Before there was a first book, there was a set of questions that kept returning.
What do we do when inherited language no longer seems large enough for the world we are living in? How do we speak about prophecy without turning it into prediction? How do we speak about apocalypse without feeding fear? How do we honor spiritual experience without confusing experience with certainty?
Those questions form part of the origin of the Eliyahu project.
Awakening must lead somewhere
I am interested in awakening, but not as an endpoint. An experience can open the eyes and still leave a person unchanged. Insight can become another identity, another argument, or another way of feeling superior unless it is tested by what it produces.
Does it deepen humility? Does it make us more truthful? Does it help us repair what we have damaged? Does it strengthen courage without making us reckless? Does it make us more capable of serving the people and communities actually within our reach?
For me, prophetic language becomes meaningful when it returns us to those questions.
The work of discernment
The traditions I engage contain powerful symbols, visions, warnings, promises, and accounts of divine encounter. They also contain centuries of interpretation. That distinction matters.
Mystical or prophetic experience does not remove the need for discernment. It increases it. The stronger the claim, the greater the need for humility, testing, context, and responsibility.
That is one reason this work moves across theology, culture, symbolism, spiritual formation, and public responsibility. The question is never only, “What does this mean?” It is also, “What does this interpretation ask of us, and what happens if we are wrong?”
Why begin with an atom bomb?
The first book, Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb, begins with an unsettling metaphor born in the nuclear age. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atom bomb became a symbol of suddenness, finality, overwhelming power, and human vulnerability. Gospel music placed that terrifying image beside the return of Christ.
The phrase is powerful precisely because it is dangerous. It can communicate sudden revelation and accountability, but it can also confuse divine action with human violence. That tension creates the doorway into the larger project.
What if apocalypse is not mainly a countdown to destruction? What if its older meaning, unveiling, gives us a better starting point? And if the curtain is pulled back, what kind of people should we become because of what we have seen?
Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb releases August 8. It is the first public step in a body of work concerned with awakening, discernment, responsibility, reconciliation, and repair. You can explore the book on the Books page.