"We hold that man is never so near grace as when he begins to feel he can do nothing at all." – C.H. Spurgeon
The other day, I was having a conversation with my friend David. I use the term “friend” loosely as I had only known him for twenty minutes at the time of the aforementioned conversation, but I really don’t know what else to call him so, for the purposes of the story, he is my “friend.” Anyhow, we were talking about perceptions of the cross and how different those perceptions can be. For instance, I grew up Catholic, and when you enter a catholic church there is generally a crucifix somewhere above the altar. The difference, on a physical level, between a crucifix and a generic cross is that the crucifix still depicts Jesus as being on the cross, in accordance with the catholic principle of “perpetual sacrifice.” On a regular, generic cross, there is no human body, just the body of the cross. This, David said, is a big deal because the Catholic crucifix, by depicting the body of Christ as being on the cross, places more emphasis on the idea of Christ’s sacrifice (what happened while Christ was on the cross), whereas the Protestant, generic cross places more emphasis on Christ’s grace and salvation (what happened once Christ came down from the cross).
Growing up in a Catholic home, attending mass every week, going to a Catholic school (which I was eventually expelled from), and surrounding myself with other Catholics, I heard a lot about Christ’s sacrifice. And while the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is extremely important, I heard very little about the grace and salvation that Christ offers. This may or may not be why I failed to believe in Christ until 6 months ago, but I do know that in the Catholic church, I couldn’t see myself believing in Christ because I had no reason to believe. In my eyes, Jesus was a man who lived and died over a thousand years ago, and who had absolutely zero relevance in my life as a young person. So, in my 8th grade year, following years of non-belief in Jesus while being very active in my home church, I began describing myself as a “secular humanist.” While I claimed at the time that the reasoning behind this “secular humanist” tag was my belief that life is all there is and humans are the most powerful beings on the planet and so on and so forth, I know have the humility to admit that I really only described myself in such a manner because it was the way my favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, described himself and I had heard a good friend whom I very much looked up to discuss it with one of his friends when I was in the 7th grade.
But while this part of my life played a very big part in my conversion and is extremely important to me on a personal level, I don’t feel that it’s entirely necessary to give you, the reader, twenty pages of background information on my favorite recording artists, films, breakfast cereals, and every girl I’ve ever had feelings for. So, to speed things up a bit, I’ll start off with the first time I smoked pot. I was 11-years old the first time I engaged in the smoking of the marijuana plant, and from my first hit, I was in love (very much like the chorus of the song “Mary Jane” by Rick James, who, by the way, also played a very big part in my conversion). As soon as that smelly smoke entered my lungs, I knew that this was what my life had been missing. So for the next 6 years, I tried as many drugs as possible, slept with as many girls as I could, screwed over as many friends as I could, and tried to forget about God as best as I could. Needless to say, this was a journey down a very tall and very bumpy hill that ended me up at a military school, jail, and eventually, Sundown Ranch, an
East Texas rehabilitation center for young people, pretty soon after my 17
th birthday. Prior to my admittance at Sundown Ranch, I had a couple run-in’s with the law, a major fistfight with my father, and got kicked out of my house, following which I went on a two-month long bender and almost died on at least three occasions.
When I first got to Sundown Ranch, I wanted to die. I was alone in the middle of nowhere with no friends or family anywhere near me. I seriously considered suicide for the first time in my life, and even went so far as to talk about it amongst the other patients. I had some pretty severe withdrawals from codeine and cocaine and almost scratched my face off. And it was at this time, the time in my life where I least expected it, where I met God for the first time.
My first encounter with God came during withdrawals. I was on bed-rest, with an IV stuck in my arm in a white room with no wallpaper. The nurses had chosen to leave two books in the room, the only two books which I was permitted to read: The Narcotics Anonymous Basic Text, and a New International translation of the Bible. When I could finally muster up the strength to lift my arm without shaking so much that the IV came loose, I decided to read something. The Narcotics Anonymous book looked stupid and had a very boring-looking cover so I went with the bible, at least it’d be good for a laugh, right? Anyhow, as I flipped through the New Testament, there was a verse that stood out to me:
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves;
it is the gift of God; Not of works, lest any man should boast.
--Ephesians 2:8, 9
I reread the verse multiple times but it didn’t sink in until over a week later. Anyhow, I realized something in that white room with no wallpaper with an IV in my arm as my body trembled with no drugs in my bloodstream for the first time in months: I needed someone. I didn’t know yet who that someone was, but I knew that something was missing in my life. This couldn’t be all there was to living.
A week later, no longer stuck in a white room in bed with an IV in my arm, I went to sleep in the boys’ living quarters, as all 5 of my roommates did the same. As I curled up in the thinnest sheets I’d ever slept under, I looked at the door, which had a deadbolt on it, to which only the staff had keys. Two hours later, I woke up from a deep sleep (on second thought, it couldn’t have been that deep if I woke up two hours into it, but who really cares?) and looked up at the door once again, the lock shining in an otherwise dark room. As I looked up at the door, I felt a great chill enter my body, like a mighty wind rushing through my bones. And at that moment, the door to our room sprang to life, slamming against the wall as it flung open and came unlocked. Frightened, I closed my eyes. But upon opening them, no one was there. I rose from my twin-sized hospital bed and stepped lightly to the door. I peeked outside the room only to see one of the Ranch’s staff playing solitaire with herself, radio at her side, as though she hadn’t heard the door open at all. Confused, I returned to my bed and thought for a long while, eventually returning to sleep. When I awoke the next morning, the door was shut and locked as it was before I had woken up that night.
Each evening at Sundown Ranch, us patients had a choice of whether or not we wanted to attend a Narcotics Anonymous meeting or “Spirituality,” a praise and worship service held in a big red barn. Up until that night, I had exclusively attended Narcotics Anonymous. But tonight I was bored with meetings, and one of my peers casually attempted to persuade me to attend Spirituality. Reluctantly, I gave in, and once I entered the barn, there was no going back. So I sat down in one of the twenty-or-so modest metal chairs lined up in front of a large white screen on the wall. I sat there for ten minutes or so before a big man with a very bushy beard stood up before me and talked a little bit about Jesus and the prodigal son and a bunch of other stupid stuff I’d already heard a thousand times.
Finally, the guy with the bushy beard walked to the back of the room and sat down. A moment later, the lights were dimmed and as the room became very dark, an image appeared on the large white screen hanging on the wall. It was the image of a candle burning—a video, actually, of multiple candles burning—and a song began to play at high volume over a set of large speakers I had never noticed before that day. The song began…
“Though I walk / through the valley / of the shadow of death…”
As the song went on, I began to feel an awkward tingle in my toes, the kind that you get on your tongue after you snort a large amount of cocaine. The sensation began to spread from my toes to my legs and onward up my body as I sat silently in my gray metal chair. Then the song reached it’s first chorus:
“Oh no, you never let go / through the calm and through the
storm…”
At this point, I should have been freaking out—my body was tingling! My initial thought was that I was having “post-acute withdrawal” problems and it was just my body’s reaction to a lack of drugs. Then I thought maybe I had eaten too much sugar at dinner (I had eaten several bowls of kiwis and pineapple) and was having an unnatural reaction to having so much sugar in my system. Then I thought maybe it was too cold in the room, and this tingling sensation was really just goosebumps. Whatever the case may have been, the timing was too perfect for there not to have been some sort of greater explanation than just withdrawals, a sugar-high, or low temperatures (in fact, if I remember correctly, it was pretty warm in the room at the time as it was a barn and it was the end of May). It was at this moment that I experienced my first “Jesus-high.”
In the weeks that followed, I didn’t think too much of this moment. It crossed my mind on a few occasions but it held very little significance to me—especially since it involved a Christian praise-and-worship song (I hate cheesy praise and worship music, or “CCM” as the Christian music industry calls it). I was beginning to doubt my lack of belief in a higher power, but it was a doubt that was creeping up on me, and, at the time, I had no idea what was going on inside of me. So, really, my thoughts on the matter were simply a mess of scattered ideas and concepts that flooded my consciousness in the weeks following my experience in the big red barn.
This mess of ideas culminated one morning in the first week of June when the frames of my glasses came apart on the basketball court when I got knocked down by a bigger kid. Now this kid—his name was Jacob (it wasn’t really Jacob but I forgot what his name was and even if I remembered, I probably wouldn’t use it out of respect and courtesy for him and also because I really like the 1960s TV show Dragnet)—was supposedly a member of the Latin Kings gang and had the tattoos to prove it. Basically, he was a mean kid: big and angry, a former meth-head with a whole slew of resentments and guilty feelings according to the kids who shared a bedroom with him. Anyways, he knocked my glasses off because I sucked and I was on his team, and a counselor rushed over to help me find the pieces. Eventually, the counselor found the screw that had been knocked out and took me and my glasses to a bench around the corner where she removed a glasses tool from her fanny-pack (yes, counselors in rehab wear fanny-packs, it’s weird).
Now keep in mind that I’m basically blind without my glasses on—well, not blind but I can’t really see much. So as I was sitting at the bench with this tiny glasses tool and attempted to put the frames of my glasses back together, I became very frustrated due to my lack of sight, thus making it very difficult to fix the glasses. I sat and diligently worked on my glasses for at least 10 minutes when I looked up and noticed a large figure across the bench from me. I squinted and realized that it was Jacob, the big Latin King who had just knocked my glasses off. As I looked closer, I noticed something on the top of his right hand: a little red ladybug. It was the only thing I could see, and I watched him smiling, playing with this red ladybug for several moments. And it was at that moment that I realized, if I couldn’t even put the semi-tiny pieces of my glasses together, how in the world could I, or any other human being, put together the pieces of a very tiny ladybug. I thought about this for a moment, admiring the greatness of the God whose power I had experienced in that white room with an IV jammed into my arm, in that locked door that had swung open in the middle of the night that only I noticed, and in that big red barn where I thought I was going crazy with the tingles.
My glasses did get fixed eventually, though they made a clicking noise whenever I touched them after that. I never spoke to Jacob again, but I wish I would have thanked him for showing me God in that smile and that ladybug on that warm day and for knocking my glasses off in the first place. A few nights later, I sat in my dark room and really prayed for the first time in my life. I must’ve prayed for a few hours, silently weeping under the thin white covers of a rehab bed. I talked to God about my life, drugs, girls, my father, and a bunch of other stuff that had been wearing down on me for years. It was that night that I finally accepted Jesus as my father (yes I know “accepted Jesus into my life” is, like, the biggest cliché ever, and I hate clichés, but for the purposes of the story, just get over it). I began to read the bible a lot more and studied the New Testament, starting with the gospels.
Now that I look back, (I say this as though it was years ago, when really it’s only been a little over six months) I can see where Jesus has helped turn my life around. I no longer do drugs—I can’t even look at cocaine in movies now without it making me want to vomit—, I have begun to repair my relationship with my father, and I am a lot happier with myself than before, all via the grace of god. And now, when I look at a cross, I don’t see guilt and shame or Father Bernard from
Cistercian Preparatory School smacking my wrists with a yardstick. Instead, I see the grace and salvation that Jesus offers us no matter what we do. For every grain of cocaine that I ever snorted, for every blunt I ever smoked, for every pill I ever popped, for every girl I ever hooked up with, for every friend I ever screwed over… Jesus forgives me.
