OF WHAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN

STRIKE

Some things were never scripture.

They were repetition.

Passed from mouth to mouth
until people stopped checking
and started calling it truth.

On a day when people speak of rising,
it is worth asking
what should rise with us—
and what should stay buried.

Because not everything handed down
came from the text.

Some of it came from habit.
Some from tradition.
Some from convenience.
Some from the need
to make a hard thing easier—
sharper, cleaner, simpler than it was.

But truth does not become truth
because it is familiar.

RESONANCE

This is how it happens.

A detail gets added.
An image gets repeated.
A phrase gets polished
until it sounds holy.

And after enough years,
people no longer remember
where it came from.

They only remember hearing it.

So Delilah becomes the one holding the blade.
The fruit becomes an apple.
A proverb becomes a slogan.

And what was once a living text
becomes a set of inherited assumptions
dressed in biblical clothing.

That is the danger
of repetition without return.

Not just that we get a detail wrong—
but that we begin trusting the echo
more than the source.

And once that happens,
people stop reading to understand.

They read only to confirm
what they were already told.

PARABLE

A man walked through an old burial ground
where stones leaned crooked with age
and names had nearly worn away.

At the center stood three markers.

On the first
was carved a woman’s name—
and beneath it, a blade.

On the second
was carved a tree—
and hanging from one branch, an apple.

On the third
was carved a rod—
and beneath it, a sentence so polished
it almost sounded too neat to question.

The man stood there for a long while.

Because he had seen those markers before.

Not in stone—
but in people’s speech.
In sermons.
In paintings.
In lessons repeated so often
they felt older than the ground itself.

But something in him
would not let him pass.

So he knelt at the first marker
and brushed away the dust.

Underneath the carving of the blade
was another line, nearly hidden:

She called for a man.

Not her hand.
Not her blade.

Her betrayal was real—
but the story told about her
was easier to picture
than what was written.

Then he went to the second marker
and cleared away the dirt around the tree.

There was no apple there.

Only one word:

fruit.

No color.
No shape.
No species.

Just the plainness
of what had been said
before imagination dressed it for display.

Then he came to the third marker,
where the polished sentence
had been carved so deeply
it looked impossible to remove.

He traced its letters with his hand
and found that beneath the saying
was not the phrase everyone quoted—
but a harder, older teaching.

Something people had shortened
until it could fit in the mouth
without demanding thought.

The man sat back
and looked around the burial ground.

He understood then:

The dead were not beneath the earth.

They were the things
people kept reviving
without asking
whether they had ever lived.

And he said aloud—
not to the graves,
but to himself:

Some things are not ancient truth.

They are old mistakes
given too many resurrections.

So he left the burial ground
as the sun rose—

carrying nothing with him
except what could survive
being read again.

SCROLL

This is the work of discernment:

Not rejecting scripture—
but refusing to confuse scripture
with the folklore built around it.

Judges 16:19 does not say
Delilah cut Samson’s hair herself.

It says she called for a man
to shave the seven locks of his head.

Genesis 3:6 does not say apple.

It says fruit.

Proverbs 13:24 and 22:15
do not say,
“Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

That polished phrase
is what people made
from something more layered,
more difficult,
and more dangerous
when simplified.

This matters.

Because distortion rarely begins
with rebellion against the text.

It begins with addition.

With smoothing.
With assumption.
With the human hunger
to make the sacred easier to carry.

But once the added thing
is repeated long enough—
people defend it
as though it came from the page itself.

And that is how tradition
can sit on the throne of memory
while the written word waits—

unopened—
for someone to return.

Easter is a fitting day to remember this.

Because resurrection
is not only about life returning.

It is also about truth emerging
from what has been covered over.

And some things
do not need resurrection.

They need burial.

Let the false detail stay buried.
Let the inherited shortcut stay buried.
Let the polished saying
that never came from the text
stay buried.

But let what was written rise.

Let what was actually said rise.

Let the source rise
above the echo.

Because truth does not need embellishment.

It only asks
that we stop replacing it.

FLAMEWALKER TRUTH

Not everything repeated in God’s name
came from God’s word.

Some things were added
by habit, fear, image, control—
or the simple laziness
of never going back to look.

So the work is not to defend
what we have always heard.

The work is to return.

To read again.
To strip away what was painted on top.
To let the page speak
before tradition speaks for it.

If a thing was never written—
it has no right
to rule the meaning.

Let Easter keep its true witness:

Not the resurrection of old distortions—
but the rising
of what was there all along.