, we need MORE Jesus. We need Him more than anything else that could possibly ever be needed. We need Him when we wake up in the morning, and we need Him when we lie down to sleep.

He is the Love, Peace, Joy, and fullness of life that we were created to need. Sharing Jesus with people is an attempt to meet their most basic, intrinsic need. It’s the most loving thing that we could possibly do because He’s the only one who can meet that core human need.

Be Bold!

When I shared this story with others, most were shocked that I would say something like that at work. “Aren’t you afraid that you’d get fired?” I had two friends disinvite me from their weddings because I tried to share Jesus with them. Losing my job because of Jesus would be way less traumatic than that.

Besides, if I got fired for talking about Jesus, Jesus would totally have my back. He said, “Blessed are those who are reviled and persecuted because of Me. Rejoice and be glad on that day. Great will be your reward in Heaven.” If I’m not taking the risk of talking about Jesus in a setting where I might get persecuted, I’m cheating myself. I’m missing out on this tremendous promise of blessing that Our Lord has given me.

So if you’re in a situation where you kinda feel like you could add Jesus but you don’t know what the end result might be, just add Jesus. If they accept Jesus, you’ve just helped to meet their most core human need. You’ve loved them in the best possible way. If they spit on you and punch you in the face, think of it as a high five from Jesus. He’s going to pour out His blessing on you because you’ve taken a risk to share His love with someone who needs it.

When they reject you, they’re really rejecting Him, which puts you in the best possible company. Even then, it’s another opportunity to just add Jesus. If someone punches you in the face because of Jesus, you can pray for them, because they REALLY need Jesus. Either way, we win because we get more Jesus in our lives, which is what everyone need.

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Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.

We have a saying in Alleluia… one way or another, we’re gonna end up in Dearing. Many years ago, that’s where the community put our graveyard.

Over Christmas break, my dear friend, Leo Suer, took his last trip to Dearing. He was hilarious and good, full of joy and zeal for the Gospel. He’d been living the Alleluia life for more than 30 years. I’m grateful for his life and his faithfulness.

The past year was hard on him, and I think by the end he was just waiting for Jesus to finish the job. When his son told me that he’d passed, I responded that he was probably up in heaven telling Jesus Boudreaux jokes. He was Cajun and had a million of them.

A Special End.

An Alleluia funeral is a special affair. It starts with opening the grave. Yes, I mean digging the grave by hand. Now that I live in Dearing, I’ve had the opportunity to open graves more than a few times.

Digging a grave for someone that you love is a thing of somber beauty. Members of the community tend to have big families, so it’s often an occasion for members of the family and close friends to come together and do something unforgettable. Stories get told. People laugh a lot and often cry. Sometimes we sing songs.

I helped some of my best friends dig their father’s grave a few years back. It was very good. I wouldn’t trade that time for the world.

The digging itself can be a bit of an adventure. After about three feet of sand, diggers hit a layer of hard Georgia red clay that doesn’t want to budge. We use a little handheld jackhammer for that layer. From that point on, the gravediggers fight inch by inch down to 54 inches. It gets hot during the summer.

Stairways to Heaven.

The visitations and funerals vary a bit because members tend to follow the standards for their denominations. For Catholics, it’s a wake and Mass. Other’s have a prayer service or celebration of life.

Leo’s wake and funeral were both jam packed. I don't think I’ve ever seen Queen of Angels Catholic Church, our little church in Thomson, GA, quite as full as it was for Leo’s funeral. Maybe on Easter. It was an amazing testimony of how his love for Jesus overflowed into the lives of everyone around him.

Alleluia really shines at the burial. Many people come to the graveside to close the grave. Unlike most funerals where the grave gets closed after everyone leaves, closing an Alleluia grave is a group effort.

After the priest or minister says the final benediction, a band starts up and shovels come out. Everyone joins in both the singing and the burying. Some of the hymns we sing are slow and moving, but many have a livelier beat. Southern gospel songs like “I’ll Fly Away” are not uncommon.

A line forms alongside the grave starting with the next of kin, and everyone gets the chance to throw a couple shovels full of dirt on the coffin. No one leaves until the dirt is flush with the surface and a cross has been drawn on it. I don’t know if anything can bring closure to a person’s life quite like closing up their grave.

A Party in the Graveyard.

On Easter Sunday a few years ago, I took the opportunity to visit the graveyard for a short time of prayer. Cemeteries are holy ground. I walked among the graves, taking note of the names. Some belong to very dear friends or their parents. Some belong to people who died before I came back to Augusta two decades ago. A few belong to children of my dear friends. Now, my own child rests there. That one hurts the most.

But back in that moment, I felt a stirring of excitement. I believe in the resurrection from the dead. One day, when the final trumpet sounds, those graves will open. There will be shouts of joy and victory as my beloved dead rise to eternal life.

The Alleluia Community is more than a good place to live. It’s more than a good place to die. The graveyard in Dearing is sown with the seeds of immortality. To the world, it looks like a place where lives have met their end. By faith I know that they are merely asleep, waiting for the moment when our Lord opens the Book of Life and reads out all our names, one by one.

On that day, there’s going to be a party in Dearing.

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To read my story of how Jesus Christ snatched me from the snares of the devil, get my book Demoniac on Amazon.com.

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Imagine that you are preparing to climb Mount Everest.  You gather maps, guide books, stories written by people who have been to the top. All of the research you think you might need.

As you digest this information, you come to recognize that you still don’t have what you need to arrive safely at the summit.  You need a guide:  someone who knows the terrain, the weather, the predators, the dangers, and the right trail. 

You need a Sherpa to join you who has already traveled the route.

Aiming for the heights.

Every Christian has been given a mountain to climb that makes Everest look like a speed bump.  “Therefore, be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”  (Matthew 5:48) 

In the Holy Scriptures, God provides the map.  The testimonies of the Saints bear witness to us that climbing the mountain is indeed possible.  The writings of learned theologians and mystics describe the signposts on the journey.  Our churches try to train and prepare us for the trip.  

But even with all of these resources, we still need a guide to travel with us, to warn us of dangers, to point out the narrow path, and to correct us when we go astray.   

A good spiritual director already knows the route… from experience.

Spiritual directors receive special gifts from God that help them guide souls in the pursuit of perfection.  Just like a good Sherpa, a good Spiritual Director will bear the marks of many successful journeys to the summit. 

Virtues such as humility, holiness, gentleness, wisdom, patience, discernment, and above all, self-sacrificing love, are the first things one should look for in a spiritual director.  These virtues are like the calloused hands and creased faces of an experienced guide who has survived many storms and perils. 

Vices like pride, control, hypocrisy, condescension, and self-importance should be a warning that you are talking to a blind guide who will lead you off a cliff.   Even as the slopes of Everest are dotted with the frozen bodies of aspiring climbers who didn’t make it, history is littered with stories of self-proclaimed spiritual masters who destroyed the lives of individuals and even entire communities.  You will know a good spiritual director by the fruit that comes from their lives and their relationships. 

Thank God for my Spiritual Sherpa!

At the beginning of my spiritual journey, I didn’t even know to seek a spiritual Sherpa.  I did lots of reading and researching on my own, but was not making much real progress.  The Lord showed me that I couldn’t do this on my own.

He brought me to the right spiritual director when I was prepared to start the journey.  I am now quite certain that I would have fallen off the mountain without guidance.  My director has helped me to train correctly, climb steep and slippery rock faces, choose the right path when faced with a fork in the trail, and survive blizzards.  

My spiritual director has been able to gently correct many of my faults, to provide perspective on difficult situations, and to deliver a word from the Lord when my emotions were too stormy for me to hear clearly.  He has shared in many joys and triumphs as well.

I still have a long way to go on my climb, but at least once a month, I sit with my spiritual director for an hour to discuss what the Lord is saying and doing in my life. He listens prayerfully, with one ear towards me and another towards the Holy Spirit. And together, we climb the mountain of the Lord.

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To read my story of how Jesus Christ snatched me from the snares of the devil, get my book Demoniac on Amazon.com.

This week, I have something a little special to send to you. I gave an hour-long talk to teenagers based on my post, Kpop Demon Hunters and the Spiritual Combat. I recorded it and share it with you to give you a little extra info on this important topic. I hope you enjoy!

To read my story of how Jesus Christ snatched me from the snares of the devil, get my book Demoniac on Amazon.com.

If this is your first note from the Country Disciple, subscribe today. You’ll get a fresh post from the intersection of faith and life every week. If you’re already a free subscriber, click upgrade to make a financial contribution that will make it possible for me to keep creating new content!

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Netflix’s breakout film of 2025 was an animation about a trio of female singers who secretly fight…. demons? Yeah, demons! As of this writing, KPop Demon Hunters has been watched an astounding 500,000,000 times. Half a BILLION streams. Our family is responsible for two of them.

Yes, I admit, I watched it twice. I enjoyed it and so did our kids. It was a little scary at points for the younger ones, so they ran off and played Minecraft. But the dialogue was funny, the action engaging, and the music surprisingly catchy (I’m bopping to it as I write this).

Spiritual warfare is one of my favorite topics, so I was keenly interested in how the movie would depict the demonic. While it got a couple of significant aspects wrong because it doesn’t come from a Christian worldview, what really amazed me were the things that it got right.

The Story in Brief

(Spoiler alert – I’m going to talk about significant plot elements through the course of this article, so if you are one of the seven people who haven’t seen the movie, I’m sorry.)

The story of the movie follows the three female singers in the band Huntr/x, which is the latest in a line of girl band/demon hunter trios. Their music creates a barrier called the Honmoon between the natural world and the demonic realm that prevents armies of demons from running amok and devouring the souls of humanity. The head demon, Gwi-Ma, languishes beneath this barrier until his demonic minion Jinu comes to him with the idea of countering Huntr/x with a demonic boy band that will steal the hearts of the fans, the source of Huntri/x’s power. He and four other demons form the Saja Boys, named and styled after the Korean spirit that ferries souls to the underworld. They return to Earth and immediately rival Huntr/x in style and popularity.

The central plot twist is that Rumi, one of the members of Huntr/x, is half-demon. Her mother was a demon hunter, but her father was a demon. Her parents’ relationship is never fully explained. She carries the mark of the demonic in the form of patterns that move and shift on her skin. (Interestingly enough, I’ve heard from a real exorcist about a type of demonic manifestation that appears as serpents writhing underneath the skin.) She keeps this secret from her bandmates until the demons reveal it 2/3 through the movie. The very public revelation of her “patterns” causes a breakup of the trio and launches the story into the climactic battle against Gwi-Ma at (of course) a giant stadium concert.

During the course of the story, Rumi falls in love with Jinu, who is actually a human soul who was enslaved by Gwi-Ma three centuries earlier when he succumbed to temptation and abandoned his family for fame and fortune. Her love for him inspires the hope that plays a crucial role in the victory at the end of story. Rumi and her friends reconcile and use their music to throw Gwi-Ma back into the underworld.

Errors of Kind

I want to briefly touch on the major errors. They seem obvious to me because I’ve actually participated in exorcisms and have studied demonology at some length. But I know that there’s a large percentage of the film’s audience that just doesn’t know what the Church teaches about demons, or doesn’t believe that demons are real at all.

The first error is the idea that Rumi is a human/demon hybrid. I’ve since learned that this kind of relationship/parentage is relatively common in anime and manga stories. It’s coming from a non-Christian worldview that doesn’t draw a hard line between humans and demons. The truth that the Church teaches is that demons (which do actually exist) are fallen angels – creatures that are immaterial and do not have bodies. While they are shown in scripture to occasionally assume bodies, they are unable to perform any natural human acts, like eating or fathering a child.

The one passage in scripture that seems to contradict this is in Genesis 6, which depicts the Sons of God intermarrying with the daughters of men and producing the Nephilim. St. Thomas Aquinas interprets this to mean that the righteous sons of Seth (Adam’s third son) and the daughters of Cain intermarried. He affirms that angels do not have physical bodies and cannot perform physical acts like reproducing with humans (Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 51, Article 3, Reply to Objection 6).

The second major error is that Jinu is a human soul that became a demon after making some bad decisions and giving himself over to Gwi-Ma during his natural human life. Again, demons are not human souls. They are fallen angels. A soul that chases after the temptations offered by the demons does not become a demon, it becomes a damned soul. Ghosts are a question for another time, but they are not and will never be demons.

The last error is perhaps the most important. In the final climactic battle scene, the members of Huntr/x forgive one another and come together to defeat the demon boy band and its master. This doesn’t work. Human beings are incapable of defeating demons on their own. The reason that Jesus took on flesh and became man is that humans need the grace of God to conquer the devil. While the demons are not gods, they are incredibly powerful spiritual entities that had dominion over the earth because of the fall. People can’t save themselves from bondage to the devil. We need a Savior.

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The Tempter’s Power

These seem like pretty significant objections, and they are, but I now want to focus on what the movie got right. There are some big ones.

1. Evil makes itself attractive. – Evil and the demonic don’t always or even usually look like the horrific pea soup vomit scenes from “The Exorcist.” The devil is a hunter of souls and knows that fear isn’t good bait. Instead, he packages temptations in wrapping like the Saja Boys. Almost impossibly good-looking and cool, even the members of Huntr/x are tempted to fall head over heels for the demonic group. The devil makes temptations attractive. He leverages natural human appetites like hunger, sexuality, and ambition, and corrupts them into vices like gluttony, lust, and pride. He knows that he’ll catch more flies with corn syrup than he will with vinegar.

2. The devil’s little whispers – The film portrays the characters experiencing the “whispers” of the devil. It does a really good job of showing how these little whispers lead us to make self-destructive decisions, often by pointing out our secret character defects. As the film launches into the big climax, the two other members of Huntr/x both experience these whispers, pointing out their flaws and how they will never be truly loved. These depictions match quite well with my own experience of the devil’s temptations, as well as with the teachings from saints like St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order.

3. The Devil is a divider – The word diabolos comes from the Greek word “to divide.” The devil works to make us divided within ourselves and to separate us from those who love us. The devil wants us internally conflicted and isolated from one another because it makes us an easy target for his other temptations, like hopelessness and despair. Like a lion prowling on the edge of a large herd of gnu’s, the devil tries to pull the small and fragile away from the protection of the group.

4. The Power of Shame – Rumi has a secret that she wants to keep hidden from her bandmates. As a demon hunter with demons of her own, Rumi’s secret shame of her demon father erects a barrier between her and her best friends. At one point, when Jinu is conspiring with Gwi-Ma to bring down Rumi, he says, “She has shame. We can exploit it to destroy her.” Shame separates us from people, even those closest to us, because it makes us think that we’re unworthy of love. Shame often drives the kind of perfectionism that Rumi exhibits during the early parts of the movie. She thinks she can outrun the shame if she is perfect, but in truth, she needs to be set free.

5. Patterns of Family Sin – When the movie refers to patterns, it is talking about the glowing tattoo-like markings on Rumi and Jinu’s skin. For me, the word “pattern” evokes family dynamics that can and do have a real effect on a person’s soul. For instance, while a father’s alcoholism doesn’t automatically make a child an alcoholic, the behavior patterns and sins that accompany alcoholism can and do affect a child’s self-concept and inclinations. This is especially true of physical or sexual abuse, which can cause a child to go to extreme lengths to conceal the shame caused by these sins against them. The way we view the world and our own actions is deeply affected by our family of origin and our life experiences.

6. The Power of Music – Music cannot save us from the devil, but that doesn’t mean that it lacks power. Aristotle talks about music’s effect on the soul and goes so far as to say, “music has a power of forming the character.” https://life-craft.org/the-power-of-music/ As I understand it, this is because music can stimulate both the mind and the emotions. Music that sounds despairing can inspire despair, while music that sounds courageous and triumphant can inspire courage and hope. It makes sense that environments like bars that thrive on drunken debauchery play music that, in lyric and melody, focus on getting drunk and having sex. The music enhances and promotes that kind of atmosphere. In a similar way, beautiful classical or sacred music can bring peace and order (Aristotle’s good character) to a home. Musical lyrics also stick in the memory. I can still recite the lyrics to Ice Ice Baby by Vanilla Ice, even though I haven’t heard it in 20 years. It’s a song about doing and dealing drugs. Why is that still in my brain? Because the brain doesn’t have a delete button.

7. The Power of Forgiveness and Love – The power that enables the climactic triumph over Gwi-Ma flows from the reconciliation between the members of Huntr/x and the love between Rumi and Jinu. Love and forgiveness have real power. The capital “L” Love that is God is, in fact, the only source of true victory over the devil. His forgiveness is the only thing that can truly set us free from the bondage of shame and sin and death.

Where Do We Go From Here

When a movie like this hits the public consciousness, the Church has an opportunity, and really an obligation, to engage. Part of the reason that this movie is so popular is that it resonates with young people’s life experiences. I am convinced that everyone has experienced the demonic in some way, even if it wasn’t as dramatic as stuff flying around the room. You don’t have to run naked through the streets of Los Angeles to realize that the devil exists (been there, done that). They know at some deep level that demons are real.

In a couple of weeks, I will give a talk about the movie at a parish youth group meeting. The adult leader said that she has had a lot of trouble getting kids to show up and engage in general. Apparently, since she started advertising, “KPop Demon Hunters and the Spiritual Combat,” interest has surged.

The Church has been called by God to proclaim the Good News to all creation. A common obstacle to proclaiming the Gospel is the lack of a shared language. Cultural artifacts like KPop Demon Hunters can be leveraged to speak the truth in a way that young people can understand. We can leverage their interest in something that speaks a partial truth to introduce them to the fullness of Truth. It can serve as a bridge between two different world views.

KPop Demon Hunters connects with people because it is a redemption story. I think a love of redemption stories is written into every human heart by the Author of the human soul, because He wants to stir in us a desire and hope for our own redemption. This movie can be a part of THE redemption story that God is bringing to fulfillment, if only we can get creative and help our young people engage in the spiritual combat. Because they’re in a spiritual combat, whether they know it or not.

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To read my story of how Jesus Christ snatched me from the snares of the devil, get my book Demoniac on Amazon.com.

Article originally published on Catholic Stand.

“The truth hurts,” the saying goes. Apparently, if you’re a demon, that’s literally true. When I assisted in an exorcism, God revealed the power of the Holy Scriptures in a rather dramatic way.

As part of the ritual, the exorcist proclaimed the first verses of the Gospel of John. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…” The demons went bananas – groaning, howling, writhing as though boiling oil was being poured on them. It took the concerted effort of four strong men to restrain the person. I was one of two men holding the legs. The person roared harsh, inhuman sounds like an animal being tortured.

When the exorcist finished the passage, the demons stopped acting up. Silence filled the church. I couldn’t help but see that the Word of God, the Truth of the Gospel, caused the demons to suffer.

St. Paul says the Word of God is “living and effective, sharper than any two edge sword, able to pierce between soul and spirit”. It never occurred to me that he might mean that it can sever the connection between a human soul and an evil spirit, yet I saw the Word of God torturing those demons.

So, if the Word of God is like a sword, how do I use it in spiritual combat? What do I do when confronted by the devil?

First, I must know my enemy. Jesus describes the devil as a strongman who holds me captive. In the parable, He describes taking away the strongman’s armor so I can be set free. What is the devil’s armor? His armor is my ignorance of his existence and tricks. If I don’t believe that the devil exists or know how he works, he can act freely to keep me in bondage.

Jesus came to undo the works of the devil and He does so by teaching me to fight. He wields the scriptures like a katana during His temptation in the desert. The devil’s three temptations represent three broad categories of sin which contain all sin. The story shows me how the devil operates and how to use the scripture against each type of temptation so I can learn to do the same.

In the first temptation, the devil says, “Use Your power, if you have any, to satisfy Your hunger.” This points to sins linked with my appetites. My appetites are not inherently evil but have become disordered due to original and personal sin. My hunger for physical goods like food and sex, or abstract goods like power and prestige, can become all-consuming. The devil does everything in his power to stoke the fire.

Jesus uses scripture to parry this attack by pointing to my deeper spiritual appetites. I’m not just a smart monkey, ruled by biology or social status. I’m created for communion with God, for eternity. The scriptures reveal my identity as a child of God and can protect me from disordered desires.

In the second temptation, the devil tries the same trick he pulled on Eve in the garden. He twists the Word of God and tries to convince Jesus to do something self-destructive. “Throw yourself off the temple and God will protect you.” The scriptures are a two-edged sword, even in the hands of my enemy. This temptation represents sins of unbelief, of the intellect. Do I believe God, or do I believe the world, the flesh, and the devil?

Jesus again uses the scriptures to defend Himself from temptation. To put the Lord to the test is to act from a place of doubt rather than one of faith. Jesus teaches here that I need to believe and trust the Word of God, but I also need to know and understand it deeply. If I know and believe the scriptures and the perennial interpretations of the scriptures given by the Church, the devil won’t be able to sow doubt and unbelief.

In the final temptation, the devil tries to entice Jesus to worship him. This temptation represents idolatry and all sins contrary to the first and greatest commandment. If I love and pursue anything more than I love and pursue God, I make it an idol.

Jesus sends the devil on his way by quoting the scripture that sums up all the rest, “Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.” The entire Bible seeks to teach me this core message. Worship God alone. The devil flees from this central truth because his purpose was to worship God, too. He rejected the Light and now lives in the outer darkness, where he has nothing but sorrow and hatred.

So, what does this battle look like in my daily life? While most Christians and even non-Christians will never need the services of an exorcist if they avoid dabbling in the occult, smaller temptations do arise. Like when the AC compressor on my truck cuts through the radiator hose for the third time in as many months. A strong temptation might arise to use the kind of words that aren’t allowed at my house.

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But then scripture comes to my defense. I recall Romans 8:28, which tells me that “all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purposes.” I might not know God’s purpose in that moment of frustration, but the truth of that scripture helps drive away doubt and anger that the devil tries to sow in my heart.

Instead of succumbing to frustration, I can thank God that my truck didn’t overheat in 97-degree traffic and leave me stranded. I can praise God that He allowed me to find the problem before I drove to work the next morning without any coolant. I can rejoice that I didn’t blow the head gasket, which would force me to rebuild the engine. With my heart at peace, I can hop into my wife’s van and head to AutoZone for a new hose and a gallon of coolant. The devil howls, humiliated and defeated again.

The Word of God gives me a rich arsenal to defend against the devil’s attacks. The scriptures armor me with hope that helps me master my appetites for the sake of an eternal kingdom. They equip me with the shield of faith to deflect the devil’s lies. And most importantly, they arm me with Love, which is God Himself. The gates of hell will not prevail against Him.

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Jesus snatched me out of the darkness and saved me from complete madness. If you want to hear more of that story, check out Demoniac, now available on Amazon.

Article originally published in The Southern Cross, official magazine of the Diocese of Savannah, GA. Reprinted with permission.