I Am Now a Deep State Federal Agent
Last week I endured one of my top five weirdest experiences in my 38 years on this earth. I will keep certain details vague because I’m not attempting to blast the person, whom you likely don’t know anyway, but I think there are things worth discussing here. I also have no desire to start the gossip train, so keep your guesses to yourself.
So it begins…
Our fateful tale begins with a regular Tuesday afternoon. Nothing crazy (yet), and I went to a - let’s call it - medical practitioner’s office located within a home office not too far from my house. I had been to this practitioner fairly regularly several years ago, but it had been long enough that I was effectively being treated as a new patient, which was fair enough.
One of the reasons I liked supporting this practitioner was because she is a Christian, homeschooling mom who is active in her church. Those in the faith supporting those in the faith and all. She is tremendously talented at what she does, and she deserves all the business she can get. I had, however, checked out her business Facebook page, and it had taken a strongly political turn. There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself, of course, but it will come into play down the road.
So I arrive for my appointment in her home office. The lights were out and she wasn’t in there upon arrival, but that wasn’t unexpected. Still, I’ve arrived on the wrong day to appointments before, so I opened the calendar app on my phone while casually leaning on the reception desk, which came to about chest height on me. It was terribly convenient.
The practitioner, whom I formerly knew to be warm and friendly, came into the office with an incredulous look on her face, clearly put off by something. She coldly greeted me before handing me the paperwork to fill out and asking how I had been.
A couple of minutes went by and, as I’m doing my best to write legibly (Penmanship has never been my strength), she asked, “Cody, were you taking pictures of my desk?”
“Oh, no,” I responded confusedly, but I moved on because I was, again, trying to write legibly.
She asked what I think about what’s going on in the world, and so on. I respond truthfully. Some of it is encouraging. Some of it discouraging. Some of it is hilarious. I am, in fact, not wrong in this assessment.
So you can imagine my surprise when I give her my paperwork and she asks to see the last photo I took on my phone. Being a good millennial, this can mean several things, but the fact that I’m a good millennial means that the last image stored in my photos folder on my iPhone was a meme. In fact, the last three images were memes. I may have a problem.
Anyway, I showed her the last photo I took, which was shockingly not a photo of her desk. I then proceeded to show her that the actual images were memes, screenshotted Instagram stories, and so on, before a glassy, distant look came over her face.
“I’m sorry. I’m not feeling well,” she said, almost as if not in the room with me. “I’m nauseous all of a sudden. We can maybe reschedule in a week or two.”
I thus departed in a state of flabbergastery I rarely feel. What just happened? I called my wife who had also had some experience with the same practitioner. I told some friends what had happened, as one does.
But you know what I didn’t do? I didn’t reschedule.
Sound and fury
It wasn’t until I hit up a Christian podcasters Signal chat I’m in with this story that I got a clear answer as to what happened. My friend Cory Wing, who does some fantastic work with Eschatology Matters and on his CivEccly Minded channel, chimed in that this sounded like Deuteronomy 28:34, which, when prefaced with verse 15 that if you don’t trust in the triune God, the following happens.
“And you shall be driven mad by the sight of what your eyes see.”
-Deuteronomy 28:34
And lest you pitch a fit about me using the Old Testament, the New Testament only reinforces this concept.
“And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to an unfit mind, to do those things which are not proper.”
- Romans 1:28
The point is this. You will put your trust in something or someone. If your trust is in Christ alone, then you are a new creation with a renewed mind (Rom. 12:2), but to trust in temporal things is lethal (Rom. 8:6).
And that’s what I saw on this practitioner’s social media feeds, both business and personal. She frantically posts in three-round bursts about stolen elections and DOGE and everything else political. As is fitting in these situations, she is screaming into the void with literally no interaction on her posts.
To top it all off, she has a recent post going so far as to show her fast food receipt as being ordered by “Elon Musk.” That’s obviously not a problem in a vacuum; I have plenty of room in my theology for silliness, but when put together with everything else, it shows what flag she’s flying. She may claim that her banner is the Lord (Ex. 17:15), but her actions implying I’m a Deep State federal agent say otherwise.
I’m not, for the record, but even if I were, she’s not that interesting, and neither are you.