Editorial Note: This article marks the start of a new Ministry column featuring the personal stories of pastors' calls to ministry. For details, please see the Note to potential writers found at the conclusion of the article.
Insecurity, guilt, fear, loneliness, rejection, alcoholism, drug abuse— the litany of woes could go on, but with passing years it seems that the vast emptiness, tragedy, and pain of my pre-Christian life is increasingly more difficult to recall. And that's a relief. It is not that I could ever forget completely, or that I would want to deny the deep, dark pit of my former life, for we always carry with us the potential of falling back.
Coming from an Irish Catholic working class background, I probably had the odds stacked against me as far as a disposition toward alcoholism was concerned. One doesn't have to come from that background to be an alcoholic; it just helps! It was Augustine who wrote some thing in the fifth century A.D. about a "God-shaped void" in every person's heart that cries out for fulfillment. Until it is filled, we often indulge in hollow, self-destructive behavior. In this I was no exception.
Early events
When, as a drunken teenage passenger in a speeding car, I was slammed into a telegraph pole. I came away with an aortic aneurysm and permanent partial paraplegia that confined me to a wheelchair for a year or so. Great introduction to adulthood! Still running from that narrow little dungeon of my own self, I would go another six years, which included a marriage, the birth of a son, and a divorce, before I stopped slamming my head against the wall and waved the white flag of surrender before my God.
It happened this way. I tried filling that "God-shaped void" with Hindu meditation and yoga, attempting to discover the "god" within, and develop my own "god-consciousness." Such an egocentric approach to spirituality is, of course, doomed.
I teamed up with Lyn, a lost little hippie from a wealthy Jewish background who, like me, was trying to get her head together and find the inner spiritual peace we desperately wanted.
Next followed fasting, then a whole meal, stone ground, "don't-panic-it's-organic" dietary regime, long sessions of Hindu meditation with the Ananda Marga devotees, all accompanied by an intense earnestness on our part to be clean, holy, and spiritually mature.
Even though Jesus said "'Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled'" (Matthew 5:6, NKJV), the evidence of that eluded us as we searched in the wrong places. Instead of looking to a universal Savior-God outside us, whose Spirit also loves to dwell within, we were trying to make ourselves into gods.
An early encounter with Adventists
When I was ready, God acknowledged my yearning for wholeness, and through an intriguing set of circumstances helped me overcome my prejudice against Christianity and led me to hear a Seventh-day Adventist preacher expounding on the biblical prophecies of Daniel and Revelation.
I was blown away by the incredible pattern of predictive truths the Bible contained, most of it verified by history, the remainder waiting its ultimate fulfillment in the events associated with the end of this world and the second coming of Jesus. Thus began a titanic struggle between the inner mystical appeal of Hinduism and the powerfully appealing prophetic/doctrinal package of Seventh-day Adventism.
This struggle led me from an Ananda Marga ashram into the tropical rainforest of North Queensland, where I spent 31 days alone in prayer and fasting on water only in a do-or-die effort to find the peace of God (Lyn, meanwhile, was following her own spiritual journey in the Philippines where she underwent psychic surgery from a so-called "faith-healer," a fateful and fatal encounter).
Emerging an emaciated wreck from the rain forest a month later, I met my first humans in a health-food store run by a Seventh-day Adventist Christian couple. Although total strangers, this young couple recognized my soul hunger, took me into their home, and modeled Christian love and truth. God was leading my life, though I could not have recognized it then.
By the time Lyn returned from the Philippines, we'd both decided on our respective spiritual pathways. I had determined to follow Christianity while Lyn would follow Hinduism and join the Ananda Marga organization. Thus came a parting of our ways after eighteen months of intense spiritual searching together. Lyn, eventually, took 20 liters of gasoline and, in an act of futile protest at the lack of spirituality in the Western World, burned herself to death outside the United Nations building in Geneva, Switzerland, in October 1978.
I quickly discovered that mere intellectual conviction of spiritual truth falls far short of the deep inner conversion of the heart yielded to God's sovereignty alone. My most earnest resolves to overcome my drug and alcohol habits were like ropes of sand. I was still a Hindu at heart, relying on my own strength for victory instead of leaning on the powerful arm of God, a recipe for continuous defeat and despair.
Turning point
One winter evening on the Australian Gold Coast I made a cold blooded, deliberate decision to turn my back on God. Just for that night I would "party-on" with some heavy duty hero in and mescaline, combined with liberal doses of tequila and beer—a mind altering concoction of potentially deadly drugs. I would put Jesus on the shelf for the night, and come back to Him tomorrow.
Hallucinating out of control that night, I suddenly became immersed in detailed cinemascopic and quadraphonic sights and sounds depicting the events described in Revelation 20—the resurrection and final destruction of those who have judged themselves unworthy of everlasting life. This was no passive observation from a safe distance. As far as I was concerned, it was actually happening—to me! I had rejected God for the last time. I had lost my eternal salvation. Words cannot describe the stark horror of those hours. My overwhelming sense of guilt and shame were indescribable as my unconverted life played out before me and my spiritually naked self stood broken and despairing before God.
God didn't need to judge me; my own sense of self-condemnation was crushing, and I actually longed for my immediate destruction. Every negative emotion the human mind can possibly conceive, passed through my soul that night—until I finally fell into the oblivion of alcohol-induced unconsciousness.
I can only understate the over whelming waves of relief that flooded my soul the next morning when I awoke to find myself still here. The hell that I'd experienced hadn't really happened. Nevertheless, it was a dreadful warning from God, and in that moment of dawning consciousness, I heard the clarion voice of God speaking as never before in an unmistakable message that drove itself clear into my psyche: "That's the last warning you're ever going to get. If you ever touch alcohol or illicit drugs again—you've already had a foretaste of your fate!"
Conversion and call
In the next few days, while still recovering from alcoholic poisoning, and as I recalled in vivid detail the events and the emotions of that hellish experience, my body involuntarily shuddered from shame and guilt. It was then that I fell broken at God's feet, yielding my miser able life to Jesus in its totality, nothing held back. I prayed, "If there's anything You can do with a mongrel like me, then take me, I'm Yours."
From condemnation, shame, and guilt, my life suddenly became filled with an overwhelming sense of acceptance. Joy and peace captured and kept me in a delightfully wonderful way for the first time in my life. The peace for which I had hungered and thirsted for so long now flooded my soul.
God had reached down and touched me in my absolute need, in my time of brokenness, and now I was in love with Jesus and on a full-on honey moon with God. I knew there and then I'd be spending the rest of my days sharing what Jesus had done for me with anyone who would listen. And I've done just that since my conversion in August 1976.
And as for alcohol and drugs, I've never tested God to see if He meant His warning. Though still working on other areas of my life, He removed all desire for those things at the time of my con version.
Now my life is put together in all of the essentials. I find ongoing and ultimate meaning in fulfilling the far-reach ing call God gave me at the time He summoned me to Him to share the good news of His love and power as the pastor of a challenging congregation.
