Third Day Ministries

By 4^th grade, it became evident to my pediatrician that I had what’s known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD. Now, this was 1987, a little bit before the “My Kid Has A Disorder, And Needs Medication” craze swept across America, so it wasn’t like I was being inundated into an already established idiom of popular culture; this was a totally foreign concept to me. They put me on Dexedrine to help me focus and control my impulsivity, and to be perfectly honest it really did work quite well, despite the fact of it being a clean, pharmaceutical grade of a widely abused street drug.

Though my school performance improved, however, I was still miserable. Every day on the bus, I would get picked on, have my ears and head flicked repeatedly by the kids sitting behind me, be called names, etc. On the playground I would often get into confrontations leading to fights, and each year I came close to getting kicked out of school for these reasons. One thing that’s not cool about the way our public schools commonly work in practice is that the strong, cocky, popular, confident kids are given free reign to torment and abuse the (insert description here) kids with little or no real restraint from teachers and counselors. I honestly cannot figure out why this is, but as soon as it stops, I believe we will see the end of the phenomena known as the “school shooting.” All of this changed, however, almost as if by magic, over the course of the first half of eighth grade.

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I had begun, over the preceding couple of years (1991-’92) to become interested in what was known then as thrash metal, music being put out by bands like Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer. This type of music strongly expresses a lot of what I guess I would describe as bitterness, anger, rage and cynicism, things which I had pent up en masse from the previous several years of being ridiculed and rejected by those from whom I sought acceptance. As I listened for the first time to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” album on the way home from school in 7^th grade I thought, “Man, this is me, this is how I feel inside…this is the perfect expression of who I am.” I quickly accumulated as large a collection of this and similar music as could be expected to have been gotten on the meager, haphazard income of a 12 year old boy.

Naturally, as one will when choosing to identify oneself strongly with anything in any kind of popular culture for the first time, I found my first clique of friends thereby. It was a real rush for me to, for the first time in my life ever, be accepted into a group of people who had there own sort of respect from the other kids in school, as a kind of class or caste in and of themselves I guess. I had always been a loner, not by choice, but because I had simply never been accepted into a group of friends before in my life. There had been one kid that I had been absolute best friends with from age 3 to 14 or so, but we had drifted apart over the last year and a half, as will commonly happen in such circumstances (Mike had moved to another school district when we were in first or second grade, an event which was actually really hard for me to deal with, as I went from having only one other person in the school that I went to that I was really good friends with, to being really good friends with nobody that I was able to see on any kind of a daily basis at all.) Chris and I, Chris being by best friend out of anybody else in the group at the time, began experimenting with cultic stuff, wicca, meditation, all the kinds of stuff any kid our age could simply get dropped off at any local bookstore, go in and read about for hours on end. Satanism, black magic, you know, all the really dark and disturbing stuff. We were just that way at the time. I’m sure it could be figured out exactly why, but anyway… We went from meditation and magic, to making each other pass out (you know, like against the wall and everything), to marijuana within about a year (not to say that these three things are, of necessity, related in any way, or that they must as a matter of course follow one after another in this order, but this was simply the way things went for us.) From there it was on to acid (LSD) within a few months, then opium, heroin and cocaine (laced in the marijuana, not injected or anything) within the year. It was amazing how it all just happened so fast, like one day I was a completely firm and grounded “I Will Never Ever Do Drugs Under Any Circumstances” kind of guy, and then a few months later I was as big of a stoner as you can be, smoking as much as bud I could manage to smoke day in and day out, not caring what was laced in with it or even thinking about the possibility of overdosing on anything, drinking until blackout or huffing air freshener or butane when no drugs were available and never stopping for a single solitary second to think once about what exactly it was I was doing with my life, or where I was going, not to mention how I was planning on getting there.

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These considerations all faded away in my peripheral vision as my only reason for being, escaping from reality into the custom designed Realm Of Being High Or Drunk Or Tripping, Or All Three Or All Three And Whatever Else Is Available enveloped my mind and will and consciousness entirely. I’m really trying my hardest not to sound melodramatic here, I guess I’m just a really extreme person and everything that I do affects me in a really strong and exaggerated way. (I should mention here that by this time, I had been prescribed to several antidepressants at once in addition to the Dexedrine, which I continued to take. I was diagnosed with a whole bunch of psychological disorders, and eventually took a day long personality profile test where they basically told me I was almost completely nuts, if you consider having a “75% tendency to psychotic deviancy” almost completely nuts.)

There’s a whole lot of stuff that I can probably just fast forward here, as you’re undoubtedly familiar with similar stories and acquainted with persons whose lives have taken such turns. Trouble with school, trouble with police, house arrest, probation, boot camp, trouble at home, suspension, treatment, three months of school, suspension, trouble with police, lockup, treatment, three months of school, yada yada. I ended up getting kicked out of Alternative Education, the last resort and proverbial meat grinder of the public school system as a whole, and having no alternatives left (no pun) but to resign myself a dropout, get a place and some dumb job. Many of my memories preceding, during and after these events are really not even there anymore it seems, but I know that I spent about half of my time, usually the waking half of my time, hanging out in this trailer out on the southwestern edge of town with my best friend, Dawn, her boyfriend Josh, and a varied myriad of other personalities who happened to come by or live there for awhile from time to time. The reason I bring this into the picture is to mention Dawn, with whom I’d actually attended a church for a number of months two years previous to this.

I’m actually going to have to rewind here, from the beginning of 1997 to the winter of ’94-’95 (sorry if this is tedious).

I’d met Dawn in High School, in English class, where she and Dave, an old friend from back when I first got friends, and I had many a stimulating discussion about whatever we were thinking about at the time. One of these conversations had, one day, chanced upon the containing of the remarks that everyone who believes in God must be stupid, and how “God” was obviously the biggest hoax ever, an invention of those in power to subdue and control the masses. Dawn responded at once to this for us to shut the (*) up because she for one, believed in God, and she wasn’t stupid. Well, I ended up getting picked up to go to this Pentecostal, Charismatic, jumping and yelling and falling down on the floor church every Sunday for the next few months (at least until the following spring).

Now I had been raised a Catholic, had long since renounced it and similar beliefs as being ridiculous, and had never even heard of speaking in tongues or getting slain in the spirit. Besides these things, I was still really involved with believing that a lot of the cultic and Wiccan things that I had been experimenting with before were valid, positive spiritual pathways, and at this church they preached that Wicca and cultic practices were totally demonic, absolutely evil, etc. They preached it in a really cool, laid back, mature matter-of-fact way, but even the fact that they did it rubbed me the wrong way. Regardless of these things, though, I continued to go and continued to listed, more because I liked Dawn than for any other reason at the time, and for the acceptance that I seemed to get out of doing so, I guess. At the end of the service, they would usually ask if there was anyone present who hadn’t “asked Jesus to come into their heart” and would like to do so. Every time they did this, Dawn would lean forward and give me a sly sort of sidelong glance that said, “Whaddya think, buddy? You gonna be a man today?” I would always be like “Whatever, man: I don’t even believe in God! Hah!”

One Sunday though, (and I’ll honestly never really be able to figure out or remember what my motive was at the time,) I went up there and prayed with the pastors and “asked Jesus to come into my heart.” I guess quotation marks are a bit frivolous; it’s really not that complicated of a concept. The basic idea was that I agreed with these people that I wasn’t in any position to expect acceptance from God (if there was a God, I said at the time) on the basis of how good or holy I was, and that were I to desire to be forgiven for my sin and to enter into any kind of unity or friendship with God, there would have to be some mediation. The whole premise of Christianity is that this mediation has been fully accomplished by Jesus Christ, that what He did in suffering and dying as a consequence of the world’s sin, and Him being the only completely sinless person ever to have walked the face of the earth (not to mention God Himself, incarnate, impossible as that may seem), has made a full provision for the forgiveness of all who have sinned (that included me).

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ANYWAYS, I say all this simply to explain how I began considering myself a Christian, as this was my motive in choosing a Christian rehab place when the bottom finally fell out of everything I had been doing and my parents gave me the choice of either going to live elsewhere and be a drug addict, or allowing them to send me somewhere to get help in a residential center of some kind. This is what eventually ended up happening, and at the time it was the best thing that could have possibly happened to me. I was placed in an environment where I was more or less forced to conform to the initial basics of reshaping my life according to what God wanted me to do. I believe that this was the best possible thing that could have happened at the time because I was so deeply in bondage to the addictions that I had been swallowed up by that I really was no longer capable of making the choices God wanted me to make without the intervention of a stronger third party.

That stronger third party happened to be a residential program in Minneapolis called Minnesota Teen Challenge. I lived there for 15 months. In that time I graduated High School, became accustomed again to living without self-medicating myself with whatever intoxicating substances I could get my hands on, came off my antidepressant medications and developed in emotional maturity to a degree where I no longer needed them, and became extremely physically fit in the process by replacing my unhealthy addictions with habitual exercise and a healthy diet. After successfully completing the program, I thought I was basically home free. After all what could be more difficult in life than what I’d already been through? I was wrong in this assumption.

A lot of things happened between my graduating Teen Challenge and my actually entering into an accurate, confident understanding of who God is, and learning to live the Christian life of temperance and holiness out of the sincere desire of my heart, and not because I “had to.” A lot of these things felt quite a bit like what I’d bet Hell must feel like when I was going through them, and I’m not sure and may never be sure whether I went through them because it was a necessary process, or because of my own naivety and ignorance.

I began going to a church where there were two competing youth leaders. These men tried to operate as a team, but just couldn’t seem to get along. The one would tell you that it was because of the other’s pride and competitiveness, and the other would tell you just exactly the opposite. One of them ended up splitting off from the church and taking about half the youth group with him. I went with this one. Everyone in this group who broke off from the church believed in the depths of his or her heart that this leader was basically God’s right hand man, and that if you weren’t on the same page with him in every area, you were really missing it. We believed this because that is the way this man came across in his preaching and teaching. It was to the extent that, if he would have begun preaching that the world was actually flat and that the whole “the earth is a sphere” thing was some kind of conspiracy, we all would have been completely convinced within a week. We would gather for meetings at his house, where the message he preached was pretty consistently along the lines of, “I can’t believe you guys. You aren’t even anywhere close to being as right with God as I am. You are pathetic, all of you. You had all better check and make sure that you are really saved, because I don’t know…” A very negative, critical attitude came over all of us as we became more and more dependant on this man’s approval in order to believe that we had God’s approval.

I began to do the things that I knew God wanted me to do out of a sense of having to perform; instead of out of a sense of love for the One that I was confident had given His all for me. This was something foreign to me, something I had never even been capable of before. In the world I had been literally incapable of being something I was not. I could never fake anything, I had no poker face, and I could only do and say those things that I really felt. In the world this can be a curse, but in the kingdom of God it is one of the greatest assets you can have. When I became a Christian and began to learn to walk in the things of God, I did the things that made God happy because nothing in the world made me happier than making my Father happy. Now, though, this began to slowly change.

The longer I was under this man’s ministry, the more I found myself more or less faking everything in order to make him happy, because I thought that then God would be happy and accept me. For some reason, I was blinded to the fact that only months ago I had been serving God cheerfully, out of the deepest love I had ever felt for anyone or anything in my entire life. Now I constantly questioned, “How can I be right with God if it is such drudgery for me to do His will? How can I be saved if it is so difficult to drag myself through this day in and day out?” This man would regularly make fun of us and belittle us, sometimes in good fun, sometimes out of a simple need to bully someone.

Often, the abuse would take on a spiritual bent. I will never forget one of these times. My wife and I had just gotten back from the hospital where she had given birth to our first child. Being in the hospital had caused us to miss two of the ministry events which we ordinarily would have gone to with the group. (There was this kind of general sense that everybody had that if you missed an event, you were on the road to perdition, and the reason for this will become plain momentarily.) We were attending a group meeting, and everyone was just getting settled into there chairs, when the leader pointedly began, “You know…sometimes we can make stuff happen in life, but it’s just not God’s time, and it’s just not God’s people.” Then he leaned right up to me and said, “Right, papa?” with a sort of smirk that said, “You’re missing it, dude, and I think it’s kind of funny because I really don’t have the time or energy to deal with you anyway.” Everyone understood by his saying this that he meant that I wasn’t supposed to have gotten married or had a kid, and being as how those are the kinds of things you can’t take back, I was genuinely, fully and completely up the wrong creek without a paddle. This was made plain by the way everyone at the meeting, our best friends, our only friends, treated us as though we’d just had the mark of the beast stamped squarely in the middle of our foreheads by Satan himself for the rest of the day.

The real irony of this was that it had been this man who had hooked my wife and me up in the first place. He had literally sat us down at a restaurant one day and told us that we were obviously being put together by God, and that if we couldn’t see that then we were going to miss it. So you see the confusion we were all swimming in as a result of these and countless other similar incidents and circumstances.

There is a great deal more I could say, and I could go on and on, but for the sake of brevity, I will assume that I have said enough and that you understand the basics of what I had gotten myself into. This went on for three years before this man and I had a falling out. I left the group and then a year and a half later found my way back into it. Aside from a great deal of material progress in his ministry, the leader was essentially the same, and it all happened all over again.

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Finally, after another two years of this, I found myself really, actually, truly going insane. I was losing my grip on reality. When I was a kid I had been victimized for years by bullies at school, and now, in the kingdom of God, I was finding myself being victimized in much the same way by a man whom I was convinced was one of the only true prophets on earth. One day, I lost my temper with one of the people I had to answer to, and they told me to go home and cool off. I never went back. One of the guys in the group with whom I’d actually truly friends since Teen Challenge called me up a little later, trying to convince me to come back, saying that he knew it was hard and that I needed to keep trying. Then the leader called me up and made as though to threaten me on a couple of different levels, basically saying, “I really don’t have time for you anymore, but you need to realize that you’d better have time for what’s going on here unless you want to miss it and end up in hell.”

This was just too much. Here was a man who, if he’d had a dog that ran away because he’d beaten it too many times, would hunt the poor animal down and try to convince it to come home by beating it again, and he was my model for a father and for God. I ended the conversation as quickly and tactfully as possible, went into the bathroom of my apartment with a revolver and played Russian roulette until my body was pumped so full of adrenaline that I didn’t even really have the motor skills to pull the trigger any more.

In light of what I now understand about God, and what I’d understood about Him before falling in with this stuff, the very fact that I was still alive as that day drew to a close is ample proof in and of itself that God loves me unconditionally (independently from my holiness or lack thereof, irregardless of my obedience or disobedience) and is guiding and protecting me and supporting me through even the worst of my blunders. At the time though, I believed it only meant that not only was I too incompetent even to kill myself, but I was also too spineless to just be a man, load the thing all the way, and do it for real.

Ironically enough, and in support of the concept that God works in mysterious ways, this same man called me a few days later and suggested a church to me, one that he was well aware preached a gospel diametrically opposed to the one he believed. This church preached a gospel in which the blood of Christ provided an all encompassing atonement for sin, whereas he preached a gospel where the blood of Christ was little more than a warning to the world of how much God hates sin. Anyways, I went to this church for about six months out of a sense of obligation, because I was “supposed to.” In truth, I was only continuing to walk in the deception that had strung me up by the ankles for the last six years, in following this man’s advice and believing that so doing was my only hope of redemption. I listened to them preach about God as a God of unconditional love, peace, joy, forgiveness, longsuffering, meekness…and thought to myself, “if they only knew the truth, that God is a God of vengeance, holiness, perfection, stringency, intolerance, and virtue before He is a God of any of those other things.”

Then one day, something happened. Something crazy.

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I was reading Romans 7 , and when I came to the beginning of verse 1 of chapter 8, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus…” I stopped there and realized that when it said “therefore,” it was speaking in reference to what Paul had been going on about in chapter 7, about how he desires only to do good, but finds himself doing evil. (This is made even more obvious by the fact that chapter and verse divisions in the Bible are not in the original text, but were added at a later date, for ease of reference.) I had been unable to see this beforehand, because the very concept clashed with my theology. But as I continued reading Romans, I was suddenly able to realize that much of what is contained in the New Testament actually clashed rather violently with what I had come to believe about God. From that moment I knew that I knew that I knew in the deepest core of my being that when Christ said, “It is finished,” just before He died, He meant that the atonement for the sin of the world had been accomplished by Him and Him alone.

I knew also that any attempt of mine to gain salvation by my own works, even works done in direct obedience to God, was no different from the efforts of the most impenitent and irreverent of sinners trying to buy salvation with money.

I suddenly understood a million things, and understood them with the understanding of divine revelation, not with the understanding of having been convinced and cornered into accepting something based of fear or necessity. I saw how the enemy had just had me pinned the whole time, not in any of the areas I had believed myself deficient in, but in the one area

I had been taught to view with disdain and consider a foolish deception; the area of faith. But the Bible says we are saved by grace THROUGH faith, and not by our works, lest any man should boast.

It occurred to me that I had now spent a considerable portion of my life sitting under the ministry of a man whose preaching consisted quite largely of him boasting of his own works. I felt immensely stupid and indescribably happy all at once. I felt like I’d lost a thousand dollars on the street to a two bit hustler, only to discover that I possessed a bank account with unlimited funds. (I use money as an illustration because it’s something we can all relate to, no matter where we are in life.)

Then, a few days later I was speaking with a friend about how I had been quarreling with my wife over piddly stuff, and he suggested that the next time my wife and I were together, I take a step back and begin to focus on interacting with her solely from the Christ in me, as it says in Colossians 2 .

Well, in the car that very day, I did this very thing, and it was like a charge of spiritual dynamite had suddenly blown away a mountain of confusion and uncertainty in my mind. I was suddenly aware that Christ was in me, and that everything that He is was who I am at the core of my being. I realized that, in accepting His sacrifice as the atonement for my sin, I had received a divine transfusion. It was this revelation that finally, truly, and completely empowered me against sin and disobedience,

It didn’t stop there and it hasn’t stopped yet, but this was where I was finally set free by God, and it is where my testimony must end for now.

Thank you for reading it.