The Interview

At this point, after the first European trip, the second European trip, and the family reunion and USA, I have to admit, I’m kind of done with writing out my own personal adventures. Going to the reunion was a real eye-opener. I don’t tag or advertise my blog, pretty much telling everyone that it’s just a place for draft material to show family and friends what I’m working on. Well, I don’t have any family or friends who read the blog except for my mother, so I’ve recently learned, so I’m getting to the point where I am done spending time with this stuff. I did promise that I would write out this trek to Israel, though, in case the Jewish Agency or the Israeli government have any interest. That being the case, let’s knock out another post. The trip is actually turning out to be quite a message from God. I hope to get a little further unfolding the story with this installment.

The last post, France, ended on a high. This one contains a bit of a fall, but it starts off fun if we begin with the bike riding. Actually, heading out from Marseille started out with a train ride, but just one. I was able to catch one more regional train down to Perpignan near the Spanish border.

I ended up staying outside of town in a kind of equivalent to an “airport hotel” that wasn’t anything to take a picture of. The hotel didn’t have a laundromat, and asking the guy up front how to do laundry looked daunting. Remember, I do not speak the language of this country. Not wanting to bother with all the difficulties of foreign language laundry, I did things old school.

I headed out toward Spain bright and early, however.

The guy I met on the train, Eric, suggested I visit Cadaques if I had the chance. It just so happens that I did, and I thought it was cool, though I must confess that I’m not sure anything on earth can beat Collioure, Port-Vendres, Barynuls-sur-Mer, or Cerbere in terms of sheer Mediterranean splendor.

Mediterranean Spain did not disappoint, however.

And that friends, is how we end a particularly spectacular leg of an utterly otherworldly bike trip. The trip did not end, though. In fact, the trippiness of the trip did not end. But, the King up High ordained that I would not do a whole lot more cycling. I stopped up north of Barcelona for a week in a resort community on the Catalan coast called Malgrat del Mar. I’ve often wondered if there were any sort of meaning or spiritual significance behind that name, Malgrat del Mar, which essentially means “Badthanks of the Sea.” I’ll let you know when I know what it means.

This place reminded me of the various tourist beach communities that I saw on the Gulf Coast of the USA. All the details were different, but the overall vibe was the same. Lots of tourists, beach strip. Here, though, instead of the Canadian snowbirds and latino tourists with a smattering of those from all over wanting to see a little of the US beach, this was more like a ton of Russian and Dutch tourists everywhere. I was frankly shocked at the Netherlands influence.

It was all over. Dutch ice cream shops, Dutch restaurants, Dutch hotels. The Dutch were everywhere. My curiosity was piqued that this little country in Europe with a population of ten million was everywhere, but I didn’t see the same kind of visibility from Israel, another country close by with a population of ten million. I also didn’t see all the Norwegian influence one would expect since that place only has ten million people and seems to top every list of the most awesome country in the world that anyone puts together. What was it about this connection between Holland and the Catalan coast? In Mannheim, in Germany, I had met this really cool Dutch guy that I continued to chat with for a lot of the trip. Could it possibly be that there were Dutch businesses and signs everywhere because the Dutch are significant to me? Such a thing is possible if God is writing the universe around me as my own personal story, as least for me, as he is also writing the universe around everyone around me as their personal story for them.

I shudder to bring it up, but, well, I may just sheepishly have to admit that there is a Dutch girl in my past who I never really got to know but who affected me powerfully for a very long time and in very many ways before fading from my purview. Noah van Ouwerkerk. That chick already has a couple of hundred thousand words spilled on the table in her honor, not a single one of which she acknowledged, so I guess we will leave her where we left her, far in the past. Just saying, I was seeing Dutch everywhere and noted that the Dutch have a kind of place in my heart, particularly at that time.

Now when I got to Malgrat del Mar something strange happened. I could tell that within my soul a powerful force had been brewing that was wanting to tell me: “you need rest.” In Malgrat del Mar, I acted on that, but perhaps not in a way that I would have expected or commended. Here comes the point in the post where I am going to have to tell you that I did something stupid. In order to rest, for some reason unbeknownst to me, my unconscious mind picked some sins to fall into that would somehow represent rest for me: wine, porn, and cigarettes.

I myself really can’t explain why I chose to let it all out, to let my guard down, specifically by engaging in these three fallacies of the human condition. Yes, people have vices, and quite often some aspect of resting from the vigilance of doing things well involves not guarding against those vices. Yes, I myself can recall numerous instances in life where relaxing and letting my guard down has resulted in this or that vice creeping into my behavior, or some unfortunate event that is best described by the negative effects of some vice that had worked its way into my pattern of activity.

There was something a little unusual about this, however. It wasn’t a matter of one sin popping up. Nor was it an issue of some seriously dangerous personal failing causing life to careen out of control. Frankly, I can say that from a certain perspective I am a little disappointed in myself. I mean, I’m Jonathan Bailey. Intensity is the name of my game. If I am going to sin, I would expect to rob banks or something. But booze, porn, and smokes? These are like some kind of stereotypical victimless (except for oneself) sins that people tend to fall into to no particular effect.

In retrospect, though, I can see how God was operating. It looks as though I was meant to fall into into some kind of sin in order to continue the spiritual lessons of the trip. Let me explain. At the outset of this trip I set out to describe an arc of personal redemption for myself against the backdrop of my own personal trauma: the devastation of women. As I have been describing that, however, a certain spiritual tension has been creeping into my descriptions that is as old as creation itself.

In spirituality there is the perspective that life is whatever we make it, and whatever we believe is the way it is. If we believe the mountain will move, it will move. On the other hand, however, there is the notion that we are characters in a story written by God with meaning, and what happens to us is a reflection of the meaning that God is writing into our lives. It would seem that a number of the adventures of my life have been showing me that these two perspectives are not entirely incompatible. That is, that we do as we are inspired to do, and this forms our reality around us, our personal perspective and world view, and this in fact to some degree effects the objective reality around us, and also, we can see that our actions ultimately form stories that contain meaning that we would never have guessed, indicating that our fates are ordained by a sovereign God.

That is, we can look at the life of a guy who gets mugged every time he leaves the house and think that perhaps he is just dreaming up a life of getting mugged everywhere. But in my case, can we say that I just dreamed up getting mugged on my ex-wife’s birthday, the same day that a Prime Minister significant to me got hammered by a President that is significant to me? I can’t be the author of that story. I had no idea that such was the case until I looked at a calendar weeks after the events took place.

Now after the events of the previous weeks we can see that I’d been laid low. God humbles the proud and exalts the humble. Further, I am on this long, multi-year trek to Israel, and had been encountering myriad difficulties. So from a spiritual perspective, there are two reasons that after the impossibly unlikely evenings of misery in Germany and Hungary, I would have the incredibly positive, miraculous experience in Marseilles with Deborah and the Jewish Agency. Also, despite the tales of women and wine in the previous posts, I had, in a general sense, been living a life of ultrahealthiness and clean living of a bicycle guy on an intercontinental ride. So basically, I had been doing rather well, but had been taking licks, and this resulted in an incredible blessing in Marseille.

It just looks in retrospect like the next chapter in the story was designed to show me how things go when I have no confidence that I am doing the right thing. I had fallen into these common sins in Malgrat del Mar, so from a psychological perspective, I would expect to have a negative self-image and would expect that the world would treat me poorly because we see ourselves in the world. Stated far more elegantly, simply, and clearly from the theistic perspective: I was doing bad, so I should expect God to come after me with a baseball bat. That is, in religion, we tend to think things will go better for us when we do better.

Remember the Widow of Zerephath?

And she said to Elijah, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance and to cause the death of my son!

1 Kings 17:18

Here the widow seems to be saying that her guilt is causing misfortune for her. In a similar vein, the majority of the book of Ezekiel can be described as a giant rant from the Almighty to the point that bad things are happening to Israel and will happen to Israel because Israel is doing bad things. This Jewish phenomenon described in the Hebrew scriptures is actually echoed in the New Testament as well.

Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.”

John 5:14

Now when we look to the eastern religions and find concepts like karma, we see the relationship between the mind and the universe described as some sort of system of universal order. These sorts of descriptions are also not foreign to the Torah, however. The primary difference is that this system of moral order is a creation of an omniscient God.

Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in His image did God make man.

Genesis 9:6

So what we are talking about is not simply Jewish, Judeo-Christian, or Abrahamic. This is an effect of world religion. It’s how the mind operates. We have just described it differently in our different spiritual traditions. And so this being the case, as I in my personal exhaustion fell to this set of common vices, bad things should start happening to me. This is in fact what happened.

Now this post is going to be a rambling mess. To describe what happened in Spain I think I am going to want to go on a big, long review of some of my personal history. It will probably ruin the post in terms of its general readability, but with this one we are going to cover some philosophical territory that has been at play throughout this trip but hasn’t really been described. To describe it, I guess I am going to dig into some of my background. My apologies. Bear with me. I’m going to have to address the subject of women that has been a feature in all this writing and on this trip.

Okay, so when I was in the Army, women comprised about 15% of the service, but they could not serve in Infantry or Armor, and they could not serve in combat units at low echelons. Therefore, although they amounted to only 15% of the Army population, infantry units were 0% female, but high echelon support units, like the intelligence brigades I was serving in, could be even 50% female. Now I had the opportunity to serve in a unit where I was the only male officer. I had just come back from a combat tour, at which point I went through a divorce. My female colleagues treated me like an evil male, ruining everything about me in the process. As a result, now, thirteen years after getting my PTSD diagnosis, I am hardly bothered by war movies, guns, or loud noises. Those triggers are very infrequent, and I have dealt with them fairly well. Women, however, are still everywhere and are very often quite vicious, so I still have issues there.

Add to this that I have suffered significant losses in my life but always had one person who was my one and only partner in all things. At least since the Fire Girl went off to live her own life. My soulmate on earth was my daughter Alia. Well, just before this trip, as if Satan were calling a cavalry charge against me, my daughter disowned me. And just to make the whole thing a conspicuous issue of spirituality, she disowned me for sending rude texts to her future mother-in-law, who is a person who has caused her a lot of problems, and she really hasn’t liked very much for a lot of their relationship. So in other words, the Robin to my Batman, the Tonto to my Lone Ranger, flushed me down the toilet for being hostile to someone she doesn’t even like. Utterly unlikely. And I haven’t even gotten into the absolutely utterly improbable and in fact impossible details of the event. In describing that event, I can only say that in December 2024 I suffered an absolutely impossibly perfect multi-megaton nuclear bombing of my soul. That is how I started this trip. “I lost my only friend” was a powerful line from an old classic Wallflower’s song, One Headlight.

Note that bicycles have one headlight. It was time to head home…wherever that was going to be. But let’s return to our story…

As a reaction to this, for his part, over the course of this trip God put in front of my path the most incredibly wonderful women that I have ever run across. Vale Peng, Laura Gomez, Gigidudu, the cycling chicks of Bratislava, the Salzburg girls, and even the divine intervention of my Jewish Agency counselor Deborah have all been received by me as healing salves from God above. I went on this trip to do something for God, and took a number of bruises for God, even to the point of getting punched in the head to the effect of making me privy to a conversation with an angel…or so one could say. Thus, one could say that I’ve been humbled, earned some cred, and God threw me a bone with the miraculous blessing of the Jewish Agency office in Marseille.

But then, there I was in Magrat del Mar with a pack of Marlboroughs in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. I’m not lying. An intercontinental bicycle tourer. I told myself I was flat on my back, and I was just going to have to pull a Margaritaville.

And then, as I mentioned previously, I got in touch with one of the Bratislava cyclist chicks, and it turned out that she was not a wonderful soul healer after all.

So now that I have fallen victim to a handful of vices that no cyclist should ever do, my train of wonderful woman healers came to an end. I was back in the world of heathen satanic Lillith monsters. I’m not going to put that whole conversation on this post. The screenshot above was just one of the many insane and outrageous things she said. To tell you the truth, the only reason I put that screenshot up there is to prove that she is a real person and that her name is Julia. That will become important at some other time. I’ll just post one screenshot of my response.

Another thing that happened was an increase in “technodemon” activity. That is, my problems with technology increased. I’ll have to try to dig up at some point screenshots of my friend Brad leaving a WhatsApp group I added him to and Brad telling me he has no idea what WhatsApp is. And there were friend requests from people who didn’t send me friend requests.

So, I am back in the world of a gynophobe plagued by witch-women and having technodemon problems. So, one must ask, did I get there because I was smoking, drinking, and watching x-rated videos?

Now let’s get back to the Israel issue. After getting my passport looked at in Marseille, I only had one document left to complete. The second affidavit of personal status. It had to be notarized, I was told that could be done at an Israeli consulate, and I had experienced the blessing of finding out that there was a consular mission in Barcelona. Well, when I set about to write them about getting a notary, they promptly wrote back that I would have to get that taken care of in Madrid.

Now think about this. In the USA a person can become a notary with just a few hours of class. I doubt the process is terribly more involved in Israel or Europe. Also in the USA you can get a notary from pretty much any bank, several stores, and many government offices. Now, the government of Israel is pretty strapped for resources. It is a fairly socialized country, and the place has absolutely exorbitant security needs. Why Israel has a mission in Barcelona seems like a question that should be answered. And to that add that I think there needs to be an explanation for why the government of Israel is paying for a consular mission that does not have the capacity to notorize a piece of paper.

Now the Israeli consulate in Madrid does actually state on its website that it provides notarization.

From the above, the embassy provides both notaries and apostilles.

It also says appointments are made by e-mail. Now I had sent e-mails to the Madrid consulate back in 2021, and they didn’t bother responding. So this time I e-mailed them and courtesy-copied a dozen people, including the Jewish Agency. This time they did respond that they do not provide notaries for foreign nationals. Even Jewish foreign nationals. Even foreign who have been instructed to get notaries from Israeli consulates by the Jewish Agency.

Honestly, none of it made any sense. The only thing that was clear is that I went from Jewish Agency offices growing up out of the ground in Marseille to now being unable to get a notary from a country with two Israeli consulates. Kids, if you are a cyclist, lay off the wine and cigarettes. And steer clear of smut no matter who you are. It’s like, my sins were breaking my faith. Letting the devil at me. That sort of thing. You know the blessings and the curses at the end of Deuteronomy. Stay in line, stick close to God, and you’ll buy a field and someone else will plant you a garden on it for free. Try to have a kid with your wife, and she will pop out twins. You’ll get more out of things than the work you put into them. But if you get out of line, you’ll have kids but they’ll be slaves in someone else’s house. Plant a field, nothing will grow. Sell yourself as a slave, nobody will want to buy you. Everything takes more work than it should. This is the lesson that I was learning from this little uncharacteristic inability to resist temptation from bush league sins.

Anyway, with all the difficulties of the notary, I ended up at one point sending off one of my hysterical e-mails to the LA office of the Jewish Agency, and the answer basically came back, look, Mr. Bailey, you have that ship back to the US in a couple of weeks, just take care of everything there. The only thing you need to worry about is your interview that we can do on Zoom just before you head back.

So with that, I was basically done. There was nothing left to prevent my Margaritaville. Wanting to get back into shape, though, and to put my vices behind me, I booked a sports hostel in Barcelona. I figured I would do nothing but ride my bike around. The bike cures a lot for me. If I get out of shape, just hop on that bike, cough up a lung, and then cigarettes, or chocolate cakes, or whatever is plaguing me go away right then.

So, after a week in Malgrat del Mar I rode into Barcelona to the sports hostel. However, when I got there, they told me I couldn’t store my bicycle there. I would have to store it outside! That is the most outrageous request I have ever received from a European hotel or hostel. This is one of the most active cycling cultures in the world. It’s common knowledge that bicycle thieves in black vans and buzz saws regularly prowl the parking lots of hotels and hostels looking for bicycles to steal. My $4,000 carbon-frame endurance road cycle would be the first one spotted and taken. There was just no way a hostel could make that request. And a hostel for athletes to boot!

Despondent, I contacted Jarret, the guy I met in Budapest who told me that he, just by chance, had a place in Barcelona. He said from the start, before I could even make a request, that I could keep my bike at his place. He would only be in town for a few more days, but at least I could check in to the hostel. In this day and age of online reservations from companies with which you have never spoken to a human being and nobody actually knows who you are, I just knew that trying to cancel the reservation would not go in my favor. Actually, I was not even able to get through to customer service. Hostelworld, the app I use, does not have chat customer service, and there is no number to call. This is the way of app-based travel in the 21st century. Everyone offers all these great services, and you hope that everything goes right when you use them, but when something goes wrong, don’t expect to even be able to get anyone on the phone, and even if you do, don’t expect anyone to look out for you. You’ll just have some chatbot tell you you’re screwed and that will be it.

So the bike went to Jarret’s, and then after he left, I ended up taking it to the local Trek store where Justo did a much-needed level two service on it. I let them know I would pick up the bike the day before I sailed back to the USA. So, the margaritaville did not end. Well, I moved from a solo hotel room to a hostel with roommates, so Xvideos went by the wayside, but I was still sipping wine from dawn till dusk and huffing on the cancer sticks.

In the hostel I ran into these three super cool (and beautiful) English chicks who had come into town to go to the Primavera Sound concert. That concert featured mostly big poppy names like Charlie XCX and whatnot, but I pointed out that I noted Wolf Alice playing, a favorite band of mine. That impressed one of girls, and we would have cool exchanges here and there when I’d see them in the room.

I was indeed sad not to see Wolf Alice with these lovely young girls, but after Budapest, I declared that I would not be going out at night anymore. I went out partying and having fun with the kids in that city and woke up the next morning getting a CT scan. I just wasn’t going to go out at night anymore for the rest of my life. I went out partying in Budapest, and Satan tried to kill me. He lost his Jonathan Bailey privileges.

As time goes on, I become untemptable. I don’t want the temptations that this world has to offer. Don’t invite me to parties from here on out. Been there, done that, Satan tried to kill me. Don’t put girls in front of my face. Been there, done that. Satan tried to kill me. Don’t stand there with a plate of drugs. Been there, done that. Satan tried to kill me. Come to me with a tempting plate of fruit after I’ve killed Satan. Then we’ll talk. Then I’ll enjoy. Until then, I have no interest. I have interest in less and less these days as it becomes clearer and clearer that the only real solution to life’s fundamental problems is a heaven and an earth for which Satan is a bad memory. Until I get to that state and place, I’m not interested in terribly much else.

One thing I do kind of regret about that time in Barcelona, though, was that I met these two guys, Noa and Carsen, who turned out to be Jewish, but I didn’t do anything with them either! I was literally too beaten down to do anything. I was either taking my afternoon nap when they were in the room, or I was just about to head to sleep when they were about to go out. I didn’t really talk to anybody pretty much that whole time in Barcelona. People are dangerous. And I just needed some sleep, do the interview with the Jewish Agency, and get on the ship.

Even so, doing nothing but wandering around the beach in Barcelona I did see a couple of things that would blow your mind if I told you about them, but they are complex and involved stories, so I am going to skip them. This post has gotten huge, and I need to tell you about the interview that I finally did have just before I got on the ship to leave.

First, the interview was on Zoom, so I got all my computer stuff together as early as I could thinking that some kind of computer problem was going to get the interview cancelled. There were more technodemons than usual at that time, remember. However, just as I had been told beforehand, five minutes before the interview I got an e-mail to the zoom link. I didn’t even have to check the junk folder. I was shocked.

Now, when the interview started, things went south from the start. The first substantial question I was asked after the basics of my name and age and all was: “so tell me about your relationship with Yeshua.” Pay attention to the wording there. You know evangelical Christians tend to tout the “personal relationship” kind of thing as opposed to devotion or obedience or affiliation. And she said, in English, “Yeshua” instead of “Jesus.” Yeshua is the Latinization of ישוע, the Hebrew name for Jesus. Messianic Jews, their gentile hangers on, and some Hebrew roots Christian types tend to say Jesus’ name that way as a Hebraism that they tend to use in their adoration of Hebrew culture. There are even sects of them who claim that saying Jesus’ name any other way, in any language at all, is some kind of sin against God. They do this because human beings pretty much always need to spend as much energy as they can focusing on the least important things they can.

My response was: “He is a valid messianic candidate.”

My interviewer looked at me and said, “what kind of answer is that?” to which I shrugged and gave a “what kind of a question is that?” look. I mean, if Jesus is indeed this superbeing type messiah that I have been writing about, king of the multiverse and all, then he must have maybe 20 billion subjects, right? I mean, I do suppose there is a chance he could know me by name, as a king is going to know his knights, and I am indeed the weirdest person in the multiverse, so that has to earn me some kind of notoriety somewhere, maybe among the heavenly host, as the population of the earth does a fantastic job of pretending I don’t exist. Anyway, even if he can think of a hundred things at once, I think it may be difficult for him to give me terribly much personal attention. Even he seems to recognize this.

See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven.

Matthew 18:10

Note he doesn’t say, “don’t give my people a hard time or I will come after you.” He says, “don’t give my people a hard time, as their angels will send God after you.”

I mean, I am certain Jesus was or is real, and I am certain he is in heaven. If when I get there, he is on a throne and I am not, I will kneel. But I am just not going to be one of those types to say, “let me tell you about my personal relationship with Yeshua. But the structure of the question told me that they were hunting Messianics, and they were thinking I was one. This was not good. And, in accordance with the above, I should not have expected it to be, being in “dirty sinner mode” at the time of the interview. The curses of Deuteronomy should have been in full swing, and that was looking to be the case.

From there attention turned to my conversion, and that put me further down the drain. I was grilled about the signatories on the certificate, about which I didn’t know much. I insisted everything about my conversion was genuine, thorough, and in accordance with Reform standards, but things were just not looking too bright at that point in the interview.

Then something amazing happened. The interviewer got some kind of a notification on her computer screen to her left that took her attention for a short second. When she resumed, everything went absolutely differently. From there we did continue a variety of theological topics, and she became convinced that I do not believe a man can be God, that Jesus could be God, that I do not ascribe to a variety of Christian doctrines such as Trinity or, most especially in my case Replacement Theology. From there we finally got off the subject of religion.

For my part I was surprised at the intensity of concentration on religious belief. For a guy like me, going to Israel alone and for ideological reasons, the question of whether I would just show up, collect my citizenship, and leave would be on their minds, I’d think. I mean, it has been on mine. Of course my trek to Israel being a six-year journey of misery and obstacles has deeply conditioned me against any sort of triviality in this matter. It is no stunt, and I’d be stupid not to make everything I can out of it as I have sacrificed much of my middle age to it. Though I have at times thought about what I would do if I got there and found myself unable to make progress on any sort of career or social situation.

When I lost Alia I encountered a song that not only described my personal situation perfectly at the time and provided motivation to start this bicycle tour, but also contained a line that sums up a lot of this question.

Now that you know it’s nowhere
What’s to stop you coming home?
All you gotta do is go there
Then you’ll really realize what’s going down

Graham Nash, Better Days

For me, there is a huge component of “let’s see what happens” at the bottom of all this. I certainly don’t know how it’s going to roll out. And that’s what we pretty much spent our time on for the rest of the interview, and we had a great time talking about it. We really had a fun conversation talking about getting into entertainment or academia, getting back in touch with old acquaintances, and learning the language. I even ended the interview by saying a few sentences in Hebrew and talking about my excitement to finally get fluent in this language that is only spoken in that one country. (I’ve always learned languages by immersion – I have no idea how to sit on a porch in Scottsdale with Duolingo and actually learn a foreign language.)

So with all this, I want to focus on that pivotal moment when she looked at her computer screen. I have no idea the role it played. It could have been a message from Benjamin Netanyahu or Jaron Varsano or some secret benefactor somewhere telling her to go easy on me. That would be a trip. I would love to know what could have been behind that. On the other hand, it could have been a message from her husband reminding her to get milk on the way home from work, serving only as a short distraction. I have no idea the role it played other than from that split second, it was like a different interview. Frankly, it seems to have been the spirit of God just changing the fundamental nature of the course of events.

That’s how I see it. And that brings me to the ultimate point of the philosophical dimension of this post. Over the last several posts in this series I’ve been concentrating on the relationship with the idea that reality is simply what we believe it is being present not only in the occult and in psychology, but also in religion. Faith moves mountains. Generally this idea is contrasted with the idea that there is an objective and immutable truth, and particularly an idea of an objective truth that contains meaning. I’ve particularly been concentrating on the phenomenon of whether things have a tendency to go against a person or in a persons favor. And of course I’ve been highlighting the phenomena in my life of my particular history with women as well as the characteristic of this six-year trek to Israel that involves everything pertaining to the voyage Israel becoming more and more difficult while everything else in my life becomes more and more splendid, this itself becoming something of a temptation or obstacle.

In this case, with these events, in this post, we see that falling into this pattern of vices did seem to result into the universe turning against me with respect to good experiences with the ladies and also with respect to Israel, to getting where I want to go. It would seem that whatever guilt, shame, or self-hatred I may have been nursing down in the unknown depths of my soul existed in a relationship with the Barcelona consulate being useless, the Madrid consulate being useless, and the first five or ten minutes of my Aliyah interview being a nightmare. But then, it would seem that something outside the system of my mind, a divine blessing, a rescue, precipitated by my interviewer completely switching gears after glancing off to the side and making the wonderful. Like the Almighty God saying, “look, little guy, I’m not going to let you screw this up because of this little slip.”

For I am mindful of the plans I have made concerning you—declares the LORD—plans for your welfare, not for disaster, to give you a hopeful future. When you call Me, and come and pray to Me, I will give heed to you. You will search for Me and find Me, if only you seek Me wholeheartedly. I will be at hand for you—declares the LORD—and I will restore your fortunes. And I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places to which I have banished you—declares the LORD—and I will bring you back to the place from which I have exiled you.

Jeremiah 29:11-14

I was exiled in September 2019. Let’s see what happens. But from where I sit, right now, it looks like there is a plan going on, activities taking place, that far supersede the meanderings of my own psychology. It looks like a story is being told. Perhaps even a peculiar chapter the greatest one ever.