HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, September 6, 2025 – Lies will be the undoing of this generation, the telling of lies and the believing of them.

Lies will be their legacy, where once there stood the promise of a Church.

I can’t listen to their lies anymore. I can’t listen to them and think “oh, there’s hope for them still”, when what they want isn’t hope but lies. If they wanted hope, God would give it to them. He would meet them half-way—more than half-way—but it’s not hope that draws them downward. They settle for lies not because there’s no promise of hope, but because the lies are prettier and warmer and fuzzier.

But even that’s a lie.

I know a woman who stayed with a husband who deceived her for decades. His philandering was notorious, and yet she still beamed with pride whenever he stood at her side. No amount of urging from family or friends could convince her to leave. She was as if mesmerized and accepted his betrayals as a condition of their marriage.

I have seen the same fatalistic acceptance in other women in other marriages, the same delusional pride. I was like them until I wasn’t. But even when I was like them, I wasn’t really like them, because I tried to leave but couldn’t, until I could.

Lies will eat at you till there’s nothing left but a gnawing that will follow you down. But the pain doesn’t stop at death. This is a truth I learned standing on the edge of a subway platform in Sydney’s red-light district. Each day like clockwork, a handful of the drug-addled and tormented would slump silently under the rush of an oncoming train. It wasn’t the raving who’d slump. It was the silent. Kings Cross Station was like a place of sacrifice, though maybe it wasn’t “like” a place of sacrifice but was a place of sacrifice. I was an atheist when God told me that my pain wouldn’t stop there, and though an atheist, I believed him. And so I stepped back just as someone yanked me back, and I never thought of suicide again.

Nine months later I was reborn.

I wonder, in hindsight, how many standing on that platform heard God’s voice and ignored it. Maybe they were silent because they were listening and considering. We can’t know this except by revelation, but I believe that all of them heard it. I believe that, even knowing he would be ignored, God would still tell all of them what he told me, still give each one of them one last chance. Even as a legalistic formality he would do it, like he directed his prophets to preach as a formality to the terminally hard-of-heart so that they can’t claim at the judgement they were never warned.

God covers all the bases, because that’s what he does. He’s perfect in everything.

They called Jeremiah the “failed prophet”, his enemies. Refusing to do as he directed, they called him bad at his job and accused him of betraying his people. But his job was given to him by God and he was anything but bad at it. We all have a touch of the failed prophet in us, standing as a silent witness among our enemies and sometimes not-so-silent. Sometimes we need to scream God’s Truth like Jeremiah had to scream it or burst. It’s hard to scream with love, so the message isn’t always warm and fuzzy. This is why they called Jeremiah the failed prophet because he wore sackcloth instead of angora. You can scream better in sackcloth.

My grandmother had a cedar chest full of angora sweaters that she prized. She’d carefully maintained them over the years after she became too old to wear them herself. I coveted them, and when it was my time to wear the sweaters, she reluctantly agreed. I wrecked them all within a week.  Angora is very delicate as well as warm and fuzzy. All that cedar and all those decades of care didn’t stand a chance against a spoiled teenager’s thoughtlessness.

I think my grandmother knew what would happen if she let me wear them, but she sacrificed them anyway. When I gave them back to her bedraggled and deformed, she didn’t scream at me. She just sighed and took them and did her best to nurture them back to what they’d been. But they were never the same and I didn’t covet them anymore. And so they laid a few decades more in the chest, flattened and defeated, until my grandmother was moved out of her house and into a home. I don’t know what happened to the cedar chest let alone to the silent witness of the sweaters. I was in Australia standing on the edge of a subway platform when she was moved.

I wear sackcloth now. Only sackcloth. It’s been gifted to me and I wear it as instructed.

It helps me scream.