Chapter 9: The New Me

"Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand" Jeremiah 18:6

I have been a churchgoer since I was nine months old. I grew up in church, but my faith was not really faith; it was routine. The crucifixion did not mean much to me because I truly did not understand what Christ had done.  Though I loved God and tried with my limited human ability to please Him, I failed. 

Then in December 2008, Christ - the very same Christ I had never truly understood - showed up and altered the course of my life. 

There was a radical shift in me, and my eyes opened, but I still had so much to learn. What followed was a continuous journey of discovery and revelation mixed with all sorts of challenges. 

It took me years to realise that the turmoil I went through was part of the learning process. It was both a physical and spiritual journey that gradually transformed the way I saw life.

The challenges did not simply disappear. What changed was my thinking and perception. God, through the Holy Spirit, was building up my faith and teaching me to look at every situation through a Biblical lens, apply Scripture to it and learn how to overcome. 

A Shift in Perception Concerning Money

One of my greatest breakthroughs came when I finally began to understand money. 

As I mentioned earlier, the question of money came back to the table. The 2008 recession continued to affect my finances into 2011/2012. I struggled during that period and, with much difficulty, managed to survive, but I fell behind on some of my bills. 

This time, however, instead of simply panicking, I felt an urge to understand money. And so another journey within the journey began.

Filled with curiosity that seemed greater than the weight I could carry, and with an unmeasured passion, I went on an adventure to discover what money really was. I could barely rest. My mind was constantly searching for answers. 

After work, I spent hours watching videos about the recession because everybody around me was talking about it. People said the banks "did it", but I wanted to understand what that actually meant. I devoured YouTube videos on almost every topic I could find related to money. 

Much of it was difficult for me to understand, and I grasped only a little at first. At one point, I even wondered whether I could create a new monetary system myself. But how? Cryptocurrency was still new to me, and I knew nothing about it. I imagined a system where I could liaise with companies online, work for them, exchange my time for points, and later convert the points into cash. 

Well, that remained only a dream. 

Blogging also came back to mind, but I asked myself: was I going to return to blogging simply for the sake of money? 

I erased the idea. 

What is Money?

For years, between 2012 and 2022, I hunted for an answer. My determination to understand money became so intense that, instead of easing the burden of teh crises I was already going through, it added another weight to what I was carrying.

To me, money had become like a ruthless invisible force. I was fighting something I could not fully understand, and it seemed to fight back.

Yet in spite of the turmoil and the challenges that multiplied around me, I never ceased to pray and worship God.

Then at last the breakthrough came during worship.

The small voice spoke again: 

"The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. The world and they that dwell in it." Psalm 24:1, 

But it did not stop there. The understanding that came to me was: "Everything is mine - people, animals, plants, the oceans, all resources and even what human beings create ultimately comes from what I have provided. 

Suddenly I understood Psalm 24:1 in a way I never had before. There was much more to that verse than I had previously seen. 

Those words were the powerful weapon that tore away the veil covering my understanding of money for years. 

I began to see that whatever we buy and sell ultimately comes from what already belongs to God. The resources are His. The earth is His. We take what exists in His creation, transform it, give it a value and exchange it with one another. 

That discovery was exciting. More than that. I felt free. 

The worries and anxiety I had associated with money began to loosen their grip on me. God shed light on the truth. My perception had shifted, but I still needed time to process what I had discovered. I ruminated on it every day.

I had one hurdle to cross, but another was ahead. 

Around 2024, I walked into a newsagent to buy something and had a brief conversation with a member of staff about money. During our conversation, he casually said:

"Oh, you know, money does not exist."

I agreed with him, but I was still trying to wrap my head around what that really meant.

I had heard the late Dr Myles Munroe make a similar point in one of his sermons on YouTube, but despite everything I had already discovered, I still did not fully understand it.

Later, when I began writing in a diary about my discoveries concerning money from a biblical perspective, another piece finally fell into place. 

I went back to the beginning - to the Garden of Eden.

There was no money.

The simple realisation made me look at everything differently. Money, which had once seemed like this powerful and mysterious force controlling so much of my life, suddenly became much smaller in my eyes.

I realised that money itself was not what I had believed it to be. It was a human concept - a means of exchange to which we had given enormous power and importance. 

That discovery changed my perception completely.

Today I understand that the money I had spent so many years chasing was not what I should have been chasing at all. The world may run on money, and the monetary system human beings have built, but where does the money that comes into our pockets actually come from? What brings it there?

The answer I found was that we must be productive.

Productivity can take many forms. It can mean working as an employee, starting a decent business, selling goods, providing a service, creating content, writing, blogging, or producing videos. In one way or another, we use our time, skills, knowledge or resources to produce something of value. 

And there was one more thing I came to understand about money. 

Money has taken many forms throughout history. Cowrie shells, for example, were used as a medium of exchange in parts of Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands. Salt was once a high-value commodity and was sometimes used in trade, while tally sticks were used for centuries in Medieval Europe, particularly in England, to record debts and payments.

Today, we use coins, paper currency, bank accounts and electronic payments. We use plastic cards to access money or credit without physically handling cash, and, more recently, digital currencies such as cryptocurrencies have introduced yet another way to represent and exchange value. 

The form may change, but the concept remains. 

Of course, it would be very easy if everyone could simply create as much money as they wanted. But if money could be produced without limit and without consequence, it would lose its value.

We cannot simply print our own personal economy into existence. Our personal economy depends on our ability to be productive and create value.

Now that I understand this concept more clearly, I decided to spread the news. 

How? Please read the next chapter

Part 3 - Chapter 8: The Inevitable Turmoil

I failed at everything. 

I distanced myself from my friends, abandoned the prayer group, stopped beating around the bush in my blogging for a while, and withdrew from any activities I was involved in with the NGOs. 

I was tired.

I needed time and space to think. I needed to be alone, and decided I would walk this part of the journey on my own.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, I experienced a sudden awakening in December 2008, and from that point on, my view of the world changed for good. I felt a deep sense of calling, and believed I had a mission to fulfil before departing this earth. 

My purpose had begun to take shape, but many pieces were still missing. 

That was partly why I had been all over the place. I was trying to bring to light what had happened to me, how my views had changed, and how sharing my experience might help others think and make decisions about their lives.

One question worried me. 

What would happen if I died without fulfilling this mission?

I had to do something. 

Then, in early 2018, while getting ready for work, I heard a small voice in my heart.

"Worship me for one hour every day."

I immediately understood it as the prompting of the Holy Spirit. The voice was sweet and soft, yet powerful to shift something inside me as though positioning me for worship. 

There was no question in my mind about what I had experienced.

For those who may not share my faith, I should explain what I mean. As a Christian, I believe that God communicates with us through the Holy Spirit. What I experienced was not an audible voice but something I heard deep within my spirit.

When I received the prompting, I knew what to do, and I did not need a reason; I simply needed to worship God for the sake of worshipping God. 

And my worship journey began.

It became a one-hour daily spiritual exercise. 

At first I did not feel anything extraordinary or see anything changing around me. I simply obeyed. Some days were easier than others. There were days I struggled to keep going, but I understood that I had to rely on faith rather than feeling. 

So I continued. 

About a year later, things began to move. 

But not in the direction I expected. 

My landlord suddenly announced that he wanted to sell the house I had lived in for almost nine years. It happened at a time when finding new accommodation was nearly impossible, and rents were rising. 

I kept praying and eventually found another place to stay with my cat, Fifi. 

That was not the end of it.

Between 2019 and 2021. I moved five times. Sometimes a landlord decided to sell. On other occasions, I discovered that the people subletting a house or apartment did not have permission to do so. 

Each time, Fifi and I had to move again.

It was frightening and exhausting. Finding accommodation was difficult enough; finding somewhere that would also accept my cat made it even harder.

Yet, each time I prayed.

Some of the landlords and landladies did not want pets in their properties, but against all odds, I found favour in their eyes, and they agreed to take Fifi on board.

During those moments, I held on to the words of Psalm 24:1

"The earth is the LORD'S and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell in it."

I believed those words. The earth belonged to God, and wherever I needed to go, He could make a way for me.

So I prayed

And each time I found somewhere that would accept both Fifi and me, I received it as an answer to that prayer.

For me, it was another reminder that even in the middle of the turmoil, God remained faithful.

Then COVID arrived and business closed.

Thankfully, during the period when I couldn't work, government financial support helped me maintain my income until work resumed.

Through all of this, I continued my daily worship.

By then I felt almost as though I had entered a contract: whatever happened around me, I wasn't going to give up praying. 

I was determined in a way I had never been before.

During those years, I also had strange dreams that left me with questions. Some frightened me; others were enigmatic. I wanted answers.

I lost time, money, and at one point my health was seriously affected. There were moments when I wondered how much more I could endure.

Still I continued.

For a long time I had expected circumstances -and sometimes people - to change.

They did not. I did.

What I was going through became a healing process and a resetting of my mind. Through prayer, revelation, understanding and the challenges I faced, I began to see things differently.

The invisible scales slowly began to fall from my inner eyes. 

I began to understand things about myself that I had previously failed to recognise. I could look back at my mistakes and analyse what had gone wrong. Patterns that had controlled me for years were becoming clearer, and I began to understand some of the beliefs behind my actions. 

My understanding of the world around me was also changing. I began to look at life increasingly through a Biblical lens and to understand, according to my reading of Scripture, how the fall has affected humanity and our perception of the world. 

Knowledge and understanding did not come all at once. They unfolded gradually - sometimes through prayer and revelation, sometimes through what I learned, and sometimes through the difficult experiences themselves. 

The storms have come in different forms and sizes. There were times when they discouraged me, distracted me, robbed me of my peace and consumed my time. There were setbacks, but by God's grace, I continued to worship and pray. What I couldn't fully see at the time was that through it all, something was happening inside me:

Transformation.

I was becoming more spiritually mature. Things I had once struggled to understand began to make sense. I could recognise mistakes I had repeated for years and see how some of my beliefs had influenced my decisions.

There were periods when I felt as though I was walking through the valley of the shadow of death. At other times, I felt as though I were passing through the valley of Baca - a dry and difficult wilderness. 

Around 2023, my health also suffered. My blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol level all rose, and it frightened me. It was another difficult period, but by God's grace, I pulled through.

Through everything, I was learning something I had not understood before: surrender.

I learned to submit my whole being - spirit, soul and body - to God. Not once. Not only when I was in trouble. It became something I practice daily.

And it is something I continue to practice today.

came, and businesses were closed. Thankfully, the Irish government took the honourable measure of continuing to pay employees both in teh private sector and the public service three-quarters of their monthly earnings until we resumed duty.

I continued to worship God daily regardless; I was locked into a kind of contract and would not give up praying, no matter what. I was determined like never before. 

I also had dreams and encounters; some were scary, others were enigmatic. I wanted answers. I lost time, money and even my health was once on the line and if it was not for god's grace, I would not have pulled through. 

The situations and the people I expected needed to change did not. I did. 

I was shaken to the core, but I learned. 

Chapter 7: More Revelation About Me

The reason I started blogging, as I mentioned earlier, was to make money - and to make it fast. But after 2008, there was another reason: I desperately wanted blogging to work. My goal was still to make money, but with a purpose attached. 

I won't disclose every detail because it isn't necessary for this story. I will focus only on what matters to this journey. 

Coming from a Born-Again Christian background, I had questions about my religion growing up. At home, my mother, a devoted Bible reader, was also passionate about politics, and she and my brother often engaged in political conversations, including everything related to it, such as finance. 

I can't say whether their conversations influenced me, but around the age of twelve, I began to take an interest in money and in why we were using it. I paid close attention as it passed from one hand to another. I found it intriguing that people were exchanging pieces of paper to obtain their basic needs and started to question it. 

Where did it come from? 

Who decided that we had to use it? 

What would happen if it stopped? 

It was too big a subject for me, so after some time I was tired and left it aside. At the age of fifteen, I began to take another interest in the Book of Revelation, which from time to time gave me sleepless nights. 

The Book of Revelation received my undivided attention for twenty-five years until I had a sudden awakening in December 2008, the very same year the global recession hit everyone. 

Something inside of me changed; I felt revived. I began looking at things differently, and questions I had carried for years came back with new force. The search for answers would continue through the days, months and years that followed.

I was personally affected when the recession happened and had my hours reduced to almost half by my employer at the time. I struggled for some time and was even late on my rent and bills before slowly recovering. But this time, instead of chasing money, the question of money came back to the table, and I had a burning desire to find out what had happened around the recession, since everybody was saying it was the bank's fault. 

What I desperately needed was time. 

My plan was simple: earn a living through blogging, leave my day job and use that freedom to research the questions that had become increasingly important to me. 

So yes, I wanted money. But I was beginning to understand that what I really wanted was enough money to buy me time. 

Now that I had a good reason to blog, I still did not know what to blog about. After my awakening, my life had taken a different course. I knew I had a purpose, but it had not yet taken shape. I was still learning, still searching and still trying to understand. Once again, there was no structure; I was simply discovering the world through a different lens.  

I went back to blogging, but this time it was even worse. Not only did I start new blogs, but I also signed up for different blogging platforms, as if that would somehow earn me money.  

I was beating around the bush with blogging. 

I knew I should not run after money, but what was that one subject that I could be passionate enough to blog about? There was none. When I thought about writing product review articles, I would feel demotivated because there were so many articles on so many products that mine would not stand out. I had no faith at all.

I roamed around for quite a while; I tried other things like creating stuff to sell online. I needed time, space, material... that was too much. It has to be something related to writing or blogging. 

My Housemate Started Blogging

During this period, something happened much closer to home that made me revisit blogging.

My then-housemate worked for a financial company. He was passionate about forex trading and would, from time to time, make a few quid online.

We would chat whenever we happened to be in the kitchen at the same time, and one day the subject of working online came up. He spoke about his trading experience, and I spoke about my blogging experience.

I knew everything about blogging in theory, but I barely put my knowledge to good use.

As far as I knew, blogging had never crossed his mind until I mentioned it to him. Then he decided to start a blog about trading.

Unlike me, he was consistent.

He had a day job, but that didn't stop him. After work, he came home, cooked, showered, and sat down to blog. It became his daily routine.

His bedroom was next to mine, and every evening I could hear his fingers tapping away at the keyboard.

Day after day, he kept going.

For three months.

Then something happened.

He started making money through affiliate marketing. I remember his first earnings being around €250.

That was a blow to my face.

For years, I had believed that it was possible to earn money through blogging. Now the proof was right there in front of me. I didn't need to listen to an Internet guru or read another article telling me it was possible.

It was happening in my own house.

But it wasn't happening to me.

I was amazed, encouraged and angry with myself at the same time.

Of course, I found an excuse.

He was younger than me. He had more strength and energy.

At least, that was what I told myself.

Deep inside, though, I knew there was more to it than that.

I didn't want to return to blogging simply because I had seen someone else making money from it. By then, I knew that if I was going to blog again, I needed to know what I had to say.

I needed something I genuinely wanted to write about.

And I needed to be happy doing it.

By then I had begun to realise that I was, in reality, in love with the idea of blogging but not blogging itself. Now that I genuinely wanted to blog about something meaningful, I had nothing to say. 

Yet blogging was still inside of me as if waiting to come out. It never completely left me.

My search to understand the Book of Revelation continued. I became overzealous and started a prayer group around 2016, joined NGOs, and attended meetings involving minor ethnic communities of Ireland involved in various activities. I was all over the place. I shared my awakening experience with everybody and got mocked and laughed at. I tried my hand at everything and nothing at once. 

All this unfolded over the ten years from 2008 to 2018.

Part 2 - Chapter 6: Why Did I fail With My Blogging Business

The Search

A few weeks had passed, and I was still trying to recover from what had happened to my AdSense account. I felt disheartened and lost hope. I knew that AdSense was not the be-all and end-all of earning money through advertising and affiliate programmes, but it still felt like a fatal blow.

I did not know exactly why my AdSense account had been disabled, but deep down, I knew that my blogging journey as a whole had gone wrong, partly because of how I had approached it. 

It felt like I was chasing money, and ironically, it ran away from me.

To me, it felt as though I had been trying to reap without sowing. I wanted the reward without the labour that should have come before it. Something about that felt dishonest to me. I had refused to be dedicated and constantly looked for shortcuts.

"Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow." (Proverbs 13:11)

I was still fascinated by blogging and the possibility of earning a living from my laptop, eventually leaving my day job. But I did not want to return to blogging with the same motives. Something had to change first. 

I needed a cure.

Looking back, I can compare myself to someone treating one obvious illness only to discover that several other problems are connected to it. Chasing money was the problem I could see most clearly, but it was not the only one. There was perfectionism, overthinking, looking for shortcuts, announcing my dreams before I had achieved them, and something even more basic: I did not really know why I wanted to blog.

My cure was not structured; it came from all directions...

For a long time I paused and reflected. From 2011 onwards, I fought battles within myself - wrong beliefs, laziness, my constant search for shortcuts, and one question that kept returning:

What was I actually trying to achieve through my blogs?

The answers did not come neatly or in any particular order. Neither did the cure. It came from different directions and different sources, sometimes in small pieces and sometimes through sudden realisations.

I read books. I watched YouTube videos. I listened to podcasts and personal stories. Sometimes something one person said stayed with me. At other times, I learned through examining myself.

Little by little, pieces began to come together.

For me, money had become associated with blogging the way sweetness is associated with sugar. How was I supposed to separate one from the other?

Yet somehow, I had to.

How?

Years passed; I began identifying more of my mistakes one after another in a neat sequence. It was a long process of learning, decluttering and challenging some of the beliefs I had carried with me.