So you’ve heard the stories of my stoner days and my first trip, now it’s time to listen to the tale of my journey, but first a little history. When I first got together with this girl in the fall of 2010, I promised her I would never trip on drugs. She knew I smoked weed and was relatively okay with it, but tripping scared her. Because I was head over heels in love, I made the promise, just in case she turned out to be the One. I had told myself long ago that drugs like weed, cigarettes, and trippers were not doing to be a part of my marriage, especially for the sake of my future children. But then we broke up, and a couple of weeks later as I was listening to my dealer talk about tripping on acid, I realized: Hey! I was single! I could do anything I pleased! I was FREE, so right away I resolved that I would try the Big 3: acid, shrooms, and ecstasy, at least once each. It was several months before the summer rolled around and the shrooms came into season, but when they did – oooooh boy.
I had not really contemplated how my relationship with God would figure into it. My premiere shrooming experience came long after my failed Lent experiment, so the closeness I had felt with God during my sobriety was long gone. I just wanted to experiment and rack up some variety of life experience, and quite honestly I didn’t much care if it was sinful. I knew it was, but I didn’t care. Not enough to stop, anyway.
My very first thought after my very first trip was: when can I do this again? Like all addictions, it evolved slowly. I was brutally careful about when and where I tripped the first time. The second, slightly less so. Each time I added a new drug to my arsenal, I made sure to not risk a bad trip by being careless. If you’ll recall, that first shroom trip almost turned bad, until I turned to God. What that says to me is that it wasn’t my preparation that protected me from a bad trip, it was God. That was the only time in my 15-20 experiences with tripping where I came close to having a bad trip. At the time I credited my own mental stamina and increasing ability to act sober when I was tripping. I had control, or at least the illusion of it, and the drugs perpetuated that illusion.
I justified tripping by taking full advantage of it. I considered drugs a massive waste of time and potential if all I did was stare at all the pretty colors. I didn’t want to just let the trip wash over me, but most of my friends did. They didn’t trip to think, they tripped to zone out. This just sounded awful to me. They wanted to sit and stare, I wanted to talk and DO. I thought that by analyzing my trip I could increase the information gleaned from my experiences. I could LEARN, not just trip. This came from the inevitable paradigm-shifts that accompany tripping.
Drugs present you with a new way of looking at the world. For a writer, this was dangerous. I was addicted to the paradigm-shifts more than the tripping itself. They were inspirational fuel for my creative side. The first (and really, the only one that mattered) was the moment-to-moment abandonment to God. On my third shroom trip I discovered the addictive power of words. One of my friends, Dalton we’ll call him, refused to give me back the lighter I had loaned him to light his cigarette, and I started speaking rhyming free verse, an on-the-spot rhyme rap where my mind kept forming words that my mouth HAD to utter. No thought process, just reaction. I was hooked. Later in the trip, I discovered the ability to manipulate conversation because my mind picked up on all the interlocking threads. The control of words was God-like. I would mentally dive into words like “awesome” and marvel at how huge they were. It was like I could swim in between the letters of words, look at them from all sides.
However, in this same shroom trip I also talked to God. I was sitting by a campfire, alone, staring into the flames, and whispering to myself a song/rhyme about the fire as a fire, or the fire as a metaphor for God in my life. I thanked God for being graceful and not leaving me alone in the middle of a trip. The reason I was alone by the fire is because my trip hit me harder than it did any of my surrounding friends, who wound up sober far sooner than I. There were two reasons for this greater ability to trip: my personality, a gift from God, has always been able to fully immerse itself in any particular activity, to live it to the fullest. My trip looked funner because it WAS funner. Even people who had never seriously considered tripping decided to seriously reconsider when they saw me doing it. I was the poster boy for drug tripping.
But there’s a deeper reason, and that reason is Jesus. Jesus had been a central part of my life for almost two decades. A few weeks before my first trip, Dalton and I were talking about God. Should we take credit for our accomplishments, or should we rely all the way on God and give Him all the credit? Dalton was of the opinion that God helps those who help themselves. I was of the opinion that nothing should be done without surrender. He then asked me to, as an example, call up a memory of me doing something good, and do be quite honest with you, I drew a complete blank.
Why? Because I am NOTHING without my God. Any good in me is/was because of God’s grace. I’m not good, I don’t do good – God does good through me, and that is good enough for me. Whether or not it was conscious, this belief was always there, an everlasting echo of my acceptance of Jesus as my savior at 8 years old. This is why there is no way in the world that I was going to trip and not bring God and Jesus along. My friends made fun of me, all of them, sober and addict alike, appalled or just plain unbelieving that God was with me on my trips, but He was.
There is a crucial difference between the body-enhancing drugs (weed, cocaine, meth) and the mind-altering ones (shrooms, acid, ecstasy). When I was still in the midst of sin, I described it as such: the body-enhancers amplify your surroundings, and the mind-alterers amplify YOU. They reach deep in to grab an innermost part of you and place it under a massively enhancing magnifiying glass – hence why my love of words shot to the surface when shrooming.
Looking back, I see I was both right and wrong in this assessment. The mind-alterers do enhance an innermost part of you, but they warp it by doing so. A person is a person precisely because they are made up of hundreds of interlocking personality traits. When the drugs magnify one aspect, the rest become smaller. Drugs cannot create or enhance anything without destroying. So despite my awareness of God’s presence in the midst of sin, I falsely believed that I enjoyed the drugs more than I enjoyed God. I LOVED shrooms because once I got a handle on them, whole new worlds of words were unlocked. The mind-blowing thing is that sitting here now, I cannot separate what I could do on shrooms from what God was enabling me to do. Think about that. People looked at me and got jealous that they weren’t as high, but they were jealous of the wrong high. Shrooms taught me moment-by-moment abandonment to Jesus, but all the cool things I discovered were possible because of Jesus, not the shrooms!
Even as I write all this it’s coming together for me – the reason none of my tripping buddies took my paradigm-shifts seriously is because these things don’t happen on trips – but they DID. For me they did, but not because of the trip but because I chose to surrender to God. Nobody knew what I was talking about, because what I was talking about made no sense. You’re not supposed to bring God along on a trip. When you do, marvelous things happen, but not because of the trip. It felt like the drugs, and part of it was the drugs, but it wasn’t the part I was paying attention to. The drugs pointed at themselves and screamed shrilly, “Over here! This is me! This is because of me!” The only thing the drugs did was distract from the real Author of my experiences.
Do you see the problem yet? Because back then I sure didn’t. Nobody in the drug culture takes trips seriously – it’s all in the mind. But God was doing amazing real things, and I couldn’t share them because I waited till I was tripping to surrender. Because of my drugful nature, I was oblivious to this fact. I kept on trying to convince my friends but they never believed me. I was high, so my behavior was automatically excused. Yet while on shrooms or acid I was remarkably competent, coherent, and fluent. I confused people with how well I carried myself. I would tell stories of my trips to other people who had far far FAR more experience than I, and do you know the response I got back all the time? “Wow never heard of that happening before.” They would quickly shrug it off as ,”Drugs are weird.” But God is weirder! Jesus was living in my heart, and my surrender to His very presence is what unleashed the joy, the weird, the ecstasy.
One time, I stayed up all night on ecstasy. It was one of the most magical nights of my life. Early in the trip, my friend, whom I’ll call Hunter, received a call from his mother (let’s call her Layla). She worked a night shift at the hospital, and asked him if we could pray for her, for while walking down an empty corridor she had felt the sense of an evil spiritual presence. This made sense to Hunter, because he knows his mother to be a very spiritually aware person, and it made sense to me, too. Evil exists. Some people are gifted with the ability to feel it more than others. So we all shared a moment of prayer. It was me, Hunter, Dalton, and one of my agnostic best friends that I’ll call Rocky. I had always avoided talking to her about God, for fear of pushing her away, but that night I did, and God used Layla’s phone call to do it, which came during our ecstasy trip. We had been planning on acid. We only wound up with ecstasy because Hunter ran into an old friend of his whom he hadn’t seen in ages, an old friend who just so happened to have some X. Completely unplanned, completely out of the blue.
Did Got get us the X? My gut tells me no, but that doesn’t mean He didn’t use it in His plan. Did He actively butterly-effect tweak the Universe to land the X in our hands just that way? Who’s to say what God actively does or doesn’t do? God doesn’t create sin, but he allows it. Perhaps He put the ecstasy in our hands to keep us from the acid, for if we had been high on acid we most certainly would not have been in a state to coherently pray to God together, and without any drugs at all we wouldn’t have even been up at that hour. So in a way, yes, I truly believe God used that ecstasy. Another reason I believe this? Hunter and me never really clicked before that night. Despite the fact that he was also a firm believer in Jesus Christ and one of Dalton’s best friends,. I disliked him quite a lot, which is highly unusual for me. Disliking people takes energy, and I have never been able to commit to it. I’d rather love and help. Hate kills. Just another everlasting echo of the acceptance of Jesus into my heart. In any case, Hunter and I saw God’s hand in that X and couldn’t help but agree: yeah, God got us the X. He was most certainly there.
Was this dangerous thinking? Probably, but maybe not for the reason you think. God created Lucifer. He allowed sin into the world. The reason it’s dangerous to think that God got us the ecstasy is because we assumed that we knew why. We tried to know the mind of God, and that is something nobody should try. We did.
That night of ecstasy was meaningful because of the bonds formed, and central to those bonds was the prayer. Before the prayer, the night was merely very groovy. After the prayer, the night became miraculous. Transformative. We invited God in and He blessed us with His presence. The next morning we read Bible verses to each other as the sun came up. It was the first time I had ever had the chance to read the Bible around Rocky. Hunter’s mom, Layla, had come home from her work at the hospital and told us how she felt the comfort of our prayers, and she prayed and read the Bible with Hunter and I as we sang worship songs and, effectively, had a church service. It was even on a Sunday. Hunter and I had Jesus in our hearts. Jesus carried our sin of drug tripping so that we might be blessed by the Father’s presence, but only because we asked.
Got it? Got does allow sin and drugs into a life, but it’s always because He plans to trump their power and expand His kingdom. If expanding his kingdom means He allowed and even (maybe?) gave us drugs, then His kingdom will be that much greater. Redemption tramples the power of sin into dust and leaves only good behind. But there has to be sin first. Because of my experiences with drugs, God chose to equip me with the ability to write about it. I am blessed and redeemed to be able to stand from a place of sanctification and tell you how God works all the time, no matter where, no matter when, no matter what. The Holy Spirit is always on the move. When we ask, He answers.
I can now thoroughly deconstruct the myths, customs, and assumptions that go along with the drug culture, much better than someone who has never done drugs. I know exactly how a druggie thinks, so I know what needs to be said and how it needs to be said. I know precisely how to frustrate and confound those who believe they are doing it for fun. I know all the pressure points, better than even they do because their minds are still clouded. I can only see because I once was blind, and God restored my sight so I can look back at all that I did and finally understand it, only thanks to Him.
Looking back, I wish oh how I wish I had not taken the easy way out, but because I am human, the easy way out was the only way out. That’s the fallen nature of humanity for you – easy is never the right way. It is only the challenges that change us into the people God created us to be. I tripped because it was the easiest way to access that moment-by-moment surrender, but how about when I was sober? Nope. Too much conscious effort. Back to the daily grind of seeking the next high. I was a cocky son of a gun assured that because God was always with me, I could keep doing what I was doing, and stop whenever I felt like it. But God had bigger and better plans.
His plans and how His divine will intertwined with my sinful nature are going to go down an even stranger path in my next installment. Once I thought that I knew why God had given me the ecstasy, I decided drugs would make a great witnessing tool. I was going to be the first ever Christian who proclaimed Jesus’s name in the middle of an acid trip to save the soul of a friend. God was going to work through me! My delusion led me to the dark, dark place of assuming that because God was with me, I’d get to decide how He used me. Bad move, Brandon. Bad move. Even as I stepped into heresy, Jesus’s blood covered me, redeemed me, and answered prayer. So stay tuned for the strangest acid trip you will ever read about. God is good. All the time.
Pop Culture Shocked 