I didn't think about it. I just assumed everything I love lasts forever.
Nobody tells you that as a child. You don't sit down and reason your way to it. It's just there — this quiet assumption underneath everything that the people you love will always be there, that the moments you live in won't end, that life will keep being life. You don't examine it. You just live from it.
And then something doesn't last. And the assumption cracks.
Maybe it's a loss you didn't see coming. Maybe it's just time — the strange, unsettling feeling that years are moving faster than they should, that things you remember like yesterday are further away than they seem. Maybe it's just a vague, persistent sense that something isn't right and you can't quite name what it is. You can barely put it into words because you don't actually know what's wrong. You just know something is.
Most people carry that feeling their whole lives and never find language for it. They assume it's anxiety, or restlessness, or just the human condition. They chase things trying to fix it — achievement, relationship, experience, comfort — and the chase never quite works. Not because there's something wrong with them. But because the thing they're feeling is real, and it points to something much deeper than any of those things can reach.
What you're feeling is the echo of what you were made to be.
You assumed everything you love lasts forever because you were designed to live forever. The assumption wasn't naivety — it was memory. Deep in the fabric of who you are, something knows that death and loss and the slipping away of time are not the way things were supposed to go. And that something is right.
This is what the Bible means when it says God set eternity in the human heart.
"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end." Ecclesiastes 3:11 NIV
The ache is not a malfunction. It is a signal. And until you understand where it comes from, nothing else quite works the way it was designed to.
What I didn't understand for most of my life — what most people never get to understand — is that this feeling has a name. It's the feeling of a circuit that has been severed.
And until the circuit is restored, nothing else works the way it was designed to.
The Original Design
To understand what broke, you first have to understand what was there before the break.
God did not create a simple creature. He created a three-part being — spirit, soul, and body — and He designed each part with a specific role. The body interacts with the physical world. The soul — the mind, will, and emotions — processes experience and makes decisions. And the spirit, the innermost part of a person, was designed to be in direct communion with God Himself.
Jesus said something that helps us see this clearly. He said it is better to lose a hand or an eye than to have the whole body thrown into hell. Most people read that and assume He is talking about the physical body. But think about it carefully. If someone loses a limb in this life, does that limb stay separated from them in eternity? Does a person who loses an arm go into judgment missing that arm? No. Jesus was talking about the spirit man — the inner person, the real you. Your spiritual body. The limb He was referring to was physical, but His point was that no physical thing is worth losing your spirit over. Whatever in your physical life is causing you to sin, deal with it. Because it is the spirit man that faces eternity, not the shell of flesh that gets buried in the ground.
And yet the two are not completely separate. What you do with your physical body affects your spirit man. What happens in your spirit affects your physical body. They are distinct but intertwined — designed to work together, with one leading. The flesh and the spirit both affect the other. But only one of them can communicate with God's Spirit. Only one of them was made to lead. And it is not the flesh.
When someone receives salvation, the spirit man is made new. But the physical body — still subject to decay, still aging, still dying — is not given eternal life at that moment. The body still goes into the ground. It is the spirit man that is born again. Which is why Paul says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. The real you — the part of you that God breathed into existence, the part that was designed to commune with Him — that is the part that matters most. And that is the part that needs to be leading.
The design was intentional and ordered: God's Spirit connects to and leads the human spirit. The human spirit, empowered by that connection, leads the soul. And the soul, rightly ordered, governs the body. It's a circuit — a complete loop of life and authority flowing from God downward through every layer of who we are.
When that circuit was live, everything worked. The human being operated exactly as God designed. The spirit man, connected to the source of all life and wisdom, could see clearly. He led rightly. He carried the authority God had delegated to him. He walked in dominion. And because the soul and body were properly led by a spirit connected to God, the whole person functioned the way God intended — as a regent, an image-bearer, a beloved son or daughter walking in relationship with their Father.
"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion...'" Genesis 1:26 ESV
Mankind was created a little lower than God Himself — Elohim — and crowned with glory and honor. The authority delegated to us was governmental. Real. Significant. And it only functioned because the circuit was complete.
The Break
Then came the fall.
When Adam sinned, the consequence was immediate and devastating — not primarily in the physical realm, but in the spiritual one. God had said: "In the day you eat of it, you shall surely die." Adam ate, and he did not drop dead physically. He lived for hundreds of years afterward. But something died the moment sin entered — the connection between God's Spirit and the human spirit was severed.
Not destroyed. Severed. There is an important difference.
The spirit man didn't disappear. The image of God wasn't erased. The capacity for relationship with God wasn't removed. But the power source was cut off. And when the top of the circuit went dead, leadership of the human being had to go somewhere. By default, it fell to the next thing in line.
The flesh.
Here is the tragedy of that moment: the flesh was never designed to lead. It is reactive, short-sighted, self-serving, and bound to this physical world. It cannot perceive spiritual realities. It cannot understand the ways of God. It was designed to be governed — not to govern. But with the spirit man disconnected and powerless, the flesh stepped into the vacuum and took control.
"For the mind that is set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot." Romans 8:6–7 ESV
Read those words carefully: it cannot. This is not stubbornness alone. This is a structural problem. Flesh-led humanity is incapable of the things it was designed for. Not because God gave up on us — but because we cut ourselves off from the only power source that made any of it possible.
The Flesh Wearing Religion's Clothes
Now here is where it gets uncomfortable — and important.
The flesh taking over by default doesn't mean a person becomes obviously wicked. The flesh is far more sophisticated than that. It can go to church. It can quote Scripture. It can use all the right language, hold all the right beliefs, and still be running the show completely disconnected from God.
I've seen this. You've probably seen it too. People who are clearly religious — who have the vocabulary, the attendance record, the moral reputation — and yet something is off. Anger dressed up as righteous conviction. Control dressed up as leadership. Pride dressed up as confidence in God. The pursuit of status and approval dressed up as ministry.
Religion became the flesh's costume.
And this is perhaps the most sobering thing Jesus ever said — not to the obvious sinners, but to the religious:
"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven... And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me...'" Matthew 7:21–23 NKJV
I never knew you. Not — I knew you once and then you wandered. Never. Meaning the connection was never actually established. The circuit was never restored. All the religious activity was happening in the flesh, disconnected from the source, producing the appearance of godliness without the power of it.
And the flesh doesn't stop there. It is sophisticated enough to wear not just religion as a costume, but theology itself. Doctrine. Denominational identity. The feeling of being right about the Bible. You can have correct theology, precise knowledge, all the answers — and still be completely flesh-driven. In fact, knowledge can become one of the flesh's favorite hiding places, because it looks so much like faith from the outside.
This is what divides denominations and splits churches and turns brothers into theological opponents. Not the enemy from outside — the flesh from within. The flesh loves being right. It loves winning arguments. It loves the status that comes from knowing more than someone else. And it will use every true thing it has ever learned about God to do it, while never actually knowing God at all.
Paul said it plainly: "If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge… but do not have love, I am nothing." Not a little less effective. Nothing. All that knowledge, all that theological precision, all that doctrinal correctness — without love, it amounts to nothing. Because knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. One is the flesh at work. The other is the Spirit.
Jesus said something even more cutting to the most theologically precise people of His day: "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about Me, yet you refuse to come to Me that you may have life." They had the Book. They didn't have the Author. They had knowledge about God. They didn't know God. The circuit was never restored.
Consider this: even the demons believe. They know exactly who God is. They know Scripture — Satan quoted it directly to Jesus in the wilderness. And he disguises himself as an angel of light, not darkness, because he knows the language, the appearance, the form. Perfect theological knowledge. Zero relationship. If knowledge alone were the mark of belonging to God, the enemy would qualify. But he doesn't. And neither does anyone else who has the Book without the Author, the doctrine without the connection, the religion without the restored circuit.
"You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that — and shudder." James 2:19 NIV
The Broken Signal
But here's what's remarkable — even in the fallen state, even with the circuit severed, the spirit man is still in there. Broken. Disconnected. Unable to lead. But present. And that broken spirit man, cut off from his source, still picks up signals.
This is why every human being — regardless of culture, religion, or background — carries an ache for something more. It's why the search for meaning is universal. It's why people who have never opened a Bible still sense that there is something greater, something they were made for, something that the physical world cannot satisfy.
Those brilliant minds who conclude we must be living in a simulation — Elon Musk saying there is a billion-to-one chance we are not — they are not crazy. They are detecting something real. They have picked up the signal. They have sensed that this physical realm is subordinate to a greater reality governing it. They just don't have the framework to name what they're detecting.
They are feeling the tingling of sensors that used to work. The broken spirit man, still inside them, still pointing toward home.
And that child who assumed everything they love lasts forever? That wasn't foolishness. That was the eternal nature God wove into every human being pressing against the limits of a fallen world. We grieve losses so deeply because something in us knows — we were never built for loss at all.
The Restoration — and the War That Follows
Salvation restores the connection.
When a person comes to Christ, God's Spirit reconnects to the human spirit. The circuit comes back online. The power source is restored. The spirit man, who has been blind and powerless and buried under years of flesh-led living, suddenly has light again — not by his own sight, but because the Spirit of Christ restores the connection with God.
This is what it means to be born again. Not a fresh start on the same terms. A fundamental change in the structure of who is leading.
But — and this is critical — the flesh doesn't quietly submit.
The flesh spent your entire pre-salvation life as the leader. It has well-worn patterns, deep grooves, old habits that run like muscle memory. Salvation changes the power source. It does not erase the history of the flesh's leadership overnight. And so the war begins — not the war to become saved, but the war to live from the restored connection rather than defaulting back to what the flesh knows.
I feel this war. You probably do too. Sometimes it shows up as going quiet toward God while getting loud toward everything else. Sometimes it's old patterns of reaction surfacing like they never left — anger, fear, the need to control, the pull toward approval. Sometimes it's subtler: starting to live for what people think rather than what God says, making decisions from the flesh's logic rather than the spirit's sight.
These are not signs that you're not saved. They are signs that the flesh is trying to retake ground it used to hold. And every time you recognize it, every time you choose the spirit over the flesh, you are strengthening the circuit — reinforcing the new leadership, rewiring toward what God always intended.
"Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh." Galatians 5:16 NKJV
Walk. Not a one-time decision. A direction. A sustained orientation. Every step is a choice about which part of you is leading.
The Question That Changes Everything
One more thing worth being clear about: Adam did not stop being the image of God after the fall.
Sin separated humanity from God's life — Ephesians 2 is clear on that. The circuit was severed. But the image of God stamped on mankind was not erased. After the flood, God still grounds the sanctity of human life in the fact that man was made in His image. The assignment of dominion was never revoked. What changed is that man lost the spiritual power to fulfill that assignment rightly. The authority was still there. The ability to exercise it for good — in alignment with God, under His leadership — was gone.
This is why idolatry and disobedience opened the door for dark spiritual powers to influence nations — not because God's design was permanently undone, but because the beings He placed in charge of the earth were now operating disconnected from Him. The dominion mandate was never permanently transferred away from humanity. If it had been, Jesus could not have reclaimed it as a man. He came to restore what a man had lost — and that required it still belonging, in some sense, to mankind.
We were not erased. We were broken. Still bearing the image — but representing a fallen, distorted version of it. Still carrying the assignment — but without the power to fulfill it rightly. Which is exactly why we needed what only Jesus could provide.
Understanding the severed circuit reframes almost everything about human experience.
It explains why people who have everything can still feel empty — the circuit is still broken, and nothing in the physical world can substitute for the connection it was designed to carry. It explains why religion without relationship produces miserable, controlling, flesh-driven people who are convinced they are doing God's work. It explains why the ache of nostalgia, the universal search for meaning, the sense that there is something more — never fully goes away until the source is found.
And it explains why the enemy's primary strategy has always been to target the mind. A human being walking in a restored circuit — spirit connected to God, soul rightly led by spirit, body governed by both — is exactly what God designed. It is a regent operating as intended. It is a child of God walking in the authority that was always theirs. It is the thing the kingdom of darkness fears most.
So the question isn't whether the circuit can be restored. Jesus settled that. The question is whether you will live from the restoration — every day, every decision, every moment choosing which set of eyes you see through.
The flesh will always argue for its old position. It is loud, familiar, and persuasive.
But it was never meant to lead.
"For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, 'Abba! Father!'" Romans 8:15 ESV
The circuit is restored. The Father is on the line. The spirit man can see again.
The only question left is whether you'll live like it.