I’ve taken two weeks off from posting any content because of two things:
* Burnout
* Money
I’ve been worried about money when Jesus clearly states to cast your cares and anxieties upon Him.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
A few months back, my therapist had to survey me for insurance purposes about my levels of anxiety and depression and at the end of the survey said, “I’m going to have say you’re at least a little anxious and depressed to the insurance company so we can keep seeing each other.”
When I was feeling down over the summer, discouraged about the work that I had been doing, he said, “Nathan, you beat depression. That’s a big deal, don’t forget that.”
It’s true. While I still feel depressed and anxious from time to time. I am not depressed. I am not anxious. Because I am not identified with the chronic, I am identified with the eternal. I am a child of God and therefore Jesus tells me to not be anxious, to not be depressed. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel those emotions, it means I don’t indulge in the behavior of worry.
So why was I worrying about money?
During the recording of this episode, there were times during the day when I checked my phone anxiously, looking for a subbing gig to pop up, because work had been slow. The substitute teaching market had become saturated, especially given the precarious and fickle nature of the freelance entertainment industry these days. Many freelancers within the studio and independent film-making system have heard about substitute as a great way to make ends meet, a few of them recommended by yours truly. It takes a while for the paperwork to clear, sometimes up to half a year, and so many of these folks who had looked to become substitute teachers have since been hired at the advent of the new school year.
Whenever a gig pops up, it gets taken immediately, and so unless you’re one of the first people to see it, you quickly lose out.
Well, I left another thing out.
I’ve only been taking high school and middle school gigs since the start of the new year. Beggars can’t be choosers and currently, I’m acting as a chooser, because I’m prioritizing writing and producing over guaranteed work. I could take work at elementary schools but it would require another level of commitment, attention, and energy, that I’m not willing to put forth in this season of my life. So I can’t really complain.
I went on a walk before recording this episode and the Holy Spirit said, “My son, in October, if you are desperate you can take elementary school gigs, but you won’t have to.”
It’s October and that has since come true. My calendar has been filling up with middle school and high school gigs.
I’ve been privileged to go on occassional walks with my Lola Rose, who is recovering from her first major falls. I’m grateful to stay at home not just to save money, get closer to family, but also to spend the last few golden years with my lovely grandma. She’s the hub of the spokes holding onto the pressure of my family, and she’s lasted nearly 90 years. Her 90th birthday is coming up in December and will be a joyous family reunion.
I continued my walk with her and the Holy Spirit said, “My son, Take the day off work tomorrow. Go pray with Caleb and your church. He needs the encouragement.”
I went and recorded the podcast, speaking on three parables about money. I went to sleep. The next day I woke up and went to a weekly morning prayer that Caleb Price, from my church started a little while back. It’s every Tuesday, starting at 8 AM, and I’m usually at work then, so I’ve never attended.
As we were praying, Kathleen, a consummate prayer warrior gifted with prophetic prowess, stopped and began to speak directly to me. She had been praying over the church, but directed her attention towards me.
“I see a dark spirit over my brother Nathanael and I’m going to do something if you’re okay with it.”
She and others began to lay hands on me and pray over me as she rebuked the spirit of Lust, seeing next to it guilt, shame, and comparison.
As they began to pray over me, I began trembling and crying tears that had been swallowed up by years of repression. I trembled and sobbed uncontrollably in ways that I hadn’t in years. I re-lived and went through memories as old as when I was a child, seeing the places in which lust, guilt, shame, and comparison had robbed me of all that I had held precious and dear.
I saw many other visions that I don’t feel privy at this time to tell, but most of all, at the end of this vicious attack on the forces that had held me captive for so long, Kathleen praised the Lord saying, “He is free. The Spirit is gone.”
She instructed me to say, “I am one with Christ and the Son who is saved is free indeed.”
And I did. And slowly the trembling, coughing, and crying began to subside.
I wasn’t sure what had happened. Everyone said I seemed different, lighter, that something had changed. I couldn’t really tell. We debriefed in a parking lot with my dear friend, Kevin Glover, who has been with me at various times in my spiritual walk, always significantly moving times, yet sparse in their occurence.
I went to a coffee shop and tried to resume the arduous content schedule I had been keeping up with up until this point and nothing made sense anymore. It was like I was looking at an operating system that needed to be rebooted because the hardware had been de-fragged, wiped clean, needing a complete factory reset, because years of accumulated dust had destroyed its ability to run smoothly anymore.
I looked through all my plans and quickly grew exhausted. I went to my car and closed my eyes and took a nap. I had experienced something something similar to this before, where my entire Rule of Life had to be reset, and all the to-do lists that previously had run my life looked like empty hieroglyphs waiting to be blot out with new blood.
So I took a nap. I woke up and drove over to a performance I had in DTLA, spitting a poem about my time in the psych ward. When I got out of my car, something felt different.
It felt as if I was floating and yet anchored to the ground. I could only describe it to my friend Justin as, “neutrally buoyant”, something I had learned in my latest scuba session.
When you descend to the bottom, 60 feet was how deep we went, you deflate entirely, sink to the bottom, equalizing as you go deeper. Then you inflate little by little until you’re neutrally buoyant, so that when you breathe in you go up, when you breathe out you go down.
I’ve always felt in my life weighed down or floating away. Sometimes the floating away felt desirable because I felt like I could see the entire world, up until it felt too high for me to keep going. When I was weighed down it was only pleasant when I completely gave up, awaiting the sweet slumber that came when I closed my eyes, the covers, and myself to the world at large.
Now, I felt like something else was keeping me buoyant, and I felt secure in that newfound footing. It was foreign, but it was simultaneously emptying and uncomfortable, because I wasn’t going as fast as I had been so used to. It was like those fuels of lust, guilt, shame, and comparison were uneven motivations, moving me at an excitedly fast pace, but never keeping me quite even, going in the same direction.
I’m still getting used to it even now.
A friend of mine later that week pitched the idea of hopping onto the platform I had already begun to create, rather than creating his own from scratch. It was something I had been inadvertently praying for, given that I knew what I was creating had to be bigger than myself, and had to be a collaborative project, one that though I might be the face of, was much larger than I could do on my own.
So I took a step back and begin to plan that. Every day, I looked through various documents that now felt overwhelming and foreign, yet ready to be synthesized into something simple and cohesive. It felt like a giant math problem that needed an entire lecture hall worth of chalkboards to map out.
I remembered a dream I had, where I re-entered a theatre I used to perform at weekly, called “The Improv Space”, and it had been re-opened, now in a double-decker building, with a theatre in the round upstairs, similar to the black box I had performed at in Orlando at the Orlando Fringe Festival. Downstairs it had a coffee shop that reminded me of “The Upside Down” a coffee shop in Westwood created by “Jews for Jesus”.
And I went and saw a show and it was wonderful. I realized that what I had been planning all along with all of this meandering about a way to produce, distribute, and create content that encompassed all of the facets of the written and spoken word was a physical space, not a digital one.
I knew I didn’t want to get involved with creating content unless it led to live, in person connections, and a way to tell all the stories that God had put on my wayward, mercenary heart.
I mapped it out on a sheet of printer paper laying around in the middle school science classroom I was substituting. It couldn’t fit on one so I added another. And another, and another until it was 10 outstretched pieces of paper taped together, marked with sharpie.
I met with my friend Nehemiah and pitched to him and asked how he would fit in. We’ve spent the past few days/ weeks trying to create this behemoth of a strategy, tactically assembling the ways in which we can make something of a place, where we could take from start to finish the vision of creating stories which, “find the funny on the way to the wise, the wise on the way to the funny, telling the truth all the way up.”
I’ve come up against many obstacles along the way recently, feeling insane many times over, feeling as if every part of my heart is laid bare, waiting to be re-assembled so that my spirit can move more freely about this troubling and scarce world of fear, shame, guilt, comparison, and lust. But now I see that many times the obstacles are put in front of me because I am trying to find a way to leave the path God has intended for me, one is straight, narrow, leading to the kingdom of Heaven.
God wants my Heart, all of it, and is unwilling to take anything less than the entirety of my Life. I know this to be true, but there has been something in the way for much of my life. It’s the knowledge that many times when I’ve offered up a sacrifice to the Lord, expecting something in return, most of the time, in my heart of hearts, I know I’m holding something back. I was holding something back, it’s my heart itself.
I’m reminded of a distant memory, when I was a burgeoning adolescent. I was a pitcher at the age of 12, on the cusp of my first “perfect game”, ready to strike out the 6th batter of the day, closing out the game.
It was a full count, and the batter I was facing was a small fry, with a strike zone straight and narrow as the eye of a needle. I had one strike left.
The crowd cheered, and as my Mom later recounted in a family therapy session, they chanted, “One more strike! One more strike! One more strike”.
She saw me shaking on the mound and urged the crowd to quiet down so I could focus. I wound up my near 70 mile an hour fastball, practiced time and time again with my Dad in the park near my house, and let it whip.
“Striiiikkkkee!” The umpire bellowed, the crowd erupting in cheers.
The batter went back dejected and the opposing team assembled in their respective dugouts, as my team mobbed me on the mound. Once done with the festivities, I walked exhaustedly back to my Dad, our coach, who gave me a hug, letting me have some time by myself in the dugout, where I quickly let out a huge sigh, dropped my body down to the splintered, wooden bench and cried my heart out.
I burst into tears and let it all out, because to hit that strike, it had taken everything out of me. And so I cried, and cried, and cried, until I couldn’t anymore.
When my Mom brought up this memory to me in family therapy over a decade later, she spoke of the pressure that I had felt on me as a child who excelled in not only sports, but academics, winning many awards in the competitive field of performative acacdemics, or the cut-throat world of competitive sports.
She spoke of how I had cried immediately after this triumphant accomplishment, and how the pressure had been too much. I had only remembered the triumph, not the tears afterward. I had thought of many moments in my life this way since then, as those in which the triumph had not been worth the agony of the tears afterward.
But that’s not the truth of what really happened. That’s only my dear Mother’s perception of what happened, because as a Mother does, she worries about her son, yearning for him to be safe in the world of risk and consequence. I’m not saying she’s wrong in interpreting it that way, but it’s not the full story.
Every single thing I’ve ever accomplished which has brought intense meaning to not only my life but all others implicated by my decision to put my heart on the line ends with a burst of uncontrollable tears, releasing pent-up anxiety, fear, guilt, shame, desire, comparison, and unbearable tension, only to be accompanied by a renewed sense of God’s grace and purpose for my life, followed by overwhelming, unadulterated joy, accompanied with an intimacy only possible through knowing that more fun is more possible than ever before.
Everything I’ve ever done that has really ever mattered for more than just me usually resulted in a Grown Man crying in public, embraced by the loving arms of those who knew that victory had been assured only by the full sacrifice of a Heart willing.
Of course, it’s a tale as old as time. It just takes a willing Heart to live to tell it.
I’ve spent my whole life feeling hopelessly overwhelmed, taking meager steps to never fully jump off the deep end, because I’m afraid that when I surface for air my ugly face is going to be ugly crying.
I once had a hat, I don’t know where it is anymore, of Michael Jordan, ugly crying.
For all the killer instinct, for all the mamba mentality, for all the psychopathic trash talk these men are capable of, no amount of steel-faced grit will stop them from balling their eyes out, crouched on the floor, holding that hard-earned trophy they’d trade in a heart beat for the Father they miss, taken too soon.
I’ll trade everything for the Kingdom of Heaven. And once I get it, I’ll trade it all again for a moment in the arms of my Father. That’s where Jesus is taking me and he needs my Heart.
The best part is, I’ll always get a new one, and it’s going to work a lot better than the last.
I’m in tears at the end of writing this. I feel overwhelmed. Of course I do. Because I’m getting a new heart, and it always feels bittersweet to lose the old one.
I took some vague and meandering notes on all thirteen of Jesus’ parables on money and the kingdom of Heaven. I’m not sure if it makes all that much sense, but here it is:
Every Parable on Money
Pretty soon we’re going to be launching everything that’s implicated by trying to create this new home for storytelling, if you want to support it, pledge a donation to the future of this Substack (still figuring out what the paid is going to look like), but more importantly, come out in person to the next live show I’m producing here:
Nathanael Philip Mosher Has Friends #2 (Live Show Taping)
The last show is on YouTube here:
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