The Michael Knowles Show - "The First Time I Saw Jesus" Beyond The Veil | The Seer Pt. 2

Episode Date: December 26, 2025

In this segment from the full Michael & The Seer episode, Michael Knowles continues his deep dive with Blake Healy into the moments he saw beyond the veil—including guardian angels, why God allows bad things to happen to good people, and the moment Blake says he saw Jesus Christ in vivid detail. WATCH FULL EPISODE HERE: https://youtu.be/mzSH3mQMCe0 - - - Today's Sponsor: Brave Books - Go to https://BraveBooks.com/KNOWLES and use code KNOWLES for 20% off your first order. - - - 🎄✨ DAILY WIRE CHRISTMAS SALE IS HERE! ✨🎄 🎁 https://www.dailywire.com/subscribe ⭐️ 40% Off DailyWire+ New Annual Memberships ⭐️ 50% Off DailyWire+ Annual Upgrade Memberships ⭐️ 50% Off DailyWire+ Annual Gift Memberships - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Focus features in Blumhouse present. Obsession. When I have a crush on a guy, no one knows. Be careful. I wish Nikki love me more than anyone in the entire world. Who you wish for. Obsession is 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. I love you so, so, so, so much.

It's blood-soaked nightmare fuel. What kind of spliced you put on her? You have been warned. Obsession, rated R. Under 17, I'm 880 Without Parent. Only theaters May 15th, with special engagements in Dolby. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points.

Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Bad advice? You talking to me? Kayak, got that right.

I saw these chains appear all around her. They were covering her from the top of her neck to the bottom of her ankles. And at the end of each was a demon. And they pulled and twisted the chains in such a way that caused her to slump her head back down. But that didn't really matter. Because for the very first time in my life, I saw Jesus standing there. Jesus leaned forward and he kissed her on the forehead. And the moment that he kissed her on the forehead, every single link in the chain exploded.

like firecrackers. And as the last link in the chain broke, there was this bright flash of white light, so bright that it completely blinded me. I couldn't see anything. A priest friend of mine says, he's not the first to say it, that it's a wicked generation that seeks after a sign and a wonder. And to Dunn will it be given but the sign of Jonah. But that it's a stupid generation that ignores signs and wonders, you know, which I think is an important, you know, addendum perhaps to death. Absolutely. So even there was a great professor I had who was a Dante scholar who made a point, you know, work on Dante called Dante Poet of the Desert, that Christians, maybe this was my extrapolating from his point, but I think it was basically the point he was making, that Christians, before were called to activism or something like that, we're primarily called to interpret. You know, we refuse to, so many people refuse to interpret the signs of the times. You can't say, you know, that we, you know, being physical but also spiritual, also intellectual

and having will, that we have to draw meaning out of things and then, you know, act in accord with that. But I don't know, that doesn't really appeal to our activist age. We always want to doing something. But we are kind of primarily contemplative. We're not the chief actors in salvation. We are recipients of grace, but we don't, we're not saving ourselves here. You know, we're, well, I don't know, we, to a wicked generation, no sign will be given, none but the sign of Jonah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's, and it was interesting, this tension between, you know, I didn't realize it really until retrospect, but I kept trying to understand, the things that I was seeing in terms of their utility.

Yeah. And it wasn't really until not really one moment or experience, but the kind of reflection on a cumulative experiences over many years, that I realized that the, like in this statement, was often the most powerful thing that was there rather than the utility. And when it comes down to it, I think someone like God, utility means a very different thing when you're omnipotent. Yes, right.

Right, of course. I mean, I've had a number of experiences that I would call numinous or religious experiences. Maybe not quite as frequently and vividly as yours. But when I've described them, one friend of mine he said, what do you think the purpose was of that experience? What do you think you were supposed to do? What do you think? And I thought, maybe I'm lazy or thick or something. But I thought, when those experiences happen, I consider it to be. a wink of providence, a reminder of God's order in the universe. And if I am to draw any particular meaning out of it, often I will just say, well, I suppose I was supposed to be there. You know, I suppose right place, right time, I guess. And I, I'm content with that. Maybe that means I'm uncurious or something, but I can't, I don't know that I can do much better than that. Yeah. No, even, even though this is such an integrated part of my life, holding it somewhat loosely seems to be part of the process, at least to me, that I, you know, anytime I've,

and people sometimes pull on me in these ways of like, anytime we try to derive like, you know, hey, who's going to win the election or what, what should I do with my job or things like that, there are occasionally moments of things that are insightful to that. But I, when I, anytime I've tried to go down those paths, it just hasn't felt right. It's, what has always felt most right is how does this reveal God? nature. What does it say about him? And any other interpretive metric to me has just not led me into a helpful place. I remember this one time. I was working at a warehouse store when I was younger and I was the low guy in the totem pole. So I was cleaning up at the end of the night and

last few shoppers are there. And I'm looking and as I've seen for years, every single person I see has a personal angel with them. It's walking alongside them, carrying something that has to do with with the purpose that God's called them to. And, you know, again, I'm just running these series of questions in my mind. This is, you know, around the time we were rounding up to 8 billion people on the planet. And I thought, okay, there's 8 million people on this planet. I mean, there's 8 billion angels wandering around. You got so many people, you know, dying every second, so many people being born every second, you know,

is, you know, if someone dies, are they reassigned to someone else? What's the logistical structure of how all this works? Are there any sabbatical you can take? Yeah, do they get a break? You know, yeah, you had a really rough run. So, you know, running this all through my mind. And again, I don't think it's wrong to speculate on these things. But as I was speculating about that, this man walked in front of me and he's, you know, shopping for some things. And I look at this angel that's with him wearing a kind of simple blue tunic. And I'm just kind of running these thoughts to my mind. And this happens very rarely. Usually the angelic stuff I see, it is very focused on whatever task it's called to. It almost never. shows me attention of any kind. But this particular angel, just for a moment, looked and made eye contact with me. And again, at this moment, I had this vision just play through my mind. And in it, very rapid fire in kind of a montage sort of way, I saw this young girl being born, and I saw this very same angel with her. And I saw this girl throughout her life. I saw all of, and unfortunately,

she had a very painful life. She had a dad who didn't treat her well. She had a very tumultuous household. And I just saw the angel with her in these moments hiding with her when she was hiding from her father, covering her when she was crying at night, you know, walking with her and comforting her as she would go to school with, you know, clothing with holes in it and be embarrassed about that. And it was still with her when she started using drugs when she became a team. teenager. It was with her when she ran away from home as a later teen. It was with her as the hardness of life that comes to people in these cycles came bit by bit. And I saw at the end this angel with this woman in an alleyway when she was being attacked. And in and she was on

the ground being attacked and this angel was standing above her and I saw it as all this darkness encroaching in from every direction and this this angel was fighting off this darkness a sword in each hand and I still to this day have in no film or or historical account seen a fight that was more furious more intense more impassioned but even despite that as this angel fought this darkness off, I watched it encroach in, and it kind of blackened the vision. And when it kind of opened again, I just saw that the woman had died. And the vision then continued to the same angel being with a young man who was being born. And this man grew up in a much more pleasant life. His parents were with him. He had maybe wasn't wealthy, but had enough the whole time. And I

watched that child grow into the man who was standing in front of me. And And, you know, when I, you know, I entered into that vision asking a logistical question of, are they reassigned? Is there? Yeah. You've got your answer. Is there a rainfall? And what I got was, again, a picture of the statement that's being made. You know, I had a somewhat like yourself from when I've heard from some of your stories, I had a short trist as an atheist, believe it or not. Really? I only lasted a few weeks when I was a teenager. But how does a guy who sees angels and demons? Why don't know. I'll share this story, and I'm happy, I'll finish this story first, and I'm happy to dive into that. But I, because of that, I run into things like the logical problem of evil and different sort of, you know, things like that. And, you know, there's questions that I've run into substantial answers for, and then some that remain mysterious, you know, that the atheists bring up and maybe they always will be.

But I remember after seeing that vision and going in the, you know, back room at my work there to cry a little bit, I, I was, even though this problem of evil, like, why do bad things happen to people? Why does God allow it? Of course, a question I get a lot is if all these people have an angel with them, what are they doing when something bad is happening? And while that woman still had the outcome that she had, and I can ask about God's sovereignty and whatever else in that situation, I can see that the attitude of that angel is the most desperate fight that I've ever seen in my entire life. life. And so while it doesn't answer the question, it at least gives me some insight into God's character and posture towards these moments. And yes, it's a mystery of why can you just snap his fingers and make that bad thing not happen, but at least showed me that his heart is, is passionately for the well-being of every person that's on this planet in a way that is honest and true and real.

And that to me was the answer of that logistical question. question is, yes, there is logistics as to how heaven works and how the spirit realm works, but they all exist to serve God's character, his nature, and the revelation of it. Right now, go to bravebooks.com slash knolls. Everyone says, get out and vote. That's how you change a country. That's true, but you know how else you can shape America's future in your own home? The left is known for decades that if you just capture the minds and hearts of kids, you can change the course of the future. It's why it's so important to teach truth to them when they're young so they don't fall for lies as they grow.

It's one of the many reasons I'm a big fan of Brave Books. Brave Books is fabulous. My kids go absolutely crazy for them. Right now, you should go to bravebooks.com slash Knowles. Give you kids something that they are going to love, that is wholesome, that is vetted, that is trusted. It's going to protect your country, not just for one election cycle, but for generations.

It's great. Teach us kids about honesty, courage, all the rest. And right now, you will get 20% off your, your first order when you use code Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. That is Bravebooks.com slash Knowles. Use code Noles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S. Bravebooks.com slash Noles. All of this really, really good advice and really good insight.

And somehow, you wind up an atheist. How does that happen? Well, I definitely never made it all the way over there. I never came about practicing atheists, whatever. Yeah, yeah. You were not a devout atheist. But as I grew older, I had this period from kind of 12 to about 15 where I was learning a lot about more, a lot more about these things that I saw. But then also, you know, as I got older, my parents were involved in church leadership.

And I saw the good and the bad and the challenges that come with that kind of, you know, Pastor Kidd experience. And then also, I've always been hungry for knowledge and learning and reading and understanding the world as best as I can. And so some of it was just running into ways that, at least the churches that I was at, the way that they would treat scientific things, subjects that I enjoyed and like studying, that they would kind of treat them with a scorn that started not make sense to me. And then, again, some of these problems that I would see that would be brought up either by atheist arguments or whatever else, this is this problem of evil, a problem of divine hiddenness. What years would this have been?

This would have been, gosh, I guess. that would have been around like, oh, man, a total brain fog here, probably around 2000, 2001, 2002, three around there. I asked because that's, it was around the same time. I became an atheist. There were a number of reasons for that. Mostly my own hubris as a punk, a little 13-year-old kid. But that was the time of the rise of the so-called new atheists.

Yes, you know, and I definitely read a lot of, I read a lot of Christopher Hitchens and, and Sam Harris and different people. And again, I wasn't so much immediately compelled by, oh, this is all so right. But it was more like, this does ask questions that I'm asking. And when I ask these questions in the environment that I'm in, with people that I do still trust, they seem scared of the question.

And that was hard for me to reconcile. And so I went through this period where I said, okay, and of course I started to realize that, hey, this experience could be false. I could be just a high-functioning schizophrenic. Right. I read about things like sleep paralysis. I'm like, oh, some of this is just a phenomenon that might just be explained by our physiology.

And I'm kind of running through all this and start to become concerned about it. And so I went through this period where I just said, I want to take everything that I believe and not throw it away, but set it on the table and decide what I want to pick up and what I don't. And in many ways, I... For those who are listening, I think we should keep talking, there is a very strange squeaking that might be some animal or something. That's possible. And I will mention, as we continue to chat, because I like to ignore these things, when I sat down with Father Rehill, we had more audio problems than I've ever experienced in an interview.

And I asked, it was annoying me at first. We were stopping and going, okay, reset, more audio issue sounds and things. We were in a new location. But then I, at one point, he seemed nonplussed. I asked him, I said, does this happen to you often? And he doesn't miss a beat and he says, story in my life all the time. And I said, okay, well, never mind, let's keep rolling. We didn't have sound problems again.

Wow. So you don't know. Are there purely, is it a purely natural explanation? or something else. I don't know. It doesn't bother me too much. These things do happen both ways sometimes, I think. But so you have this question,

which is, am I a highly functioning schizophrenic? Yeah, and I approach it with a level ahead. You know, just as I, of course, grabbed a few books about schizophrenia and tried to understand how it operated. And it was reasonable by, there's a lot of symptoms that I could theoretically have as a lot of symptoms I clearly don't have, you know.

And so it didn't throw me off the cliff, but it brought this question up. And so it wasn't really a singular moment. It was this kind of one-by-one selection of these different principles, these ideas that I had been given and choosing to pick them up back again and again. Ironically, I say I became an atheist. I talked to God about it a lot during that time. And it really was, I see just a season of reconstruction where I end,

And the other part two was I noticed that with all this stuff that I saw, there's plenty of times that there was stuff that I saw that I would say to someone that's like involved knowledge that I couldn't have known otherwise. But and so there was a certain verifiability in, in that. Yeah. But I didn't like trusting in that. That's like I don't, and I couldn't quite put my finger on why exactly, but it's just this, you know, it's too easy for me. me to try to delude myself if I insist on looking for proofs of that what I'm doing is valid or right. And so I just kind of decided to set that entire idea, again, on the table with everything else. But bit by bit, I would start to pick things back up. And, you know, I was raised to,

you know, you shouldn't have sex before you get married. I'm like, okay, maybe. I don't know why. I'm not going to just go run out and do that real quick because that's a thing. But let me. Can't take it back exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Why? okay, well, great, why? And again, I would just have a short vision where the Lord would show me something that would just mean that, oh, it's, that sexuality is this thing, that you can create a context for how you experience it. And things are of different quality, depending on the context in which we experience them, and are of different value based on the context we experience them. And so what kind of context do you want to create for sexuality? Do you

want that to be something that you share with one person or something that's, you're just of lower value that can go anywhere. And so I thought, okay, that one goes back on the table. And, you know, there was one experience that I had that was kind of the most transformative. And it really, it didn't walk away from it fully transformed or knowing that this was now it. But it was the one that started the snowball of doing. It's a little bit of a long story. So I apologize for that.

That's a long show. Don't worry. It works out. It works out. But I was on a mission strip with our youth. group and we were in in Europe and so we were at this conference at the end of it, youth pastors used always kind of do something more relaxed or fun at the end of, because we were usually working pretty hard for the rest of it. And so it was this big youth conference that was being

held outside of London and it was being held in this big cattle auction house, a double-decker stadium seating kind of situation. And there were so many kids coming to this thing that they had actually set up tents in the fields that were around the area there. And so we were staying in the tents going to the conference slash concert and, you know, flash forward at the very last session, last night of the conference. And I'm sitting there. I'm in the upper back row. We're going to be flying out the next day. And it's been a long trip, so we're pretty tired. And, you know, I've grown up in church. And so by the pentameter and rhythm of the way that the preacher is speaking, I can tell that he's kind of gearing up for a gospel message. I invite people to receive Jesus for

the first time. And, you know, I've been saved since I got saved at the post office. when I was three years old, which is a separate story. But I, and so I decided that the best thing for me to do was to try to take a quick nap. And so I, very spiritual. During the gospel message? Yeah, you know, very spiritual decision. I'm also in the middle of this kind of tumult with my, with my faith at this point as well. So I put my feet up on the empty chair in front of me and lean back and lean forward for no real particular reason one more time just to look back down. And for the the very first time in my life, I saw Jesus standing there. He was in the space between the stage and the chairs, and he was just pacing back and forth in that space. And he was pacing in such a way

that his gaze was remaining fixed at a point somewhere at the back of the room. He would turn his head so that he could keep looking at that spot. And so I followed his line of sight to the place that he was looking, and I saw this girl, you know, 14, 15 years old. And there was this divider between where the stadium seating started and the rest of the chairs were. And she was leaning down with her head kind of rested against this divider. And immediately, the second I saw her, I knew that that's who Jesus was looking at. And I heard a voice in the back of my mind say, he sees no one but her. And the way that he was walking, it had this, this purposefulness, this intensity, this, this, it wasn't anxious, it wasn't nervous.

but there was just this, this purposefulness to the way that he was walking. And it was so strong that it felt like all my other senses were almost shutting down or growing dull just so that more attention could be dedicated to watching the way that he was walking. And so it was distantly that I heard the preacher begin to invite people up to the front to receive Jesus if they hadn't before. But as soon as I heard that, my eyes immediately snapped back to the girl. and I saw her just for the briefest moment. She was laying there with her head against the divider, and then she just peaked up.

And the second that she peaked up, I saw him move, but it didn't take him any time to get there. Jesus was pacing at the front, and then he was standing right there in front of her. And again, I'm just feeling the weight of the moment. My attention is being just drawn more deeply, being almost magnetically pulled towards this. And she had slumped her head.

head back down in those intervening moments. And so one more time as he was standing in front of her, she just raised her eyes for just the briefest moment. And as she raised her eyes the second time, I saw these chains appear all around her. They were covering her from the top of her neck to the bottom of her ankles. And they went off in four long strands. And at the end of each was a demon. And they pulled and twisted the chains in such a way that caused her to slump her head back down and and rest it on this divider. But that didn't really matter because Jesus leaned forward and he kissed her on the forehead. And the moment that he kissed her on the forehead,

every single link in the chain exploded, like firecrackers. Every single one of them. And the demons flew back from the loss of tension. And as the last link in the chain broke, there was this bright flash of white light, so bright that it completely blinded me. I couldn't see anything. And after a few moments, my vision faded back in, but when it did, I couldn't see the stadium. I couldn't see the chairs. I looked down and I couldn't even see my own body. I couldn't see myself. All I could see was Jesus and the girl. And she was, he was standing there with his arms open wide.

And, you know, before she'd just been wearing some normal clothes, but in that moment, and, you know, it's something of a Christian cliche, but she was wearing these robes that were whiter than white, the widest thing I've ever seen before or since. She leans forward and she hugs Jesus around the waist. And as soon as she does, I feel the sense of heaviness from above me. And so I look up and I see this hand coming down. And it's big. Each finger is about as big around as a baseball bat. And it's coming down index finger extended and it touches me on the forehead. And as soon as it does, all of reality suddenly snaps back into place. The stadium chairs, everything, it just pops into existence. I find myself standing. I'm not entirely sure when that happened. But the snap back to reality is so

sudden that I kind of stumble backwards and fall into my chair. And I'm sitting there feeling overwhelmed and kind of get my wits about me just in time to sit up to see the girl running up to the front to receive Jesus, even though she already had. Now, that was obviously a very impactful thing to see, and I felt very shook by it in the moment. But what really changed me and changed the way that I was understanding these things that I saw in the spirit is what happened right afterwards. I was sitting there, and I was getting feeling like a truck had run over me,

you know, just like feeling, feeling just shaky and, and processing, almost feeling like the heat of having seen that radiate off of me. And all of a sudden, everyone around me stands up and starts walking. I'm like, oh, I guess it ended at some point. And so I get up and I start walking. And I'm pretty good at getting lost to my own neighborhood and broad daylight. So I'm not entirely confident in my ability to make it to the correct tent that our group is staying in. And so I, you know, 3,000 kids leaving this thing all at once.

and I look and I see one of the girls from my youth group and kind of fix my gaze on her and think, as long as I keep my eyes on her, I'm not going to get too terribly lost in this situation. So still feeling shaky, a little unbalanced. I'm walking and have my eyes fixed on this girl. Now, this is a girl from my youth group. I know her, but we weren't super close friends or anything.

But as I have my gaze fixed on her, I see everything there is to know about her, life. I see every moment of joy, every moment of peace, every moment of fear, and every moment of pain. They flashed through my mind, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, one right after the other. Not just as it, not just like a slideshow, but as if they were memories that I had had, as if they were memories about someone who I cared about very much, a sibling or a dear friend. And I saw all these things and then I saw her entire future. I saw every decision that she could possibly make. I saw all the decisions that she would actually make. I saw the perfect, beautiful path that the

Lord had laid before her. And I saw which parts of that she would choose and which parts of that she would not choose. And all of this, everything about her past, everything about her future, just swirled and congealed together into this overwhelming feeling of love. This, this feeling of love that was so massive. It was like an idea. It was like a sensation that was too big for my mind to hold. It felt like trying to grip a ball that's five sizes too big. You can kind of almost get it, but not quite. And it just got bigger and bigger and bigger until it was painful to look at her. So I had to turn away and look in a different direction. And next to me was another person, a person I never met before. But as I looked at them, I saw everything there was to know about

their life. I saw every decision they'd ever made, every decision they would make. I saw all of it, and it all again swirled and could yield together into this overwhelming feeling of love that again became so overwhelming that it began to feel painful. So again, I turned and looked away, but as I mentioned, I'm in a very large crowd. And so I would look and see this person and saw everything there was to know about their life. Saw this person, saw everything that there was to know about their life. And I'm ping-ponging from person to person, unable to slow it, down, unable to control it, the rate at which it's getting to the point that it's overwhelming happening faster and faster and faster. It's like my eyes are magnets that keep sucking from person to

person to person. And again, I describe this as a feeling, but it felt like more than that. I, I didn't, it didn't make me want anything from the person, but it demanded to be expressed to them. I wanted to hug them. I wanted to kiss them. I wanted to pick them up the air and spin them around. I wanted to give them words of encouragement. I wanted to grab them and scream in their face how much God loved them. But anytime I thought of anything to do, it was so painfully and woefully inadequate in comparison to that love, that it felt almost insulting to do something so small

in the face of something so big. And so I finally got a bright idea and looked straight at the ground. And so I'm shuffling through this crowd of 3,000 people, staring at my shoes when I kid you not, someone's foot kicks out in front of me. I see everything there is to know about their life. I see every decision they've ever made. I see every decision they will make. I see the fullness of their potential and how far they're going to make it along that line of potential. But again, I fall completely and totally in love with this person before I even see their face. And, you know, somehow I found my way back

to our campsite and just fell down face first in my pillow. And thank goodness, when I will up the next day, whatever that was, was gone. Because I honestly don't know how I would be able to function if I hadn't. But that experience was the first of many that really, the way I like to describe it, I guess, is it set the compass for how I am to navigate these things that I'm seeing. You know, I can talk now out of the retrospect of numerous experience and talk about how important it is to only try to understand these things within the context of who God is, to not try to just spiritually discern this or that. That's what witches and people like that do, but to know instead try to understand it by God's perspective, how he sees it, how he wants us to understand it. And, you know, as it says in Scripture,

one of the most sublime and true pictures of his nature is love. And I experienced just a snapshot of it that day, just a small piece of it. And that was the interpretive compass that I needed to try to make sense of these things that I saw. And at least for me, that and experiences that I had afterwards became the answer to my atheistic conundrum, which was really what it came down to it is I didn't really care if what I was seeing was right or a construction of my mind. If it served that kind of goodness, that kind of love, then it couldn't be just something that I manufactured. It couldn't just be something else. This is something that is worth serving. And even if I might feel uncertain about this, or even though this question might still be hanging in my mind,

if it serves that goodness, then I don't need to know all the details. I don't need to understand. So you're not saying, it's not a utilitarian calculation. Well, I don't know if it's true, but it's for a good purpose, so it's fine. You're saying something, no, no, no, it's, the love is manifestly true, and it is serving the love, which is true. So I'm not going to worry about the doubts in my mind. Do I have that right? Yeah, the best way I can describe, it's funny, because even to this day, I can get down that utilitarian way of thinking and ponder on it and think about it and, you know, and, but that, the reality of that love is so profound that all of those ideas seem so small in comparison to it, that why, even though I still

have a value for that understanding, for those questions, for what answers might lie behind those, they are so secondary as too small a rank for the distance between this other thing. And I would gladly serve that mystery and all. St. John Henry Newman had a great line, which has stuck with me, which is 10,000 questions don't make one doubt. Of course you have. questions. But that doesn't make one doubt. It sounds like that was your experience. Yeah, absolutely. That realizing that they're, that to doubt the reality that was behind that was impossible. It's now to my advantage, I think, it's that, that sense of having questions of of not, I guess, you know, not really believing in myself, not believing in my own gift,

but believing in God. Yeah, yeah. And if this gift serves him, than it is a worthwhile venture, that has actually, to me, been of benefit, because rather than trying to get my questions answered, I'm trying to understand this love more. But you said something very troubling in that, which is you said you could see every choice that people could make, and the whole path God had laid out for them, and how far they were going to make it down that path, basically,

and how they were going to reject certain goods that God had laid out for them, how far to their potential they would make it. But we all sin. And so we all presumably, you know, get off the path and maybe we can then conclude we don't live up to our full potential. Or maybe not. This is a troubling thing for me. What if I blew it? What if I just don't make it to my full potential?

Absolutely. It's, you know, I walked away from that experience, especially once the kind of heat of it cooled down and I started to kind of run through. what the implications of some of that might be and how to understand that. I, and I still wrestle with the same questions of, you know, I don't pretend to be able to unravel the mystery of God's sovereignty versus free will. And, you know, there's, again, many minds have wrestled with that one. But that somehow in his sovereignty, that he could create and create the opportunity for an ideal, for an ideal that is up to the standard of his, goodness, which of course is impossibly high, that he could create an absolutely golden and clear

opportunity for that, that we could in our sin all fall short of that, because I didn't see one that didn't in that option. And yet that the response to that and the sum measurement of all that was this overwhelming adoration, this overwhelming love, that I felt almost as if I was seeing the whole of what a person is in that moment and feeling how much God loved each and every one of those people. And it's hard because, you know, we all know that while we were yet sinners, God loved us. You know, it's true. Yet we still have this. And I still, of course, recommend everyone live as righteous a life as possible. Like, of course, it's to your own benefit and to the benefit of everyone around you, knowing that every one of us, myself included, will fail.

Yet, I guess the best way I can put it, and this is, you know, maybe it just leaves it more open than it does close it, but that God knew what kind of thing he was creating when he made us. And even though it is true that there is maybe a better version of each of our lives, it is also true that he made us this way and wanted us this way. And so is it somehow also true that this is actually the best. And that's a mystery that I don't know how to unravel. Yeah. Yeah. Like Adam and Eve didn't have to sin. Yeah.

They chose to sin. And so that was that. And they get kicked out of the garden and sin and death purveyed the world. But also Christian San Easter, oh, happy fault that won for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer. no sin, no need for the redemption. Yeah. I'll take it. I'll take it. It's a grand mystery.

But it's, you know, again, I don't pretend to know the answers. But I also know that if a book doesn't have a villain, doesn't have challenges to overcome, I know that it's a book that we tend to not be compelled by. Even though I can sit on the edge of this and want good things to happen to these characters, characters in the book because I like them, I will be dissatisfied with any story that I read that the conflict doesn't add up to something that is of substance of meaning. And whether that's, you know, the nature of the wrestle that we have and that itself is pleasing to God or it would maybe be more pleasing to him if we walked that line exactly right. I, the best I can

find is a truth that's in a great deal of tension in that space. Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill, Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news. Bring your AT&T or T mobile bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal. So get away from that unfortunate phone bill and get to Verizon. Run, ride, canoe. Whatever it takes, we'll be here. Bring your AT&T or T mobile bill to a Verizon store today

and we'll give you a better deal on the best network. A better deal. No surprises. That's Verizon. Best network based on route metrics, best overall mobile network performance U.S. second half 2025. All rights reserved. It must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person

for giving me the deal. Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply.