Crossing KCU

And then I am slowly swept forward, moving closer and closer, as if I am a cloud moving with the wind. As the castle begins to come into greater focus I can see more details, and I am stunned at the intricacy of the stonework below me. From further away the fortress looked peaceful and quiet, but as I move to a vantage point that is directly over it, I can see that this is not the case at all. There is a vast army of black creatures pouring out of holes in the ground and smashing up against the walls of the castle. They have already broken through the outer wall and are moving quickly to gain entrance into the fortress itself. They move quietly over every inch of the walls, sliding through gaps and weak places like black ink. They look like shadows without any real substance to them at all. There are thousands of them.

To understand what led me to a place like Kentucky Christian University, you first have to understand a little bit about who I was before that time. But that is the boring part of the story, and right now I’m trying to capture your interest enough to really get you into reading this book… so we’ll get to my teenage years a little later.

So jumping ahead, right into the middle of my first semester at college… I fell in love with this girl. Her name was Lucy, and it wouldn’t be much of a story if I didn’t tell you that she was the most beautiful girl I had ever known up to that point in my life. Lucy was an ordinary girl from the suburbs of Detroit, and I was an ordinary guy from the suburbs outside of Indianapolis. We were both pretty laid back people, and from the first time we had a conversation we were friends. We would sit in the cafeteria after dinner and have long talks about everything and nothing at the same time. We would sit across from each other in the lobby of the dorm and have staring contests. We would go on drives around the town and smoke cigarettes. We would go out to the park near the college, sit by the lake, and smoke cigarettes. We would hang out with each other all day sometimes, and smoke even more cigarettes.

Lucy was the first girl I had ever really been close friends with, other than my own sister. Sure I had known other girls from school and church, but this was extremely different, completely new, and probably the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me before. I spent time with Lucy everyday. We ate our meals together, we went on road trips together, we went to the mall together, we had class together, we got high together, and by the end of my second semester at college, she was the single most important person in my life. And Lucy was beautiful. She was the kind of girl that attracted people to her everywhere she went. She had a combination of personality and looks that could mesmerize just about anyone. And she was my best friend.

Stories that start out this way don’t usually stay that way for very long. I was the classic, archetypal fat kid. I was the kind of kid growing up that most girls had never wanted to be friends with, let alone have as a boyfriend. When Lucy came into my life it was like experiencing some sort of massive electrical shock that left me spinning around in some kind of fantasy land where everything was about flowers and butterflies. But that wasn’t reality. The reality was that I was the fat kid that gets to be really close friends with the beautiful girl, who in turn, views her friendship with the fat kid as a valuable, brother-sister kind of relationship, but never anything more. Which is really nobody’s fault, and is just the way that things work in this world. –Unless of course you live in China or Africa where fat guys rule the world and get all the chicks they want.

I was thinking about this recently. I was thinking that fat guys in America are the mythological equivalents of all the greatest heroes our modern, pop-culture has produced. Of course, being a fat guy, I am a little biased, but I think I’m onto something with this theory. If the story of the Star Wars saga were to take place in our society, Luke Skywalker would be a fat guy. He’s the great mythological hero of course. He takes on all the enemies of the dark side, he learns about the force, develops genuine character, maturity, discovers and confronts his heritage, and is in general the go to guy. But, at the same time, he never gets the girl. In fact, the only girl he is close to ends up being his sister! Superman would also be a fat guy, were we to remove him from the mythological realm and place him in the real world. He is the greatest of the American mythological heroes. He flies around the entire world, bullets bounce off of him, he can hear and see what no one else can, but he never really gets the girl (at least in the traditional mythology of Superman.) Lois Lane ends up with the other guy. Even Harry Potter (though he is British of course) would also be a fat guy. He is the central hero of the story, destined to be the only one who can stand against the evil Lord Voldemort, he makes it through trial after trial, fighting off the creatures that no one else can, and yet, his love life is in shambles, and the only girl he is really close to ends up with his best friend. But I think my favorite example of this phenomenon is King Kong. King Kong is perhaps the purest expression of the fat guy theory. He is the quintessential tragic hero, taken out of his comfortable home and forced into a world that is even larger than he is, pitting him against all the evil that greedy men can muster. And all the while, at the heart of this story, is this beautiful woman who has captured his heart and who he would do anything to protect, even though she can never really love him the way he loves her, and thus he is ultimately destroyed by his pursuit of the love he can never have.

Anyway, as fate would have it, in my first year of college I found myself living out this grand American mythology in my very own life, as I pined after my beautiful best friend who would never see me the same way. Of course I wasn’t Luke Skywalker, or Superman, or Harry Potter… King Kong, I’m not so sure about, I think I might have been a little like him. But the point is, when I finally came to terms with the realization that my relationship with Lucy was never going to be what I hoped for, I became filled with a dark depression that in a very short amount of time, consumed my entire life.

There was a deep longing inside of me, a desire for some sort of fulfillment, some sort of purpose, some kind of joy, and meeting Lucy had awoken this longing. Being friends with her, being close to her, had shown me that there was something more to life that I was missing, something magnificent, something that satisfied every desire. The problem was that I thought it was her. It wasn’t her. And when I found that out, I was devastated. I felt like dying. I walked around in a haze for months. I would drink, smoke pot, and do whatever I could to sedate myself, because I was aching on the inside. I was broken. I was lost.

At the end of my first year in college, I went back home to my parents’ house for the summer. Lucy came with me. My parents are really nice people, and they love having people over to stay at our house, and they knew we were good friends, so it was no big deal for Lucy to come and stay with us. We had a great time that summer. Out of the three months we were there together, we each only worked for about a month. So we had a lot of free time to hang out and do whatever we wanted.

I remember one night in particular, we went to an old farmhouse out in the country. Lucy had made friends with a guy when she was working at a local truck stop, and so we went out to a party he was having with several of his friends. I remember sitting around a campfire that night, out in the middle of a wide open field at the edge of this farm, in a circle of strangers, thinking quietly to myself. It was only still the beginning of the summer, but I was already thinking about whether or not I wanted to return to college in the autumn. Many things had happened to me during my first year of college. I was already a very different person than the one I had been the previous summer, fresh out of high school. Most of the accumulated experiences during that year were traumatic in some form or another. Christian college was not at all what I had been led to believe it was. On the one side of things, I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and there was no rationale for continuing my education at an expensive, private, Christian institution in hickville, Kentucky. On the other hand, Lucy was going to still be going there, and that made all the difference. As I said before, she was the most important person and influence in my life at that time. I would do anything to be with her. I would go anywhere she went. If that meant returning to K.C.U., or to the very gates of Hell then so be it.

Still sitting by the fire, and lost in the midst of my own thoughts, I had lost track of Lucy who had disappeared with this new guy friend of hers. When I decided to go looking for her, I found them kissing up by the house. I think rage was the immediate emotion that I felt, but being the quiet, sensitive dude that I was, I just went back to the fire and began stewing in my own peculiar mixture of violent thoughts, searching out each possible response to what I was feeling, which interestingly enough always ended up with the guy being thrown into the fire that was blazing in front of me.

It was in that moment that one of the other guys at the party came over and asked if I wanted to buy any Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD). I bought two large hits off him. Then I went and collected Lucy, told her it was time for us to leave, and after using my size to intimidate the guy she was with, we got into my car and drove home. Such was the prelude to one of the worst days of my entire life which was about to begin the following morning.

If you aren’t familiar with the drug LSD, it is a chemical compound first developed by a Swiss chemist in 1938 and later produced by the United States military who experimented with its use as a mind control agent, truth serum, and biological weapon. It was also used as a medicine for psychiatric patients before eventually being made illegal in the 1960s. The interesting thing about LSD is that scientists have never been able to come to a consensus when attempting to pinpoint exactly what the drug does when a person takes it. What they do agree upon, is that it is an extremely unpredictable, hallucination inducing drug with effects typically lasting about 12 hours. The common dose which produces this effect is about one tenth the size of a grain of sand, has no color, no odor, and dissolves easily on the tongue.

Now on the morning in question, a typical weekday during the first week of June, 1998 to be absolutely precise, I awoke to the sunshine making its way through my window. After stretching out, rolling over on my back and looking up at the ceiling, I recalled my purchase from the night before. I immediately reached over into the drawer of my nightstand, withdrew a tiny cellophane wrapper, emptied the two pieces of white blotter paper into my palm, and stared at them for a few moments. I knew what this was going to do, for the most part anyway. I had done this drug half a dozen times already, and each time had been a little different. Somewhere in the back of my mind I felt the dull twinge of fear attempting to make a plea about why I should not do this. It was true; every other time I had done LSD had turned out to be a frightening experience in many ways which I did not fully understand. But on this morning I knew it would make Lucy mad that I was going to trip on acid without her, and that’s what decided it. I put one of them into my mouth. About an hour later I consumed the second hit.

I was still mad at Lucy because of the night before, but she had some shopping to do that day and invited me along, so after we got ready and ate some breakfast we headed out the door. It was about a twenty or thirty minute drive to where the mall was, and it was sometime in there when the drug began to work its effects on my mind. Lucy was driving her car and I was in the passenger seat. As we zipped around the Indianapolis bypass the light coming into the car began to intensify, and I soon found myself shutting my eyes and drifting deep into my thoughts. Enya was playing softly in the background, and her voice was carrying me away to another land.

We pulled into a small parking lot a few blocks away from the mall. It was a small insurance company. Lucy told me to wait in the car, and that she would be just a few minutes. Directly in front of the car was a very large, old oak tree. It had some peculiar qualities to it. From the bottom of the trunk, rising out of the ground it seemed, yet still embedded firmly within the bark was the upper half of a woman’s body. She was frozen inside the tree, and yet her arms and head were halfway out of the trunk reaching up towards the sky. Several feet above her, also frozen halfway in and halfway out of the tree trunk was the upper body of a man, reaching down as if trying to grasp the woman’s arms that were reaching up to him. They were both completely covered in the bark, and looked as if they were a natural part of tree. It was at that time that I began to think I had made a mistake by consuming the double dosage of LSD.

Suddenly Lucy was back in the car, and we were off to the mall. The mall was where I very nearly went insane. When I was walking through the parking lot on the way in I began feeling a huge weight bearing down upon my shoulders. It distinctly felt as if two hands were pushing with all their might to smash me into the ground. With each step I took closer to the mall entrance the greater this sensation intensified.

I was never sure afterwards how long we actually spent in the mall. What I do know is that Lucy was shoe shopping, and that in the process, she visited all five shoe stores that were spread throughout the mall, and a couple of them she visited more than once. Now as I said before, scientists haven’t been able to agree upon the specific effects of LSD upon the mind, and it varies from person to person. But with me, it had the effect of greatly amplifying every sense and every experience. It was as if the volume of life had been plugged into a large speaker system and was being broadcast at full decibel capacity. I have never again gone shoe shopping with a woman since that day.

After leaving the mall we went to the gas station to buy cigarettes. Lucy, having discovered by that time that I was tripping on LSD, and because I had smoked our last cigarette, decided to make me go into the station to purchase the smokes. It was one of the most difficult tasks I had ever undertaken. She gave me a strong pep talk, and after coming to the conclusion that I just might be able to pull it off, I went on my assigned mission. It was difficult. There were some real weirdoes in that gas station. People were looking at me like I was a fugitive, and whenever I looked into someone’s eyes, I could read their minds. Moreover, the concept of money, for some reason, made absolutely no sense to me at all. As I pulled a couple of dollars and some change out of my pocket, I began having flashbacks to first grade when we had cut out paper money from the back of our math workbook and learned how to count pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. I finally managed to ask the clerk for a pack of smokes, and then handed him the money. By the time I got back to the car I was ready to call it a day.

I don’t remember much about the rest of the afternoon. It’s all a very hazy blur to me now. But later that evening, with the drug still acting on me with full strength, I came full circle. When it got dark, Lucy announced that she was going out to spend time with the guy she had been kissing the night before at the party. I stepped out on the porch as she was leaving, and without being able to control it at all, I just started crying. She put her arms around my neck, gave me a big hug, and then she left. I went in the house and cried for a couple of hours in my room before finally being tired enough to fall asleep. I wasn’t mad at Lucy, as I had been the previous night. Instead I was filled with the pain of rejection. –Not simply a rejection from her, but every rejection of my entire life, now personified and embodied by her rejection of me. The memory of the trauma of that day has stayed with me all these years, despite everything that has happened in my life since. That was the day that I knew something was very wrong with me. There was something on the inside of me that was killing me from the inside out.

I start out with this story, because this is really the beginning of my spiritual awareness of sin. My awareness of sin did not begin with a realization that I myself was a sinner. It began with the realization that something was very drastically and horribly wrong with the world. Up until that time I had a basic, privileged, white, middle-class, American view of the world; that is, that everything was pretty good, and there wasn’t really anything to worry about. When I finally encountered the pain of rejection for the first time in my life— real pain, deep, emotional, and spiritual… when I felt that, I saw for the first time, a small glimpse of the reality that most people in the world deal with on a daily basis. Most people in the world do not have access to the amount of opiates that we rich Americans take for granted. These are things like satellite television, the internet, video games, cell phones, a great pantheon of prescription medications for everything you can think of, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, Chinese Buffets, 401ks, iPods, dependable electricity, an abundance of clean water, the ability to travel wherever we want, and the list goes on and on and on. All of these things are not necessarily bad things, and I certainly enjoy most of them too, but the point is that we in this country, with all of these various amenities, are heavily insulated against the harsh realities of human existence that the majority of people in the world encounter everyday. For most people in the world, pain is simply a natural part of life.

Now I know what you’re thinking: most of the world has to deal with physical pain and struggle to maintain survival, and my pain was nothing like that, it was emotional and did not have anything to do with my physical survival. Well that is true in technical terms, but it was still pain, real pain, and that pain allowed me to see some reality for the first time in all my nineteen years of life. For me, pain was something I never felt, something I couldn’t feel, until I had my heart ripped to pieces by loving a woman who didn’t love me back.

There was something powerful and raw about pouring my heart into another person, and having it handed back to me. There was something mystical about it. I didn’t know why that was at the time, but in the several years since then I have discovered the answer.
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I was raised in a way that made me extremely familiar with the basic, popular stories of the Bible. From a young age I knew about Noah, Moses, David, and Elijah, but I could never have guessed there were so many other stories, less familiar, less sensational, sandwiched into the middle, where I would find my own struggles, desires, and longings reflected back at me. There was this one story in particular, about a guy named Jeremiah, which I found eerily haunting to read about. He had spent his whole life pissing off the leaders of the country, telling them they were going to die and that everything they owned would be stolen, and their capital city annihilated. Imagine someone doing that today. But Jeremiah kept at it, and the first book he wrote was so charged with controversy, that the king of the land actually burned it one page at a time right in front of him. Jeremiah just went back and re-wrote the whole thing again. And that’s the book we have today. Here’s a bit of something he wrote:

“Go and proclaim in the hearing of Jerusalem: ‘I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the desert, through a land not sown. Israel was holy to the LORD, the first-fruits of his harvest; all who devoured her were held guilty, and disaster overtook them,’ declares the LORD. Hear the word of the LORD, O house of Jacob, all you clans of the house of Israel. This is what the LORD says: ‘What fault did your fathers find in me, that they strayed so far from me? They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves. They did not ask, ‘Where is the LORD, who brought us up out of Egypt and led us through the barren wilderness, through a land of deserts and rifts, a land of drought and darkness, a land where no one travels and no one lives?’ …Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their Glory for worthless idols. Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror,’ declares the LORD. ‘My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” (Jeremiah 2:1-6, 11-13)

All throughout the Old Testament, there are stories dealing with the same exact theme—the theme of the one true God, full of love, endlessly pursuing the love of his people. He pursues them throughout generations, constantly reaching out to them in thousands of ways. At times God even speaks to his people directly, and at times, he even refers to them as his wife. And time after time, God’s people reject his love. They ignore him, they abandon him, and they go after false gods made of stone and wood who are unable to love them, care for them, or protect them. When they do this God gets angry with them, and his heart is broken, and he starts throwing things. That’s what Jeremiah was writing about.

So what’s the point, you might be asking…? The point is this: Although I thought of myself as a Christian who belonged to God at the time, I was trying to give my heart to someone who had no right to take it, and by the grace of God, she rejected me. My love for her was idolatry. The love I was trying to give her belonged only to God. In effect, I was doing the same thing that God’s people back in ancient times were doing. However terrible I felt at the rejection I received from Lucy, God felt my rejection of him all the more, in ways I will never even know. While I was still pursuing Lucy, and trying to escape reality through drugs, the Lord was pursuing me. But I still didn’t know any of this at the time.

I start off with this because it really touches upon a theme that I think is reflected throughout the rest of the story. Much of the conflict that I’ll be telling you about is really, at the core, my own struggle with what it means to really love God, and as a part of this messed up monstrosity we call the Church, what it means to love other people. A lot of it is hard for me to tell, because if I’m going to be honest, I have to tell about how messed up I was, and how I was really acting like a whore in God’s sight. –A whore that he loved none the less.

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“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” –Romans 5:8