The lesson of being lead in the wilderness for 10 years

I called my confessor priest and good friend Fr. Jim the other day and he mentioned he had brought me up in a recent bible study. The study was in the book of Genesis however one of the participants skipped forward to the book of Exodus. The parishioner inquired of Fr. Jim why God would allow the Hebrews to wonder aimlessly for 40 years in the desert. The parishioner went on to question why God would seemingly abandon the Hebrew people in the desert for 40 years. In response my friend explained that God had not abandoned the Hebrew people. He was always with them while they were in the desert, but they needed to grow and learn about faith while before they could enter the promised land.

Fr. Jim then relayed to the class a bit about his friendship with me, how we met and some of the things that I have gone through in the past 10 years.

Fr. Jim and I met when he was still an Orthodox Deacon about 11 years ago, sometime around 2011. We had initially met on-line due to my being an iconographer and from Pittsburgh. The first time we met in person was when he and his family were visiting the area. I did not realize the first time we met how deep and close of a friendship we would form over the next decade. It is only with hindsight that I can see the process which led to my now ex-wife leaving me in 2014 and us divorcing in 2016 had already begun by the time I met Fr. Jim and his family. This new friend of mine would be my guide through the darkness and wilderness that I would soon find myself in. A darkness which lasted until only a few weeks ago.

The darkness was the combination of results of some bad decisions that I had made in life and the actions of others which resulted in a nasty storm hitting my life. In hindsight I can honestly say I would have been lost without the guidance of Fr. Jim. He definitely helped me to not lose my faith during this time, no matter how many times I thought I would. There were times when I seriously thought I would lose my faith in God and if was not for the guidance of my friend I might have been tempted to. People can talk all they want about how strong their faith is, but the real test of faith is when you have nothing to go on but faith. To answer the ages old question of faith vs. works, it is what you do when you have nothing but faith to go on that is the true sign of your faith.

Let me explain: My faith began being tested as early as 2009. The test at that time caused my now ex-wife and I to change parishes, which had an immediate blessing. Once we moved parishes I began working on my temper and some other elements of what I would later learn is autism with then Fr. John, now Bishop JOHN of the Antiochian Church. However, that test of 2009 would lay the foundation for further negativity coming from the priest on the Southside of Pittsburgh. The consequences of a bad decision I made in 2007 began rearing their ugly heads from 2012 on. First the TV was turned off due to non-payment, and never turned back on. Then in 2014 it became clear to me that my now ex-wife had been playing games with the water company to keep the water on without paying for it and when the lady who the now ex-wife had been playing this game with retired the water was turned off with a $4,000.00 bill. Two months after the water was turned off, the now ex-wife jumped ship.

Rewinding to 2013 the day I got the $ to get my car inspection, insurance and registration up to date which had all expired I got pulled over by a cop before I could ever make it to my insurance agents office. Car was impounded and I was in a state of shock. The now ex and I walked over to the office of the priest on the Southside which was a block or two from where this happened. I was barely able to speak I was in such a deep shock. He helped us out with getting home and all but while we were waiting for our ride to show something happened that would set a nasty set of dominoes in motion. The maid of honor from our wedding was there doing some charity work and amazed at the fact that I could barely speak and was completely emotionless. She mentioned my dogs and I was able to crack the tiniest of smiles which brought the response from her “well at least something makes you happy.” Looking back in hindsight this was the beginning of the end of my marriage. From that point forward she began spending quite a bit more time with my now ex-wife. It was only after the ex-wife left in 2014 while I was on a small vacation to my parents' house that it became clear that the maid of honor from my own wedding was instrumental in my ex-wife leaving. It was through her influence and the influence of the woman who used to be my favorite aunt that my ex-wife left. She didn’t even have the decency to tell me to my face, she just put it in a two-page letter that she left on my desk the day I returned from a 5-day trip to my parents' house near the ocean.

That day in 2014 when I came home to a 2-page letter, 12 hours before I had a wedding to photograph, I thought I had faced the worse. But no, that was not the end, just the beginning of the troubles. And yet that very day when my entire world came crashing down and the end of everything I had known happened, new life had already sprouted. A fellow photographer who I had met earlier that year and was a cigar smoker invited me to have a cigar with him about two weeks later. This began the process of us regularly meeting to have a cigar and drink together and build a strong friendship right at the very time it was needed in my life. My next-door neighbor who was elderly and had been distant to me and the now ex-wife quickly opened up to me once he realized she was gone, and we soon became good friends. Fr. Jim was still a deacon at the time, but he understood the trust issue I had with the church. On top of trust issues from priests who tried to avoid paying me for icons I had painted for them in past years, the priest from the Southside was directly in my now ex-wife leaving and might have even gotten the bishop involved based on false accusations he made against me. Knowing this Fr. Jim took it upon himself to make sure I had guidance and had not lost total trust in the church and faith in God. So even in the darkest of times God made sure I had someone there to guide me. Just like he did with the Hebrews in Exodus.

The onset of the divorce, however, was only the beginning of the waves that came crashing on my life. I had several dogs at the time and in 2015 my favorite dog and best friend in the whole world died of anemia. I lost my house due to foreclosure and then in 2016 my now ex-wife sold her house out from under me for far less than it was worth. She was in a monastery and did not need the money, so she did not care what she got for the house. This was despite the hundreds of hours my dad and I had spent renovating it for her. I was forced to move at the wrong time of the year to find a place to live. I found one which was well out of the city and would let me have my dogs with me. It was not the best place, but it was all I could find at the time.

During the three-year period between 2014–2017 I was involved in three separate car crashes, none of which were my fault. Each of these car crashes resulted in a major concussion. The only real tie I maintained with the church during this time was with Fr. Deacon Jim. My faith in God was tested to the point of near breaking with each new thing that happened. With each new thing that happened I dropped further and further into a nasty state of depression that had begun around 2012 and did not end until January 2022. And yet, no matter how thin my faith was worn, no matter how many times I was tempted to give up on life, God always made sure that something would pull me through the darkest moments. I do not claim it was my own strength because there were countless times when I was ready to quit. But I never did.

At the same time all of this was going on, I was beginning to understand that I am autistic and that my struggles with the many challenges of autism was the cause of many of my troubles in life. Learning that I was autistic was a blessing because it helped me to understand the nature of my struggles in life. In all of this darkness going on around me there was growth. It was not easy growth, and it was not without pain. But it was much needed growth.

In 2017 Fr. Deacon Jim was ordained a priest after he had been a deacon for many years and had practically given up on ever being ordained a priest. He and I joke to this day that he was ordained priest for the sole purpose of watching after my soul. The truth is without his guidance during this time I would have been lost. He helped me out spiritually as well as in a material manner on countless occasions, and always did so with a smile and without ever thinking about what was in it for himself. Yes, there were 2 local priests who I trusted, but it is different when your good friend is a priest.

What seemed like the darkest hour of the trials came in 2019 in the summer. I had been driving for Lyft for about four years when that summer my car began having a whole host of issues that required expensive repairs. The car problems began to affect my ability to drive and make money so that the car payments fell 3 months behind, and the car was repossessed. At the time this looked like the end of the world to me. With no car, how would I get to work? This was one of those moments when I was most tempted to give up on life. And yet I was encouraged to not give up and trust God. I was not sure how things would work out, but I found the tiniest bit of faith to hold on to. And then BIG things occurred. Fr. Jim texted me telling me that a member of his parish had donated a 20-year-old vehicle to his parish to give to someone in need. He was giving this to me. Shortly after this I was doing a paid photoshoot with an old friend who I work with from time to time. She found out that I no longer had the job with Lyft and told me her former employer was hiring and she still had good relations with a few of the supervisors there. She used those friendships to help get me an interview and a job with the company, even though I had no experience in this field. This was the beginning of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

I got the job with the company. I have had 3 promotions with since I started in fall 2019 and still work for them. Losing my job with Lyft ended up being a blessing because of covid hitting in 2020 and totally disrupting life as we know it. Once covid began there was no way people could make the kind of money doing ride share that they were making the year before when everyone was still freely going places and entertaining themselves on the weekend. So, looking back now, it seems God got me out of that job at just the right time, even though at that time it looked like the end of the world. This same friend who helped me get the job also found for me online a cocker spaniel puppy who was in need of a new home, and through the grace of God work at the same time was offering bonuses for overtime that ended up paying for the puppy! This puppy ended up being an almost exact clone of my dog Lambert who had died in 2015.

They say it is darkest right before the dawn and there was one final test that might have been the most brutal of them all. The final test came in 2021 when the duplex I had been living in for 5 years was sold by the owner to a real estate investment company. The house I was living in was not the nicest of places, but at least the old owner was responsive to me. The new company was anything but that. I did not like living there as the house had radiator heat with no air filter, while being situated in an area between two steel mills. Thus, the dust in the house was uncontrollable. There were numerous other issues with the house that never got fixed. This included the shower head not being hooked up which meant I had to take standing baths every day for 5 years. I hated it there, but at least I had a place to live. Things got much worse with the new company that owned the place.

It started with the new owner putting the new lease in my mailbox on June 30th around 6 pm, six hours before I needed to be signed and returned. The people on the other side of the duplex refused to sign and got out immediately. I dragged my feet over fear of moving. In early Oct during a cold spell the furnace would not turn on and the real estate company dragged their feet about getting a guy to come out and fix the furnace. This was the sign to me there was about to be real trouble. One of my neighbors had to have said something to the company because they ended up sending a repair man out much quicker than they planned to do. A few weeks later the breaker to the kitchen tripped while I was making dinner one Sunday night while on lunch break from my work at home job. This did not seem like an issue to me as it happened from time to time over the past 5 years of living there. I went to the basement to reset the breaker and it would not reset. I called my dad who is a retired mechanical engineer and spent his entire career managing maintenance and engineering in steel mills to come help me with the breaker box and he could not fix it. I called the company the next morning on Monday, and they said they would send someone to look at it. It was Weds before the electrical handyman came out to look at the power. I had missed 2 1/2 days of work due to this. The electrical handyman found 1 outlet that was working, enough for me to power my refrigerator and my work computers. However, there was no light. The real estate company promised to have someone come out within two weeks to begin working on the power issue. That person never did show up.

I ended up living in darkness during the two months of the year with the shortest daytime with only camping lanterns for light at night. Again, I my faith was stretched to the limit. I was tempted almost daily to just give up. I have no idea where I found the strength to keep on going. By Dec 1st I had decided enough was enough with the new owners of the house and began preparing to move. Being autistic, I hate change. I resist change at all costs. And yet I was forced to change. And yet this change ended up being the end of the suffering.

Once the move was complete the first week in January something amazing happened. I had been going to counselling since Sept and seeing a psychiatrist to help with my anxiety since May, and yet despite this I was still battling depression that bordered on despair many days a week. Some weeks it was every day. I have the best psychiatrist and best counselor there is and had been making great progress working with these two ladies. Both ladies encouraged me to be patient and not lose trust in the work we had been doing or the work I had been doing over the past 10 years. However, it took the move which I had been trying to avoid for at least 2 years to bring about the end of the suffering and the reward for not losing my faith during the ten years “in the wilderness”. The reward was that once moved the depression almost instantly disappeared. Depression that had lasted for 10 years all of a sudden no longer existed. As if a shroud had been lifted from my life.

I firmly believe the Old Testament story of the Hebrew people being lost in the wilderness for 40 years before entering the Holy Land was an actual event that happened. I believe that God gave them a guide in Moses to keep them from losing their faith. However, at least in my case, that story also is a metaphor for what I have gone through in my own life. Just like the Hebrew people, it was my own actions which brought on the beginning of this ten-year wilderness. I had many things to learn over the past 10 years. It was not fun and often hurt deeply. Growth is never easy. Having faith is often not easy. At the same time God made sure I had a guide in my dear friend Fr. Jim and the many other people he put in my life. However, it was upon me to not lose my faith no matter how dark things got. I thank God that I did not lose my faith. I thank God for all that I have learned in that time. I thank God for all of the help I had making it through this time. I look forward to the life of happiness that I have begun to experience again.

Glory to God!