ENDURANCE
- dkclements
- 4 hours ago
- 10 min read
THE SUN BEATS DOWN on the South Lawn of the White House. A UFC cage stands ready for the 250th celebration. Fighters will step into the octagon while the nation marks its birthday and the President his eightieth.
Critics cry “circus!” On social media the knives are out. MAGA voices, once ironclad, now crack under the weight of waiting. “Where are the arrests?” “No accountability.” “Trump’s messaging is off.” “He’s playing golf while the deep state laughs.” The comments pile up like drift ice—sharp, cold, unrelenting. Patriots who stormed the breach in 2020 and 2024 now buckle. The silence from the machinery of justice is too much to bear.
“Fighters on the lawn is too much” they say. Yet, history shows that Theodore Roosevelt brought fighters to the lawn before. In fact, Roosevelt stepped in against military aide Col. Daniel T. Moore one afternoon until the punch came that tore the eye loose inside and left him half-blind but never saying much about it until later. Years on, Obama had the Foo Fighters out there under the lights with the amplifiers roaring for the crowd. Now the cage stands ready and the fighters will come again. It was all the same thing, the lawn taking what a man wanted to put on it, nothing new under the flag.
Still, I read the posts. I feel the fracture. I have written before of the war against me—the investigations, the threats, the attempts to strip my license, the cost to my family. I know what it is to stand when the ground shifts. Around the same time I was introduced to the world on Tucker Carlson’s show, my sister was shot in the head. My mother, a sainted wreck, picked up the pieces. To function, I had to turn off the parts that feel too deeply. Triage. There was no saving a family if we did not first save our country.
After the Rededication of our nation and the release of Tina Peters, you would think I would be on cloud nine. The fulfillment of a long-awaited dream of national repentance. People lining the streets in the swamp to worship God. That was a day for the history books. Something changed in the spiritual realm. Believers received a jolt of hope. A screenshot of a witches’ forum confirms an energy shift. The enemy is now sick and exhausted.
Seeing Tina free, of course I rejoiced. Two major battles won.
But not the war.
Joy was fleeting. I am consumed with the war—the day we finally take scalps.
Indulge me another fever dream. The eyes gazing on that UFC cage are interrupted. For me, men swearing allegiance to the same flag and fighting on a lawn does nothing to evoke the pride of a nation’s independence against tyranny. The wrong people are in the cage. I want the broadcast to switch to another cage—one holding Obama, Hillary, and their Rothschild handlers.
So instead of relishing our nation’s repentance, I drove north to Talbot County, Maryland. To Third Haven, the old Quaker house of prayer. I sat for an hour in silence on a pew once occupied by William Penn, the spiritual founding father of our nation. No words. No songs. Just the weight of waiting on God.
I told Him, “I am not okay. Where are You?”
You see, He made me a promise. In the first episode titled “Can America Covenant with God,” I shared that something supernatural happened to me on January 6th, 2021. Many have asked about it.
In a nutshell, I prayed for angels, and gossamer threaded outlines appeared. For the play-by-play watch the video. I was told, “Do not worry. We are going to win.”
“We are going to win.”
I have bet everything on that promise—my job, my marriage, my children, my reputation, and defending a man’s anointing whose got bigger problems to solve then checking in on how I’m doing.
That is why, as Trump reaches his eightieth year, I pray new life is given to our nation’s rebirth. I say this as my own father has just reached eighty. He is dying. He says, “Enough. I am tired.” Hospice has been arranged.
We are not okay. We have not been okay for a long time. My brother is blind and needs twenty-four-hour care. When my father breathes his last, the burden falls heavier on me. The last six years have left me exhausted. An old back injury has returned with fury. Days in bed. Jarring pain. Little sleep. And through it all I wait for God to speak.
Nothing.
Silence.
I promised myself and my readers I would publish nothing unless I felt the clear prick of the Spirit. So, what do you write when heaven is quiet? When your mind feeds you what the crowd wants to hear—namely that everything will be okay—yet God says, “Don’t do it. That’s not from Me. Those are the small gods of self-sabotage whispering about lost clicks and fading relevance. You are warring with the idolatry of productivity.”
He is right.
Give me a lost cause, a burden, a fight, and I can soar. Give me silence and I fall apart.
The hardest part is not hearing God’s voice. Waiting. Being still.
But that is exactly what I did in that old timbered church. Pondering how to get closer to the Presence I felt with my gossamer threaded outlines. My mind sees a ship stuck on a frozen horizon—its name: ENDURANCE. An understanding dawns. That ship is the topic for today.
ENDURANCE
This is a meditation of three parts.
First, my own. The waiting that hollows a man. The depression that whispers futility. The back that screams while the soul strains for a word from above. The Word replies, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). “Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!” (Psalm 27:14).
My father. Eighty years now spent. “I’m tired,” he says. Simple words. True words. A generation passing. The earth remains. Over the past twelve years we have spoken only a few times, usually after a health scare that brings me to his bedside. Each time I renew hope that we will reconcile before his mind fades further. My hopes are dashed against rocks of pride and the rigid program that now drives his speech. No real thought for the aging son who stands before him. No connection to grandchildren he does not know. Just a one-way transmission replaying the same talking points, like an old record humming the same tune over and over.
I am finally resolved that I will not receive my little miracle of connection with my father. The world broke him at forty when he blew the whistle on fraud, waste, and abuse in the military-industrial complex. He checked out and I haven’t seen him since. I have made an eternal vow to fight the very forces that broke him. In a cruel twist of fate, he could have nothing to do with a son whose passion to never quit served as a constant reminder of the moment he gave up. Instead, under the guise of love, he has bid me to avoid pain, enjoy a simple life of quaint visits where he replays the record called “Low Expectation Blues” with his greatest hits: “It will work itself out,” You can’t ask for much more than that,” and “That’s why I don’t get involved.” My insides scream in silent rebuttal, muttering, “It didn’t work itself out. If I could find it, I’d strangle him.” Followed by a “I WILL ask for much more," and "because you didn’t get involved, I have to!”
I’ll hear my pops play the same record tomorrow, and as many times as I must until the Lord claims him in His good time. The moral of the first meditation? Waiting is a duty we owe to dying fathers. I’m commanded to honor him, so I do.
The second meditation is Ernest Shackleton. In 1914 the Endurance left South Georgia for Antarctica. The goal was to cross the continent. Ice seized the ship before they ever landed. For twenty months the crew lived in the Antarctic’s cold clutches. The ship was crushed and sank. They camped on ice floes as the winter darkness closed in. Food ran low. Hope thinned.
There has never been a waiting like theirs.
One day the floe split beneath them with a crack like judgment. A chasm opened. A sailor nearly plunged into the black water, saved only by desperate hands and quick feet. On another day a massive leopard seal erupted through the ice, jaws wide, chasing Thomas Orde-Lees across the floe. Frank Wild dropped the beast with a single shot.
When the ice finally broke, they reached the barren rocks of Elephant Island. Shackleton took five men and launched the James Caird, a twenty-two-foot boat, into the Southern Ocean—the most dangerous waters on earth, the Furious Fifties, with waves like moving mountains. They sailed eight hundred miles through hurricane-force gales and freezing spray. When they staggered ashore on South Georgia, the hardened Norwegian whalers stared at the wrecked men and removed their hats in respect. Such seamanship had never been witnessed.
Shackleton crossed the island’s unmapped mountains and glaciers on foot with two companions, returned with a ship, and rescued every single man left on Elephant Island. Not one lost.
Every day on the ice was a meditation on survival. Waiting. Moving when movement seemed impossible. Holding the men together when meaning itself seemed crushed under the floes. Shackleton did not conquer Antarctica. He brought every soul home through pure endurance.
“Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him” (Psalm 37:7).
“Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles” (Isaiah 40:31).
Could you imagine the endurance required to survive nearly two years of being cold, wet, staring at six months of darkness and light, with survival depending on how the wind blew the glacier you stood upon?
I have waited in life, but never for the ground beneath me to move in a certain direction. The spirit of suicide surely whispered to Shackelton’s men, “Give up. Hell has frozen over, and it has claimed you.” I imagine the war to shrug off such thoughts were constant.
The moral of this second meditation? I can say my efforts holding the hearts of my American country men together pale in comparison to that of Ernest Shackelton. I’m not physically stranded. I have provision. But, mentally and spiritually, I am as tired as my eighty-year-old father. But the greatness of Shackelton hearkens me on from beyond the grave, “Endure. Do not give up, no matter how hopeless it seems.”
The third meditation is Solomon. Ecclesiastes is the rumination of a demoralized king. The son of David looked at life under the sun and called it vanity of vanities. All is vanity. Generations come and go. The sun rises and sets. The wind circles. Streams run to the sea that is never full. Nothing new under the sun. Greater wisdom brings greater sorrow.
He toiled, built, gathered wealth, chased pleasure, pursued understanding. All of it vapor. A striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight. What is lacking cannot be numbered.
Think on that. His wisdom and wealth made him no happier than you or I. As I sit in my garage study, the wisest man who ever lived and I share the same burden: a season of silence and questioning the meaning of it all. So, what drives happiness in the end? David spoke of a deer panting for water. The satisfaction of eternal thirst being quenched. The presence of God Himself.
Solomon did not end in despair, but he took a tortured route to get there. He sat in the silence. He felt the weight. And at the close of the matter he said: “Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. God will bring every deed into judgment.”
I end with this.
Forgive my meditation, which is little more than a confession of weakness. Namely, laying bare the depression, the exhaustion, the silence. But I am claiming a promise by doing so. The scriptures say: “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16).
“Healing.”
Say it with me. “Lord, I need healing for what’s broken inside.”
I sat in the Quaker silence at Third Haven and thought of these threads. For a moment I laid on the pew staring up. I saw a small, vented opening in the ceiling, and traced the building for a way to the attic. I was told the young children at Third Haven would sit in the attic of the structure during services. I found stairs and wandered up, not sure of whether I was going into a forbidden area. The walls were signed by believers going back hundreds of years.
There, I received an understanding while standing in the attic alone. I desired to be closer to God, seated at a higher place. And he brought me to where the children sat, high above where the Puritans would have sat below.
Matthew 11:25 came to mind: “At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.” And then Matthew 18 flashed, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”
In that children’s attic, I said, “I’m here father. I love you. I am yours.”
I could feel His smile.
My thoughts now turn to my father on earth, his quiet farewell. Shackleton’s small boat in the raging seas. Solomon’s honest lament. The MAGA faithful chafing under delay. The cage on the White House lawn. Trump seems to think we’ll be okay, shooshing his naysayers, with an admonishment. “Don’t be a panican.”
The waiting is real. The silence from heaven can break a man. But the quest is not to escape the wait. It is to endure it without losing the men entrusted to you. To row when the wind howls. To sit when there is nothing to say. To trust that the same God who crushed the Endurance in ice can still bring every soul home.
I have nothing grand to publish today. Only this: I am still here. Still waiting. And like a child, I still believe that the One who spoke creation knows the exact hour when the ice will break.
Hold fast, brothers. Solomon was right. All is vanity under the sun. But above the sun there is a voice, even when we cannot hear it. One day it will speak. And every crooked thing will be made straight. It’s God’s turn to set things right.
Until then, we endure.
David K. Clements is a seasoned attorney, former law professor, filmmaker and dedicated advocate for election integrity and constitutional rights. If you think he's on to something, consider being a monthly sponsor of his independent journalism at:
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