The pandemic opened a gap in time. Like a two year layover, the plane was grounded so that we could hop off, sit quietly in the concourse, read the map, and adjust our itineraries. For some, the opening of this gap in time caused the vacuum to fill with old habits, often bad habits. For others, a re-prioritization of life occurred, but the order of those priorities varied dramatically between people. Politics, technology, porn, drinking, and material possessions seemed to take the top place for many. Liquor store shopping sprees and shiny things captured much of our time, talent, and treasure. Having deleted all social media accounts for much of the pandemic, I missed the online drama, but now having been drawn back to social media for community and school event information, I see now that I didn’t miss much.

This time has caused a great deal of sorrow for many from the virus. But far more have felt a mental sickness from the isolation. We are told that the world is changing, but it is the same world that it was before. Human nature did not change. A trend toward disorder and chaos is clearly happening, but this is not a new thing or even original, as there is nothing new under the sun. This has happened many times before. We are living in a time best described in the book of Wisdom, chapter 2. These seemingly novel ideas pumped by the media are as old as time. The narrative around a post-Christian, post-American, post-9/11, post-colonial, post-2008, post-capitalist, post-Cold War, post-modern, post-truth, post-Covid, post-everything world are as credible as the sugary calories I get from my favorite Post cereal (which is no longer Cinnamon Toast Crunch, but Honey Bunches of Oats (with Almonds)). Today, I find that the back of a cereal box has more reading depth than any of the the major news outlets. At this point, I grant professional wrestling a higher level of seriousness than The New York Times, CNN, or Fox News, because at least pro wrestlers have the courtesy to wink and admit they are pretending. The falseness of pro wrestling is obvious, and therefore far more honest, which today gives these steroid and drug-fueled wrestlers a higher integrity than the smoke and mirrors surrounding the veiled ideologies disguised as news from our media companies. To see this madness in action, just login to Facebook or Twitter and scroll through your friends’ postings. The vociferous progressive and angry conservative will sway like a reed to whatever is popular today. Remember Kony 2012? Remember Cecil the Lion? Remember the wet market? Remember flattening the curve? Remember that insulting tweet? Remember the thousand other daily crises between then and now? Look at today’s headlines and you will see today’s Cecil the Lion. Everything is a crisis. And here’s the thing I’ve learned: when everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis.

To illustrate what I mean by that, here’s a real world tale of what happens when “everything is a crisis.” A software company had a model of measuring the severity of customer problems, which went from 1 to 7, with severity 1 being the highest, or worst. A severity 1 meant that the system was down and the customer was losing money. For a long time, this model worked, until a series of especially vocal customers began to realize that if they lobbied to get every support issue elevated to level 1, they received instant and premium support. The most talented troubleshooters would come running to their aid, since the skilled employees were always in demand for difficult issues. Thus, the customers began ranting and raving about every case until they received the recognition and label of severity 1 on all tickets. These customers saw this as a good thing.

What happened in reality is that more customers began to realize how to game the severity model, and soon many issues were in the high-priority, house-is-on-fire queue. So while customers imagined this was a good thing, the support staff that I was part of burned out and realized that if every incoming case was high priority, then all tickets were actual normal priority, regardless of the assigned severity. The skilled engineers began working longer hours and grew frustrated. If every ticket requires all hands on deck, then eventually you run out of hands. It’s like when a freshman keeps pulling the fire alarm in a college dormitory over and over, night after night; eventually people stop getting out of bed to go outside, and discover they would rather die in the fire than waste their time freezing outside at 3 AM for no good reason.

In the end, the support issue severity system became so meaningless that a higher level of zero was added. Yes, for real. A new status was invented quietly to address the problem. Within a year the skilled employees started to depart the company looking for greener pastures where they were not running from one meaningless task to the next. Customers eventually realized that “severity 0” was the secret internal status that they now needed, and believe it or not, the company had to add a negative status, “severity -1”, to hide yet another level for actual crisis tickets. As time went on, the product support grew lazy and cynical and tickets lingered without anyone really caring, while customers continued to scream on the phone about their “severity 1” or “severity 0” ticket that wasn’t getting addressed. Everyone suffered, until the whole severity system had to be re-ordered when a new boss came in and shook up the whole severity triage. It was kind of like Simba returning and replacing Scar in the pride. The new boss, Simba, fought for the engineers and we battled to reset the severity of tickets to their proper places. But the sad ending here is that this boss eventually left, because in cleaning up he stepped on a few toes of the hyenas (a.k.a. cynical engineers) who enjoyed the status quo. Why would anyone prefer a bad system to a disciplined and logical system? Because when everything was a crisis, no one had to do any work. It was a state of gridlock where engineers could complain about the state, but then just go home at five o’clock. The result of “everything is a crisis” is a kind of despair or paralysis, which can even become comfortable in its dysfunction for those riding the current. In chasing every problem, no problem is addressed. In sounding the alarm, we become living examples of the boy who cried wolf. I suspect the wolf is near, if not already here, but we stopped expecting him to ever appear.

This watering down of what the word “crisis” means will eventually make a real crisis strike us like lightning. I suspect it is only a high level of material comfort and extended time of peace and prosperity that could allow us all to have so much time and energy to spend online seeking a daily problem to get excited about. We are somewhere in the seven stages of empire, as after the fourth stage of affluence comes the age of intellect, followed by decadence, and soon afterward, decline and collapse.

The pandemic held this state of constant crisis in front of our eyes, since we were all shut indoors and kept separate. Early on I realized that I could react in one of two ways to the noise. I could embrace the cage match of fixing the world’s problems by thumbing responses on my phone. (I was slow to realize in the early days of social media that clicking a “like” button will not bring about a utopia.) Or…I could turn the phone off and change myself. At least, I could try - not sure I can really change, but an effort can be made. This goes back to my use of the Serenity Prayer. This little prayer is the great knife that cuts through issues and helps discern which road to take. And as far as that utopia goes, I look forward to the incredible time ahead that the partisans are promising, but in the meantime, while I continue to witness the result and reality of Original Sin in every human being including myself, I will try to live for today with hope for the future. I’ll try not to think about actual crises that could happen, such as the launch of the ten thousand nuclear warheads aimed at every major city across the world, or the possibility of a giant solar flare frying every electronic circuit on earth, or the dollar being dumped as the world’s reserve currency creating exponential inflation, or drought and famine across world agriculture, or biological warfare that would make Covid look like a sniffle.

In this two year pandemic, if you haven’t made a change yet but have considered making one, or want to make a change, this opening in time might have been the greatest opportunity of your lifetime. The question to ask yourself is this: did you waste this time? Did you let it slip by? Did you freak out over every 24-hour news cycle? Or did you turn off the TV? Did you put your phone down or cling to it every waking minute?

I hope you didn’t waste it, or that you don’t waste what is left of it. There will never be a perfect time, but if you did squander this time, these many months when the world slowed down, then the perfect time to change is now. The old Chinese proverb holds true: the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago; the second best time is today. This isn’t some new age idea. It is ancient and cross-cultural. But it comes with one warning: when you “seize the day” make sure you what you are seizing is something worth reaching for.

When I think of the lost years of my life, I think of hiking experiences where I’ve stopped to look at trees growing in strange places.

Warning: I’m switching metaphors now.

On cliffs and rocky paths, tree roots cling to impossibly small cracks, nooks, and crannies. The tree itself twists and bends, growing sideways or curling toward a sunny spot. How these trees survive bewilders me. They seem to have nothing to hold onto, yet they live and grow. Some even appear to thrive, but the weight of the tree growing sideways will eventually fall due to its own weight fighting against gravity. They struggle, yet live full lives. With their improper footings and nutrients they become stunted as the roots grope along cliff and rock edges in a desperate search for water and minerals. The will to live, to survive, shows itself in the exposed roots. You can see this intense yearning to live in plants and animals everywhere you look in nature. This is never a question in nature. The will to survive and reproduce are the two driving forces for all living things, unquestioned among all species from largest to smallest.

With people, I often can’t tell who is like the thriving tree on the craggy precipice, who is out of place, who is out of sorts, or who is growing sideways but seemingly fine. They may appear to be thriving, but have no footing, and rather than a physical search for sustenance they engage in an unseen mental and spiritual search, only to have their roots grasp at rocks and sand that give no nutrition. They slowly starve trying to draw life-water from a swamp of politics, sports, porn, liquor, or possessions. Others seem to have access to an untapped source that defies reason. An unseen wellspring feeds the taproot. These strange trees are often the ones that make the woods and the cliffs beautiful.

If every tree was in solid soil and growing straight and true, I’m not sure a mountain hike would be as interesting. What’s strange is you often see a tree that appears to be on solid footing, on good soil, but is actually sick, while the strange tree on the cliff protrudes sideways from the rock, yet appears to be healthier than the tree in rich soil. There are healthy looking trees that are hollow inside due to beetles or disease and you don’t know it until the day a strong wind snaps the trunk in half or uproots the rotten base.

The difference between trees and people is that we can change our footings. We can move, whereas a tree cannot. We can ask ourselves questions and react. We can change. Here’s a list of questions for asking yourself:

How did you spend the first year of the pandemic? What were you doing for the last 22 months? Did you grow or did you shrink? Did you get older or were you reborn? Did you scroll on your phone constantly? Did you discover the power of silence? Did you look inside and ask the real questions that you want to ask? Did you live online? Did you comment online? Did you stew about politics? Did you rage quietly or publicly about how the virus was being handled? Did you swipe left or right all day? Did you stare at your favorite porn each day? Did you get drunk often and lol about it?

You may have wasted the greatest opportunity of your lifetime, and that might have been the best chance to change your footing.  

When is a good time to find true meaning? Now is a pretty good time. The present seems like a good opportunity. Yesterday was better, but today is a good choice. You can try to get back to where you once had meaning, or if no such place exists, to find that place. If no place can be easily found, ask, seek, and knock. Pound on the doors of new places. Search for the right path and place to plant yourself. I would suggest you stop shopping at Amazon and start shopping where people meet in flesh and bone and talk about real things. You will not find it at the bar or liquor store. You will not find it at the mall or on an app. Millions have looked in those places, and millions have never found it there. You will not find it in yourself, either, despite the convincing claims of New Age religion and modernism. The “self” is exactly the stumbling block that needs to be looked away from to experience a true change.

There is something in you that aches to be aroused, and believe it or not, it’s not sexual. There is an assumed obsession around that subject today, where happiness is thought by many to only come through something to do with titillation and body parts. This is probably the greatest distraction of the current age, maybe only matched by the desire for possessions and shiny things. But there is something deeper in the center of you that wants and demands something greater to believe in.

I think an honest question to ask oneself who has become a cynic or doubter is this: why did you stop believing? What is the real reason? What crushed you? What stole it away? What political position made you stop believing? What intellectual argument? What hypocrite turned your stomach? What jerk or cruel act twisted the good into something bent and broken? Why did you abandon belief? Was it something you did to someone else? Because there is a reason it happened, or multiple reasons. Something made you doubt and maybe even stop believing.

Or perhaps is it just indifference. You stopped caring. Someone talked you out of it. We can very easily be talked out of belief by clever argument if we’re not careful, and there are many arguments that try to convert you away from your true belief. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that anyone who insists that you not talk about your religion to others, is preaching their religion to you in that very ask. What they are saying is actually this: “My belief is that you shouldn’t speak about your belief.” In other words, they are converting you to adopt their non-belief and indifference toward faith. Then out of concern for niceness and offending the other person (who, by the way, may have just effectively silenced you or even caused you to abandon your convictions) you grow quiet as if your principles were mere suggestions for living instead of the bedrock of meaning in your life. The religion of the self is the de facto religion of this age, but this is an unsatisfying way to live. An age of doubt is here, temporarily. If you don’t realize this fact, you have already been converted, or are being converted to it, or have allowed it to silence you. Many people are having their faith euthanized right now, slowly going to sleep in our culture that acts like carbon monoxide on our spiritual life.

Every day that you actively doubt is a day that you aid and abet your own de-conversion and willfully turn away from God. The great trick of this era is that government and corporations and schools and media companies pretend to act for our benefit instead of their own. We are instructed by all of these institutions that it is somehow intolerant or bigoted to proclaim the life, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus in public. The irony is that all of these institutions will pass away before long, from the U.S. Senate to Amazon.com to the Teacher’s Union to the Washington Post. These are all temporary things trying to silence something that can never be silenced, no matter how much noise is made, or how much smothering of people’s faith is attempted. In reality, there is nothing intolerant about having convictions and principles to live by, and at least in America this right to hold religious belief is protected. Nor is there anything bigoted about being open about your faith, as anyone who reads the four biographies of Jesus can discover rather easily, if he or she decides to crack the cover of the book and stop accepting what the culture is preaching. The culture of the self is very hard to turn away from. It’s everywhere. A society that pushes a religion of no-religion doesn’t like to hear anything about parables or miracles, and therefore today we are being told that the God of love is suddenly a God of hate. This is not a failure to transmit on God’s part, this is a failure to receive on our part. We only want a God that affirms what we desire, and that remains the case unless you experience the invasion of grace.

In the idleness of the past years, in the pandemic, some larger questions of life must have jarred you from time to time. If these questions haven't sprung up, then you will just continue on the road of indifference that ends in the land of Blah. I don’t want to be in that gray place. That road requires no action and no vigor and offers no real satisfaction, unless the next TV show or case of beer or oversized meal or one-night hookup can somehow fulfill the deepest concern inside you.

Call me a skeptic.

Many of us walked away from God for a reason, somewhere along the way. There are many possible reasons. If the problem is intellectual, that God cannot be real, then there is reading and listening, as you have probably spent much more time reading and listening to reasons not to believe and have never given the spiritual way a fighting chance. I have gone over my own struggle in detail in earlier chapters of this journey. Ideas and reason blocked me, as I wanted to learn everything, to know, to appear smart, wise, and most of all, consider myself above superstition and myth.

But ideas are just one cause of spiritual blindness. Often a human drives us away. Someone brashly shoved religion on you, and failed to deliver the message. A confluence of things drove me away. If it wasn’t only ideas about God, then what other cause pushed you away?

Perhaps it was one of these things:

Someone hurt your feelings. Something crushed you. Something distracted you. Someone annoyed you. Someone did something to someone that you loved.

What do all of these have in common?

All of these are reasons that have a person or a group of people at the root. Notice that the problem in any one of those reasons was not God. The reason is always something else.

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