Spiritual Autobiography 1

Hello Gentle Reader I have decided to give the rants about collective trauma a bit of a rest, not because I have run out of things to say, but to give emphasis to my personal testimony as a Christian. In this and following posts I will be writing my personal history with the Christian faith. I think, or at least hope, that this will give some of you a little more perspective about some of the things that I write about. Here goes: It all started in 1970, when I was fourteen. I had spent the summer between grades eight and nine, smoking pot in the park with older peers, drinking beer and wine and going on long solitary wanderings in the downtown, west End and Stanley Park areas of Vancouver. I was on a journey of some kind, but I had no idea where I was going. I was meeting people everywhere, and listening carefully because I knew that each one held some kind of secret that I was needing to unlock for myself. This experience of being on a journey continued through the fall and into the winter. I was reading an underground journal, the original Georgia Strait when it was still a controversial underground newspaper. I read all kinds of subversive articles about the importance of environmental protection, women's and abortion rights, free love, gay rights, and political and social revolution. On December 29 I met my first-ever Jesus Freak. An English hippy named Richard Hitchcock. He looked just like Jesus and spoke in a Cockney accent. I connected with this man (he was twenty-one) and on my suggestion we went to a basement coffee shop nearby on the corner of W. Hastings and Richards. For about two hours he opened up to me about his Christian experience, of how Jesus had changed his life, of how much happier he was serving God than going out to party, get drunk and get laid. I might have dismissed him as a religious weirdo but there was something authentic about this man. He invited me to join him and some of his companions in their house for dinner. I accepted the invitation. We all met together at the bus terminal, which has long since been a parking lot near the current central library building. We all piled into a van and they drove me I knew not where. They were happy, pleasant, friendly and singing Christian songs. I was quite intrigued by the novelty. These were all people who were more or less fresh off the street: hippies, street people, former drug users, from all parts of Canada, the US and even from other places, I suspected. They were all young, in their twenties, though at fourteen, to me they seemed all very old and mature. I felt so strangely at home with those people. I felt absolutely no sense of threat or impending danger. I felt as if I could trust these men, or at least trust whatever cause or reason had brought us together. Their house was in the Fairview Slopes, demolished in the seventies and eighties like most of the old houses in that area for townhouses and condos. The supper was simple but hearty and delicious. The people I ate with were very friendly, kind and hospitable. I saw there a guy I knew from the park in Richmond, someone I`d smoked pot with, I think. He was now one of them, just eighteen I think. Then it began to happen. at first I wondered if they had put something in the food. I felt high, like I`d just smoked some of the best weed ever, but only better. I told my hosts what I was feeling. They replied that I was simply feeling and responding to God's love and presence. And you know something, Gentle Reader? I believed them then, just as I believe them now. One of them asked me if I would like to accept Jesus as my saviour. Though I already just had, I consented. we were upstairs in one of the attic bedrooms at the time, four of us I think. They gathered 'round me, gently laid their hands on my head and shoulders and asked Jesus to forgive and cleanse me of all my sins and to come into my heart. I accepted, silently on the spot. taking the bus home that cold and rainy winter night I knew without doubt that something had changed, that something truly authentic had happened to me, and that this would be changing the course of my life. I watched the rain streaming down the bus window, illumined by streetlights and passing cars and it all seemed so lovely and so magical. I went home to the split-level house in Richmond that I shared with my mother and brother, absolutely unaware of just what kind of changes lay before me....