Junior Year High School
Is this the face of a devil worshipper?
Junior Year High School
Is this the face of a devil worshipper?
After I stopped going to church when I was fourteen, God wasn't quite ready to give up on me. I started smoking cigarettes when I was fifteen, and luckily missed the drugs and peer pressure in high school. Part of what I missed in the drugs was due to drugs not being prevalent in the small city near Kansas City that I was growing up in. Part was due to inability, because I had not begun puberty yet. Part was due to an underclassman named Gary Brewster.
Gary rode on the bus with me after school and was also always on my bus when the school band took trips. Gary was one of the "Christians", a small group of "weirdos" in our school. Gary must have made me his special project, because he "pestered" me continuously.
Gary took every opportunity to sit close to me and talk to me about God and Jesus Christ. However, my fourteen years or so of church and Sunday School served only to ask questions that Gary couldn't answer. I even looked stuff up in the bible to try to get him to leave me alone while he researched it or got it from someone else.
Though Gary continued to pester me throughout high school, I never did take him up on his offer to introduce Jesus to me.
Only known to very few people, the reason I was so resistant to Gary and christianity at that time was that I was seeking, and thought I'd found what I was looking for. A classmate's parents were into the occult, so I got a good dose of whatever they were seeking. I studied witchcraft, astrology, numerology, even Buddhism. After about two years of this, they all started weirding me out when they began getting into black magic and other stuff that I was not willing to because it made me very afraid. Thank God, huh?
When I got out of high school, a lot of things began to change for me. I started experimenting with pot. I grew my hair long and launched into an era on the tail end of the hippy movement. I was only doing the pot, but I had all the ideas of "anti-establishment" and "free love".
In the picture above I'm about twenty, even though I look much younger, and by the time I was 21, my experimentation moved up to worse drugs like THC, Mescaline, and pills like Quaaludes and other uppers and downers. I'd also started drinking, and had begun having sex. In a few more years, I was doing lots of drugs except for shooting up, which is something that I could never do, and the heavy stuff like Heroin and LSD, which I never considered. Just about everything else was fair game, though. I began dating several women and having sex and even moved into the disco era, though I only truly got drunk twice. I could never develop a taste for the stuff and I did not like totally losing control of myself. I'm 24 in the picture below.
By the time I was 28, I was seeking to fill this hole in my life. I tried stuffing in sex, drugs, drinking, and anything else I could in an attempt to fill up that gap that seemed to always be missing.
I got married, thinking that would do it, and finally, finally, someone told me about who Jesus is. They showed me from John 1:1-3,14 where Jesus is also God, not just one cool radical dude that got whacked way too soon, or the Son of God, or Messiah, or whatever.
Well, that was all it took me...I started spending all my breaks with this man for the next two years, studying the bible. Needless to say, I got saved for the first time in my life, but my wife didn't take to it too well. Although the teaching was sound, the man, who was an ordained minister, sucked us into a cult-like envirionment. After two years, I had no idea I was head saved, or knowledge saved, but the stuff hadn't got down into my heart yet.
My wife and I by this time had separated, because she still wanted to do drugs and continue the former lifestyle, and I didn't, though I had little faith or patience for christianity, I did have the knowledge. When I found out my wife was running around on me, I believed I had concourse for divorce, according to 1st Corinthians Chapter 7, but my cult-like pastor disagreed. When the smoke cleared, I was divorced and excommunicated from the church, which was a good thing, believe me.
What was not so good was that I soon ended up leaving the church over all this. I would spend the next eleven years on a dangerous see-saw between being drawn back to God and the church, and on the other end back to the old lifestyle, with cocaine added as my drug of choice. When one part was up, the other part was ignored, and vice versa. When this picture was taken, I had a new wife and a new stepchild.
Although my first wife had a young baby boy, with this wife I got to see this little boy come into the world. This still remains one of my top ten all time memories, although I wasn't walking with God at the time. Even when I was walking with God, I was only loaning him my head and my knowledge, not my life. I would actually draw near to God and one of the first things he would do is talk to me about the call to pastor he had put on my life. I would then get scared and run away. This continued for years.
A year older here, I was so enamoured of my stepson. I still am to this day, though this marriage ended in divorce also, though that was not by my choice.
Then, in 1995, some things started to get me fed up with living on the see-saw I had made of my life. I started to get more serious about God. I was so inadequate for the task though. I was so immature, and had so much to learn about servanthood.
After six months of life-changing therapy with an excellent counsellor who admired my trying to learn to help myself, I thought I was ready. All I really had done with the therapy was get rid of my life's baggage. I had so much to learn. Of course, I made my mistakes both in my christian life and the ministries I worked in.
I began working in some ministries, mainly in calling on the older folks who could not attend church, and I had become the Drama Minister in the church I was in. I just could not be responsible for others, because I was not responsible for myself, though I loved the responsibility.
I walked with my spiritual blinders on and would end up getting wounded by less-than-perfect-people, including pastors, who did not keep their promises. Though they were wrong, I compounded the wrong by leaving church, and when I would come back, I had lost confidence in many people that I am still attempting to overcome.
Of course, leaving church over being hurt, I tipped up the other end of that dangerous see-saw once again. About all I had really accomplished was to quit smoking and get rid of the baggage that holds us back, and not to want to trust in people who were going to let me down.