Melanie Gillespie
July 10, 2026

Disclaimer: as a person with an outlier brain, I am highly likely to tell you how the watch was made when you merely ask me for the time. 😬🤣🤷🏻‍♀️ My sharing below may wind up like that... No matter. I will need every word I write by the end for what I am here to share. Thank you for the grace of your patience and willingness to accurately see me and love me.

BACKGROUND

For many years, I have traveled a personal spiritual path that has opened and deepened me to many of the mysteries of the cosmos and the Earth. 

This path has never found me feeling clearly aligned with any particular doctrine, religion, or philosophy, while often resonating with much in many. And so, during those years, when pressed, I referred to myself as a solitary esoteric mystic. 

I was routinely shown (from within) aspects of creation (such as that creation occurs through trinity spirality) and how life works, which I strove to share in as ethical and high-integrity a manner as possible and following Divine guidance. 

My personal devotion bloomed out of my reverence for Life and this planet and the deep sacred current of lifeforce as sacred and inviolable.

My devotion strengthened over time, becoming increasingly precise and narrow out of a desire to be as pure and clear an instrument of God as I could be. 

I felt a central line of Divine energy that runs through all things as "the energy line of accuracy" to which I desired to cleave over all other things. I feel it piercing our very center and beaming outward in front of us, guiding us if we choose to follow.

I committed myself over and over into what I came to call "hopeful obedience" to this Divine energy of accuracy and found myself increasingly unable to abide in any proximity to what felt corrupted or too far removed from that energy.

My publicly shared work, through written and audio means and in private and small group services, has been in devotion to helping others find this within themselves in the manner that felt most accurate to them. 

I've shared these ethics, received concepts, and distilled wisdoms openly and consistently for many years. Showing up as genuinely and authentically my true self as possible has long been a core value.

During these years, much of my mentoring work has focused exclusively on those born with what is typically called a highly gifted brain.

Learning how to properly live with such a brain requires specific skills and capacities that are not taught in the mainstream.

While many perceive such a brain as an asset or even a superpower, in an unskilled person it can be an absolute curse.

What I perceived in my early understanding of esoteric metaphysics and cosmogony was that humans with this brain type are given it as their fundamental portal or initiatory faculty, which opens them to the deeper mysteries. The deeper mysteries being - in my view - open to all, simply through variable pathways depending on one's personal biological characteristics.

In more recent work, I have begun specifically speaking into the reality that the trajectory of humanity is largely shaped by the actions and contributions of the highly gifted when they are in a high-functioning state.

This makes many people uncomfortable as it feels in some vague way unfair, but it is nevertheless pretty demonstrably true by any student of culture and/or history.

This places, in my view, a disproportionate burden on such people to step properly and fully into their "true potential," a phrase which has dominated their lives since childhood in most cases.

This can problematically tip them into savior or martyr roles. It's a subtle and challenging thing to untangle, as all humans are still struggling with a deep-seated desire to be "the chosen one."  More on this separately, except for this:

Upholding the human option - deeply embedded in our psyche through stories and culture - to become the chosen one continues to enforce a verticality of power, authority, and connection to the Divine. 

I could write an entire book on this topic alone to explain, but this sharing is not at all the place for it. I just need it to be one of the elements I am laying out on the table, so to speak, before I share my personal news.

The Divine is available and accessible to any and all who choose to open themselves to it, and sometimes even those who do not! Think of unexpected conversion events as an example.

My entire life has carried a throughline of devotion to the belief in the democratization and horizontality of access to the Divine and to personal sovereignty that is in right relation to Life.


At times, my fierce and firm belief and advocacy in this has blocked me from various goals or from seeing certain views.

PERSONAL EVENT

On May 25, 2026, I had my own unexpected conversion experience. I am now a devoted follower of Jesus and the Holy Trinity.

This will shock most people who have known me well earlier in my life and probably even those who have known me more closely in the past decade.

But as I have been integrating this fact, it actually feels more like an evolution than a revolution for me, given my path. And yet it has also been shocking to me in certain ways nonetheless.

I have not joined a church, nor am I ascribed to any particular Christian doctrinal view at this time. I have been immersing directly through prayer and have been led periodically to sit with certain pieces of scripture and certain apologetics perspectives.

This is how Jesus has been leading me, and I follow his will to the best of my ability despite the certain knowledge that I can never be perfect in that.

It is still hopeful obedience to the Divine and to Life, but now it is firmly whittled and distilled down to precisely and purely Jesus and the Holy Trinity.

I am no theologian and have no aspiration to establish myself as a priest or pastor or the like. But I have felt a profound shift in my fundamental view of the world and my place in it.

I am devout not just to my purpose as I have sought to discern and clarify and refine over many years, but even more so now to the One who made me and gave me this purpose.

I want to try and describe to you my experience below, but first I want to share that I have had such trepidation about fully "coming out" with this news. Not because it isn't pure joy to me; it is, but because I know it may alienate many.

How do I know this?

Because for most of my life, when I have learned someone is a "Jesus person," I myself have turned away from them either radically or subtly.

For most of my young adult life, the concept of all the Abrahamic religions was intensely triggering to me, in fact. 

I did not grow up in a particularly religious home. My father was raised Catholic but did not practice, and my mother was what I would call "gently" Episcopalian and baptized me and had me confirmed in that church as a young child, but I have no conscious memories of church life or study even in those early times. 

I was adopted as a baby, in fact. I learned when I became a mother myself that my biological mother came from a strict Catholic home. She was a teen unmarried mother and placed in a Catholic "Unwed Mothers" home in the Boston area for her pregnancy. I have since wondered about how the deep shame and rejection she experienced translated between us while I was in the womb. Epigenetics would suggest it could have a significant impact.

My half-sister from my father's first marriage is eight years older than me. She lived with us mainly in the summers. She became a devout Catholic on her own at 16. I remember that summer vividly. Her C. S Lewis books that I tried in vain to understand at 8 (he wrote The Lion, The Wicth, and The Wardrobe after all 🤣!) were in certain ways as formative as the record albums she left behind and that I listened to obsessively after she was gone as my first ever. Pink Floyd's The Wall, James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, Jackson Brown's Running On Empty, Carole King's Tapestry... Sitting on the floor in front of the massive stero speaker in our back living room was everything! If you know, you know!

I always respected her faith. There was a rigor and a truth in her about it that rang true for me. I still abhorred the church itself.

During my private mentoring work over the past decade, I have had a number of women come into my practice who I thought of as refugees from extreme fundamentalist and conservative Christian communities. Usually, but not exclusively in the US South. They had extreme childhood trauma and sometimes direct abuse to detangle. 

Holding them gently during that process while ensuring room was also held on the other side for their own new communion with the Divine in whatever manner they felt called to, if any, was something I did lovingly and masterfully. It certainly did nothing to encourage me towards Jesus, though.

It is only in the past decade that I have found my heart softened by my own personal communion with the Divine, which has not previously been translated within me as specific to Jesus and the Triune God, but which made me both know and believe that the mysteries of the nature of life are available to all and that there is far more to it all than I could dream up. And I can dream up ALOT!

My watchword in sharing my beliefs and perspectives became "take what's useful now and discard the rest without judgment (as it may become useful later)." A philosophy I came to firmly embody down to my cells. 

Without this process, I cannot imagine what my experience would have been like of Jesus coming in to me and bringing me in to Him.

ATTEMPTING TO DESCRIBE THE EXPERIENCE ITSELF

No self-respecting writer would share this personal and entirely joyful news without doing her best to describe the experience.

And yet...

Truly, words fail. Utterly.

The best I can do is tell you that I have repeatedly found myself utterly transfixed in the reality of myself as the tinest, most infinitesimal speck of sand, of a fragment of sand in the incomprehensibly vast cosmos. My utter smallness being humbling beyond any previous felt sensation. At the same time, my seeing and feeling this occurs only because I am granted to see as Jesus sees in those moments so I simultaneously see and feel a love beyond all measure or description. 

TRUE PURE LOVE.

An incredibly personal and direct love that Jesus specifically has for ME. Tiny grain of sand me. Exactly as I am, scrambling along the wild and jagged beaches of life.

A love so extreme and so personal it sees every atom and particle of my being across every possible layer of reality and loves it all entirely.

A love that requires nothing in return other than my own opening of my own heart, which is not only easy, it is the only thing that matters to me, the only thing possible for me, to open all of myself entirely to Jesus, to give all of myself over to him. To humbly ask him to abide inside me as I know this is all he wants and to have him take me to live inside him, such that we are living in a beautiful divine communion beyond even what I have experienced or envisioned in trying to share with people about COMMUNION Blooming as this year's energy theme for the planet.

And all I can say, over and over, is I HAD NO IDEA. I HAD NO IDEA and I AM SO SORRY. I AM SO SORRY, I DIDN'T KNOW in the most humbled repentance I've never felt, while filled with a Beauty and Grace and Love and Redemption I didn't even imagine.

I feel him filling me with scripture too, even if I haven't read it, the words pour out of my mouth in unbidden prayer only to later be found when I am shown where to see them.

In the phases of time when I am not swept away in this beautitude beyond all words or thought, I am able to feel how he is this for every single human. That this was his promise and his gift and the new covenant that every human can come to him. DIRECTLY. His church (in my experience, I am no theologian, recall, and not debating doctrine!) are all the humans who have opened their hearts fully to him and accepted him wholly. The bodies receiving him and being received by him. 

The Kingdom of Heaven is truly within us and the center energy line of accuracy I have been cleaving to has come from him this entire time.

One note about doctrine/belief: I have always firmly said NO to most teachings of the neospiritual community even while surfing alongside of it in various ways, including this idea of "unity consciousness" in which we are all assimilated into one God and in which we believe ourselves to BE God. NO. Always a hard no from me in my experience of the cosmos being designed for Differentiated Communion. 

Now though, I see this is more than just profane, but actually demonic and part of the greater spiritual war which has been ongoing for millennia here, which I have discussed periodically over the years as well. 

I understand many will despise me saying this, and that's okay. 

If you have questions about how things I have taught in the past track now (or not) with where I now hold faith as a follower of Jesus, please feel free to ask them of me! You can reach me at melanie@melaniegillespie.com or via the contact form on this site.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR MY WORK

My work organizes itself via two main channels: 

1) The Joyful Story Club and my sharing of written joyful fantasy books, and;

2) The Outlier Brain, here, where I nurture and mentor humans with gifted brains.

The stories don't change hardly at all, although a few ambiguities I held on certain plot points have resolved themselves more clearly. It's not Christian fiction per se, but I feel it has always been something that is acceptable/adjacent/aligned.

The mentoring work does shift now. It's a subtle but profound shift for me. My expertise remains rare and of high value, of course. But it is now applied from a new framework, one devoted to:

Faithful STEWARDSHIP of exceptional abilities as provided by God for a purpose.

I have never seen the gifted brain as a badge of superiority or even identity, really. It's something you have to learn how to use if you want to experience life well. If you were born without one foot, you'd have to learn how to ambulate and move differently than most. This is no different except for that it gives you the potential to run faster, metaphorically speaking, than virtually everyone else, if you figure it out. 

If God has entrusted you with unusual cognitive ability, how do you develop it wisely, direct it toward meaningful work, and use it in service of God and others? 

I've long been a big believer in the Spider-Man Creed: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. Which, it turns out, is simply another way of saying: “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked” (Luke 12:48)

It is no longer a matter for me of you simply choosing what sort of life you want and supporting you to live it regardless of the broader context.

It is about helping you to steward this God-given ability for a greater purpose based on your own discernment of that in your own faith journey (whether your faith journey is with Jesus or not, I expect you are a seeker of some sort and so long as you are interested in a contribution to the greater good that is fine with me, in terms of my work on your behalf).

In my Fundamentals of the Highly Gifted Brain library, I urged you to become and embody your own true essence, learn the rhythms needed for your own brain's ways, and dial in and amp up your signal of receiving inner guidance and direction. These are the three pillars of that work.

Now I say to you that this personal and unique essence that you are, which I have said is the "Source" light shining through the unique prism you are designed as, is actually the expression of God in the form of both that unique prism that you are and the way in which you steward that prism for the effect of God's Light pouring through you into this world.

Unlike most of the world's enabling of you becoming whoever you choose to become in some nihilistic or hedonistic fashion, I have been teaching you to become what you truly and uniquely actually are... 

And now I say: become who God designed you to become. You have a destiny to fulfill. That ever elusive "true potential" is what God made you for and to which you have an actual obligation to pursue with everything you've got.

So my new watchwords are things like:

• calling
• stewardship
• discernment
• faithfulness
• vocation
• service

With these and my own proven expertise in:

• gifted cognition
• mentoring
• purpose development
• high-capacity thinking
• pattern recognition
• helping gifted adults flourish

I now invite you into the question of:

What does faithful stewardship of giftedness look like?

Stay tuned for more on this new Stewardship Framework I have been developing to share in service of supporting you to discover, discern, build, impact, and deepen through an ongoing journey into what faithful next step God may be inviting you into.

I understand that you may no longer feel you can walk with me on this giftedness journey, if my new faith feels too mismatched with your own way of experiencing life. I have, AS I ALWAYS HAVE, full respect for your view and your autonomy. 

My goal with this sharing, is to simply be open and transparent, as always, with you about where I am, who I am now, and what you therefore may expect from me in the future.

For some, I hope this will be exciting and bring us closer. If so, I hope you'll take the time to send me a quick note to tell me so!

Down below is the way to sign up for the topics I share in, feel free to update yourself there as you see fit.

ONE WAY TO WALK THE NEXT STEPS WITH ME:

I've been designing this new Stewardship Framework I mentioned above. I'm calling it:
The Gifted Minds, Faithful Lives Stewardship Circle.

Phase 1 of this is open now. I'd love for you to join me or share this with someone you know who would enjoy it.

Read all about it here or by clicking below: