My Desert is a spiritual memoir—recently completed, coming this summer. What follows is a substantial excerpt from Chapter 2. The full chapter—and the personal story beneath it—will be available when My Desert publishes this summer. It is the foundation beneath the purpose that drives everything this publication is building.

An iPod, a phone, and internet communicator…

Are you getting it?

Steve Jobs, January 9, 2007

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We left our Egypts. Many of us left them generations ago—the villages that told us who we were, the traditions that answered questions before we thought to ask them, the structures that constrained us but also held us. We named those bonds. We broke them. And we walked out into what we were promised was freedom. But the wilderness on the other side of liberation is still wilderness. It has its own dangers, its own exhaustions, its own golden calves. And in that wilderness, another call was waiting—not from a burning bush, but from a stage in San Francisco.

The call came on a January morning when most of us were not paying attention. Steve Jobs had done this before—the theatrical product launch, the black turtleneck, the showman’s mastery of anticipation and reveal. But this morning was different. This morning he was holding something that would, within a decade, become the most intimate object most of us have ever owned. Something that would follow us into our bedrooms and bathrooms, into our children’s cribs and our parents’ hospital rooms, into every corner of human experience that had previously belonged to us alone. He began, as showmen do, with misdirection. “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” Applause. But then he kept going. “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products.” He let that land. Three products.

He was grinning now, the magician letting them see behind the curtain. “These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it... iPhone.” The roar that followed was not just enthusiasm for a product.

It was recognition. The audience sensed—even if they could not yet articulate it—that they were witnessing a convergence. Three liberations, fused into a single object that fit in your pocket. Entertainment. Communication. Information. All of it, everywhere, always. This changes everything, Apple’s marketing would declare. They were more right than they knew.

I was not in that audience. I watched the keynote later, the way most of us experienced things in 2007—on a computer screen, at a desk, tethered to a place. But I remember the feeling that something had shifted. Not just in technology—technology was always shifting—but in what was possible. The device Jobs held up that morning promised to collapse distances I had not even recognized as distances. The gap between wanting to know and knowing. The gap between wanting to reach someone and reaching them. The gap between wherever I was and wherever I wanted to be. Three liberations, converging into one. Three doors, opening simultaneously. Three ancient human limitations—the isolation of distance, the silence of solitude, the friction of not-knowing—overcome in a single stroke.

The call was unmistakable: Come. Be free. Within a decade, that device would become among the most rapidly adopted technologies in modern history. By 2020, billions of people would carry smartphones, walking around with more computing power in their pockets than existed in the entire world when I was born. We answered the call. All of us. We traded our flip phones for touch screens, our paper maps for GPS, our boredom for infinite scroll. We answered because the call was real. The liberation was genuine. The doors that opened were doors we had been pushing against for centuries. We are the most connected generation in human history. The most informed. The most entertained. The most liberated from the ancient constraints of geography and ignorance and isolation. And yet.

There is another call to freedom in the story we have been tracing. Israel heard it in Egypt, in the middle of their bondage. God spoke to Moses from a burning bush: I have seen the misery of my people. I have heard them crying out. I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them. The call was unmistakable. After four hundred years of slavery, liberation was coming. The God who had seemed silent was speaking. The chains would break. The doors would open. Freedom—real freedom, the kind they had dreamed about for generations—was finally at hand. And it came. The plagues fell. The sea parted. Pharaoh’s army drowned beneath the waves. Israel walked out of Egypt on dry ground, free at last, the weight of four centuries lifted from their shoulders. Within weeks, they were complaining about the food. Within months, they were longing for Egypt—not just any part of Egypt, but the specific menu of their captivity: the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks they remembered from the land that had crushed them. Within a year, they had built a golden calf because God had gone silent and they could not bear the silence.

I used to read those stories with condescension. How could they be so ungrateful? How could they answer the call to freedom and then spend their freedom wishing they were slaves again? I do not read them that way anymore. I read them now as someone who has answered a call to freedom and discovered that freedom raises questions it cannot answer. Someone who has walked through open doors and found the other side more disorienting than the room I left. Someone who has been delivered from something and not yet delivered to anything. The call to freedom is real. God’s call to Israel was real. The iPhone’s promise was real. But answering the call is not the same as arriving. Liberation is not the same as home.

As a teenager living in Germany, I often traveled to Berlin, riding the trains that carried you through a continent sliced in half—through the Iron Curtain. Once in West Berlin, we were occasionally shuttled over to East Berlin. I remember Treptower Park from one of those trips. Bronze soldiers towering over manicured lawns, inscriptions about liberation surrounded by barbed wire keeping the “liberated” from leaving. What struck me wasn’t the monuments—it was the people. East Germans moved around us like we were radioactive. An old man feeding birds looked up, and in one brief glance I saw something raw—a desperate longing—before it was buried again under practiced silence.

And I watched as an East German woman clutched her son tighter as we walked near, as if granting him an inkling of freedom might cost her something she couldn’t afford to lose. She was gazing into nothing, no eye contact, performing the only freedom available to her—the freedom to be invisible, to take up no space, to give the system nothing it could use. I was a teenager. I didn’t have the words for what I was watching. But I understood that this woman lived inside a call to freedom that was pure propaganda—a system that used the language of liberation to enforce the most comprehensive captivity I had ever seen. Every time we came and went through Checkpoint Charlie, we were reminded—the guards, the dogs, the guns, the wall—of how futile it was for those fellow humans to chase the scent of freedom.

The border guards, the barbed wire, the watchtowers I had seen through binoculars near Bad Kissingen—these were the punctuation marks of a freedom that was really a framework. The horror wasn’t dramatic. It was daily. Souls caged by their own government. The East Germans were told they were free and were imprisoned. These experiences taught me something the iPhone story confirms from the opposite direction: a call to freedom can be genuine and still not deliver you where you need to go. We were told we were free and walked willingly into something we are only now beginning to name. The mechanisms are different. The disorientation is the same.

This chapter is about what happens after we answer a call to freedom. We are going to trace what the iPhone converged—those three liberations Jobs announced on that January morning—and see what each one promised, what each one delivered, and what each one cost. We are going to follow the telephone and what it did to presence, the entertainment device and what it did to silence, the internet machine and what it did to identity. We are going to name the wilderness we now inhabit: the strange exhaustion of infinite choice, the loneliness that persists despite constant connection, the weight of having to construct ourselves day after day because no one else will tell us who we are. And we are going to see what we build when the freedom becomes unbearable—the golden calves we reach for, not made of gold anymore, but of silicon and code and the desperate hope that the next convergence will finally answer the question the last one raised. The call to freedom is not a lie. It is an invitation—genuine, urgent, worth answering. But the call is not the destination. And answering it is only the beginning.

The Telephone and What It Did to Presence

My grandmother kept her telephone in the kitchen. It was red, heavy, attached to the wall by a cord that could not have been more than two feet long. When it rang—that mechanical bell, insistent and impossible to ignore—whoever was nearest would walk to it, stand, and answer. You could not wander. You could not multitask. You could not take the call somewhere more convenient. You stood in the kitchen, present to the voice on the other end, until the conversation was finished.

I remember watching her on that phone. The way she held the receiver with both hands, as if it were something precious. The way she gave the conversation her full attention—not because she was unusually disciplined, but because the technology demanded it. There was nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. For the duration of that call, she was fully there. The phone was a miracle, of course. Her parents had grown up in a world where reaching someone far away meant writing a letter and waiting weeks for a reply. The telephone collapsed that distance into nothing—voice to voice, instant, real. You could hear your daughter in another city. You could learn of a birth or a death without the cruel delay of the post. The isolation that had defined human existence since the beginning of time suddenly had a remedy. But the miracle had edges. It lived in one place. It asked you to come to it. And when you did, it asked for all of you.

The edges softened slowly, the way edges do. Coiled cords let you wander a few feet. Cordless phones freed you from the wall entirely. But someone still had to be home. The phone rang in a place, and if you were out—at work, at the store, living your life somewhere beyond the walls—the call went unanswered. You could be unreachable. You could be unavailable. You could be somewhere the phone was not. I did not understand, then, what a gift that was.

The cell phone changed everything. By the late 1990s, the technology had shrunk and cheapened enough to become ordinary. Suddenly, the phone was not a place you went to. It was an object you carried. The tether had finally snapped. I kept my first one in my car, for emergencies—that was what we told ourselves in those days. But a lifeline can be pulled from both directions. Within a few years, the emergency-only phone had become the always-on phone. The device I carried for safety became the device others expected me to carry. The freedom to call became the obligation to answer. The old excuse—“I wasn’t home”—had dissolved. The hallway had followed me out the door, and it was never going back.

I told myself this was liberation. In many ways, it was. But something else was dissolving with the friction. I noticed it first in restaurants: a couple at a nearby table, both looking at their phones, not together, not sharing something on the screen, just elsewhere. Two people who had chosen to spend an evening together, sitting three feet apart, each of them absent to the other. I noticed it in my own home—my children trying to tell me something while my eyes drifted to the screen in my hand, the half-attention I gave them, the “uh-huh” that meant I was listening without hearing, the way their voices had to compete with whatever notification had just arrived. I noticed it in myself: the itch to check, even when I was with people I loved, the feeling that something might be happening somewhere else, something I might be missing, something more urgent than the person in front of me.

I remember one afternoon in particular. My son had built something with his Legos—not a small thing, not a quick assembly, but a project he had been working on with the focused intensity that only a child can sustain. He came to find me, and he was lit up. He wanted to show me everything. The garage that opened. The cars that fit inside. The features he had designed himself, the choices he had made, the problems he had solved. He was narrating the whole thing—every detail, every decision—with the breathless pride of a boy who had made something significant and needed someone to see it.

I was on my phone.

I was not doing anything important. I cannot remember what I was looking at—email, probably, or the news, or nothing at all, just the reflexive scroll that had become as automatic as breathing. My son was talking, and I was giving him the sounds that pass for listening: the “uh-huh,” the “oh wow,” the half-glance that says I am here without really being here. I was performing the motions of attention with none of its substance.

And then I saw his face change.

It was not dramatic. He did not cry or shout or slam the Lego set down on the table. It was quieter than that, and worse. The light just went out. The excitement drained from his voice the way color drains from a sky before a storm. He realized—in that wordless way children realize things, the understanding arriving in the body before the mind can name it—that I was not listening. That his moment of triumph was competing with a screen, and the screen was winning. That the thing he had built with such care and pride was not enough to hold his father’s attention.

He stopped talking. He picked up his creation and walked away. And I sat there with my phone in my hand, aware—dimly, in that muffled way we become aware of things we do not want to face—that I had just taught my son something about what he was worth. Not with words. Not with intention. But with the most honest language a parent speaks: the language of where we put our eyes.

The Israelites learned this in the wilderness. In Egypt, they had been present—terribly, crushingly present—to the taskmasters and the quotas and the endless making of bricks. There was no elsewhere to escape to, no distraction from the weight of their bondage. Freedom gave them the way out. The sea parted. The chains broke. They were liberated from the presence that had crushed them. But liberation from presence is not the same as liberation into presence. Moses went up the mountain to meet with God, and for forty days the people waited. Present to each other’s bodies, absent from any shared understanding of what they were doing there or what came next. And so they built a calf. Something to be present to. Something that would be present to them. The calf was a solution to a presence problem—a bad solution, but a solution.

I know this because I have lived it. I have sat in rooms with people I love and been elsewhere. I have held my phone while my children spoke to me and given them the scraps of my attention. I have answered the call to freedom—the call to reach anyone, anywhere, anytime—and discovered that answering the call is not the same as arriving. The liberation is real. I do not want to go back to the hallway, to the tether, to the world where being unreachable was the default. But I am learning that liberation without wisdom is just another kind of bondage. The freedom to be anywhere has become the inability to be fully somewhere.

This is what the first liberation cost us. There are two more to trace.

The Entertainment Device and What It Did to Silence

I remember boredom. Not the word—everyone knows the word—but the experience itself, the texture of an afternoon with nothing to do. I am old enough to have known it as a regular companion, a recurring visitor who showed up on summer days and rainy weekends and long car rides through landscapes that held nothing of interest for a child. Boredom was not pleasant, exactly, but it was familiar. It had a rhythm. You settled into it the way you settle into a waiting room, knowing that eventually something would shift—an idea would surface, a friend would call, your mother would announce dinner—and the empty time would fill with something. Until then, you waited. You stared at ceilings. You invented games with whatever was at hand. You learned, without anyone teaching you, how to be alone with yourself.

My children do not know this boredom. They have never had to. From the moment they were old enough to hold a device, the empty time has had a remedy. Restless in the car? Here is a screen. Waiting at a restaurant? Here is a screen. Nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon? The screen is waiting, infinite and patient, ready to fill any silence with sound, any stillness with motion, any emptiness with content. I do not blame them for reaching toward it. I reach toward it myself.

The iPod was the beginning—or at least, it was the beginning I noticed. Before the iPod, music lived in places. You could carry it with you, but carrying it required intention. You had to choose the cassette, then the CD, then decide that this walk or commute was a music occasion rather than a silence occasion. The choice was real because the alternative was real. The iPod changed the math. A thousand songs in your pocket, Jobs announced in 2001, and the number kept climbing. The friction of choosing disappeared. Music was no longer something you decided to have; it became something you had to decide not to have. The default flipped. Silence became the choice that required effort.

I’ll always remember the first time I flew cross country without headphones after years of never leaving home without them. It was not voluntary—I had forgotten them, left them on the kitchen counter, and by the time I realized it I was already going through airport security. The sounds on the airplane pressed in: rattling carts, random chatter, complaining passengers, even my own breathing. It was louder than I expected, this world I had been muting for years. And beneath the sounds, something else—a kind of empty space where the music usually went, a silence that was not silent at all but full of my own thoughts, unmediated, unavoidable. I did not know what to do with them. I had forgotten these quiet moments with only myself for company. The thoughts came anyway: worries I had been outrunning, questions I had been drowning out, a low hum of anxiety that the music had been masking so effectively I had forgotten it was there. That flight was one of the most uncomfortable I’d flown. It was also one of the most necessary.

The entertainment device—the iPod that became the iPhone that became the streaming service that became the algorithm that knows what you want before you know you want it—solved a problem humans have always had. We get bored. We get restless. We need something to occupy the mind when the mind has nothing to occupy it. This is not a flaw; it is a feature. Boredom is the mind’s way of signaling that it is ready for something—ready to create, to explore, to connect, to pray. The great religious traditions have always known this. The desert fathers sought silence because they understood that God speaks in the spaces between noise. The Sabbath was not merely rest from labor; it was rest from distraction, a clearing in the week where something other than productivity could grow. Silence was not the absence of something good. It was the presence of something necessary—a container in which the soul could hear itself, and perhaps hear something beyond itself.

The entertainment device filled the container. It did so with good things—music I love, podcasts that teach me, audiobooks that expand my world. I am not pretending these are worthless. They are genuine goods, and I have been genuinely enriched by them. But a container that is always full cannot receive anything new. A mind that is always stimulated loses the capacity for the kind of unstimulated wandering where insight is born. We have abolished the empty afternoon. We have filled every gap, every pause, every moment of potential silence with content. And we have lost something we did not know we needed until it was gone.

The Israelites in the wilderness had silence thrust upon them. There was no entertainment in the desert—no music except what they made themselves, no stories except the ones they told around fires, no distraction from the vast and terrifying emptiness of the landscape they were crossing. Forty years of it. Forty years of waking to the same sand, the same sky, the same unanswered questions. When Moses went up the mountain and the silence deepened, they could not bear it. They reached for gold. They built something to look at, something to sing to, something to fill the void that the silence had exposed. The calf was entertainment as much as it was idolatry. It gave them something to do with their attention when their attention had nowhere else to go.

This is what the second liberation cost us. The freedom from boredom became the inability to be bored. The access to infinite entertainment became the incapacity for silence. We answered the call, and the call was real, and the music is very good. But somewhere beneath the music, there is a voice we are no longer quiet enough to hear.

The Internet Machine and What It Did to Identity

There was a time when you were who your village said you were. The baker’s son. The blacksmith’s daughter. The family that had farmed that land for four generations. Identity was not something you constructed; it was something you inherited, received, wore like a coat passed down from people who had worn it before you. The coat did not always fit. Sometimes it was too tight, sometimes too heavy, sometimes cut for a life you did not want to live. But it was yours, and it told you who you were without requiring you to figure it out for yourself.

That world is gone. We dismantled it deliberately, and for good reason. The inherited identity was often a prison—the woman who could not be anything but a wife, the Black man who could not drink from the same fountain, the immigrant we assumed could do nothing more than mow lawns. The old structures that told you who you were also told you who you could not be, and the telling was enforced with violence, exclusion, shame. The liberation from inherited identity was not a mistake. It was a moral achievement, purchased at great cost by people who refused to wear coats that were killing them. I do not want to go back. None of us should want to go back.

But liberation from a thing is not the same as liberation into a thing. When the old structures fell, they did not leave behind a self that had been hiding underneath, fully formed and waiting to emerge. They left behind a question: If I am not who the village says I am, then who am I? The question is harder than it sounds. When identity is not given, it must be constructed. And construction, it turns out, is endless work.

The internet arrived into this vacuum like a gift and a curse wrapped in the same glowing package. Suddenly, you could be anyone. The constraints of geography dissolved—you could find your people, your tribe, your community of the like-minded, no matter how obscure your interests or how isolated your physical location. The constraints of gatekeeping dissolved—you could publish your thoughts, your art, your self, without waiting for permission from anyone who might tell you no. The constraints of the body itself began to dissolve—online, no one knew if you were young or old, confident or terrified. You could construct a self from scratch, word by word and image by image, and present it to an audience that would never see you sweat.

I remember preparing for a meeting with potential partners, years ago, rehearsing talking points in the car, adjusting my tone, deciding which version of my story to tell depending on which questions were asked. I walked in with three different versions of myself loaded and ready—the confident executive, the thoughtful strategist, the generous collaborator. The meeting went well. They saw exactly what I wanted them to see. Afterward, sitting in the airport waiting for my flight, I realized I could not remember which version I had been. The performance had gone so smoothly that I had lost track of the performer. I sat there with coffee growing cold in my hand, wondering which of those versions—if any—was actually me.

This is what the internet machine produces: selves that require constant maintenance. We do not simply have identities anymore; we produce them, curate them, perform them for audiences we can never fully see. Every post is a choice about who we want to appear to be. Every photo is edited, every caption is crafted, every silence is strategic. We are all, now, in the business of self-presentation—a business that never closes, that demands constant attention, that follows us from platform to platform until the line between who we are and who we are performing becomes impossible to locate.

The exhaustion is enormous. Not the exhaustion of physical labor—we have machines for that—but the exhaustion of never being finished. The constructed self is never complete. It requires updating, refreshing, adjusting to new audiences and new algorithms. There is no Sabbath from self-construction. The internet gave us the freedom to become anyone, and the freedom became an obligation. We are all self-made now—which means we are all working, all the time, on a project that never ends.

In Egypt, Israel had no identity problem. They knew exactly who they were: slaves. The identity was brutal, dehumanizing, imposed from outside by people who did not love them. But it was clear. You did not have to construct yourself when Pharaoh had already constructed you. The identity was a prison, but it was also, in its terrible way, a relief. Someone else carried the weight of meaning.

The wilderness stripped that away. Free from Pharaoh, Israel was also free from Pharaoh’s answer to the identity question. They were no longer slaves—but what were they? God’s people, chosen, called—but what did that mean, day to day, in the desert where nothing told them who they were except sand and silence? The golden calf was not just a god; it was a self. It was a way of saying this is who we are now—a people who worship this, who gather around this, who belong to this. The calf provided identity when the wilderness provided only questions.

We are building calves too. We build them out of profiles and platforms, followers and feeds. We build them because the internet gave us the freedom to be anyone, and being anyone is harder than being someone, and we need something to tell us who we are. The curated self is not evil—it is a reasonable response to an impossible situation. But it cannot bear the weight we place on it. The followers cannot love you; they do not know you. The likes cannot validate you; they are not looking at you. The image you have constructed is not you; it is a performance of you, and the performance requires an audience that will never see the performer behind the mask.

I do not know who I am without the construction. That is the hardest sentence I have written in this chapter, and I am not sure it is entirely true—but it is true enough to unsettle me. I catch glimpses sometimes—in prayer, in silence, in the moments when the performance fails and something unmanaged surfaces. But the glimpses are brief, and the construction reasserts itself quickly, and I am left wondering if the exhaustion I feel is simply the cost of modern life or if it is something more—a signal that I have been working on the wrong project, building the wrong thing, asking the wrong question.

The internet promised to help us find ourselves. It gave us tools for construction instead. The freedom to be anyone has become the obligation to be someone, and the someone we are building is never finished, never secure, never at rest. This is what the third liberation cost us. There is a self beneath the construction, I believe. But I am only beginning to learn how to find it.

Convergence

On that January morning in 2007, Steve Jobs fused the three liberations into a single object. The telephone, the entertainment device, the internet machine—all of them converging into something you could hold in your hand, carry in your pocket, reach for a hundred times a day without thinking. The iPhone was not just a better phone or a smaller computer. It was a convergence. It took three separate promises and made them one promise, three separate freedoms and made them one freedom, three separate costs and made them—

What? Invisible. The costs converged too, but we could not see them because the liberation was so bright.

The promise of convergence is always the same: more freedom. If the telephone freed your voice and the iPod freed your music and the internet freed your self, then surely the combination would free you more completely than any single liberation could. The math seemed obvious. Three freedoms combined should equal more freedom than three freedoms apart.

But freedom does not add that way. The costs add. The absences accumulate. The telephone’s erosion of presence plus the entertainment device’s erasure of silence plus the internet’s endless demand for self-construction—these do not cancel each other out. They compound. The device that converged three liberations also converged three exhaustions into a single, pocket-sized engine of depletion.

I carry mine everywhere. I reach for it before I am fully awake and set it down only when I am too tired to keep my eyes open. It is the most intimate object I own—more present to my daily experience than my wedding ring, more constant than any friendship, more demanding than any child. It promises me presence, entertainment, identity. It delivers fragments of each, enough to keep me reaching, never enough to let me rest.

The device in my pocket is the most sophisticated freedom-delivery system ever created, and I am more tired than my grandmother ever was, standing in her kitchen, tethered to a wall, bored on a Sunday afternoon, knowing exactly who she was because the village had told her and she had no reason to doubt it.

We keep building these convergences. We cannot seem to stop.

The pattern is ancient. Israel, standing at the base of Sinai while Moses lingered on the mountain, facing the same impossible weight of freedom we face now—free from Egypt but not yet free for anything, liberated from Pharaoh’s identity but not yet inhabited by God’s. They could not bear it. Forty days of silence, forty days of uncertainty, forty days of a freedom that asked everything and answered nothing. So they took what they had—gold from their ears, gold from their past, gold that had once decorated their bondage—and they converged it. They melted it down and made it one thing. A calf. A god. Something to worship, something to organize around, something to answer the question that freedom had raised and could not resolve: Who are we now, and what are we for?

The calf was a convergence. It took scattered resources and fused them into a single object of devotion. It took scattered people and gave them something to gather around. It promised to be enough—to fill the void that the wilderness had opened, to answer the silence that God’s absence had created. The Israelites did not build the calf because they were wicked. They built it because they were human, and humans cannot bear the weight of unanswered freedom for very long.

We are better at building calves than they were. Our convergences are more sophisticated, more seamless, more capable of hiding their inadequacy behind sleek interfaces and personalized recommendations. The iPhone was a golden calf—not because technology is evil, but because we asked it to bear a weight it was never designed to bear. We asked it to answer the question of who we are and what our lives are for. We asked a device to do what only God can do.

And the promise of AI is breathtaking. AI will free us from tedious work. It will free us from the limitations of our own knowledge. It will free us from the burden of creation itself. More freedom. That is always the promise. And the promise is not entirely false. But I have learned to ask the question that liberation never answers on its own: Freedom for what?

If AI frees me from the tedious work, what will I do with the hours it returns? If it frees me from the limitations of my knowledge, what will I do with the knowing? If it frees me from the burden of creation, what will I do with the emptiness where creation used to be?

The liberation is coming. It is already here, in fragments, and the fragments are converging rapidly into something that will reshape human experience as profoundly as the iPhone did, perhaps more. And I find myself standing at the base of another mountain, watching another golden calf take shape, wondering if this one will finally be enough — knowing, even as I wonder, that it will not be. That no convergence is enough. That the question freedom raises cannot be answered by more freedom, no matter how sophisticated the delivery system.

[EXCERPT ENDS]

This is a substantial excerpt from Chapter 2 of My Desert. The full chapter—and the personal story beneath the theological argument—will be available when the book publishes this summer. The full book traces forty years of wandering through what I call the spiritual desert—learning to distinguish between the God we construct and the God who actually shows up.

To see my other work, visit Extracted. Most recent: Anatomy of One Pull—One ACH debit, One Tuesday morning, How many potential federal crimes can one transaction touch—and how many parties does it implicate?

You will seek me and find me

when you seek me with all your heart.

Jeremiah 29:13

I’ve knelt before God many times in my life — at times out of reverence, more often in sheer desperation: my nephew’s broken body after a tragic 4-wheeler accident, my wife’s cancer diagnosis on the eve of our wedding and her long fight for life, and my father’s 15-year battle with a different cancer. Those moments burned into me like fire on stone — prayers not born of habit but of the primal realization that I was powerless.

And yet, strangely, it wasn’t tragedy that finally undid me.

It was math.

In May 2025, I did the arithmetic that changed everything. 2025 minus 1985. Forty years. Forty years since I’d graduated high school and “set out free” as we said then, confusing a diploma with wisdom and swagger with direction. Forty years of wandering in a wilderness largely of my own design.

For decades, I had wondered why a loving God let His people wander forty years in the desert. It always seemed unnecessarily cruel — like a cosmic timeout that dragged on long after the lesson should have been learned. But there I sat, tallying my own years of wandering, and the irony landed with the subtlety of a brick: God hadn’t abandoned me in the wilderness. I’d volunteered — choosing my own path over His, time and time again. The Israelites, at least, had the excuse of being dragged out of Egypt against their better judgment.

I signed up for the tour.

And once I named it — forty years, wandering, lost — I couldn’t un-name it. The fog that had allowed me to keep moving without direction suddenly thinned. I could see the desert I was standing in.

This is a book about naming.

God has been teaching us this from the beginning. In the first verses of Scripture, He doesn’t just create — He names. Light and dark. Day and night. Creation wasn’t merely making; it was ordering, declaring what things are so they can become what they’re for. The formless void became a world with shape and purpose. Naming was how God brought order out of chaos.

And then He did something remarkable — something that tells us more about His character than a thousand sermons. He shared the work. He brought the animals to Adam “to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” The point was the walking together, the shared work, the side-by-side ordering of a world still young enough to smell like morning. God, it seems, has always preferred company to efficiency.

This is the pattern that runs through the whole story. He named Jacob “Israel” — he who wrestles with God — while the hip was still out of socket and the dawn was just breaking. He named Simon “rock” before steadiness was anywhere in evidence. He named Israel “my people,” long before they had done anything to earn it. In each case, the naming was not a label applied from a distance. It was an approach. A closing of the gap. A God who keeps stepping closer when any sensible deity would keep His distance.

This is why the unnamed holds such power over us. What we cannot name remains chaos — formless, resistant to purpose. The vague unease, the exhaustion without explanation, the sense that something is wrong but we cannot say what — these flourish in the unnamed. But what we can name, we can begin to address. Naming is how we participate in God’s work — and it is, I have come to believe, how He participates in ours.

I was thirteen the first time I walked through a concentration camp. What broke me at Dachau was not any single image but the accumulation — the photographs, the records, the ovens, the sheer organizational competence of it all. Evil that clocked in and clocked out. By the time I walked back through those gates, something had fractured that has never fully healed — a grief for souls I could not help, and a question I would carry for decades: What kind of world is this, and what am I supposed to do about it?

That question gathered weight as I grew. Living in Germany as a teenager, I saw the Iron Curtain up close — the barbed wire, the guard towers, the faces of people caged by their own government. In a park in East Berlin, I watched a mother yank her son away from us with fear so sharp it looked rehearsed, because, I would learn, mere curiosity about Westerners could be construed as espionage. I stood at the border near my home in Bad Kissingen and peered through binoculars at young guards whose job was to shoot their own neighbors for wanting to leave.

These experiences didn’t fade the way they seemed to for others. They lodged in me — became the lens through which I saw everything. And because I could not change what I had witnessed, because the moral weight was too heavy for a boy to carry, I found ways to set it down. Not by resolving it. By burying it.

What followed was a long education in the architecture of avoidance. I built a life designed to outrun the weight — a life of achievement, indulgence, and carefully constructed distance from the questions that wouldn’t stop asking themselves. For years, friends, colleagues — even family — saw a version of me that was carefully assembled: the confident handshake, the easy laugh, the career trajectory that impressed in the right circles. Beneath the surface lived fears that had haunted me since childhood — fear of failure, of loneliness, of not doing enough for those who suffer in this world.

I built a career. I married an extraordinary woman. I am raising two incredible children. I accumulated many of the markers that the world calls success. And yet, the more blessed my life became, the more fraudulent I felt. The guilt whispered through the gratitude like static through a radio signal: Why should you enjoy comfort while so many others suffer? What gives you the right?

I could not answer that question. So I kept moving. I kept acquiring. I kept drowning the static in more noise.

And the pattern was set — circular and self-defeating, a path that always led me back to the same parched ground. A man trying to dig his way out of a hole, mystified by the fact that the deeper he dug, the further he seemed from the surface.

I had buried it all so thoroughly that I no longer knew where the graves were. Naming is what gave me a shovel. When I finally named my desert — called it what it was, out loud, without flinching — the dirt began to move. Not all at once. But enough to see what I had put in the ground and why.

This book tells the story of that excavation. How I learned to name the desert I was standing in. And how naming it — finally, after forty years — made it possible to take the first step toward something other than more wandering.

I’ve been a Christian all my life — baptized, confirmed, raised in the church. But sitting with that forty-year arithmetic, I realized with uncomfortable clarity: I didn’t have a “God story.” There was no single moment when belief struck like lightning, no dramatic conversion, no clear before and after.

I had simply grown up in faith the way some people grow up speaking two languages — it was just part of the environment.

For years, I thought faith required a moment — some dramatic turn that would make everything click into place. What I’ve learned is that my story was never about finding God. It was about learning what to do with Him once found. Belief is easy. Walking changes everything.

Walking, I have come to understand, is precisely what He is after. Not admiration from a distance. Not theological agreement. Not even obedience, at least not as the first thing. What He seems to want — what the whole arc of Scripture keeps insisting on, from Eden to Emmaus — is company. A God who walked with Adam in the cool of the day. Who traveled with Israel as cloud and fire. Who, when the fullness of time arrived, did not send a message or a manual but came Himself, in dust and skin, to walk the same roads we walk.

My forty years weren’t spent searching for God — they were spent learning what to do with the fact that He was already there, already keeping pace with a man who refused to slow down long enough to notice. This book is my God story. Not of how I first believed, but of how I am learning to walk with Him still, stumbling and getting back up, making wrong turns and being gently redirected.

But naming my desert changed something. Once I could see where I was, I stopped needing to see everything else. The fog had lifted enough to reveal not the entire path, but the ground directly beneath my feet. And on that ground, one step had become visible.

I did not know where it would lead. But I knew what the next step was: I could write it down. I could tell the truth about where I had been. That was enough to begin.

The writing itself became part of crossing my Jordan. Each chapter was a step into the water. Each confession, each attempt to find words for what had been wordless, moved me further from the shore I had stood on for too long. I did not write this book and then cross. The writing was the crossing.

And here is what I discovered: naming is how purpose reveals itself. Not as a destination, but as a direction. For years I had searched for purpose the way you search for lost keys — frantically, in all the wrong places, growing increasingly convinced that someone must have moved them. But the keys weren’t missing. I was just looking for purpose like a prize instead of receiving it like a step.

I’m writing this from a posture I’m still practicing — open hands, honest eyes, and a steady decision to love even when my feelings resist. I’m not writing from the far side of anything — I’m writing in the middle of it, still learning, still failing, still being carried. My faith is part of this story, and I won’t hide it. But I also won’t weaponize it. If you don’t share my beliefs, you’re not an outsider here.

What I offer is language for the wilderness, a companion written from the middle of my journey.

Not everyone who picks up this book is in a desert. Some of you are in a good season — perhaps the best season you have known. Your work has meaning. Your faith is not a crisis but a practice. If that is you, this book is not here to tell you something is wrong. It is here because even a life that is working can be working at a fraction of what it was designed for. You may not need rescue. But you may find, as I did, that there are gears you have not yet discovered, a harmony available to you that competence alone will never produce. The wilderness is any place where you have not yet heard the voice that is trying to reach you.

Each chapter names a place in the journey: the bonds that hold us, the freedom that isn’t, the image of God we’ve carried, the hope beneath our doubt, the love that is posture rather than feeling, the river where stillness becomes necessary, the puzzle that reveals itself only in pieces, the harmony we glimpse but cannot sustain. As you read, you may recognize the terrain. You may find yourself saying, That’s where I am.

If so, name it. Say it aloud if you need to. Write it down.

The naming is not a verdict. It is the first step toward movement. What will you call this season? What will you name this struggle? Not because naming is magic, but because it is the beginning of honesty — and honesty, it turns out, is the door through which God has been waiting to walk.

This book is my first step, a turning — not because I have all the answers, but because I finally stopped pretending I ever did. A story of coming home — not to a place, but to a Person who has been walking beside me far longer than I can imagine.

The journey begins with naming. It ends with being named.

This “Introduction” sets the table for what My Desert explores: the journey from striving to alignment, from performing to being present. The full book traces forty years of wandering through what I call the spiritual desert—learning to distinguish between the God we construct and the God who actually shows up. My Desert will be available this summer.

To see my other work, visit Extracted. Most recent: Stand The Post — Nacha’s response to seven questions — what it says, what it omits, and what it confirms about who is standing watch over an $86 trillion network.

My Desert is my first book—a spiritual memoir that has been, frankly, a herculean task. I know how many people dream of writing a book, watching others who seem to do it effortlessly. The effortless path was not my journey. Every chapter fought me. Every metaphor had to be earned.

The book demanded what it demanded—not efficiency, but integrity. Not shortcuts, but truth.

Much like the work I’ve begun with Extracted—pulling essential insights from complex realities—writing this memoir became an exercise in extracting meaning from forty years of wandering. Both require the same uncompromising pursuit: getting to what’s actually true, not what’s convenient.

Many people know Ken Miles from the 2019 film Ford v Ferrari—directed by James Mangold and starring Christian Bale as the British-born engineer and test driver who helped Ford Motor Company build the GT40 capable of defeating Ferrari at the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans. Matt Damon plays Carroll Shelby, the designer and strategist who partnered with Miles to challenge Ferrari’s dominance in endurance racing. The film, written by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, and Jason Keller, dramatizes one of the greatest underdog stories in automotive history.

Miles worked alongside Shelby to develop Ford’s answer to Ferrari’s dominance in endurance racing. While Shelby was the strategist and salesman, Miles was the craftsman—the kind of man who could hear imbalance in the Ford FE V8 engine before the gauges caught it, who understood the GT40’s aerodynamics better than its designers, and who insisted on getting the car right even when Ford executives preferred speed over precision. He paid a price for that uncompromising pursuit of excellence. But he also found something most people never touch: the perfect lap.

Writing this book taught me what Miles understood: you don’t manufacture harmony. You recognize it when resistance finally fades. You don’t force the perfect lap—whether on a racetrack or on the page. You pursue it with relentless integrity until, for a moment, everything aligns.

The excerpt below, from one of the book's final chapters, explores what that alignment looks like—and what it costs. My Desert will be available this summer.

[EXCERPT BEGINS]

Ford v Ferrari has become one of my favorite movies.

Matt Damon plays Carroll Shelby with measured brilliance—the designer, the strategist, the man who understands both machines and people. On the surface, it’s a story about racing: an upstart American team partnering with Ford to challenge Ferrari, the reigning symbol of European elegance and mechanical dominance. Grit versus pedigree. Ingenuity versus tradition.

But the soul of the film isn’t just Shelby.

It’s Ken Miles too—played by Christian Bale—the gifted, maddening, deeply human driver who seems forever caught between brilliance and cost. Miles wasn’t the charming salesman; he was the craftsman. The kind of man who feels most at home with grease under his nails, sleeves rolled up, arguing with physics itself. An engineer first, a driver second—and somehow, both completely.

There is a quiet scene in the film that has stayed with me far longer than the roar of any engine.

It’s evening in California. The track is empty, the day’s testing finished. The desert beyond has gone still, the light soft and amber. Engines tick as they cool, metal contracting like a body exhaling after effort. Ken Miles sits on the hood of a car beside his young son, Peter. You can almost smell the warm rubber, the fuel lingering in the air.

Peter looks at his father with the unguarded attention only a child can give. Miles, uncharacteristically quiet, begins to talk about the perfect lap.

He doesn’t describe it with numbers or trophies. He doesn’t speak of horsepower or gear ratios, though he knows them all by heart. Instead, he talks about a feeling.

“It’s out there,” he says. “The perfect lap. No mistakes. Every gear just right, every corner just so. You see it, you feel it—and you chase it.”

The scene is fictional, but it fits Miles so well it feels truer than fact. He lived his life pursuing harmony—those rare moments when every moving part aligns. He could hear imbalance in an engine before the gauges caught it. He drove not against the car, but with it, coaxing both machine and driver toward the edge of what they could do together.

And in 1966, on the long, punishing circuit of Le Mans, it appeared—for a moment—that he found it.

The race unfolded over twenty-four hours of relentless demand. Night pressed in thick with fuel and rain. Floodlights carved tunnels through the dark as cars screamed past at impossible speeds. For most drivers, it was chaos. For Miles, it was rhythm.

Lap after lap, he pushed the Ford GT40 beyond what its designers thought possible—smoother, faster, more consistent. At one point, he shattered the lap record, then did it again. Crew members began to whisper about “Miles’ rhythm.” Each downshift landed like a heartbeat; each apex traced with painterly perfection.

Just before dawn, cameras caught him cresting the Mulsanne Straight. The sky was beginning to lighten. His hands rested easily on the wheel. His shoulders were relaxed. There was, just barely, the hint of a smile.

Not triumph.

But peace.

For an instant, it seemed he had touched what he’d been describing—not perfection, but harmony. Courage and restraint moving together.

The Problem We Didn’t Know We Were Solving

Most of us don’t wake up thinking we are out of harmony. We wake up thinking we need to try harder.

It happens the way most misalignment does—not through a single wrong turn but through a long series of well-intentioned adjustments, each one so reasonable that questioning it would feel ungrateful. A little more effort here. A little more vigilance there. An unspoken conviction that if we could just stay attentive enough, morally careful enough, we could keep everything from slipping. We do not notice the moment when faithfulness becomes white-knuckling, because the two feel so remarkably similar from inside the car.

Faith, for many of us, entered this noise rather than relieving it. We were taught that belief mattered. And it does. But somewhere along the way, belief began to feel like performance—like a man carrying a piano up a staircase and calling it worship.

Without quite noticing when it happened, we learned to grip.

We gripped our decisions, our prayers, our sense of progress. We held the wheel tightly, correcting constantly, convinced that vigilance itself was the mark of faithfulness. And when life failed to smooth out—when grief arrived unannounced, when prayers remained unanswered—we assumed the problem must be us. Not paying close enough attention. Not faithful enough.

This is the quiet exhaustion that many people of faith carry but rarely name, because naming it feels like a failure of the faith they are trying to sustain. It is not doubt, exactly, and not rebellion. It is something subtler and heavier than both: the bone-deep weariness of always being slightly out of sync, always correcting—as though life were a sequence of demanding corners to be survived rather than a road to be traveled.

Racing, after all, is never just about speed. It is a conversation between three things: the driver, the car, and the track. The driver brings vision and judgment—when to trust what cannot be seen beyond the next bend. The car brings its own limitations and strengths—power, fragility, the accumulated wear of previous laps. And the track brings conditions no one controls—curves that tighten unexpectedly, stretches that invite confidence and punish arrogance in equal measure.

Harmony is not achieved by any one of these acting alone.

For most of my life, I assumed I was both the car and the driver. Life was the track—unpredictable, demanding, sometimes generous, often unforgiving. God, if I was honest, functioned more like a distant engineer: responsible for the original design, perhaps available for consultation, but largely watching to see how I handled the wheel.

That arrangement made effort central. It made failure feel personal and success feel briefly relieving, never restful. If something went wrong, the fault was obvious—I had misjudged the corner, chosen the wrong line. If something went right, the relief lasted only until the next lap began.

But what if that assumption was wrong?

What if life was still the track—uncontrollable, beautiful, indifferent to my confidence—and I was still the car, carrying history, limits, capacity, and wear—but God was not standing off to the side, clipboard in hand?

What if He was the driver?

Not a driver forcing the car beyond its limits, but one who knows precisely what it was designed to do. One who listens for the slightest vibration, who senses resistance before damage occurs, who understands when to push and when restraint is the higher wisdom. A driver who does not despise the car for its limitations, but accounts for them—even honors them—in how He drives.

That possibility does not remove agency. Cars respond. They participate. They matter. But they are not asked to carry what they were never meant to carry. And if we take that possibility seriously—if we let it settle beyond the intellect and into the bones—then everything we have experienced as spiritual pressure begins to look different.

Why Glimpses Are Enough

There are questions that press quietly beneath everything we have been exploring.

If harmony is real—if there are moments when trust replaces tension and the road opens and everything moves together—why doesn’t it last?

And beneath that question, a harder one: If God is the Driver, and He knows the course, and He is not anxious about outcomes—why does He permit so much disruption?

These are not complaints. They are honest observations about how life works. Anyone who has tasted alignment—even briefly—knows how quickly it passes. The morning that began in peace ends in frustration. The prayer that felt like conversation yesterday feels like recitation today. If we are not careful, we begin to interpret this as failure—as though God offered something beautiful and we fumbled it.

But what if the glimpse is the design?

Consider how God moved through the wilderness with Israel. He did not give them a map. He gave them a cloud by day and fire by night—presence that moved, guidance that required attention, direction that could not be predicted or controlled. They could not study the route in advance. They could not plan their stops. They had to watch, every morning, to see whether the cloud lifted or stayed.

This was not inefficiency on God’s part. It was formation.

A map can be memorized and then ignored. A pillar of fire requires you to keep looking. A map creates independence; presence creates relationship. God was not merely getting Israel from Egypt to Canaan. He was teaching them to travel with Him—to wake each day asking not “Where are we going?” but “Where is He?”

This pattern tells us something essential about the arrangement we are in. God has never promised permanence in the way we instinctively want it. He has promised presence—but presence that cannot be captured and carried like a possession. The harmony we experience is not meant to be sustained through our effort. It is meant to be returned to through our attention.

If the goal were sustained harmony, then every disruption would be failure. Every return of noise would be evidence that something had gone wrong—with us, with God, with the whole arrangement. But if the goal is relationship—if God is more interested in our repeated return than in our unbroken consistency—then the glimpses are not failures. They are the curriculum.

Each taste of harmony teaches us what to listen for. Each moment of alignment recalibrates our instincts. Each experience of peace—however brief—deposits something in us that remains even after the feeling fades. We learn the difference between noise and signal. We learn what the Driver’s touch feels like. We learn to recognize the rhythm even when we cannot sustain it.

The glimpse was never meant to be the destination. It was meant to be the tutor—showing us what harmony feels like so that we recognize it when it returns, giving us a reference point that outlasts the experience itself. And that knowledge—the knowledge that harmony is real, that we have touched it even if we cannot hold it—is enough to sustain us through every season when we cannot feel it at all.

Ken Miles understood this. He did not claim to live in the perfect lap. He described it as something “out there”—something you chase, something you feel when it comes, something that passes. He spent his life pursuing it, and by all accounts he touched it more than most. But he never spoke of it as a possession. He spoke of it as a gift that arrives and departs on its own terms.

The same is true of the life God invites us into.

We will not sustain harmony. We are not asked to. What we are asked to do is simpler and, in its own way, harder: to keep listening. To keep returning. To trust that the glimpses are not taunts but promises—evidence that what we were made for is real, even when we cannot feel it.

And when the harmony fades—as it will, tonight or tomorrow or next year—we do not conclude that we have failed. We simply remember what we have learned:

The rhythm is still there.

The Driver is still present.

And the road back is always shorter than we fear.

[EXCERPT ENDS]

This excerpt from “The Perfect Lap” captures the heart of what My Desert explores: the journey from striving to alignment, from performing to being present. The full book traces forty years of wandering through what I call the spiritual desert—learning to distinguish between the God we construct and the God who actually shows up. My Desert will be available this summer.

Ford v Ferrari (2019), directed by James Mangold, written by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, and Jason Keller. 20th Century Studios.

To see my other work, visit Extracted. Most recent: The Enforcer, the Fence and The Keeper — How Nacha’s governance structure turned America’s payment network into an engine of predatory extraction.