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
