“If This Reached You, God Is Trying to Get Your Attention.”
You Weren’t Supposed to See This. But Here You Are.
I have been coughing for eleven days straight now. Not the cute little cough that makes people offer you a lozenge. The kind of cough where your neighbors start Googling “is tuberculosis still a thing” and your ribs feel like you went twelve rounds with a middleweight who fights dirty. The kind where you’re on a phone call and the other person just quietly hangs up because there’s no conversation happening anymore, just a man slowly dying into a microphone.
Eleven days. Because I got the flu first. Beat the flu. Felt human again for roughly forty-five minutes. And then bronchitis showed up like a debt collector who heard you’d just gotten paid.
I need to explain how this is even possible for a person who has not left his apartment in two months. I live alone. I work alone. I do not go to bars or restaurants or church or the grocery store or anywhere else where humans congregate and exchange respiratory pathogens. I sit in my apartment and I write about the most powerful people on earth doing the most depraved things imaginable and I publish it on the internet and then I go to sleep and then I wake up and I do it again. That’s my life. That’s the whole thing. There is no subplot. There are no B-stories. A monk on a remote mountain in Tibet has a more active social calendar than I do.
And yet, somehow, two separate respiratory illnesses found me. Consecutively. In my sealed apartment. I am forced to conclude that either God has a very specific sense of humor or the germs are simply more competent than our intelligence agencies.
So there I am, hacking up what I’m fairly certain is a piece of my actual soul, when I check my Substack dashboard and discover that we’ve lost about a hundred paid subscribers in the span of roughly two weeks.
Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the economics of independent journalism, let me paint you a picture. I left a six-figure financial technology career to do this. I was a stock analyst. I worked for billionaires. I wore nice clothes and ate at restaurants that didn’t have pictures on the menu. Then I decided that telling the truth about how the world actually works was more important than my 401(k), and the first five years of The Wise Wolf I made about a hundred dollars a month. If I was lucky. My savings account went from “comfortable” to “concerning” to “nonexistent” in a timeframe that would have impressed a gambling addict.
Someone left a comment recently accusing me of “begging” for paid subscribers and said I’m “clearly” making over a million dollars a year from this newsletter. I laughed so hard I triggered a coughing fit that lasted four minutes. Not even close, buddy. I would make more money delivering pizza. I would make more money as an entry level mail clerk at literally any Fortune 500 company. I would make more money standing on a street corner with a cardboard sign that says “will analyze equities for food.” But sure. Millionaire. That’s me. Rolling in it over here in my apartment that I haven’t left in sixty days because I can’t afford to go anywhere.
The hundred subscribers we lost? Best I can figure, some of them got upset because our Epstein investigation named their hero. That’s the thing about investigating an international child trafficking operation run by an intelligence asset. The names in those files don’t care about your voter registration. Democrats are in there. Republicans are in there. Your favorite senator is probably in there. The billionaire whose electric car you drive or whose social media platform you’re addicted to is in there. And some people would rather cancel a five dollar a month subscription than sit with the possibility that the guy they voted for might have been a customer of a Mossad-connected child rape operation.
I get it. I do. The truth is not fun. Nobody wakes up in the morning excited to learn that the entire American power structure might be compromised by a foreign intelligence service using trafficked children as leverage. That’s not a fun Tuesday. But it’s the truth, and I gave up everything to tell it, and I will not stop naming names because it makes people uncomfortable. If the names made you uncomfortable, good. They should. Be uncomfortable. Then do something about it.
But that wasn’t the worst part of my month. Not even close.
My thyroid decided this would be an excellent time to flare up. If you’re not familiar with thyroid problems (lucky you), one of the fun symptoms is something called moon face. Your face retains water and balloons up so you look like you gained forty pounds overnight while simultaneously aging two decades. Your skin dries out and cracks. You look, and I cannot stress this enough, absolutely terrible.
I had been talking to a girl. Flirting, even. Things were going well. And because I’m an honest person who doesn’t catfish people, I sent her a photo with the caption “this is as bad as I can possibly look.” She has not responded. It has been several days. I think we can safely classify this as a ghosting. Which is fine. It’s not like I have time for romance between the bronchitis and the Mossad investigations and the complete financial precarity of my existence. Still. Would’ve been nice.
So there’s the picture. Sick, bloated, hemorrhaging subscribers, alone in an apartment that is starting to feel less like a home and more like a very boring prison cell. And then my phone rings.
It’s my mom. My dad had a heart attack.
I hadn’t left my apartment in two months. Now I had to drive hundreds of miles to my parents’ house because my father might be dying. So I went. Of course I went. I drove through the night with bronchitis, coughing so hard I had to pull over twice because I literally could not see the road.
I got to my parents’ house. My mom was a wreck. My dad was in the hospital. I slept on their couch and waited and prayed and coughed and waited some more.
My dad came home from the hospital the next day. I went to hug him.
He told me his heart attack was ‘my fault’…
Let me just sit with that sentence for a second because even typing it feels surreal. My father told me that my life “stresses him out” so badly that it caused his heart to fail. He and my mom have worried about me constantly ever since I got stabbed and left for dead a few years back while investigating the murder of Isaac Kappy on location. That’s a long story for another article but the short version is that investigating powerful people who do evil things is not a safe occupation and I have the scars to prove it. Literally.
And I understand, on some level, that a parent watching their child choose a dangerous life of purpose over a safe life of comfort is terrifying. I understand that love expresses itself as fear sometimes. I understand that a man lying in a hospital bed processing his own mortality might lash out at the nearest target.
But standing in that living room, sick, exhausted, hundreds of miles from the tiny apartment where I hide from the world and try to do something that matters, hearing my own father say that my calling is killing him? That broke something in me. Or maybe it broke something open.
Because I went back to their guest room and I prayed. Not the polite kind of prayer where you thank God for your food and ask for a good day. The ugly kind. The kind where you’re on your knees at two in the morning with snot running down your face (partially from the bronchitis, partially from the crying, it was honestly hard to tell) and you’re just saying “give me a sign, give me something, I need to know I’m not wasting my life.”
And then I opened YouTube and the first video on my feed was called “If This Reached You, God Is Trying to Get Your Attention.”
I am not in the habit of believing in algorithmic prophecy. YouTube’s recommendation engine is designed to sell you things, not save your soul. The same algorithm that served me this video also thinks I want to watch a man pressure wash a driveway for forty-five minutes (I do, actually, but that’s beside the point). Still. When you’re on your knees at two in the morning begging for a sign and the first thing you see is essentially God saying “hey, look over here, dummy,” you pay attention.
The message in that video was simple enough that even a bronchitis-addled, thyroid-swollen, recently-ghosted investigative journalist could understand it.
The hard season you’re in right now is not the season you’re staying in.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. The confusion, the darkness, the isolation, the coughing, the lost subscribers, the angry father, the empty savings account, the girl who saw your moon face and decided she’d rather be alone. All of it. Temporary.
Not because everything magically gets better. I am far too jaded to believe in magic. I watched an intelligence-connected pedophile operate for decades while every institution in America looked the other way. I’ve read the emails. I’ve seen the flight logs. I know exactly how broken this world is, down to the specific dollar amounts and tail numbers and island coordinates. Magic is not coming.
But seasons change whether you believe in them or not.
The guy in the video talked about God having a plan that’s better than the one you came up with. And I have to tell you, my plan was pretty good. My plan involved a corner office and a retirement account and a nice car and maybe a wife who didn’t ghost me after seeing one bad photo. My plan did not include getting stabbed in the desert or coughing up my lungs alone in an apartment or having my father tell me I’m killing him by telling the truth about people who hurt children.
God’s plan, apparently, is messier. And lonelier. And involves significantly more bronchitis than I would have preferred.
But God’s plan also involves sixty thousand people reading what I write. It involves Lily, a twenty-two year old journalism student sharp enough to turn down a Hollywood gossip job to help me expose actual evil. It involves readers who send me emails at three in the morning saying “I shared your article with my pastor and now our whole church is awake.” It involves a community of people who care more about truth than comfort, which is increasingly rare in a country that seems to prefer comfortable lies served up by algorithms designed to keep you passive and consuming.
The video said something else that stuck with me. That the faithfulness you showed in the hard season is what qualifies you for the next one. That the fact you didn’t quit when it would have been so easy and so reasonable and so completely understandable to quit is the thing that proves you’re ready for what’s coming.
I think about that a lot. I could have quit a hundred times. A thousand times. Every death threat was an invitation to quit. Every empty bank statement was a permission slip. Getting stabbed was a pretty strong suggestion. My own father blaming his heart attack on me was, if we’re being honest, a fairly compelling argument for going back to analyzing tech stocks and shutting up.
But I didn’t quit. And if you’re reading this, you probably didn’t quit whatever hard thing you’re going through either. Maybe your hard thing is financial. Maybe it’s medical. Maybe it’s relational. Maybe you’re sitting in your own version of a sealed apartment wondering if any of it matters and whether God even sees you in here.
He does.
I know that sounds trite coming from a guy who just spent two thousand words complaining about his thyroid. But I mean it with everything I have. The hard season is real. The isolation is real. The coughing is very, unfortunately, extremely real. But it’s not permanent. It’s not the whole story. It’s the chapter that makes the next one mean something.
The video said that what took other people years to accomplish, God is going to do quickly for you because you were faithful in the difficult season. I don’t know if I believe in the prosperity gospel version of that. I don’t think God is going to FedEx me a check and a new set of lungs and a girlfriend who finds moon face charming. But I believe in the version where the struggle itself was the preparation. Where the years of empty bank accounts and death threats and failed relationships and angry parents were God teaching me to survive on nothing but purpose. Because you can’t take that from a person. You can take their money and their health and their subscribers and their father’s approval. But you cannot take the thing that gets them out of bed at five in the morning to write another article about the darkness in this world.
That’s the part they can’t kill. That’s the part that survives the season.
I want to be honest with you about something. I can’t afford a doctor. I can’t afford a therapist. I’m self-employed, which means I make just enough money to be disqualified from the government healthcare programs designed for people who can’t afford healthcare, but nowhere near enough to actually afford healthcare on my own. The irony of this system is so thick you could choke on it, which I would, except my bronchial tubes are already handling that department. I have a stack of medical procedures I need that I cannot pay for. I’ve got Lily’s education to think about. My parents are both dealing with serious health problems. My mom just had heart surgery. My dad went from cancer to a heart condition in the span of a year. They argue constantly after thirty-plus years of marriage because that’s what fear does to people who love each other.
It’s a lot. I don’t have a therapist’s couch to dump this on so I’m dumping it on you, my readers, because you’re the closest thing I have to a community that understands why someone would choose this life.
And here’s the solution I can offer, since I promised solutions and not just emotional baggage.
Whatever your hard season looks like, the answer isn’t figuring out the whole plan. It’s not having all the steps mapped out. It’s knowing that the season is a season. That the struggle has a purpose even when the purpose is invisible. That the fact you haven’t quit yet is itself a kind of prayer, and God hears it, even if his answer shows up as a YouTube video at two in the morning while you’re drowning in your own mucus on your parents’ guest bed.
The season is changing. For me. For you. For all of us who have been faithful to hard, thankless, confusing, isolating callings that nobody asked us to take on but that we couldn’t walk away from.
I believe that. Despite everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve lost and everything that hurts right now, I believe that.
And if this article reached you today, of all days, out of all the things the algorithm could have shown you, maybe that’s not an accident either.
Grace and peace,
The Wise Wolf
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a bottle of cough syrup.
If you made it this far, you’re one of the people keeping this operation alive. Literally. We dropped from number one in the faith category down to thirty-one because getting sick killed our momentum from the Epstein series. If this article meant something to you, sharing it is free and it helps more than you know. And if you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber, this would be a really good week for it. Not because I’m a millionaire begging for pocket change. Because I’m a guy with bronchitis and a broken heart trying to keep the lights on long enough to finish what God started.
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You are a very interesting person. I am sure conversations with you would be as entertaining as enlightening. I appreciate what you have written and that you are doing it. We all have so much to read and adding new substacks means more time reading than writing or acting. Novelty can often justify the rabbit holes we go down but do remember we all have too much to read-every day- with the constant corruption and devastation to rights and rule of law, not to mention the environment and any semblance of world stability. I think losing subscribers is par for the course when you are writing about the sins of the elite, but also, complaint is itself a form of poverty and personal complaint seems unbecoming- even if you write it entertainingly. We often avoid the beggars at the stop signs. You may find people avoiding reading that asks for money. I get at least 10 texts a day asking for money for candidates as I gave to many during the last election to try and save us from republican hell. It gets annoying and makes me feel bad that I cannot fund all the good candidates and causes. Feeling bad makes people delete things.
Just giving you a little psychology here and I hope it finds you moving toward healing as you clearly need it, doctor or not. God is the kingdom within you and I think you know this and it is why you shifted careers to honor your expression of the divine, truth.
One last thing- it's a shame your parents have not read the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Luis, but you should. Don't take your dad's declaration personally as it is not a use of impeccability with his word; it is not him doing his best, and it assumes much. All four agreements we should have with ourselves were violated by your dad's blame. Blame and shame vibrate low. Don't take on that judgment! I remember my mom being against me going to law school- Don't you need to feed your family? Yep, and I will do it better in three years with a career that lets me contribute by being my best version of myself. Stay on task, whatever you think is prayer. As Shakespeare seems to have said: tis nothing so but thinking makes it.
among other things, He doesn't want us getting too comfortable here. We look for a city not made with human hands.