Future-Back Thinking

What the Heck is That and What Does it Have to do with “Well-Being?”

Mar 11, 2026

I’m currently reading books and taking courses on how to be an online entrepreneur. You might ask what does that have to do with spiritual abuse, spiritual growth, wholeness, or personal well-being? You’d be right to ask. Here’s my answer: the more I know what online tools are available for me to use in and beyond “Launch Your Well-Being,” the more people I can reach with the gifts the Lord has given me. My vision includes using my creativity to create online courses, memberships, and books. So, in my later years, yes, I’m learning how to be an online entrepreneur.

One of the authors I’m reading is Bob Johannsen, who is a sociologist working in the technology field. Just recently, he and two other authors penned a book titled “Office Shock,” in which they recite the several reasons that the traditional office space in buildings is radically changing. Reasons that radically change every aspect of life as we know it today – changes such as the Pandemic, the positive and negative effects of social media, the ever-evolving internet – just to name a few. Those changes (and more) are not just affecting the world of how, when, and where corporations large and small do business. Those changes are affecting every aspect of life in today’s disrupted world.

That laundry list of wide-spread changes is affecting the Church also. I read in another book, “The Great DeChurching,” that in the last 25 years, a staggering 40 million American Christians have left the church. They’re de-churched! Forty million! Across all denominations! Of course that means that all the major polling services are busy doing surveys in an effort to find out the reasons why.

And of course, there is a subset of that 40 million who left the church because they were spiritually abused. Other subsets include the Millenials and GenX who have also de-churched themselves. These are some of the reasons why I’m in the process of starting an online business. It will be called “North Star Caritas.” We all need a North Star for guidance. Caritas means caring, compassion, that kind of loving attitude and behavior.

Bob Johannsen and his cohorts wriote about what they call “future-back thinking.” They claim that the many conditions and events that are disrupting life as we knew it a few short years ago, are happening at such a rapid-fire speed, that the best way to “have it together today for tomorrow,” is to start wondering about what reality will be like 10 years from now. Then and only then, begin to think 5 years before that, working their way back to NOW.

These authors tell their readers to “have fun” imagining what life will be like 10 years from now. So, I’ve begun thinking about there being more and more human cyborgs with this, that, or the other kind of sensor implanted in their bodies. This will have medical, scientific, and practical effects on how we can be augmented. Think that’s crazy? It’s already begun, my friends. What was science fiction only a few years ago is becoming reality at warp speed.

The example of cyborgs is only one out of the several scenarios that I dreamed up. However, that word “augmented” caught my attention. I began thinking that we Christians have the Holy Spirit living and breathing within us. The one and the same Holy Spirit who leads, guides, and gives gifts that empower us to do what we really can’t do without those gifts. And so, I began thinking we are already “augmented” – humans augmented with God’s Holy Spirit. That thought grounds me as I think all those other thoughts of 10 years out.

All of this has led me to have the insight to begin an online company called “North Star Caritas” that would offer courses and memberships on a variety of topics, from well-being, to traumas of life (including spiritual abuse), to having a North Star to hold on to with a sense of coherence in this crazy world we live in.

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