Recalibrating Everything To the Nanosecond We See JESUS

By J.D Price, Andy Brown and Adam Benson

SWIPE THROUGH THE NEWS THESE DAYS

it's mostly rubble and ruins and truth packaged as plural to make it more palatable. It's mankind trying to control everything from wo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Premium Book Publishers
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798869030962

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Recalibrating Everything

To the Nanosecond We See JESUS

J.D. Price

Copyright © 2023 Premium Book Publishers

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This book is a work of non-fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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First Edition: November, 2023

Book Published by Mr. Adam Benson & Mr. Andy Brown

on behalf of Premium Book Publishers.

ISBN: 979-8-8690-3096-2

DEDICATION

This book was written for three dear daughters: Emma the Compassionate Old Soul, Ellie Kate the Fire and the Fan, and Brooke the Dancer and Dreamer.

It is dedicated to a woman who is grace personified, my mother.

It is inspired by my best friend and stunning Irish bride.

It is fueled by the memory of my earthly father, the greatest man I’ve ever known.

TABLE OF CONTENTs

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE – BANJO MUSIC

INTRODUCTION

Everything Is Backwards, Sideways, And Upside Down

CHAPTER 1 MENAGERIE OF MISERABLE MESSIAHS

Recalibrating Our Image of Jesus

CHAPTER 2 THE STRONG KING

Recalibrating Our Understanding of God’s Power

CHAPTER 3 THE CRAP IN THE CUP

Recalibrating Our Grasp of the Dark Garden

CHAPTER 4 WE ALL SWUNG THE SLEDGE

Recalibrating Our Culpability at Golgotha

CHAPTER 5 BEYOND THE SHADOWS

Recalibrating Our Doubts

CHAPTER 6 THINGS WE’D NEVER SAY

Recalibrating Our Words

CHAPTER 7 FIREFLIES

Recalibrating Our Wonder

CHAPTER 8 LONG TABLES AND HOLY KISSES

Recalibrating Our Anticipation for Heaven

CHAPTER 9 WOODSHED

Recalibrating Our Works

CHAPTER 10 SOME TEARS DENT THE EARTH

Recalibrating How We See Others

CHAPTER 11 OUR WEEPING DIES AT DAWN5

Recalibrating Our Fear of Death

CHAPTER 12 CIRCUS TENTS COLLAPSING

Recalibrating Our Earthly Solutions

CHAPTER 13 HAPPINESS FOUGHT JOY AND LEFT VERY SAD

Recalibrating Our Contentment

CHAPTER 14 SALAD BAR SAVIORS

Recalibrating Our Bent Towards Universalism

CHAPTER 15 BIG CAT IN AN OLD ZOO

Recalibrating Our View of the Enemy

CHAPTER 16 WE GONNA NEED MO BANDWIDTH

Recalibrating Our Worship

CHAPTER 17 UNITY AND THE CINEMATIC END

Recalibrating What Divides Us

EPILOGUE – THEN HE SHALL TURN

Everything Gets Recalibrated in the End

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To Pat Brown and her tiny school in Thousand Oaks, California, Debbie McAngus and her inspiring Northland Christian art class and a Blinn College English Professor whose name escapes me--thank you for your piercing and passionate voices that encouraged me to paint with words.

A ginormous thanks to Brandon Limanni. This book needed your insane design skills and artistic instincts. You nailed it brother.

And to my big brother Jeff---thank you for being a courageous example of what it looks like to pursue art and deeper things for a lifetime. May we keep telling others about Jesus through honest art.

PROLOGUE

                                            BANJO MUSIC

F

ULL DISCLOSURE, I’M NOT a charismatic pastor who leads a booming church in suburbia. I don’t have a hipster haircut, a helicopter, or a social media empire. Oh, and that edgy new book everyone’s raving about—I didn’t write a word of it.

Impressed yet?

Yeah, me neither.

I write soul prose. Which is simply grace-drenched words and imagery tethered to Truth. Tethered to King Jesus to be exact. That makes this book a little dangerous. Dangerous like reaching down into a box of broken glass and baby rattlesnakes. Dangerous because it’s not for the Clorox churchianity crowd but for weary believers struggling to believe that Jesus is still showing-up at the 11th hour to fix the plot on this screwed-up Netflix original.

I also wrote it for myself as a kind of therapy because I’m way too ravenous for most of the spiritual fast food currently offered on this Shadowland’s drive-thru menu.

How about you? Some of you look famished too. Are you hungry enough to travel a long road with a dude with duct-taped theology and maybe, just maybe, find some bread and blinding light along the journey?

If so, I thank you in advance.

Recalibrating Everything is my broken prayer and bold proclamation. It’s a praise song played on a 1-stringed banjo.

But I play loud. Very loud.

INTRODUCTION

EVERYTHING IS BACKWARDS, SIDEWAYS, AND UPSIDE DOWN

Sometimes I wake at four in the morning, when all the darkness is swarming, and it covers me in fear. - The Little Things That Give You Away, U2

O

UR WORLD’S COLLAPSING. It’s a cardboard condo in a hurricane. No amount of sunshiny positivity changes that. Does anyone even want to debate this?

Look around and it won’t take long to see political vitriol flying through spittle and tweets or the racial and economic tensions growing by the day. It’s as if the invisible walls holding back Hell are breaching; as if death and decay are shouting at us like mad carnival barkers 24-7-365 via CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. Wars and rumors of war are everywhere.

Humanity is sighing in sync these days. These sighs are a reaction to how things are versus how we think they should be or how they used to be. We’re sighing because, these days, good is viewed by many as evil and evil is now very hip. We’re sighing because in our bones we know it’s almost time again for another kid to emerge from the social media tall grass with an AK-47 manifesto and a bad Instagram pic. We’re sighing because in a garden long ago our first parents tried the fruit sampler then bit the dust and suddenly sighing was our native tongue.

You feel it too. Down in your gut. Eden’s sins have poisoned our blood. Our water. Our everything.

More frustrating than the decay and the disintegration are the weak solutions. Whether it’s a guy in a t-shirt that reads GET OVER IT, or people insisting we just be the best version of ourselves or we need to chase a bucket list, it's all just slapping Band-Aids on fatal wounds in the end. Even Christian radio keeps doubling down on songs more trite than full of trembling.

None of it helps much.

It’s all impressively underwhelming.

Maybe, it’s because, as my Irish bride says, This life’s just really, really hard.

Yes, it is my sweet Kerry Jane. And it comes standard with two-ton questions like:

Is there still a way through the chaos?

Is there a truth when false things fall like rain?

Is there life in this land of growing shadows and death?

The questions don’t go away. Ever. They’re relentless. They never take a single vacation day. They come in the form of big campus atheists blasting away on bullhorns as they point out the tensions all around us. The tension between God’s goodness and genocide. The tension between his holiness and human trafficking. The tension between knowing he owns all the cattle on every hill, yet millions starve. The tension between his exhortation to, Let the children come to me while child pornography proliferates.

Who will speak to these tensions?

Who will bring a healing balm?

Who will send a downpour of redeeming rain for the million little funeral pyres burning all around us?

How much longer can our wet-eyed lamentations coexist with the promises of a better day?

Will the headlines relent long enough to morph into signposts and point us back towards the high mountain and a Healer?

Is everything in this life supposed to be this crazy?

Maybe.

Switchfoot did sing after all that the shadow proves the sunshine. Maybe these dark days testify to a spark.  Maybe all of this is heading somewhere better. Maybe our fears funnel to a flashpoint? And I don’t mean some things. Not a few things. Not a random sample. Not just stuff generated by an algorithm. But EVERYTHING.

And not for just some folks but for everyone. All of us. No one’s exempt according to the scrolls.

We have arrived at the heart of things now.

The reason I wrote this work.

I’m talking about a moment in time and space pulsing with power and pregnant with healing. A holy Kairos. I am pointing to a future nanosecond.

The one when we stand and fall at the feet of Jesus.

Yes, that stunning and startling moment when time as we know it ceases, rollcall starts and we find ourselves before the One who proclaimed in John 14:6, I am the way, the truth and the life.

Do not miss this point as we all have a date with it. You heard me right, every last one of us. The religious and the rebels; the rich and the rag-tag; the beautiful and the banished; the haters and the hated. No one gets to call in sick that day.

This book is a banshee cry blaring through the smoke and confusion our world keeps pumping out. And the cry is this—Everything is about King Jesus.

This work is my flare shot into the aforementioned collapsing sky. It’s a tears flowing down my face like rivers, voice-cracking, body shaking call to tether our souls in totality to a grander reality. It’s a reminder to hang on for what’s ahead because by rapture or resurrection each of us is headed for a one on one with the One who’s equal parts holy fire and overwhelming love. I’m a poet playing a one-stringed banjo imploring anyone who will listen to approach this Rabbi of Rabbi’s like a child so you can tug on a tassel on his robe and ask him to recalibrate all you are to this moment.

Recalibrate. The word paints a mental picture of watches or engines sitting idle and needing repair, but the word also means to change the way we do or think about something. And don’t we all need recalibrating? I know I do. And so do you. Karen in the line at Walmart does too. So does the Pope and the hip rapper on Good Morning America and that grandma who just bought forty-five bucks worth of booze and lotto tix. 

The need for recalibration is a universal condition.

The pages ahead contain my own work-in-progress recalibrations. True stories of real and raw struggles where I met Jesus and wept, even wailed, and eventually worshiped him again as he spoke to my forgetfulness, my waywardness, my inwardness. Where I asked him to hunt down the lies which far too often run unchecked as ravenous wolves in the lonely woods of my mind and heart.

And He did.

He spoke love over lies.

He soaked shadows in light.

He recalibrated me.

And He’s still doing it.

This book’s also an invitation. Because you have broken parts and false understandings that need recalibrating. So read on and be filled with wild hope. Bring every tear and tension, every bane and burden. Bring it all.

One quick disclaimer before we start--this book is not some trendy gimmick—it’s not making a claim to be spiritual snake oil or a rebooted Prayer of Jabez. Oh no, it’s simply a call to live backwards from a moment. The Moment. It’s fixing our eyes on Jesus and nothing else because one day he’ll recalibrate how we see everything. Everything. Yes---everything.

CHAPTER

1

MENAGERIE OF MISERABLE MESSIAHS

                    Recalibrating Our Image of Jesus

O God, give me no words. Give me something that transcends talk. Let me collide with your answers in something as visible as the blood of Yahweh dripping from the steel head of a hammer. Maybe, then, I can actually live.

- Calvin Miller

H

ERE’S A POLARIZING QUESTION right off the bat—is the Jesus you know the Jesus who is? I mean is he the real deal? Is he the Jesus who rightly informs what truth is, fuels true worship and lights up the darkest crawl spaces of hearts and minds?

This question matters. It really, really matters.

I hear some of you—what are you talking about dude—there’s only one Jesus. Well, no, the Jesus roster is fat if you count the frauds.

So which Jesus you got?

More importantly which Jesus has you?

Is it a Happy Meal Jesus slapped on the dashboard of your life to pacify a bent towards religiosity? Is it a Tsunami Jesus full of rage and disappointment you fear more than a fever blister on prom night? Is it a Drool Jesus who’s so boring and lame he makes you wonder if a timeshare on a lake in hell would really be that bad?

I hope not. Because all those versions are lies. They’re ditches. They’re dead ends. They’re the subterfuge of the Snake King.

So how did we get so many frauds in the first place? I’m not going to pretend to understand every reason but it’s likely because we’re living in a relentless over-the-top illusion show these days. One where we distract ourselves with goofy smartphone games and Tik Toks and random clickbait stories that all leave little room for discernment. We hardly blink as we turn our ears to the voices getting the primo airtime—voices telling and selling us the malarky that there’s my truth and your truth and the lady’s truth in the Escalade in front of us in the Starbucks drive-thru.

It all makes us vulnerable. It makes us mistake shadows for shade. It finds us standing with weak worldviews inside some very scary reptile houses too distracted to notice the glass is broken where they keep the Big Snake. Thus, we miss the hiss and just hear what we want to hear.

More than that our spiritual cataracts blind us to the parade of bad Jesus caricatures. They make it hard for us to see that there are posers and pretenders everywhere. It all makes us forget that evil’s been renting a suit made of lightbulbs and lies for a very long time.

So again, I ask---which Jesus you got? Is it the One who will be standing in the end? Is it Jesus 1.0. The One who was there at the beginning before the counterfeits. The One who’ll be there in the end when the phony ones burn like tissue paper in a smelter.

More than that, do we realize that the Father God hasn’t revealed or hinted at plans to release a software update to fix the real Jesus’s seemingly outdated morality. Apparently, those offensive parables and hard teachings are here to stay. This might be because the Son of God is perfect and that’s a very, very good thing. It’s a good thing because we can recalibrate to such a deity with total confidence. It’s a good thing because in the real Jesus there dwells no darkness at all. It’s a good thing because He’s the only truly legit being in the universe. Yes, the real Jesus is exactly who he claims to be.

This chapter is about that Jesus.

But before we meet Him allow me to make a painful confession as I’ve collected a ton of bad Jesus figures over my fifty-odd years. So many in fact that I had to build a mental glass menagerie to keep track of them all. Let’s look at some of my pathetic pretenders as it might just help you see a few of yours.

ETHEREAL GURU JESUS

My 1970’s Southern California childhood is where I met my first bad Jesus. I call him Ethereal Guru Jesus. This Jesus haunted me often with his pale melanin and Pacific Ocean blue eyes. I met him in a Baptist church in Newbury Park. A place, in hindsight, that was more mausoleum than mercy seat. The Jesus dwelling there was aloof and scary. He lived in the religious paintings of the books and wall art of cold Sunday School lessons. You know the images I’m talking about---the ones where he’s sitting in a Mona Lisa pose with limp, parted down the middle hair. The ones where he’s gazing into the middle distance and looks like a fella who just wants to be left alone. 

Ethereal Guru Jesus was a flawed marketing vision, a fever dream of white Protestant men in bad 1960’s J.C. Penney polyester business suits. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. But back then he seemed so real. Yes, this Wonder bread white Jesus always seemed to be floating over my life but never entered the fray. Everything about him was washed-out and weak. He didn’t look like a man who spent most of his life under the burning Judean sun. He sure didn’t appear to have the stuff to deal with splinters or sins. I don’t remember the exact moment, but at some point, my young heart strongly sensed that such an anemic figure could have never commanded riptides or called out demoniacs or thrashed a temple by flipping merchant’s tables.

DIMEBAG JESUS

Eventually, in my developing mind, Ethereal Guru Jesus morphed into Dime Bag Jesus. As I grew older, I started realizing the older kids smoked a ton of weed in the bathrooms at nearby Borchard Park. I smelled it so often my hyper-imaginative brain concluded that Jesus, if he had been walking the earth at the time, might have supported his ministry by selling pot out of his beat-to-hell Ford Pinto near a high school in Topanga Canyon. You know the image I’m talking about—that fella who looks like a dropout from a liberal arts philosophy program and just got fired from Trader Joe’s due to anger issues, so he has to take a gig stocking pomegranates at Whole Foods. Hollywood loves this kind of modern hippy trippy Jesus far too often depicted as a crazy, homeless figure who may just have a bit of Oxycontin left to trade if you can give him a place to crash for a couple of days. This Jesus has no miracles but a little bit of meth. Dime bag Jesus was at Woodstock and all the wild parties in those Hollywood Hills Bob Seger and the Eagles wrote about. He dropped acid with Manson and levitated with the Beatles and maybe even surfed at Venice Beach and played golf with Elvis.

ONE OF MANY OPTIONS JESUS

In 1980, after my dad was transferred to a little oil and gas town called Houston, Texas, my two Southern California-centric messiahs rebranded themselves as One of Many Options Jesus. This latest version no longer reeked of Mary Jane or sported love beads, but my 5th grade mind clearly imagined him hanging out in the world religions section of B. Dalton Booksellers where I’m pretty sure he worked part time.

One of Many Options Jesus was tirelessly inoffensive. He made it very clear that if he wasn’t your cup of tea, he was more than happy to help you find a book on astral projection or Zen Buddhism or Ouija Board for Dummies. In my