When a guest describes getting into a stranger’s yellow truck in a Walmart parking lot—and you find yourself hoping he survives the story—you know you’re not in theoretical territory anymore.
That’s where my interview with Jonathan England ended this past Sunday: at the cliffhanger moment where he lands in Costa Rica just as COVID shuts the world down, is told to turn around and leave “before you get stuck indefinitely,” and chooses to stay. Not because it made sense on paper, but because he and his wife had both heard, very clearly: “You have one hour. Pack your bags. Fly to Costa Rica.”
To understand why someone would say yes to that, you have to go back much earlier—to a 12‑year‑old boy in a dark bedroom, holding his dying brother’s hand.
From Hero Child to “I Don’t Matter” to “I Am Mattering”
Jonathan grew up as the “healthy” son in a family marked by muscular dystrophy on his mother’s side. His older brother, Matthew, was diagnosed early. By eight, Matthew was in a wheelchair. By 12, Jonathan was feeding him because Matthew could no longer feed himself.
His mother’s own deep shame and grief over the disease shaped the family dynamic: Jonathan was groomed as the hero—emotionally responsible for saving his mother from her pain and his brother from his suffering. He describes three roles that people often inhabit to get significance when they don’t know what love is: hero, victim, and villain. His mother cycled between victim and hero; Jonathan learned that “my feelings don’t matter, everyone else’s do.”
By the time he was 12 and Matthew 16, the family knew the disease was nearing its end. One night, his mother sent Jonathan into Matthew’s room with a terrible assignment: tell your brother “it’s okay to die,” so he can let go more easily.
They watched movies together, as usual. The last one, appropriately and eerily, was The Nightmare Before Christmas. When the credits rolled, Jonathan did what he’d been trained to do.
He lied.
He told his brother, “It’s okay to die”—even though inside, everything in him screamed that it was not okay. He wanted his brother to live. But the “hero” saying what he was supposed to say overrode the boy who needed to grieve.
Matthew’s last words were not what you might expect:
“John, I’m not dying. I’m waking up.
Soon I’ll be home with God. I won’t be stuck in this body. I’ll be playing like a little kid.”
Jonathan didn’t cry. Not that night. Not at the funeral. Not for decades. He describes that moment as the point where he disconnected from his emotions and, step by step, from God.
Inside, three silent decisions were made:
- I don’t matter.
- There is no God (or if there is, something’s wrong with Him or with us).
- I failed love. There is no hope.
The fruit of those vows?
“I became a broke, ignorant, blackout drunk atheist beach bum—and an evangelist atheist. It was my job to convince people God didn’t exist.”
That was his Babylon.
A Crash, a Jail Cell, and the Birth of “I Matter”
Years later, blackout drunk behind the wheel, Jonathan rear‑ended a car at a stoplight and came to only at impact. He tried to flee. A police officer at the intersection caught him within a mile and took him to jail.
Sitting in the cell, the old scripts collided with a new realization.
A voice kept repeating in his head: “You could have killed someone.”
His first reaction was self‑loathing. But then he followed the thought through:
- “If one of my actions could have hurt someone that badly…
then another one of my actions could help someone that much.” - “If my actions can hurt or help, then my actions actually matter.”
- “If my actions matter, then my decisions matter.”
- “If my decisions matter… then I matter.”
He describes it as an identity shift: from “I don’t matter” to “I am mattering.”
In that moment he decided: From here on, the world will be a better place because I existed, not a worse one.
He had no idea how. He was sitting in jail. But for the first time since Matthew’s death, he could see a sliver of light in what had been total darkness.
That realization led him into real estate and, within a few years, to building a multi‑million‑dollar portfolio and the largest real estate investment club in his city. Then came another crisis: everyone had what they were supposed to want—money, vacations, comfort—and yet everyone, including him, was miserable.
The solution, it turned out, wasn’t more Babylon.
A Prophet in a Storage Shed and “I Want Your Life”
Hungry for truth, Jonathan swung hard toward the spiritual. He began attending church multiple times every Sunday, plus midweek services, in multiple congregations and traditions—looking for what was right, not just what was wrong.
Around that time, an old friend from his punk‑band days invited him to jam in a storage shed that doubled as a paint booth for taxi cabs. Jonathan played drums, his friend played guitar. After a while, they noticed a big, curly‑haired redneck standing there, clapping. He’d been listening silently for twenty minutes.
That man lived in a storage unit next door.
Jonathan’s friend left. The redneck prophet stayed. There was something different about him. Jonathan gave him a business card and left without much thought.
The next day—Jonathan’s birthday, January 22, 2015—he was in a meditation group when his phone rang from an unknown number. Normally he’d ignore it, but he heard an inner nudge:
“Answer the call.”
It was the man from the storage shed.
“Oh God, something’s come over me. I gotta meet with you right now, ’cause God’s got a message for you.”
Jonathan’s first response: “If God’s got a message for me, He can come to me. He doesn’t need to talk to some homeless dude.”
But he’s an all‑in kind of guy. So he asked where the man was.
“Walmart parking lot.”
The same Walmart where he’d once been arrested for drunk driving.
Jonathan called his dad in Kentucky: “I’m about to go meet a strange homeless guy who says he has a message from God for me. If you never hear from me again, check the cameras at the Walmart parking lot.”
He was only half joking. He pegged the odds at “at least 50% this dude’s gonna be wearing my skin later.”
He arrived. The man had a little yellow truck. “Get in,” he said.
Jonathan got in.
“Shut the door.”
He shut it. The man started the engine, put it in gear, and began rocking back and forth, speaking in tongues. They drove 45 minutes down the highway, seemingly with no destination.
Jonathan, present and very sober this time, waited for a single line of obvious nonsense so he could dismiss the whole thing. Instead, the man began naming details of his childhood, parents, grandparents, deep inner life—things he could not have known.
Then he shifted to the future:
“In three days, God’s going to come to you and ask for your life.
If you give it to Him, you can never take credit for anything ever again.”
Jonathan got out of the truck and called a straight‑arrow Christian friend—his “Opie Taylor”—who ran a Bible study.
“What do you know about speaking in tongues?”
“It’s in the Bible,” his friend said.
“What about prophecy?”
“That’s in there too. But the Bible says a false prophet should be put to death. And he gave you a timeline: three days. This is easy. Either in three days you know to get as far away from that guy as you can—or he’s the real deal.”
Three days later—January 25, 2015—Jonathan was in his room when his body began to vibrate. He felt like he was dissolving into light. The whole room filled with golden, glittering light.
He heard a voice without words:
“I’m God. I’m here for your life.”
Even without a felt body, he was terrified.
“What are you going to do with it?” he thought.
Silence.
That meant he couldn’t bargain. It wouldn’t be an informed decision; it had to be an inspired one.
He reasoned: “If this is God, I’m going to die anyway. He’ll have my life eventually no matter what. I can’t come up with a single logical reason to say no.”
“I got checkmated,” he says. “So I said yes.”
In an instant, he dropped from his head into his heart.
“I didn’t know what love was until that moment. I didn’t know what joy was. I didn’t know what peace was. It all happened in an instant. I was in the Kingdom. I was free.”
Then came visions—of personal calling, of global shaking, of what he calls the tale of two kingdoms.
Two Trains, Two Kingdoms: Leaving Babylon
In that encounter, Jonathan “saw” two trains:
- On one train, people were waking up—drawing nearer to God, themselves, and nature. Life was becoming more organic, more relational, more rooted in love and presence.
- On the other, people were getting more disconnected—from God, from one another, from their own bodies. Life was becoming more artificial, more controlled, more driven by fear.
At that moment in the vision, the trains were still close enough together that you could jump from one to the other. But they were diverging. Eventually they would be far apart; from each, the other would no longer be visible.
Jonathan connects this to imagery from Revelation and Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25: two kingdoms manifesting:
- A Beast system where “you can’t buy or sell” without biometric IDs and total compliance—Babylon 2.0, built on fear and control.
- The Kingdom of God, where we “own nothing and are happy” not because the state took our stuff, but because we finally recognize the King actually does own everything, and we are stewards, not owners.
In his language:
“It’s not that there’s only one God; it’s that there is only God. In Him we live and move and have our being.
There’s no spot where God is not. The only question is: are you aware of God, or not?”
From that perspective, the “two kingdoms” are not two ontological realities. There is only God’s Kingdom. The split is in perception and participation:
- Babylon is the illusion of separation, the metaverse of fear and scarcity, made “more real than real” by our belief in it.
- The Kingdom is the truth that has always been there, but which we may or may not choose to enter and embody.
The trains, then, symbolize a hardening of choices over time. As he put it:
“Right now the trains are close. You can still jump. But at some point, there’s no more ‘Fifty Shades of Gray.’ It’s black or white. Heaven on earth or hell on earth.
The question is: which train are you on—and are you willing to jump while you still can?”
That is what he means by “leaving Babylon.”
Not necessarily moving to Costa Rica. (We’ll get to that in the next episode.) But recognizing that everyday alignments—what we worship, what we fear, where we put our trust—are incrementally placing us on one train or the other.
A Question for You
If you map your daily life—habits, media diet, financial decisions, emotional reflexes—onto Jonathan’s two trains:
- Which train are you on most of the time?
- Where, very concretely, are you following love, presence, and organic connection?
- Where are you following fear, control, and artificial security?
And if you sense you’re on the wrong train in any area, what would it look like to jump—before the tracks diverge further?
That’s the invitation Jonathan’s story leaves us with, cliffhanger and all.
Next Week on Created in the Image of God
Next Sunday’s episode shifts from leaving Babylon to leaving addiction—but the theme is remarkably similar: surrendering control to enter freedom.
I’ll be speaking with Rose Anne Forte, who, after giving up alcohol, experienced God moving at “God speed” in her life. She’s now the author of two devotionals (one for substances, one for behaviors), a book on preparing people to get ready to quit when they don’t know how, and a course that distills the core spiritual principles needed to stay the course.
If you or someone you love is wrestling with addiction—or simply wants to understand what real transformation looks like—you’ll want to tune in.
Episode 219 with Roseanne Forte airs February 8th on Created in the Image of God.
