Even then, long before you knew Him, the Lord was there

What happens when you go back to your earliest childhood memory?

Every Thursday we’ll release a new episode of “From Work To Worship”, where we explore how people’s calling becomes their calling card, how vocation fuels occupation, and how “to work” can be “to worship” when we understand who we were made for. Episode 4 is comedian, musician, poet, and aspiring human being, Nathanael Philip Abad Mosher, the other side of PPDK Productions.

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Here is some of our interview with Nathanael Philip Abad Mosher.

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Nathanael

So my name is Nathanael Philip Mosher.

Nehemiah

Take us back to your earliest memory in life. What was that like?

Nathanael

I actually went into a deep dive, trying to figure out what my earliest memory was, and it was an image.

It was a Mega Blocks castle at Tara Hills where I grew up in a condominium, and that's all I remembered. So I'm like, why do I remember this? And actually I had been going back to early childhood memories because I was tackling pornography addiction, and I thought, well, this wasn't always a part of who I was, but it had hit me at such an early age, like eight or nine years old that for me to go back to find out who I was before it, I had to go that far back.

So I thought of what are those things I was into? Like I was into yo yo and chess and Random hobbies and games and all these different things reading a lot. So I remembered that memory and I have been practicing stillness, like prolonged stillness and also tackling pornography addiction and reading this book called “Unwanted” by Jay Stringer.

So I kept trying to go back to that memory. And this is about two years ago now, uh, I was on medication for four years and I got off the medication and all of a sudden I'm in a deep, deep depression, just debilitating, crippling. I can't leave the bed and it's like three days. I can't leave the bed. It's on New Year's.

I cancel all my plans. My, uh, ex at the time was out of town, so I wasn't seeing her. Actually, I was living in Westchester, and I had left. So we're in the loft of my parents house –my house, I don't know, I’ll inherit it, so they're still here.

Nehemiah

What are you, the prodigal son? Trying to get your inheritance early?

Nathanael

100%. Oh, shoot.

Nehemiah

Watch out for this one.

Nathanael

Oh, wait. Uh, I'm not trying to get it early. I missed that.

So, I was living there and it was this big 18 by almost 20 feet garage that they had converted into a space and I thought, Oh, I'll take this studio and go there and have more space. And it was a bad deal because there was leaking in the foundation and then it rained the most it's ever rained in like five years in LA.

And so I'm in that studio and there's a couch there and I sort of had that space to myself so I could just be alone there in this house where I'm living with like five people. So I was just depressed. Just stay in there. Just. Couldn't get out of bed and, uh, praying and trying to get deep, you know, feeling a lot of pain and emotional or physical.

What you said last week about that, there's five layers, right? There's the spiritual underneath and the emotional, then the mental and the physical, then the material. So, I had sort of started to understand that these were started to get away from detaching myself from the emotional part and start to see that it's physical and then understanding through meditation and prayer and community and just different ways to weather the physical pain.

But there was a physcal uniquely physical part which is that my mental, my emotional and my physical were just completely disparately dissected and separate. So my mental says, get up. My emotional says, I don't know, I want to, I want physical relief from this pain. And then, and then my nervous system is just, I can't move.

So I'm like, get up. I want to get up. Nothing's happening.

So I'm sitting there. I'm, I'm down there. I can't get up. It's like two, three days. And, uh, I decided to, to binge, listen to Think and Grow rich because someone had talked about it. So I was taking that time to just sit there and finish that book. So I did, I did. But at the end of that, the Lord took me to that memory and I'm in that memory.

And, uh, I see the Mega Blocks castle and it starts to Zoom out and I see my Dad's over here. My mom's over speaking to him. And over here is my sister. And I start to cry. I look at my Mega Blocks castle. It's like broken or something. I'll look over there. My sister's crying. So I'm crying. I'm like, she's crying.

Wow. This is broken. What's happening? Uh, and then I look over and my parents are arguing and I'm crying. I'm crying. I'm crying. My Dad looks distraught. I told my mom, I said, did Dad lose a job? When I was like three, he's like, oh yeah, he was on thin ice. So they're stressed about stuff. They're stressed out.

They're talking and then all of a sudden they notice my sister's crying. So they're freaking out because she's crying. So they're tending to her and they don't recognize me. I'm crying crying and mind you I can feel Everything in this memory Like on a deep visceral level full body every level of experience.

I can feel it. I'm in it And, uh, I'm crying. I'm crying. I'm crying. And then all of a sudden, everything just goes dark. Everything shuts off. And I recognize that this isn't working. Like they don't know I'm here. It's not working. So, like, this is pointless. Like this castle stupid anyways, like starting to pick it back up and I realized that's what would happen when I would sink into depression.

It would be tremendous physical anxiety and pain and just like overwhelming sensation, crying, crying, crying, freaking out, fear, trembling. Shut off and then that shut off what happened, it severed what I wanted and what my physical like nervous system was like, we're off.

– Praise, praise Jesus. I pray that the tech in this room does not get overwhelmed and shut off while I'm saying this, by the way, we need to invest in a fire extinguisher ASAP –

So I realized that that was depression. Like that, that's exactly what would happen. And I had not seen that that was the physical manifestation and representation of this pattern that was happening throughout my life. And I was on mood stabilizing medication called Depakote. And I had been starting to do research about what it was doing.

And it shuts off neural activity. It has to do with salt and electrolysis and how, how, you know, the chemical, I don't know. Someone's going to comment, be like, you don't know nothing, whatever. Um, but I'll get back to that.

That's what was happening. So I'm in this memory, it shut off. I'm like, screw this castle. All of a sudden in the memory, I see a hand reach out. It says, take my hand and I go, okay. And he picks me up and I leaped out of bed and I went and wrote a song immediately at the piano. Yeah.

Nehemiah

And so it seems like you were able to go back on your earliest member memory and see that there was a lot of chaos. But you also had a helping hand.

Nathanael

Yea.

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You can listen to the full episode of part 4 here:

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