Crossing KCU

The weather was pretty dark and dreary as I pulled on to the AA9 highway, heading west out of Grayson, Kentucky. The rain was falling in a steady, solid sheet, and my windshield wipers were going full blast. I finished the last drag off my cigarette, flicked it out of the window, and began mulling over the series of events that had led me to this moment. I was in the middle of my third semester at Kentucky Christian University, and I had finally had enough. I had struggled through my freshmen year there, but in the process had been swept up into a whirlwind of pot smoking, beer drinking, and rabble rousing; things not unusual at a Christian school (or at least this one in particular), despite what some may think. At any rate, that summer things had gotten even worse, and by the end of it I was going through entire weeks without being sober; mostly because I didn’t want to deal with reality. I still didn’t want to deal with it, but it was time. So I lit up another smoke, popped Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” into the CD player, and wiped away the tears that were streaming down my face.

That weekend had been a difficult one. Lana and I had driven back home with a couple of our other friends, Marc who I had grown up with, and Brian Burden who we had all met as freshmen the year before. There was a party on Saturday night. There were always parties on Saturday night. At some point around midnight Lana had become slightly intoxicated and it became my duty to keep all the horny guys away from her. I was still stuck on her. She was still my idol. But I knew by that time that I was fighting a losing battle. On the way home from the party that night I finally just asked her straight out what our relationship was about—were we just friends, was there something more, would there ever be something more?

She said no, that we were just close friends, like brother and sister. So that was that. I had pined over her for about a year, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I was sick on the inside. But as it turned out, as painful as it was at the time, this was the best thing that could have happened to me. This was the exact day that my illusion was shattered completely, and I was forced to accept that Lana was not the woman for me. Several months earlier, the day of the LSD trip, I had come face to face with the same truth, but I had lied to myself, unable to handle it. Now I was completely sober, and I had a straight answer, and there was no room for telling myself anymore lies.

The next morning, as I lay in bed, Lana came in to wake me up for church. I told her to go ahead without me. Church… when you have your heart completely broken, going to sit in a pew for an hour, listening to people sing hymns as if they are at a funeral service, and then hearing about how to communicate effectively with your wife and children, or how to get along with your boss at work, or how to take control of your financial life, doesn’t seem to make much sense. Instead of going to church I laid in bed, and for the first and only time in my life, I contemplated suicide.

I’ve since come to think of suicide as the ultimate act of irrationality. Even so, I can tell you that in the moment, it can seem to be the most logical act in the world. The story of how I came to find myself in that kind of mental state isn’t anything really special or unique. It can happen to anyone, regardless of who you are and what you believe. It happens when the amount of pain you are feeling inside becomes so strong that you can’t really feel anything else. I had been hurting for many reasons a long time before that day ever came along. Until then I had found ways of pushing the pain aside, or ignoring it, or by finding things to help me forget it was even there. The problem was that this pain never really went away completely.

Well, at that point, with no other outs, at the end of myself, I thought about God again. If you really begin thinking that death sounds like it might not be that bad of an option, then chances are you will also start thinking about what comes after death. That more than anything else, is what made me go back to God. You might think the experience I described at the end of the last chapter would be enough, but it wasn’t. That encounter with the demon was what prepared me to go to God. My life really had to disintegrate a lot more before I was willing to go to him on my knees and ask him to be the Lord and King of my life.

It was that morning, in that moment when suicide first entered my thoughts as a viable option that I had literally cried out to God, and asked him to kill me. I knew deep down that I couldn’t really commit suicide, so I just asked God to end my life right then and there. I told him how depressed and sad I was, and how much I hurt, and how I didn’t want to live life if this was all there was to it. I asked him why Lana didn’t love me the way I loved her. If she didn’t love me, knowing me as well as she did, and being as close to me as she was, how could anyone ever love me? So I asked God to kill me that morning, and that’s exactly what he did. He killed me with his words. From deep down inside of me, where I had buried the Holy Spirit, the voice of the Lord rose up and filled my mind, and this is what he said: “Adam, no human can love you the way you need to be loved, the way you want to be loved, and the way you were created to be loved. Only I can do that.” That was the first time I ever heard the Lord actually say something to me, and I knew it was him speaking to me because it made perfect sense, and it cut me so deeply that I could literally feel, in that moment, the love of God wash over me.
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The second thing I ever heard the Lord say to me personally, was that evening when he told me to leave K.C.U. That made sense too. Staying there wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I didn’t know what I was doing there in the first place, so it made sense to leave. Besides, I felt defeated by the campus and I was tired of all the rules, regulations, and fake Christians trying to control my behavior. I didn’t understand why I had to make sure my bed was made, or why I had to wear dress clothes to the chapel services, or why for that matter it was mandatory for me to go to chapel in the first place. I was nineteen years old, and I had people my own age making sure I was in the dorm by 11:30 each night for curfew. I probably could have put up with these rules if the people enforcing them were just honest about the reasons those rules existed. Instead of admitting that it had to do with the image of the school and whether or not churches were donating enough money, they just said it was for our own spiritual well being, and acted like Jesus himself was the one who instituted them.

It is worth noting, that during that first year and half in Kentucky, there were only two individuals in positions of authority who truly modeled Jesus Christ for me on that entire Christian campus. These were the two resident assistants (RAs) that governed the sections I lived in. They were the only two authority figures who did not judge me, or shove the rules down my throat. In fact, neither of them ever wrote me a single demerit, though they easily could have done so a number of times. Instead, they talked to me, and took a genuine interest in my life. They never acted like they were above me in any way, but always treated me like I was their brother. I loved them for that.

At the same time, however, there were many other authorities and students on the campus who I hated. I hated them because the only time they ever talked to me or interacted with me on a personal level was when they were enforcing rules or judging me for things that they did not like or agree with. These were the Christian leaders, people in ministry positions, and instead of showing me who Christ really was, they wrote me demerits, handed out fines, and treated me like I was a piece of trash. If it wasn’t for those two kind RAs, I would never have seen the love of Christ on the campus during that first year and a half.

Regardless, it was now time to drop out of this Christian college (it was still just a college back in those days). I knew without a doubt that this was what God had told me to do. I needed to get away from everyone so that I could spend time alone with God and figure out what it meant to follow Christ as my Lord. I knew he was there now, and I was beginning to talk to him, but I was still an extremely unhappy person. Moreover, I didn’t understand life at all. In the fake atmosphere of the insulated Christian campus I was living in, no answers were forthcoming. So, in my first genuine act of obedience to Christ, I packed up my stuff, said goodbye to Lana, Marc, and Brian, and then headed back to Indiana.

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” –Matthew 7:13-14