I’ve been debating with myself a long time whether or not to write this post. For one, a lot of this is private information that many people don’t know. It has the potential to shock some people, but I eventually decided it needed to be written, because drugs have been such an important part of my life, and if I tried to tell the story of how God worked in my life, I have to include the drugs. How can a redemption story work unless there is something from which I am redeemed? Another reason I decided this story needs to be told is that a lot of people I’ve talked to think God doesn’t work through sin, but I’m here to tell you He DOES. He has to, doesn’t he? The world is full of sin, and if God wasn’t able to work through it, He’d be a puny God not worth worshipping or even paying attention to. People seem to think that wherever there are drugs, God is nowhere near that. But that’s not true. I KNOW that’s not true, and I’m here to share my journey with drugs and faith and tell you a story of God’s grace and how He’s not like the husband who stands idly by while the wife barfs into the toilet and says, “You chose to get drunk this is the price you pay.” God is like the husband who will sit down next to the wife and hold back her hair, sing her a song, comfort her and tell her, “I’m here. I love you. What do you need? Ask and you will receive.”
The most important part of this story begins when I was 8 years old and got baptized, accepted Jesus. Which means that for almost twenty years now, Jesus has been with me. He’s never left me, nor forsaken me. My story would be vastly different if I hadn’t had Jesus along the way with me. When I dropped acid or tripped on shrooms or smoked weed, Jesus was there, because I had invited him into my life long ago. That didn’t make what I was doing any less sinful, but it did mean I was under a protection and a cover that a non-Christian would not have been. I hear stories of drug addicts telling how Jesus saved them from drugs, which is beautiful. However, then I hear these same drug addicts say that you can’t see or find God in a trip, which in my experience is blatantly wrong. You can if you’re a Christian. Why? For the simple reason that if you’re a Christian, Jesus is always with you. He’s not going to say, “Oh wait you’re doing acid? Sorry, you’re on your own.”
Jesus said, “Come to me all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest…for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” This means that Jesus doesn’t come into our lives to be the frowning father figure condemning us for every sin. What He wants to do is take the struggle of sin away from us. Sin enslaves us into pattern of self-destructive behavior, and Jesus means to take that away, no matter what the sin is. As my blog entry “Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?” shows, sin is not meant to be our struggle. We struggle against a defeated enemy. Jesus only waits for us to give it up to Him. But He’s not goint to take away our struggle with sin until we ask, and it’s a daily task of asking. This works for any kind of sin. Gossiping, cigarette smoking, drug tripping. God wants you to say, “Here, Jesus, please take this away from me. I can’t handle it anymore.” And Jesus will. He did for me. All I had to do was ask, and never stop asking.
Here’s the thing. If a Christian trips on drugs, chances are they won’t ask Jesus to come along with them, because they feel they’re not “allowed.” This is silly and tragic but expected, and why? Because that’s the insidious power of sin – it separates you from God not just because it is against Him, but because of its guilt-inducing properties that make you feel like you can’t ask God for help because you’re sinning against Him. The first and foremost reason we should not sin is because God commanded us not to. However, very close behind that is that we shouldn’t sin because we never can tell how much sin will push our psyches to the point where we will never ask God for help. God knows us way better than we do. I detailed in my blog post “Addicted” how we don’t know ourselves that well at all. We have a very bad track record of figuring out what it is that we actually want. So we need to trust Him and come to Him sooner rather than later. I didn’t, but God still showed grace through my decisions.
My first drug trip ever was on shrooms, a psychedelic. About an hour into the trip, things started to go south. I started feeling tremendous fear bogging me down, the world felt like it was collapsing, and I was terrified. So what did I do? I asked, “God please be with me on this trip. I need your help.” Almost instantaneously the fear evaporated, the world felt more livable, and I was comforted. God did not say, “Whoa, wait, you’re on a shroom trip? Sorry can’t help you there, bud.” No, He chose to help me and be with me in that moment because He loved me. Love is the most personal force in the world. It’s also the most powerful. Check out 1 Corinthians 13. That’s a picture of how uncompromisingly perfect God’s love is. Do you get what I am saying? Who I am chose to do drugs. God loves who I am. So what kind of love would God’s be if He wasn’t able to speak to me while I was doing drugs?
Love is an incredibly specific force. This is crucial to my whole point, so follow me here. You love your parents differently than you love your siblings, than you love your child, than your spouse, than your friend. Each love is no less powerful, no less true, but each love is exhibited in specific and personal ways, and those ways are guided by who the person is. You don’t love or interact with your child the same way you do with a friend. That would be idiotic and dangerous and just impractical. It also follows that a parent with three children loves each of them differently and specifically, but all the same. They love their children three different ways. Love’s malleability and adaptibility to be able to endure and adore any person is part of its strength. God has 7 billion children, and 7 billion different ways to love. He has rules, of course. See “Freedom Through Limitations.” But this does not diminish His love or His ability to expresss it in a variety of mind-boggling and specific ways.
So are we clear on just how specific God can make His love? With me, who was intent on experimenting, God’s specific love manifested in the form of getting through to me even as I was tripping. But here’s the most centrally crucial point: I did not stop asking. That is always our fatal mistake in a sin. With sin comes guilt, and with guilt comes us beating ourselves up and failing to take advantage of the grace and forgiveness God’s always available love provides. But He will not provide, He will not give you that grace and love, if you do not ask for it. Why would He? If you’re not asking, you don’t want it. God doesn’t want a bunch of automatons he can wave a magic wand of forgiveness over. He wants interaction. He wants a relationship. That’s what Christianity ultimately is – a relationship with the Creator of the universe. And a relationship involves give and take, of sometimes asking for forgiveness and grace.
So here’s where it starts to get a little bit tricky and personal. I can’t make every reader understand this, but I’ll do my best to describe it and not sound sacreligious. In that particular first trip, I felt God’s presence more than I ever had before. NO I AM NOT SAYING THAT I NEEDED THE DRUGS. I’m saying that God spoke to me that way as a way of saying, “I’m here for you no matter what. But these are dangerous waters. You don’t need these things. You need me.” I know God doesn’t need drugs to speak to people, but because of who I am and the choices I made that was the only way I would accept or see God’s presence. God knew that if He didn’t answer me, didn’t come to me, didn’t speak to me, I probably would have fallen to the wayside, away from Him. It would have been entirely my fault if I had done so, but guess what? I was operating under the status of being purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ. I was no longer under the law, but under grace. I had given up my life to God long ago. God knew my true heart better than I did, and He chose to be gracious to me and help me find it by speaking to me in the middle of my sin.
The important thing in this scenario is NOT the sin, which is what almost everybody I talked to would immediately focus on. The important thing in this scenario is GOD’S GRACE. Get it? God’s grace trumped the power of sin in my life in that drug scenario. He forgave me for my sin against Him and gave me the blessing of His comfort and His presence. What that first trip taught me is that when you ask God for His presence, comfort, and help, he will give it to you. Did I NEED the trip to experience God? No. But my sinful nature was more concerned with temporary self-satisfaction than with what was right, as is anybody’s sinful nature, and because God loved me specifically He chose to spoke to me through the trip. What made that night special and memorable and fun was not the trip, but God working through the trip.
Grace and love. Grace and love. Grace and love. Grace and love. Need me to repeat it? That’s at the central part of my story. God’s grace and love despite my sin. Now, here’s another crucial aspect: one of the things acid, shrooms, ecstacy, any kind of “tripping” drug does is heighten meaning. Everything feels more meaningful, because your brain is operating at a different clip than usual. This is why, whether in the Christian crowd or the addict crowd, taking anything seriously in a drug trip is frowned upon, because hey, it was in the trip, so it didn’t mean anything. It was just “fun.” And yet God used that first trip to begin to open my eyes to the billions of ways every day life can be meaningful. God works in big ways, but he also works in small ways too. Because of the butterfly effect, you never know what the tiniest little apparently inconsequential thing can mean. A butterfly flapping its wings here could cause a rainstorm across the globe. Who better to direct every aspect of creation than an ultimately divine mind?
See, this was a problem for everybody, because drugs have a stigma, as if it’s somehow especially through them that God won’t work. But I’m here to tell you that’s a lie. God can and did work through drugs in my life. The feeling of comfort and peace that I felt that day did not come from some artificially-enhanced feeling of tripping. It came from God loving me and giving me grace. The meaning of the trip came from God, not the drug. But there’s such a stigma with drugs that everybody assumes that you can’t talk to God while you’re on them. You most certainly can, I have, and He spoke back. What God’s work through drugs did for me was teach me how to rely on Him moment by moment, for in that first terrifying shroom trip, the specter of a bad trip always loomed just out of my field of consciousness, and I never stopped asking God to keep on staying with me and give me comfort. God didn’t do that because I was on drugs, he did it because, honestly, it was probably the first time I ever did that in my life – a moment-by-moment abandoment to God. And He rewarded that abandonment with His awesome presence.
It may sort of sound like I’m saying, “Drugs are a great way to teach moment-by-moment abandonment to God!” but I’m not, because I fully regret what I did. I wish I hadn’t put myself through that because now here I am far from all my friends and my real home and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Drugs a terrible way to teach dependence on God. But that’s how I learned it. You see, God’s grace and love rewarded me, even in the midst of my sin, and used my sin to teach me life lessons. I think it’s what He does for all of us. Because of our fallen sinful nature, we feel like we must sin in order to learn anything of consequence, and that’s what gets us in trouble.
And the next part of my story will continue to show God’s never-failing grace and love, because you see even after that amazing display of God’s love, I kept sinning and indulging. I didn’t even come close to stopping tripping. I kept going, and went at it harder. That first night I caught a glimpse of God’s love and grace, but the drugs obscured my view, so I went chasing after the drugs in search of that spiritual closeness again, not realizing that if I truly gave everything up to God I could have that all the time. I wanted that moment-by-moment abandoment, but I didn’t want to work for it. Tripping made it easier, because I was scared of a bad trip, and it was easier to rely on him moment-by-moment in the midst of a trip. In other words, I took the cop-out route.
It was insidious, you see, because the drugs may have been what God used to teach me, but the drugs were also what tried to destroy me, and what kept me from the lessons that God was trying to teach me for so long until I only got them just a few weeks before my flight took off. So the next part of my story will talk about my many further experiences with tripping and drugs and how God never once left my side, even as I spat in His face and nailed him to the cross, beat Him up and called to Him to prophesy and predict with which fist I was punching Him. As I write this there are tears in my eyes. That imagery kicks me, punches me in the gut. I can’t believe what I did to Him through my actions. But in the very next breath those tears turn to tears of joy, tears of acceptance, of His infinte, incomprehensible grace. I was pummeling God to a bloody pulp and He never abandoned me, he still answered prayer and came to my side. Stay tuned.
Pop Culture Shocked 