A Wild Ride - PART I

It was the summer of 1967,right at the peak of the Hippie movement. Well, the peak for Dallas anyway. I had just turned 18. Black lights and incense, paisley and lava lamps were everywhere and, of course, LSD and "free" love. Drugs were everywhere and if anything could be sniffed, smoked, chewed, swallowed or injected, I didn't hesitate to try it. San Francisco was calling. Woodstock knocked once, but I was too stoned to get to the highway. I was just a dumb kid caught up in the excitement of the times and it was an exciting time to be alive. We all had something we wanted to live for and after years of our friends dying in Vietnam, we wanted peace.

 "Mystic crystal revelation...Aquarius."

The hippie movement traveled to the beat of Hendricks, Joplin, Morrison, Dylan, and a host of others. It's now my theory that the Beatles were what kept most of us somewhat sane. "Love is all you need." sounded right on, but I couldn't find it even in the middle of a "Love In", but I kept searching.

After 18 years of not fitting in anywhere, I now felt that I did. In spite of this, it was just a few months and quite a few drug-trips later that my thinking started to skew. Confused and weakened by all the "cheap thrills", my self-made wonderland morphed into a wanderland. I was searching for the truth, something I could base my beliefs in, but nothing was stable. Everything was debatable and everyone had a different "bag". Anyone could tell me their version of "the truth". I couldn't refute it. I had no standard to judge it by.

"All you need is LOVE."

I need to backtrack a little because it all really began when I ended up in a home for pregnant teenagers. It was there that I met Beth. I thought Beth was just so cool. She was intelligent and insightful for a 16 year old. She had long brown hair, dressed like a beatnik and, came from Boston. Being in that sad situation unified all of us girls, but Beth and I were especially drawn to each other. I liked her hipness and she liked my comic relief. She was very self-assured, but depressive. I was low on self-esteem, but upbeat. We soon became best friends.

The home we were assigned to was in an old mansion way out in the suburbs of Dallas. It was the cozy home I'd always wanted, but the stipulation was that when the baby was born, you would sign them over to the adoption agency. The agency paid our room and board and all the hospital bills and we "paid" with our babies. It was a heart-rending, difficult thing to do, but my family was poor and I wanted my baby to have a better life than I had. To my amazement, she was born one day before my 18th birthday. I got to see her only for a few minutes 8 days after she was born. We kissed good-bye and they took my baby away.

Afterwards I fell into a deep depression, then one day Beth called. We both wanted to bury our broken hearts and began hanging out together. She was already into the hippie movement and gradually she brought me in. At first I started with a joint, then LSD, then STP, then THC and on an on it went. The months flew by as we did countless hallucinogens, discussed Karma and the universe, but the biggest shock came a year later when I saw her heating up something white in a teaspoon. I looked down at it and she said, "Do you know what this is?" A sly smile spread across her face. "This..." she said with a significant pause, "...is narcotics." As if it was something to be revered. As for me, I was horrified. Up to that point, Beth had been my spiritual "guru", the yin to my yang, and here she was taking heroine! "Heroine??", I said, "Aren't we supposed to be on a journey? Aren't we looking for the truth?" She weakly explained her actions which made no sense to me, but few things did. It wasn't much longer before I tried the dulling powder which, thank God, didn't appeal to me.

"PURPLE HAZE ALL IN MY BRAIN"

After months of drugs, everything became a blur. We slept wherever we found a place to lay our heads. This was usually in a dealers apartment or house where we could get our drugs for free or for sex. We drifted from one to the other, trading our bodies for their dope. One evening, after hours of smoking pot, I was unable to sleep and went into the kitchen. To my surprise, there sat Beth wrapped in a blanket like an Indian. It was cold so I got a blanket and we launched into one of our cosmic talks. Beth started to talk about her fears and doubts about life and death. Being a simple soul, I said, "Well, what about God?" For me, He was the answer to everything. I still believed in Him, but then Beth, with her typical subtlety, gingerly replied, "Well....I....you see, I don't really believe in God." I gasped inwardly. The shock hitting me like a thunder-bolt. I thought for sure a real one would hit her! But Beth just stared at me with those green, cat-like eyes. Again a decision presented itself and I now had to choose. The truth or Beth? Here before me was a life-altering decision. In my heart, I thought, "Maybe I don't believe in God either."

There was my decision. In that instant I physically felt God's presence, what some call a "conscience", leave me. It just lifted off and floated away. I remember thinking, "Free at last!" This was then accompanied by a "good" feeling that I no longer had to feel bad about making wrong decisions. God wasn't going to tell me anything anymore. Indeed.

"Do you love it? Do you hate it?...

...There it is the way you made it." --Zappa

A few months later, Beth and I were sleeping at a drug-dealers place when the police crashed through the door. After a week in jail I found myself on 5 years probation and with a 5000 dollar bail to pay my crooked lawyer. I sat in that jail cell and thought, "Where's the fun now? Where's the enlightenment that I thought all of this searching was going to bring me?" I knew that I had no enlightenment. I had nothing. I had dragged myself across this long, hot desert, believing that the mirage of "Love and Peace" would quench my thirst; the phantom happiness that always seemed just out of reach. But after months and months of chasing it I was tired. I began to believe that there was no love. That love was also a mirage.

After getting out of jail, I changed. I went from being a fun-loving, cheerful person to a depressed, withdrawn wretch. I turned deeply within myself and withdrew to the point that even my drug addict friends started to wonder about me. But I knew it was no use to try and talk to them while they were still caught up in their games and in their own selves. Thus, I withdrew further.

"When the truth is found...

to be LIES..." - Jefferson Airplane

I'd been launched into outer space without a space-ship, just a thin suit and a rope attached to nothing. I drifted, turned and floated directionless. Even my vision was affected. People around me appeared to retreat into a two-dimensional background like wallpaper.

The best way I can explain was that it was like looking through the wrong side of the binoculars. Everyone looked farther away than they were.

I drifted off. Their voices and words becoming distant and meaningless. My own body seemed to be merely a machine that conveyed me from one place to the other. Sex was a mechanical, pointless waste of time.

I was more than numb with boredom. A suffocating, greenish fog enveloped me as a feeling of intense and unshakeable sorrow replaced all but a spark of hope.

One night, though, it just became too much for me.

Beth and I had grown apart, but in desperation I called her. When she answered the phone I groaned out, "Beth..Beth! I've just got to talk to somebody." I felt that if anyone could understand me, Beth could, but her words cut away my last hope with her cold reply, "Why don't you just find some other friends?" Slowly I hung up the phone. No such "friends" existed. My final decision was now clear.

It was midnight as I dragged myself to the park. In spite of everything there was still one last ember of hope. I couldn't stop thinking, "If there is a God, he's going to have to find me, because I...give...up." My family had failed me, my friends failed me, drugs failed me, sex, meditating, religion, I failed me. Nothing worked. Work didn't work.

I sat down on the steps at the park pavilion and decided, "I'm going to sit here till I die. If there's no love then everything is meaningless." By 3 a.m. I was still sitting there. The usual park freaks scampering about playing their drugged-out mind games.

Sitting there, I thought a mirage was forming in the darkness of the park.

As it approached the lighted pavilion where myself and a few other stoners were sitting. ecoming clearer, I realized that a group of about 15 people were approaching

I scowled at their not-hip, "straight" clothes and thought, "Oh, god, NO! Not the Baptists!"

I immediately put my head on my knees, hoping they'd leave me alone. The usual hippies that had been running around the park suddenly stopped to gather around.

The odd group of visitors started to come towards us and I heard one of them say, "We're not with a church."

My head shot up in surprise, "Not with a church?" I thought, then I concluded,"they've gotta be a bunch of pranksters or they're all crazy." As I'd expected, they began to speak about God and about miracles. I wanted nothing to do with it. I'd been preached to countless times before and condemned to hell almost each time. I couldn't swallow this game.

As I glared at them I noticed that they were quite a mixture.

There were 12 year olds, teenagers, 2 middle-aged men, one from Argentina, who finally started walking up to each of the hecklers saying in thick accent, „Jesoos ees rrrreal. Jesoos ees rrrreal.“

"These guys are nuts.", thought, but as I watched them, I realized that they couldn't ALL be crazy. "Not the kids."

And then I realized that if they were playing a joke on us, they would have come on Sunday with the rest of the clowns & church freaks.

One of the teen girls stepped forward.

She wasn't at all the type I would have listened to. Smart, nerdy-looking and a „good church girl“, but here was something different. Something about her courage that attracted me.

She said, "I didn't believe in God either ..."

Instantly, she was interrupted and mocked by one of the self-styled hippies that I knew was an idiot.

She continued, "...but I told God to show me he was real." She then explained a miracle that happened to her.

I took my head off my knees and concentrated my gaze as deeply as I could. The unvarnished sincerity in in her eyes told me she believed what she was saying. Something I hadn't seen in a long time.

Off in the corner, I noticed that an older man was instructing the younger ones. When they'd get talked into a corner or a trick question was posed, he would couch them or he'd give a short answer or say, "We don't know." which surprised me.

"Hey, they aren't pretending to know everything.", I thought to myself.

But it wasn't only the courage, the honesty and simplicity. I could also see that they genuinely cared about us. They weren't judging us as "filthy hippies".

I was so touched that, when the crowd of hippies dispersed, I went over to the man to understand better. Two others joined us and he began to tell us of his own experiences.

He started talking to the three of us, telling us about miracles of God taking care of him and his family. He said, "God told me to quit my job, take my kids out of school and just travel around and tell everybody about Him."

He then proceeded to tell us of the miraculous way God provided for them, prefaced by one statement that spoke loudly to me. He said, "God spoke to me, and when I told my wife she thought I was crazy."

Hold it! Freeze frame right there. My heart leaped in my chest. I thought to myself, "Everybody thinks I'm crazy, too!" But I never believed it was crazy to hope true Love existed. Could this be it?

He then told how God took care of them, supplying gas for the car, places to stay and so on. I then felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. I felt hope. My heart began to lift. I thought, "This is the kind of God that I always thought God should be. A God who talks to us. A God who cares."

After sitting on the grass & listening for several minutes waiting for the punch line (which I thought was going to be „come to our church“), I finally said in desperation, "Well, man, how did you find Jesus?"

I didn't know if there had ever been any such person. Before that, I had tried everything and every way I could think of to find God.

The man stopped, looked at me and spread his arms wide and said, "All I said was 'Jesus come into my heart. Forgive my sins and give me eternal life.'"

What followed was a series of incredible incidents.

As the words came out of his mouth, the power of it almost knocked me backwards. I felt like a truck hit me, but fear of being dragged off to a church kept me from showing it outwardly.

It was now 4 a.m. And as I left the park, all I could think of was, "I've got to try this. I've tried everything else. This is my last hope. Oh, God, I hope this works."

I walked quickly down the darkened street, alone, with no fear only a cacophony of voices screaming in my head, "NO! NO! Don't do THAT!! Don't pray that prayer! How stupid! How unCOOL to talk to Jesus!" Before this change, when I would even think the name "Jesus" it sounded sickening to me.

The mental battle I went through was horrific as thoughts, actually demons, flew at me,

"You don't want to pray to Jesus!" " NO! NO! DON'T PRAY THAT! DON'T PRAY THAT!!! DON'T!"

I felt I was on a battlefield in a war. So I countered with, "I've gotta try this. It's my only hope!" The demons attacked ferociously and I fought back as wave after wave of doubt and fear attacked my mind and heart! " What would your friends think? What if they could see you?"

These arguments were weak, I didn't care at all what my so-called friends thought. Finally I said, "Look devil, I'm the only one who sees what a square I am. I'm gonna DO this!" As I made this firm and final decision, the voices immediately stopped. Boom! They were silenced.

By the time I got home, it was about 4 a.m. and everyone was asleep as I knelt down in my mom's living room. I hadn't prayed in a long time, but though I was way out of practice, I thought this was the best position to start from.

I took a deep breath thinking, "If Jesus is real, then the sky is going to open up, the angels are going to come down and they're going to take me out of here far away from this horrible world." I hated my life. I hated the world and my greatest desire was to know spiritual truth and love.

I looked up, swallowed hard and from the deepest part of my heart I prayed, "Jesus, if you're real and if what that man says is true, then you can save me. Please come into my heart, forgive my sins and give me eternal life." I had no idea what any of that meant, but it was my last hope.

I waited. Silence. No explosion, no sky rolling back, no manifestations, no angels, nothing! I waited a few more minutes, then got up. Instantly a doubt "Maybe he didn't come in." whizzed into my brain followed immediately by, "Maybe he did." I thought "Hmm, maybe he did." And I left it at that.

Two days later I was struck by the realization that I was peaceful. A totally new experience.

Up till that point I was so nervous that chewed my fingernails till they bled. When I had nothing left to chew, I'd chew my knuckles till they bled. Having this strange calm come over me was most remarkable. All the fears I was fearing had left me and I sailed on a calm sea.

MY STORY PART II The following evening, I went out with a friend of mine, Joe, that I hadn't seen in a long time.

The second floor apartment overlooked a swimming pool and after a few minutes of listening to meaningless conversation, I went out to stare at the pool. The blue pool was lit up and I was trying to use it as a sort of "crystal ball" still trying to use the failed methods of trying to transcend myself somehow into heaven.

After a few minutes of fruitless effort, I became bored.

Suddenly, I remembered that the man I'd met 3 nights before, had given me something to read.

I reached into my back pocket and pulled out this very church-oriented pamphlet. God must have "blinded" my hippy eyes from seeing the picture on the front. A man wearing a suit and tie, holding hands with a woman and child. The picture screamed, "Establishment! Church!" Typifying everything I was against, but at that moment, my eyes were blinded to it.

I turned the page and started reading. It was dull at first, but something made me continue.

When I got to the bottom of the second page, nothing could have prepared me for what was coming.

The words, with the power of an atomic bomb, exploded off the page!

"FOR.......GOD.......SO.......LOVED.......THE.......WORLD...",

I was shaking and holding onto the booklet like a ship-mast in a storm! Each word, every syllable, took me to a depth of richness that I never knew existed. Not only tangibly, but visually!

The explosions continued as I gripped the book, eyes staring....BOOM! "HE gave His only Son....."

Each word-bomb not just raised me up, but shot me upwards into a dimension I never knew existed.

Gorgeous, crystal light was embedded in every word.

A warmth I'd never felt before, together with a deep and unshakeable comfort, surrounded me. Comfort, peace, light, are so inadequate to describe the experience. Underscoring it all, was a deep awareness of being loved and adored. A feeling that nothing would ever hurt me again flowed into my very being. Every doubt I had was gone.

I leaped up and ran into the apartment jumping around and waving the pamphlet. I must have looked like a Pentecostal gone stark-raving mad, I gasped out, " You gotta read this! You gotta read this!" A girl sitting on the floor with her boyfriend took it, started to read, but then said with disgust, "I think it's kinda funky." Then the boy said, "Oh, you mean the bottom of the second page." He got it! "

Yes! Yes!", I shouted, but he wasn't as excited as I was so I took it back and started to read again.

Once more BANG! The words exploded from the page literally knocking me backwards.

I fell directly into their stereo and heard the needle (on their oh so cool blues record) go "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzut!" across the someone howled, "Hey, man, get this chick outta here! She's not cool!"

My very stoned friend Joe picked me up off the floor and and lead me outside.

Sitting on the balcony together, I shoved the pamphlet into his hand. "Joe, you gotta read this!".

He took the pamphlet, but he was somewhere else.

I stared at him. I couldn't comprehend why he wasn't flipping out like I was.

I the heard God's voice say, „It doesn't matter right now.“

I pulled the pamphlet from his fingers and started reading again, but didn't know that my eyes had traveled away from the lines of Biblical verse onto words of humans which weren't jumping off the page.

My heart was gripped with fear. I trembled and thought, "The light's gone!"

Somehow I'd had all the truth and nothing but the truth. Now the Light that I'd been searching for all of my life was gone. Overwhelmed with dispair, I threw the book over my shoulder, put my head down on the balcony iron-railing and said, "I give up."

Instantly, I was lifted out of my body. Looking about, it appeared that I'd entered some kind of grey bubble and I heard my voice telling God all that was in my heart, "Well, I've tried to be good. I've tried to find out what the truth is and to find love and to help others." Etc etc.

When my heart was emptied out, the grey bubble burst open and a light as bright as a million suns shining all at once beamed down all around me! I immediately looked up at the source of the Light and what then took place can never be described in words. But I can only use weak adjectives to say that I was looking directly into the most beautiful face I'd ever seen. It was not exactly physical, it was more real than the physical world and this is impossible to explain.

I was aware of myself at the same time. It was like panoramic vision and I could even see myself and I looked like a baby!

I looked around and up and then I realized what I was sitting on. I was being held by Jesus Himself and I was sitting, literally, in the palm of His hand. In comparison it seemed I was two inches tall.

Looking once again into his eyes, I felt 100%, pure Love. All that I could say was, "God, you're beautiful. I love you!" "God, you're beautiful. I love you!" "God, you're beautiful. I love you!"

Each time I would say this, He would repeat back, "I love you, too." But with a depth of sincerity that I'd never experienced. As if He would never tire of telling me and never tire of hearing me. As often as I needed it, that's as often as He would repeat it.

His words didn't come as a shout, but as if inside of my heart. At the same time I could see them coming. They had the appearance as of when you see a gasoline explosion; a rolling fire. That's how His words looked, but with a bright and unbelievably beautiful white light. It was all the colors of the spectrum, but not dark. More like golden.

He then changed the scene and suddenly had turned me towards a sort of wall which seemed to be about 20 feet away, but distance didn't seem to exist. Everything was sort of interwoven. As I watched, His other hand slid the wall to the side.

As the wall was moved, I became aware of a sound, as more of the wall slid away, the sound became louder and sounded like a giant bee hive buzzing with millions of bees. Instantly a voice whisphered in my ear, "That's the world." My eyes widened and I began to see more clearly.

I felt as if I was being fine-tuned both the visual as well as the audio. What had sounded like bees clarified into their individual voices. The hectic swarm in front of my eyes came into focus. Individual beings each one screaming, as though insane or in some kind of mental anquish. The appearance of these spirits was awful, but I felt no fear. Though it is a crass description, each spirit looked like human dung!

As I watched, a peculiar thing happened. One of these spirits was released and began floating towards me. Sort of like a fish in water. I was curious as it came towards my chest and then entered my solar plexis. Instantly, my thoughts were filled with a terrible and vile scene. Awful and filthy pornography followed immediately by a screaming, accusing voice, "LOOK WHAT YOU'RE THINKING RIGHT HERE IN FRONT OF GOD HIMSELF!!!!" Immediately I was filled with terror and turned toward God expecting instant annihilation. I began apologizing to God profusely, terrified and telling Him I didn't mean to think that and so on.

I faced the direction where I'd previously seen his beautiful face, but there was only a dark looking thunder cloud where the warm light had been. My anguished heart poured forth apologies, while at the same time feeling it was all hopeless. Then, cutting through the fear and remorse, I heard His tender, loving and reassuring voice.

As He spoke, I began to relax, the dark cloud got lighter with each word. The fear in my heart was less and less. It was like He was reaching into my heart and cleaning it from the fear.

Finally, and this is the only sentence I remember from that long, comforting talk, I heard Him say,

"Do not worry. All is good."

Exactly those words, and with that last word "Good", I fell backwards into His palm as if in a dead sleep.

I felt like a baby in it's mother's womb. Not a care, not a worry, everything taken care of then....

WHOOSH! Immediately He raised me up to a sitting position facing that same wall with the confined spirits behind it.

Once again, He allowed only one of the spirits to approach me and the whole process repeated itself. Filthy thought, condemnation, fear, confusion, the grey, heavy cloud.

Then through it came His voice, a feeling of lightness and ending with the same declaration, "Do not worry. All is good." or „Don't worry. Everything is okay.“ and again, I fell asleep.

Suddenly I was back in my body raising my head up off my arm that I'd laid it on. I was bewildered and looked over. Joe was still sitting right next to me, caught in time and looking more stoned than ever.

My thoughts whirled as I came into my body. I gasped out and said, „JOE, DID YOU SEE THAT!??“ Without turning his head, Joe stared forward nodding and said, „We're in this all the time.“

I realized he was somewhere else and I looked up, questioning it in my mind. Instantly God said, “It doesn't matter. He'll learn later."

I flipped out and thought, „I can still hear Him!"

So I asked something else and, again, He answered me! I thought of another question, then another one with Him answering before I could finish asking.

The speed of the communication then picked up and I can only compare it to like being wet-wired to a Master Computer. But in the middle of my rapid-fire questioning, He stopped answering.

The shock of realizing I was only hearing my voice after awhile scared me, so I shut up and listened and when I got really quiet, back came the answer, "Those things are not important." „Okay, not important. What's really important?“ I asked myself then I said, "Will I ever find someone who loves me and that I'll love,too."

"Yes.", came back the definite reply. I relaxed and felt lighter than air.

I knew I could trust Him. I knew everything He said was only True.

While all of this was going on, I was being driven around in a car with Joe and another guy, but all the while it was as if I barely touched the ground.

I'd see people on the street in certain unhappy situations and asked God if they were going to be okay.

He showed me a sort of vision of their future and the happy ending to each situation. It was wonderful to experience. As though I could see that everything, truly everything no matter how „bad“ it may look, something incredible will come from it.

So I was talking to God and bathing in the wonderful words He was saying, but we humans know that in the midst of our euphoria, a little demon of fear is always lurking about.

Even in that amazing realm that I was in, I was struck by my greatest fear, "Yeah. You're all happy now, but you've got this awful disease!"

It seemed true, but not for long.

I looked up and said, "God will I...", but before I could finish my question, the answer, "Yes!." shot back loud and clear and definite.

Instantly, I was healed. The wounds and infection from a sexual disease I'd had for months, vanished over a period of 8 hours. Not a trace was left and it never returned.

Five days and more experiences later, I knew all I wanted to do was serve God. The difficulty was that I thought I had to go where He is. So I began to think of how I could get myself a quick passage to Heaven.

I struck on the idea of ordering some speed. I knew a guy who would sell me some. I had tried one only a few months before and drove round-trip from Shreveport. LA to Dallas in less than 15 hours, including eating breakfast.

That afternoon I was crossing the street when a van ran the red light and nearly ran over me! A girl jumped out with a flyer in her hand and ran up to me. "Do you believe in Jesus?"

I saw it was a van full of hippie Christians.

To make a long story short, they showed to me more clearly Jesus' Words and that He needed me to serve Him here on earth first.

"Go into all the world and preach this good news to every creature." Jesus, mark 16:15

If you know Him, you can't help but talk about Him. Forty-six years later, and many miracles behind me, I know Who I'm trusting in and I can hardly wait to see His face again.

One last note regarding my baby daughter.

We found each other 29 years later and it was a happy reunion. I discovered that I'm a grandmother of 3 and I am now a great-grandmother.

The adventure is still on and it continues to confirm the title of my favorite Christmas movie, „It's a Wonderful Life“.

"I once was lost, but now I'm found,