Reflections from Manheim Boulevard

I have been in New Paltz much more lately, and it is funny to think that not long ago I went down to the Carolinas with such certainty in my mind, such a definite guarantee that I would scarcely return. In my head, an entire life had been planned. An entire life had begun. It moved forward confidently until it did not. And it was not just schooling. There was more to it than that. I will not go into those details here, because that is not what this post is for. There may be another time, another post, where the background is laid bare. But for now, simply this: I am back. Out of all places in the world, New Paltz is the least expected place for me to fit in. I come from Kingston, just north of it, and though the towns sit close on the map, the cultures are vastly different. The COVID exodus from the city radically altered Kingston in an extremely short time. What once felt distinct rapidly became reshaped. In some ways, Kingston and New Paltz are more similar now than they used to be. Yet New Paltz seems more timeless, perhaps slightly less corrupted. It is not free from corruption; it is simply a different form of it, though the same heart beats beneath. Kingston once felt like a hub of Machiavellian mindsets, less true gang mentality and more a wannabe gang mentality, which can be worse. The most dangerous people are not always those who are dangerous. The most dangerous are those trying to prove that they are.  

In A Bronx Tale, the story centers on a young Italian-American boy named Calogero growing up in a rough Bronx neighborhood. He stands between two models of manhood. His father is a hardworking bus driver, steady, principled, and unimpressed by flash. He believes in honesty, patience, and quiet integrity. He repeats certain phrases to his son, things like, “You’ll understand when you’re older.” It is the language of long vision. The language of a man who knows that wisdom often cannot be argued into a child. On the other side stands Sonny, the local mob boss. Sonny commands fear and respect. He has money, influence, and visible power. When he walks into a room, people move. He represents control, immediate, tangible, undeniable. He speaks differently. His phrases are blunt: “Nobody cares.” It is the language of survival, of dominance, of realism stripped of mercy. To a young boy, Sonny looks like success. His world is cinematic. It is classic 90s mob energy. And I will say plainly, it is probably my favorite movie. If someone has never seen it and hates spoilers, they should stop reading and go watch it. It is worth it. Near the end, there is the funeral scene. Sonny is dead. The power, the money, the fear, all of it evaporates. At the very end, Calogero says goodbye, and there is a quiet realization. His father always warned him about Sonny’s world. Yet in that final moment, Calogero recognizes something deeper: his father did care about Sonny. He says, “You were wrong about that, Sonny.” It means Sonny believed “nobody cares.” He believed the world runs on power and indifference. But the quiet, steady father, the man Sonny dismissed, did care. He cared about his son. He even cared, in a human way, about Sonny. The father’s worldview was not naive; it was rooted in something stronger than fear. In that moment, Calogero sees that love, not dominance, was the truer strength all along. Earlier in the film, Sonny says, “The saddest thing in life is wasted talent.” We are meant to assume that Calogero learned the lesson, at he avoided wasting his own talent by not stepping fully into the mob world. But there is a deeper irony. Sonny himself was the wasted talent. He had leadership. He had intelligence. He had influence. But he spent it building a kingdom that could not last. You can take over the block. You can command a neighborhood. You can make people move when you walk in. But to what end? We see clearly now who runs this world and who thrives in systems built on fear, ego, and manipulation. Is that who you want to be aligned with?

Another example many may be more familiar with comes from the Disney adaptation of The Jungle Book. King Louie sings about wanting to “be like you,” speaking to Mowgli, the human boy. On the surface, the song is playful, jazzy, and almost comedic. But underneath, it reveals something ancient. King Louie wants fire, the symbol of human power. He wants to transcend his created nature. He wants to climb higher in the hierarchy by force. He believes that if he can just acquire the right secret, the right tool, or the right leverage, he can become something greater. In doing so, he disrupts the order of the jungle. His desire is not for growth within his nature but escape from it. He wants elevation through grasping.

This is the Machiavellian binary at work. Dominate or disappear. Seize power or be irrelevant. Build your own legacy or be forgotten. It assumes that identity must be manufactured, influence must be engineered, and destiny must be controlled. It treats life as a competition for leverage. It mirrors the original temptation in Eden: “You can be like God.” It is the belief that elevation comes through grasping rather than surrender. The trap is not merely choosing the wrong strategy; the trap is believing the only way forward is through strategy at all. The goal is not to dominate nor to disappear. The goal is to walk with the Spirit. Part of what it means to put away childish things means to accept the inheritance given in Christ and steward it with joy. It is to multiply what you have been entrusted with, not to grumble that your name is not stamped on the kingdom you falsely tried to construct.

So should we then fight and construct elaborate systems to oppose those who live by the way of the world? Should we out-strategize the strategists? Outmaneuver the manipulators? Build a counter-machine to resist their machine? In the Book of Habakkuk, the prophet Habakkuk looks out at his nation and sees corruption, violence, and injustice. He cries out to God: Why do You tolerate wrongdoing? Why are you silent while evil seems to win? And God answers, but not the way Habakkuk expects. God says He is raising up Babylon. Babylon. Not a reform movement. Not a revival. Babylon was a ruthless empire, efficient, strategic, and dominant. If there were ever a Machiavellian superpower, it was Babylon. They conquered through fear. They engineered control. They embodied the “dominate or disappear” mentality. From the outside, it looked like the world was rigged in their favor. Evil prospered. Power accumulated. God appeared silent. Habakkuk is stunned. He basically asks, “How can you use people more wicked than us to judge us?” How does that make sense? Where is justice? Habakkuk does not respond by trying to out-Babylon Babylon. He does not begin drafting a counter-empire strategy. He does not adopt manipulation in the name of righteousness. He does not attempt to force a legacy to secure God’s reputation. Instead, he climbs the watchtower and waits. He questions honestly, but he waits. He listens. And what God ultimately gives him is not a military blueprint. It is a revelation of sovereignty. God assures him that Babylon’s rise is not ultimate. It is temporary. Accountable. Measured. “The righteous shall live by faith.” By the end of the book, Habakkuk has not received the kind of answer modern minds crave. He has not been handed control. He has been handed perspective. In chapter 3, he declares that even if the fig tree does not blossom, even if the fields produce no food, even if everything collapses he will rejoice in the Lord. Nothing externally has improved yet. Babylon is still rising. But internally, Habakkuk has shifted. He chooses faith over fear. Trust over control. That is the difference. This does not mean passivity. It does not mean apathy. It does not mean Christians never resist injustice. It means the resistance begins with surrender, not control. It means we refuse to adopt the methods of Babylon in order to defeat Babylon. We do not manipulate in the name of righteousness. We do not engineer identity. We do not panic-build legacies to prove God is still winning. Habakkuk’s victory is not that Babylon falls immediately. His victory is that his heart no longer depends on Babylon falling to trust God. He becomes steady. Rooted. Joyful in famine.

I want to make something very clear: I did not leave the South because of any fault in the church life there. If anything, I found it deeply inspiring. What struck me most was not perfection. It was posture. In many parts of the North, particularly in historic centers of influence, there has been a long project of institution-building. Strong schools. Strong seminaries. Strong intellectual frameworks. Over time, however, trust shifts. Instead of institutions serving the Spirit, the Spirit is expected to operate within the boundaries of institutions. Structure begins to replace surrender. Take Harvard University as a symbolic example. Its original motto was “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae,” Truth for Christ and the Church. Truth was explicitly tethered to a person and a body. Today the motto is simply “Veritas.” Truth remains but detached. What begins as Christ-centered conviction can slowly become an abstract principle. In many seminaries across the North, theology grew increasingly sophisticated. But sophistication without repentance becomes sterile. Christianity can slowly transform from lived power into a studied concept. It becomes something analyzed rather than embodied. Something debated rather than obeyed. By contrast, much of Southern Christianity operates differently. There, church is not merely a private preference for the especially devout. It is cultural rhythm. In many Southern towns, you go to church not only because you are “religious,” but because you are alive and decent. Faith is woven into social expectation. It is public normalcy. Even those who quietly mock church culture up north often soften in the South, because they sense they are guests within a different framework. Now, this does not mean Southern theology is flawless. It is not. But there remains in many places a deep, generational awareness that God is real, that He is watching, and that He is holy. That reverence lingers in the air.

Churches, ideally, should be open. They should sit at the center of culture, not as power brokers scrambling to manufacture relevance, but as stewards of a legacy already completed in Christ. The Church does not need to invent a kingdom. It inherits one. When churches attempt to create their own legacy, they drift toward Machiavellian anxiety: branding, strategy, influence, and optics. When they rest in Christ’s finished work, they become free to serve without panic. The impact flows from surrender. We often want to challenge corrupt legacies boldly, and sometimes that is right. But before confronting external towers, we must cleanse our internal ones. We must examine our own hunger for recognition, our own desire to control outcomes, and our own subtle wish to build something with our name engraved on it. This is constant for me as well, yet christ completed the necessary work. 

My experience at SUNY New Paltz has been entirely unique, so much so that I can only understand it through providence. I know I am where I am because I did everything in my power to avoid coming back to New York. I had plans. I had direction. I had a different trajectory in mind. And yet, piece by piece, circumstance by circumstance, everything aligned in a way that nearly forced my return. I am not even enrolled or have ever been enrolled at SUNY New Paltz, im not even sure how i ended up going there. The only way I can describe it is this: God sent the great fish and had it spit me onto Nineveh. When I first left this place, I despised it, perhaps worse than Jonah despised Nineveh. It felt like ashes. Like the burnt structure of what was once my house. There was memory here. There was disappointment here. There was pain here. It did not feel like fertile ground; it felt like aftermath. But when I returned, something changed, not externally, but internally. The Spirit did not alter the buildings or the streets; He altered my sight. I was no longer allowed to see it as ruin. Instead, a strange joy began to rise in me for the history and the nature of the area. The more I examined the details, the more I could see the Lord’s fingerprints. What once felt scorched began to feel sacred. This little valley of rock and mud is, through spiritual eyes, a marvelous wonder. It genuinely pains me when people walk through it without seeing it, not that they must see it exactly as I do, but that they might at least see it. There is glory embedded in the ordinary here. I also know I am where I am supposed to be because I have been entrusted by the power of the Holy Spirit to steward a Bible study mostly composed of future teachers. That responsibility humbles me beyond words. To help shape those who will shape others is no small thing. It is one of the greatest blessings of my life. Right outside the Sojourner Truth Library on campus, there is one of the most breathtaking views of the Shawangunks I have ever seen. When the sun sets behind those ridges, the sky opens in color. And when I stand there and realize that the God who made that sunset also looks at me, a piece of dirt that has spit in His face, and chooses to use me, it is enough. Truly enough. Anything beyond that thought brings tears. And yet He has given me more blessings than I could possibly list. 

Being here has not been easy. It has brought challenges. It has brought conversations I will never forget. I have spoken with people whose depth and beauty of thought stunned me with phrases and insights I had never heard before. I have also encountered words so foolish you instinctively slap your forehead. I have met people from every continent and every culture. people full of ideas, people searching, people lost, faithful servants, and prideful eggheads. And somehow, every single one of them has deepened my appreciation for this life. Even the difficult ones. Maybe not immediately. Sometimes it takes time. But they all teach me something. Problems are not always bad; they are just things to give attention to, and sometimes all we have to give is our attention. When a problem arises and God uses you to help address it. Understand what that means. He trusted you with that moment. Let that be more than enough. I could never thank God sufficiently for what He has provided for me. So I am grateful that I will praise Him forever. As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, love remains. After the noise. After the institutions. After the arguments. Love remains. And after all of this I am overwhelmed with gratitude that this love will remain. We speak so casually about resurrection power that we risk normalizing it. We make it common. But our God is not common. To treat Him as common is a grave danger. To actually sit with the reality that we will be back, that there is eternal, dunamis-filled power infused with love that will cause us to stand again and rejoice forever, is beyond awe-inspiring and ambition-fueling. We will never truly die in Christ. We carry the power of His Spirit. Time, as we know it, is temporary. Soon there will be no time. God wills it all. All is love. Exposure is not always a virtue. Love is the greatest virtue. In Christ, we have love. Apart from Him, our hearts are desperately wicked. But in Him, we have peace. It is all in Christ. Do not tell me only what they did wrong. Do not tell me only what you hate. Tell me what you love.

Christ is risen. Easter is coming. Spring is coming. The thaw has begun. I know I’m early. There may still be flurries. Cold snaps may return briefly. But the decline of winter is certain. Challenges will continue in this world. But the world has been overcome by Christ. Rest in Him alone. Stay certain of His return.

Edit:
I may have jumped the gun New York is bracing for another record-breaking blizzard. Another foot of snow is coming, less than a month after the last one. Oddly, the reactions feel smaller this time. Whatever, let it snow. Spring will surely return. And if it doesn’t, if it turns into some endless midnight sun scenario straight out of The Twilight Zone, so be it. Winter is winter, and it too shall have its place. God bless us, everyone. 

𝔒 𝔗𝔥𝔢𝔬𝔰 𝔱𝔬 𝔗𝔥𝔢𝔩𝔢𝔦. 𝕹𝖔 𝖌𝖚𝖎𝖑𝖙 𝖎𝖓 𝖑𝖎𝖋𝖊, 𝖓𝖔 𝖋𝖊𝖆𝖗 𝖔𝖋 𝖉𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍, 𝖙𝖍𝖎𝖘 𝖎𝖘 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖕𝖔𝖜𝖊𝖗 𝖔𝖋 𝕮𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝖎𝖓 𝖒𝖊 𝖋𝖗𝖔𝖒 𝖑𝖎𝖋𝖊’𝖘 𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖘𝖙 𝖈𝖗𝖞 𝖙𝖔 𝖋𝖎𝖓𝖆𝖑 𝖇𝖗𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍. 𝕵𝖊𝖘𝖚𝖘 𝖈𝖔𝖒𝖒𝖆𝖓𝖉𝖘 𝖒𝖞 𝖉𝖊𝖘𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖞!!!!

𝕭𝕰𝕹 𝕬𝕹𝕿𝕳𝕺𝕹𝖄 𝕾𝕴𝕸𝕺𝕹
Writing as 𝖂𝕴𝕷𝕷 𝕱𝕺𝕽𝕲𝕰
𝕻𝕴𝕷𝕲𝕽𝕴𝕄 𝕻𝕺𝕹𝕯𝕰𝕽𝕴𝕹𝕲𝕾 𝕸𝕴𝕹𝕴𝕾𝕿𝕽𝖄