My Story Part V: Bongs, Bibles & Chance Encounters

After my incident with Bill it seems that these chance occurrences began to happen more frequently. As far as I could tell, folks sought me out more than I sought them out. Like I said, I was not a church-going peron who was attempting to convince my friends and family to follow Jesus. I was just living and sharing what was happening in my life.

For example, one afternoon a friend and his roommate stopped by for a visit. They sat in my living-room cleaning their weed in the top of a shoe box. Take a pinch of the weed between your fingers drop it in the top of the box and then rumble your fingers underneath the box to create a vibration, the seeds would roll to the bottom of the box, voila-- no sticks, no stems, no seeds. Where’s the bong?

After he cleaned his weed and smoked a bong or two he threw his bag of weed on the table on top of my Bible. Something about that bothered me. Not because I had a problem with them smoking weed but not on the bible. I said, “Dude, you can’t lay your weed on my bible, bro.” That’s what Led Zeppelin’s House of the Holy was for, not the bible. I doubt God had a huge issue with it, or it didn’t seem to bother me as much as it did my Aunt who thought that God didn’t like cards, wine, or cigarettes. He apologized and then asked if I was religious and if I wanted a bong hit.

We started talking and his roommate began to ask me questions about my spirituality. The next thing I knew he was telling me his story of once being in the church but that he fell away from going and since coming to college he had not read the bible or prayed all that much. For some reason he was very willing to open up about his journey.

Two weeks later I walk into a crowded bar and from across the room I hear someone yell my name, “Rick! Rick!” I turned around and saw this guy from across the room and he yelled in front of 200 people, “Dude, I’ve been reading my bible!” I wonder if this is what probably prompted the young 19 year old Carly Simon look-a-like that I had met at my party one night to ask me if I was “born again”. I replied, “I think I know what you mean by that question so for your purposes I guess you could say that I am but I wouldn’t use those words to define it.” She was sweet and cute but that was the end of my rap for the night.

So there I was, being me and finding everywhere I turned folks coming to me and wanting to talk about God. It was weird. Why me? How could folks tell? I had no rule book to define what was happening but nearly every day often out of the clear blue sky folks would talk to me about God.

The only thing I had going for me was my story and my experience. That’s what I shared. Words like sin and repentance were not in my vocabulary. That was not the foundation of my spiritual life. The foundation was this overwhelming sense of complete Love and acceptance. I just knew that there was a God, it knew me and somehow loved me. God contacted me, remember, I didn’t not contact God. I became aware; I had an awakening and all I was doing was acknowledging the event in my life.

I didn’t know you were not supposed to use the F-word and Jesus in the same sentence. The people that I encountered on a daily basis did not think I sounded weird nor did they attempt to define my experience. They were accepting. It was the Christians who were not accepting of my story and attempted to give me the rules, “You know, The Lord thinks….” Why was being anti-social a prerequisite for being a Christian? How come preachers didn’t use the f-word? What I often heard from the many Christians that I encountered seemed unlike the God that I had met. Why couldn’t a complete normal human being have a completely abnormal, out-of-this-world encounter with his Maker? Is God capable without our help to touch the soul of another human being a way that turned his life on a dime? What I read in scripture pulled me closer to God; what I heard from the religious folks I knew made me want to walk away. Why? Why were all of these people that I encountered so willing to listen and share their stories with me?

This God-thing that was happening to me was real and I had noting to do with it. It happened to me and it just kept pouring. I did nothing to cause it. It just happened.

No rules, no church—just a friend, a bible, prayer and meditation and God was everywhere and in everything. I fell madly in love with God because God for some reason had fallen madly in love with me. That was the God who I wanted to give my heart, life, soul and mind to. And so I did.

More to come…

I’ll fast forward a few years in my next post.