I’ve been thinking about something that used to confuse me for years. I was told that someone else died to remove the barrier between me and God. That his death handled my disconnection. And the longer I lived inside my own mess, the less that explanation worked.
Because no one else can feel my shame for me, and love can heal that shame. No one else can untangle my fear for me, and love can handle my fear. And no one else can reconnect my heart from the outside, and once again love can.
What I’ve come to understand is this: what we call “sin” is not just bad behavior. It’s a disconnection. It’s what happens when a man’s life is cut off, from love, from truth, from himself. And most of us didn’t wake up one day and choose that. We were shaped into it. Wounded into it. Taught early that connection was unsafe, conditional, or temporary.
That kind of break doesn’t live in theology. It lives in the nervous system.
We learned to survive. Some of us used anger. Some used lust. Some used isolation. Some used power. We found ways to regulate pain we didn’t have words for. And then later the world called us monsters for the strategies that once kept us alive.
Religion sometimes piled on. It said God was disappointed, waiting for us to fix ourselves. And when that didn’t work, it said someone else paid the price so we wouldn’t have to.
But punishment never healed a wound. Shame never restored connection.
So I had to look deeper.
There’s a line that says, “When two or three gather in my name, I am there.” Think about that. Presence shows up in relationships. Not in isolation. Not in performance. Not in private perfection. In shared honesty. In two broken men sitting across from each other telling the truth.
That’s not magic. That’s attachment repair.
The barrier between us and God isn’t blood that needs to be spilled. It’s separation that needs to be surrendered. And here’s the part that took me the longest to swallow: the thing keeping the disconnection alive isn’t God. It’s me.
My separateness.
My ego.
My need to be in control.
My insistence that I can run my own universe.
The first commandment isn’t about statues or carved images. It’s about the one god I keep putting in front of everything else: self. Self in all its forms. Self as lust. Self as pride. Self as victim. Self as judge.
Self as rescuer. Self as executioner.
As long as I sit on the throne, I stay disconnected.
Not because God leaves. But because I refuse to get out of the driver’s seat.
The first step says we’re powerless and our lives have become unmanageable. That isn’t humiliation. That’s alignment. It’s the moment I admit that self-management, self-salvation, self-justification has never produced peace.
Surrender doesn’t collapse. It’s repositioning.
When I have no other gods before God, there’s only one thing left to dethrone: me. And when I finally slide into the back seat and let go—really let go—something shifts. The nervous system settles. The fight quiets. The endless managing slows down.
“Let go and let God” isn’t a slogan. It’s survival for a man whose ego has been running him into walls for decades.
The cross, seen this way, isn’t about someone fixing me from the outside. It’s about Love staying present while self destroys itself. It’s about showing that even at the worst edge of human collapse, connection does not withdraw.
And when two men sit in a room and tell the truth in that name, when ego drops and honesty rises—presence shows up. Not because we earned it. But because surrender made space for it.
The only thing that keeps me disconnected is my refusal to surrender self. Every relapse into ego is a relapse into separation. Every act of surrender is a step back into connection.
Freedom isn’t me becoming better.
It’s me becoming smaller.
It’s self stepping down so Love can step in.
That’s the key. Not striving. Not proving. Not performing.
Surrender.
And I’m walking that surrender with you. Not as a man who mastered it, but as a man who finally knows what the real enemy is.
It isn’t God.
It isn’t fate.
It isn’t even the past.
It’s the throne of self.
Step down from it, brothers. There’s room in the back seat with me! I am here to help you trudge the road to happy destiny. I have enclosed the first chapter of my auto-bio. This is for all of us, not for my ego. God has blessed me with the ability to tell our stories. I love you all…
Love (agape) is always present and just waiting for us to lift our finger to connect.
God Is Love Love= Agape (/ɑːˈɡɑːpeɪ, ˈɑːɡəˌpeɪ, ˈæɡə-/; from Ancient Greek ἀγάπη (agápē)) is “the highest form of love, charity” and “the love of God for [human beings] and of [human beings] for God”. This is in contrast to philia, brotherly love, or philautia, self-love, as it embraces a profound sacrificial love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance.
1 John 4:7-12
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.