From Junkie to JerusalemNäide

Wandering in the Wilderness

Our minds were made up. We were off to Flagstaff, and I was going to find God.

But things played out differently from what any of us expected. Little did I know that the Holy Spirit had set me up. Kim, Rhonda, and I packed our stuff, tossed it in the VW van, and hit the road. With beads hanging from the rearview mirror and peace signs and flowers doodled everywhere, we were free-spirited hippies looking for purpose, meaning, and the promised land.

In reality, we were lost and wandering in the wilderness.

About thirty miles into our trip, we visited a friend of mine who was also a drug dealer. He had just acquired some heavy-duty hallucinogens and said, “Why don’t you spend the night? We’ll get high, and you can leave in the morning.”

That sounded like a sweet offer, so we took him up on it and looked forward to getting high. My user friends had tagged me with the nickname OD (for “overdose”) because if everybody took one tab of acid, I took three, with no questions asked. You would think I’d learned my lesson by then, but I hadn’t. I took three hits of the hallucinogenic acid and went on a twenty-four-hour psychedelic trip. I was so out of it that we had to stay with my friend for an extra day. Neither he nor Kim and Rhonda thought I’d ever come out of it. Eventually, I did, but my system needed some time to readjust before we could get back on the road. As we drove toward Arizona, Kim looked at me with curiosity.

“What were you seeing?” she asked.

“When?”

“You know, when you were tripping out.”

Instead of answering, I gripped the steering wheel tightly and gazed straight ahead, my eyes focused on the road.

Kim continued, “You were under the kitchen table, and you kept screaming, ‘God, don’t leave me here! Oh my God, I’m lost forever. Don’t leave me here!’ Do you have any memory of that?”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember,” I said. “I was trying to forget about it.”

“You were holding onto the table legs for dear life, screaming, but what were you seeing?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Maybe you need to.”

“It was the strangest thing,” I replied. “I was in a black cubicle-like space in the middle of a vast, burning desert that stretched as far as I could see. I was trapped and kept asking God to help me get out. Then, my perspective changed, and I was on a hill, looking down at myself in the same desert, trapped in the same black cubicle space. On the hill, I was standing next to God. I wasn’t looking at Him, but I could see Him from the corner of my eye. Something kept me from turning fully, but I knew it was Him. We were both looking down at the other me, who was below us, screaming, ‘Please don’t leave me here!’ And I said to God, ‘Why don’t You help him?’ And God answered, ‘I wanted to, but now it’s too late. He’s lost forever.’”

As Kim’s facial expression switched from inquisitive to distraught, I said, “Isn’t that wild?”

I must have smirked, because she said, “That’s not even funny.”

“No, no,” I said, “I don’t think it’s funny. I don’t know what it is.”

I had no Bible or church background. Neither did Rhonda. But Kim was a Pentecostal backslider. She didn’t know it, but she had a well of Bible knowledge inside her, and it would bubble to the surface every now and then.

The truth was that I didn’t believe in hell or anything like that. Really, I didn’t know anything.

Rhonda had sat quietly, taking in the conversation between Kim and me. Now, all three of us became silent, lost in our own thoughts. The only sound in the van came from the staticky AM radio. As the wind whipped through our hair, Stephen Stills and Eric Clapton–type music played, and I pondered everything, including Eric.