Imagine being part of a revolution. Imagine that you are living your life; working your job, taking classes for a degree, raising a family, hanging with friends – whatever it is that you do. Then it happens. You meet this person who turns your world upside-down. You thought you were content; you had plans for your life and a general trajectory. But then you hear this person saying things that just take hold somewhere deep inside you and you can’t shake it.

Now, to be clear, you’re not the type of person that falls for every conspiracy theory or pop-psychology out there. You’re balanced, you don’t machine-gun share every post that aligns with your political bent; for the most part you dodge any kind of topic that might stir contempt or emotional debate. You’re just doing your best to stay in your lane.

But then you hear this guy. He’s not apolitical, yet he seems to cut through any argumentative bait that’s thrown at him from a mysterious angle that can’t be traced back to a partisan platform. It’s like his perspective is foreign, so otherworldly, that when he speaks, everyone, from every side, is knocked back on their heels. Yet, though it’s uncomfortable, it’s also refreshing.

Somehow, though this person isn’t an influencer in the typical sense – he isn’t running for office; isn’t a billionaire; doesn’t have millions of followers on any platforms – he changes you. All of the sudden, what you thought you knew about life, what you thought you knew about how things work and what this life – at least what your life is all about – changes.

It’s uncomfortable. You’re constantly compelled to stop listening to him. You return to your life and try looking over your plans that you had for your future, but all of the sudden they are colorless. They shouldn’t be! What happened? You were going to make so much money, take so many trips, make so many memories; all of which seemed so perfect before you started listening to this guy talk in his weird way about life.

The weirdest thing is that what he’s talking about isn’t actually appealing; not compared to what you had planned at least. He keeps talking about not living for yourself; about not building wealth; about not doing whatever you feel like will make you happy. It’s obnoxious that it’s aggravated your psyche so much; why can’t you just forget about him? But the problem is that it’s not just a mind game; you know that it’s more than that – and it’s precisely this problem that keeps his words and everything that he is hanging around in your whole being.

You hear other people talk about him and you aren’t affected the same way. They can talk about him; they can use the same language; they can quote him for god’s sake, but it’s not the same. But when he talks, even if what he is saying is utterly ridiculous, backward, and upside down (which it pretty much all is to you) – you know that there is deeper truth in what he says than in anything that you have ever known. It’s like what you knew to be true was black and white – what he says is color; what you knew before was 3d – he brings the fourth dimension and reveals the truer reality of everything. Again, it may be disorienting; nauseating to start to understand this because it turns everything inside out. But the consequence of losing the life you had planned starts to pale in comparison to life that you taste when he talks about his Kingdom.

You finally take the plunge. Whatever your life looks like from here on out doesn’t matter as long as you end up wherever he is. Where’s that? not sure. But it doesn’t matter, as long as he’s there, because the reality that he brings is just simply so much more than any situation without him.

So you keep following. You keep listening to his words, and though you have heard what he has to say dozens of times, each time you listen again, you hear something new. But more than that, you feel like you become someone new -not all at once, but slightly, incrementally. Sometimes you tune out the familiar words, and though you don’t realize the colors fading back to gray, you do realize the rush of colors when you tune your ear again.

Imagine that the revolution isn’t broadcast like a military or political revolution would be. In fact, imagine that the more subtle it acted, the more powerful it was. Imagine a revolutionary that hid in the hills; that didn’t track fame and power; that dodged opportunities to capitalize. Then, instead of raising an army for battle, he says that he is starting a family for a party. He also says that you’ve been part of the family from the get go. He starts to introduce you to one of your new siblings – they look nothing like you, they don’t speak your language; you find out that they didn’t vote the way that you did – and as you realize this, you both laugh uncontrollably because at one point, those things seemed to matter. Now, only he matters .