MY TWIN SONS ERIC & IRA WERE BORN in the ordinary fashion, naturally speaking—except as an added bonus they were delivered at home, and in the very bed which they were so lovingly conceived 42-weeks earlier. This was of course by our grand design, home birth, that is. It was actually a big deal in California at the time, as this sort of procedure simply isn’t smiled upon where twins are involved. Our greatest speed bumps to a natural unmedicated birth without the looming threat of c-section were the cultural obstacles that arose among the temperaments of certain church friends and relations who, and I quote, “washed their hands” of the impending disaster, seeing as how they could not possibly dissuade such delusional, uneducated, and my personal favorite, “morally incompetent” minds. News of their birth spread in home birthing circles. Apparently my sons were written about in medical journals as far east as India—or so I’m told.

The story between their conceptions is particularly of interest, because one child was seeded before the weekend, with the second, I believe—this is something I cannot prove, but fully regard as true for reasons which will not be stated here—being fertilized after the weekend.

See, my wife went on a mission trip down to Mexico for the weekend while I grudgingly accepted a getaway with “guys and guns” in the desert somewhere near the Nevada border. I did my time in the service, so I can say this with the credentialed backing and conscious of having committed myself to my country by stating I really hate guns. I fully whole-heartedly hate them. Include the psychological penis-sizing which guns seem to arouse in men with a loaded cooler of alcohol thrown into the mix, and you’ve got a tree-loving Jesus freak standing on the tracks between two colliding trains, or something to that effect—perhaps I’m being overly dramatic. Anyhow, that was our bizarre weekend wedged between the conceptions of both sons. My wife expanded God’s kingdom upon the Earth. And I paid a visit to Hell.

Did I mention that church leaders were present—almost all of them. It was a small band of brothers. Little did I know, when grudgingly accepting the invitation, that the “guy getaway” was pre-conceived as an intervention—for yours truly. Apparently, and I’m only now as I write these words beginning to understand this, I was “too loose in my thinking,” specifically where writing is concerned. I was an embarrassment to their congregation. This, coming from California, a media beacon of morality for the world. Also included in their talk was the fact that I’d never actually finished college—I’m not making this up—which they apparently had, also reason for me not to depart from their wisdom. No doubt my detractors will immediately scoff to learn this fact, how I simply walked away from a degree after finishing a good many classes. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

So they had the talk—it lasted well into the night—while they guzzled down beer and loaded their guns, finally slurring as they attempted pronunciation for what remained of the talk, then fumbled around shooting wildly into starry Creation, and being of depraved minds, killing whatever they saw.

The best I could do, having no keys to a getaway car, was to avoid the ever-shifting downward stare of their guns until they drank themselves to sleep. At first light, having no insight that I was soon to be a father, nor divulging my plans to anyone, I made a break for it. What plans, you say? I hadn’t any. None except to flee into the desert without food or water, choosing even death if it came down to it. And I walked, as many as ten miles, listening to the growing procession of their guns until they faded from ear-shot. I walked like that into the desert of my own mind until I stumbled upon a ghost town. Mm-hmm, the places of legend do exist.

As I explored what remained of a once-thriving western outpost, I could only imagine that the wind which whistled through the crumbling carcasses of nails, shards of broken glass, and wood, once held superior minds.

Education, I thought, is overrated.

To say I was in desperate need of new friends or no friends at all is an understatement. It should come as no surprise then, upon finally coming out as one who adheres to the full unbroken Testimony of the Lord concerning His creation—or the doctrine of Flat Earth—that my same circle of church friends, at least some of them, thought it their civic duty unto the Lord to save me from my superstitious foolishness. Of course, upon learning that I could not be rerouted in my plight from their delusional thinking—the City of Destruction, I call it—much as that day in the desert, they resorted to their next strategic task—mockery.

I was just recently speaking with another prominent proponent to the Doctrine of Flat Earth. He runs a heavily trafficked channel on YouTube and will remain anonymous. We were discussing our many similarities, which include service to our country, marrying the love of our life, children, and attending college only to toss our degrees into the wastebasket with the carefree action of a liberated thinker, when we seemingly had the same thought at the exact moment.

He and I were finally glad—we both spoke this truth in the cross-hairs of our words—that we had thought to dismiss our education, if it meant our indoctrination into this system was similarly stunted of its growth. It was not until only recently that both of us, and as many others as God has similarly chosen to wake, unexpectedly opened our eyes to what the Apostles Paul and Peter for two-millennia desperately warned the church about.

Nobody saw this coming.

We were fleeing into the desert to escape the Great Delusion of man.