Seventeen years is a long time to keep a desert between yourself and the ghosts of your past. In all that time, I never set foot near the people who bore me, the soil that chained me. But the air of the airport terminal was thin during my layover, and something—a quiet, insistent pull—whispered that it was time to test the boundaries of grace. Elohim knows the heart when it falters; He meets us even in the turbulence of our resistance.
I reached out to my uncle. His replies were erratic, jittery, wrapped in a strange, guarded tension. Yet, compelled by an invisible current, I kept reaching back as my plane landed and I found myself sitting in the city of my youth.
Against every instinct of survival, against the quiet warnings echoing in my spirit, I ordered a Lyft to my old family home.
The Threshold
The gravel crunched beneath the tires just as it used to, a familiar sound that clawed at old wounds. I walked up the porch steps and knocked on the door.
The wood groaned. My nephew opened it first, his eyes widening in a silent shock. Then his mother appeared behind him, and behind her, her mother.
In an instant, something surreal rippled through the doorway. It was strange, almost mechanical, how they manufactured smiles—wide, tight, and utterly hollow. In their eyes, I wasn’t a returning traveler seeking peace or reconciliation. They looked at me and saw a scapegoat. They thought I had finally come back to offer myself up, to sacrifice my life to absolve the lingering rot of their conscience.
I wasn’t there for a sacrifice. I had come for clarity—to witness firsthand what becomes of a generation of people who suffer deeply, and in turn, weaponize that suffering to crush everyone around them.
The reality of it was devastating. It was bad, a spiritual decay that seeped into the very floorboards of the house.
The Warning
Later, sitting across from my son, the weight of that truth pressed heavily into my chest. I looked him in the eye and gave him a solemn charge: Never go to Texas with your children.
He looked at me, confused, searching my face for context.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because,” I told him, my voice steady against the rising tide of memory, “unless they learn to become part of the swarm—unless they are the locust as well—they will be forever changed by the wasteland. And one day, looking back through the ruin, they may hold you responsible for the fact that they are nothing more than insects underneath it all.”
In the struggle and in the abundance of life’s seasons, Elohim remains our shelter, drawing us close not to feed the locusts, but to teach us how to walk away.
———
If you were born to a
Cancer
Libra
Aries
or Virgo mother
You have a live pathetic
Like no other
You will learn
Evil
Pain
Destruction
and Greed
Humiliating experiences
Where your soul will bleed
To Elohim or Satan
You will run
To prove which will
You really want done.
———-
