Regular Joe's Gospel Commentary: Matthew Chapter 1 Parts I & II

By JOSE SEGOVIA

This book was not written to impress an academic board or secure a tenure track. I am a simple man with time spent studying and contemplating. This book came from a rupture, a moment when the comfortable, surface-level understanding of the Gospel gave way. The only way forward was to follow that fracture back to the bedrock. It emerged not from academic certainty but from a desperate need to map the hidden contours of a Kingdom currently at war.

It is not a dissertation. It is the result of a rescue operation.

I was five years old when my family traded the tropical heat of El Salvador for the biting cold of Canada. Even then I knew I was vibrating on a different frequency. While other kids played, I sat in silence. I did not know that a Civil War had forced my soul to age faster than my body ever could. That war shaped my spirituality before I could even read the Bible. I felt the Holy Spirit then, a distinct and silent presence that led me to become an altar boy at eight years old.

But the world has a way of grinding the gratitude out of you.

By fourteen the administration at our parish changed. The mystery was replaced by a ledger. My parents were struggling immigrants scraping by to survive. I watched from the altar as the church asked for just a little bit more to finish a building. That confusion and audacity was the wedge. I loved God but I hated the administration. At fourteen that was enough to drive me out.

For the next two decades I lived for me. I pushed Christ into the margins. Every time I stepped into a church my body revolted. It was the shame. I told myself I had no time for faith.

How na ve.

God stopped me at thirty-two. It started as a medical mystery. By thirty-five it had a name - Sarcoidosis. It started in my lymph nodes and moved to my lungs. Today at thirty-eight I am managing Stage 4 Pulmonary Sarcoidosis, arthritis, osteoporosis, and glaucoma. I had to get seriously sick to see the blessings. I had to be stripped of physical strength to realize I had been relying on the wrong power source.

Yet even in pain I looked for shortcuts. I experimented with psychedelics. I walked right up to the abyss. I had to touch the edge of darkness to finally miss the light. But here is the danger: if you are not talking to God, the silence will be filled with something else.

Then came the thunderclap.

I was thirty-six, sitting in my drive house with a friend. No trips. No chemicals. Just a normal evening. Then I felt it. All it took was the breeze. It was not a draft. I felt the Wind, a physical embrace, sudden and undeniable. In that gust I heard the instruction as clearly as a loudspeaker "Stop running. Stop fighting. Surrender".

I broke. I cried tears of absolute surrender right there. I gave up the illusion of control. I told them Christ had it covered.
That surrender did not turn off my brain. It ignited it. My gathering of knowledge was no longer passive. I needed to know my Father intimately. I needed to understand the mechanics of this mercy. My wife and I went through RCIA. My kids are baptized. We are married in the Church. I am home.

But the closer you come to Christ, the bigger the target on your back. The war I used to run from is now the war I study.
This is a field report between the ruins of modern skepticism and the emerging horizon of the Kingdom. It is a response of the heart written beneath the Cross.

If even one passage in this book brings you closer to the King, then it belongs entirely to Him. If it deepens your wonder or anchors you in the storm, that is enough. To awaken awe for the Eternal Logos is enough.

And if it falls short in wisdom, may it not fall short in love.

Jos L. Segovia

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GC66ZJ5B
• ISBN13: 9798279477951
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 47 Pages
• Weight: 0.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"