The Opening

Before I tell you how this book started, I need to tell you about the toys.

When I was a boy, I destroyed every toy my parents ever bought me. Not out of anger — out of need. I had to know how they worked. I would play with a thing for a day and then the screwdriver came out, and by nightfall it was in pieces on the floor with me hunched over it, trying to understand the inner workings. It did not stop at toys. I took apart whatever I could get my hands on. I blew up toasters. I blew up microwaves. You name it, I opened it — usually without permission and occasionally without survivors. And then one day my dad sat me down and showed me a motor, two wires, and a battery — and my world changed. Touch the wires, and the thing moved. There was a reason inside everything, and the reason could be found, and once you found it, you could ask the question that has driven my whole life since: how can I make this better?

I did not know it then, but God was showing me my own code. That drive — take it apart, find the reason, understand the design — was not a phase and it was not a quirk. It was the calling He wrote into me, the package I have spent a lifetime unpacking. It made me an engineer. It gave me the career the first book came out of. And, in a turn I never saw coming, it is the reason this second book exists — because the day came when God took the boy who reverse-engineered toasters and set him loose on something else entirely: the devices of the enemy.

Paul's own word — "we are not ignorant of his devices" (2 Corinthians 2:11, KJV). I have been taking apart devices since I could hold a screwdriver. I just never imagined whose.