From October 24th 1998 until May of 2002 I was smoke-free...I was drug-free by January 14, 1999, my mother's birthday and my own rebirth day....the day my soul was sprung.  I took a few years to see the world straight on, without chemicals any stronger than caffeine.  My technique involved not only relying on God to see me through my weakest moments, my strongest cravings....but also on an intentional mind adjustment.  I would try to re-remember moments from before I first smoked.  Occasions like getting in the car or pushing back an empty dinner plate...I would think about me in those situations, a younger me, who could get through without the minutest thought of smoking.  It actually worked/works quite well for me.  I've quit a couple more times in the past few years....8 months here, 4 months, 3 weeks....never starting again through any physical cravings.  Ah, but there's where I fail. 

Every time I started again, I linked up the pain, the stressors that cigs, alcohol, and weed seemed to smooth over.  I just shoved my today up against the memories of being lost and hurt and alone and walking hollow.  All that time sober and clear-minded was just squeezed out like the jelly in an otherwise rotten donut.  Smoking and drugs were cool to me for about a month in High School....and soon after grew to be intentional instruments of self-annihilation.  I had a strategy.  I was in control....not God.  I pick when and how I go out; not Him.

My recent impulsive purchase of 60, yes 60, packs of the same French cigarettes I smoked in my 10 days in France in my Senior year of High School, 3 days before I took a hungry man's dose of sleeping pills....this impulse came after a 5 month stretch without a single drag.  I still have 5 packs left, and I plan on quitting again when they at last become the outermost crust on my lungs. 

In the last few months, these non-filter gypsy sticks have been accompanied by the logical side-effects...I can't run or swim....I can't even perform my rush hour concerts....huffing and puffing....voice cracking and outright failing.  I have even noticed that my skin is sort of leathery and ashen....though I suppose that could just be attributed to aging and a general distaste for looking at myself.  Either way, I desire change.

Now, even after my salvation, I've been obsessed with this looming morbidity, this notion that I am not long for this earth...that I will die at a relatively young age.  I've touched on this a bit in previous entries, conversations, drunken jags....and, frankly, I'm tired of it all.  I see how much just thinking this way changes how I attack challenges or how my friends and family respond to me.  In short, I leave a carefully distributed layer of egg shells wherever I go.  I hate it! 

In the last few months, I've had a new opportunity to find wisdom.  I've seen a direct parallel between this self-medicating roller coaster and my emotions, the condition of my heart, my spirit.  My post-salvation self plunged deeply into my relationship with God.....reading everything I could get my hands on....theology, philosophy, physics, genetics, history, political theory, even inspirational stuff...I was/am always trying to fill in the holes in my knowledge...

Somewhere along the way, I forgot about my heart....I guess I was actually glad to have been able to kick the habit.  I had only tiny bits here and there of interest...glints of soggy-heartedness that would come and go as crushes and infatuations...and would fade just as quickly as those occasional impulses to take a drag off a cigarette or a bong.  And I've been rather proud of this.....sort of had a relationship history as addictive as my drug history.  I would let it take hold of me, possess me, strip me of all rationale...I would let it wear me down to a stubby little sniffling pariah stooped low with the happy burden of unrequited love.  Oh, what a bliss to be right about being unlovable!  So much joy can be found in emotional self-flagellation!  But none of it is really joyous, no happiness in being right about being wrong.  God is surely not nodding his assent somewhere...brushing the tangles out of my fur..."There, there..."

So I found that correlation recently......old habits and old thinking need not manifest only in drugs or smoking.  I found myself picking up the happy burden again....stepping into my own little sequel, a resurrection of my melodramatic career...I've pulled out the grease paint and raided my costume boxes.  Here I am whining about being 30 and working menial service jobs, living in a dungeon of cat-hair and tobacco stench....thinking old thoughts...ignoring the Spirit.  Fact is, as of right now, even if I'm trying to step outside of this, I'm still very much entrenched.  I'm fighting out; I haven't come out to live to tell my tale...I'm still living in it. 

And just as I see that my smoking and drugs have put such a strain on my health and wellbeing, I have also seen how my bad emotional habits have taken their toll as well.  The difference here obviously is that there exists such a thing as healthy emotional habits, Spririt-guided love and affection.  I need not necessarily go back to a void of love...a business-as-usual resumption of dormancy.  I used to aspire to robotic rationality....a soul stripped of emotions and impulse.  I even go through periods of convincing myself that none of my "friends" actually wish that I come to parties...that they just feel obliged, that they're being charitable.  Not any more.  I want to feel and feel the right things in the right order in the right time.  I want to cultivate relationships, to love and be loved.  Unfortunately, I have no distant memories to use as a model of emotional health...I can't kick this habit so easily.  I'll be working from the ground up, from scratch.  But....I'm willing....and, with God's help, able to kick this one. 

Ever since I can remember, fall has been a love/hate thing.  You have your fall colors, your chance to wear sweet polyester jackets, your buttcrack-sweat-free walks in the evening...your significant dip in the electric bill, your revitalized sense of smell, your buttcrack-sweat-free drives in your A/C-free car....I even love football season even if I can't even walk up a flight of stairs without thinking of passing out.

I have also, however, dreaded the thermodynamic notion of energy loss, the Sun being so distant, my body aching in the chill, the poet's beginning of the end.  All my sad and wintry songs find their way back into the shuffle....I get images of scraping ice off my windows, dead pets, the shivering men under the overpasses...

Yeah...a bit morbid....I've had this conversation with my peeps.  It doesn't help to talk with my bro in Phoenix....he just laughs at me and tells me I can come live with him and his soon-to-be wife!  Don't get me wrong!  I love hot coffee in the cold...soup is so divine.  And, again, my jackets are kick-ass....and I get to wear my Hemingway hat.....beard will be coming!....barring any sort of job-related restrictions.

This year was the 3-0 for me....had a crappy crisis ordeal over it.  Sat back and went over my life up to now.  It's not pretty when you look at all the big mistakes I've made....But when I sit back far enough, I've found it to be rather like God's knack for Impressionism....Looks pretty good from afar...really far.  I may not be where I want to be financially or professionally....I got some brutal fat pockets that, almost on queue at 30, have joined in on the mocking mob of aggravations. 

But then I think now about how I thought I'd be dead at 10...then at 18...at 19...at 20...24...and......then Christ came to me.  And that old me did die.  Funny sometimes to remember the past through the eyes of a new me...Most of the people around me now know that the last couple of years have brought with them some old thinking, old demons....I remember when I first told my dad about my salvation...(he's a Christian)....I said I was relieved that I could finally be happy...and he quickly said to me that that wasn't a guarantee while we were still on this Earth...I got mad at him....He was playing the Debbie Downer!  At 30 and 8 years old in Christian years, I'm finally able to really suss out what he meant....I have peace with God....joy at what He's done and what He's promised....I know that I will ever be with those Christians in my life....for all eternity...I'm definitely not always happy or even most of the time happy, but that's largely because I haven't made peace with myself, with my past.  I've chosen to ignore the problems the old me had instead of dealing with them in the Spirit.  I picked up old habits, old fears and doubts...Is it no wonder those problems have begun to resurface at 30?....at an arbitrary critical point in time? 

Christ began his road to suffering, death, and resurrection at this age....Me?  Whoa....nowhere near walking in His footsteps, taking up my own cross....I know...none of us compare....but that first year in His arms....jiminy....weeping just thinking about it. 

K...so maybe I sort of went off on a tangent here...Let's see...tie it together....hmm...well....I guess I've conflated that moribund (thanks, Kell!) feeling I get when the air begins to chill with my impressions this year of where my life en total appears to be in the changing seasons of life....Yeah...I know....I suppose I could live to 80 or 90, I guess....I have just always doubted that....And no matter how much I squandered away those Spring and Summer years of my life, I do not take for granted being alive.  I feel colder, hardened...my hair is falling out like dry wispy autumn leaves, my joints are stiffer, my eyes have earned their wrinkles....pptthh....I could go on and on....

All in all, and in the last few months, I have come to realize what a gift each and every day can be when I'm not still dwelling in the past and entertaining old me...I do talk to God a lot more when I get that fall chill...I savor the day when I'm in His presence...and......not on my time-table but His.  And for now, I'm getting by with a lot of help from my friends. 

Man I need to sleep....Did you actually read that claptrap I just wrote?  Geez Louise!  Sorry!  Had to put in my self-styled last-paragraph self-deprecating statement!  Just wouldn't be me if I didn't mock myself!  Blah -blah -yackety-yackety! 

I said, previously, that I would try to explain the idea of compatibilism.  "Try" would definitely be the operative word here.  The number of books and articles, theologians that have devoted their lives to the reconciliation of the two poles of the argument, is  simply overwhelming.  The average chap could certainly grow frustrated.  The debate is not without tension, and is often just averted, ignored.  I'm talking about free will v. predestination.

I'm no expert, either.  I shall attempt to simply communicate my view of the debate.  I don't pretend to have the final word on the subject.  Nor is it possible to simplify such a subject without cutting out some of the most crucial logical points that keep the differing views at each other's heels.  All that said, here goes...

I'm a 5-point Calvinist.  Thought I should get that out of the way first.  However, I came to know the Calvinist interpretation long before I was a Christian.  No other Christian theology made any rational coherent sense to me.  That was one of my primary hang-ups against Christianity: incoherence, an unwillingness and all out disapproval of the task of the logician.  Most Christians I've met since becoming a Christian have, however, had nothing but knee-jerk insults to throw at 5-pointers.  "They're fatalists."  "They are against spreading the Gospel."  "They think some people are just born to go to hell."  "They just want an excuse to sin and get away with it." 

None of that's true, by the way.  Though, I'm sure there are fatalists out there who actively believe some of that.

Calvinism would normally be shoved to the far right in the debate between libertarian freedom and determinism.  It's a bad rap, in my opinion, and it normally manifests as a misunderstanding or disparity of operative terms.  When I say predestined, do you immediately think that means that humanity loses the ability to choose?  When I say human culpability, do you immediately dismiss God's hand in your every decision?  How can God condemn me if my choices are predetermined, or, conversely, how can I say a decision is actually made by me if by me I mean the collection of all the decisions and consequences thereof that are stored in my memory?  Isn't that just an autonomic reflex at that point?

My view has a lot to do with perspective.  Two perspectives, precisely:  Mine and God's.  My perspective is limited by uncertainty, lack of foreknowledge, a process of weighing probabilities....probabilities of everything from a coin flip to whether I'll stop at a red light, from engaging in a bad habit to overcoming it. 

God's perspective has no uncertainty.  For Him the probability of everything is 100%.  In other words, probability is defined by uncertainty, human ignorance.  There is no such thing as random or chance scientifically or logically speaking.  They are only measurements of man's inability to circumscribe the total factors that consist an event or decision.

My view of the activity of the minds of men is based in the created order.  From the first point in spacetime, the cosmological singularity that was followed by the Bing Bang, all effects were preceded by a cause.  Every action causes a reaction.  Our decisions are composed of several causal factors: human nature after the fall, our environment in which we collect data, the Holy Spirit acting both generally, in the hearts of all of mankind, and specifically, in the born-again phenomenon and the ongoing sanctification of the elect.  The debate between free will and predestination, to me, lies squarely in the understanding of human ignorance. 

Every time we make a decision, whether we make it under duress and immediacy or whether we have years to make it, we weigh probabilities and opt for what we believe to be the best decision.  In fact, we are slaves to this...this choosing of what has been dubbed "our greatest desire."  For all of our choices, we favor the option that will bring us the least pain or the most pleasure.  Now, whether we decide that separation from God's Will is more painful than neglecting our natural urges depends on the available or most attractive choices at the very instant of our decision.  How many, like myself, have opted to satiate an urge and immediately regretted it?  What seems to motivate our poor decisions, in retrospect, always appears foolish, and we are embarrassed later on. 

Many times, when we make a decision, we forget to include key factors that would influence the decision.  That would be one form of our ignorance: simply neglecting to incorporate all factors at our disposal.  We also make decisions where certain factors just aren't at our disposal to make the best choice.  That would be a harder more solid form of ignorance.  I would emphasize that both forms of ignorance define human existence.  They define what we call free will. 

When we make a decision, we have a split second or perhaps a rather extended length of time to make the most informed decision.  Each decision allows us to weigh options.  For example, my title to this little crippled essay refers to a very sensory-oriented decision at a candy store.  We weigh which candy, in our memory, yielded the most enjoyment.  We also weigh whether we want one thing or many.  We may even weigh the fact that our recent decisions have fallen to the Hershey's over the Sour Patch Kids, so we pick the Kids to sort of even it up....well, I do that.  Some of us may not even have a sweet tooth and wouldn't be caught dead in the candy store.  Maybe we're broke, so we shouldn't buy any candy.  Maybe we've bought so much candy recently, that we'd be spending more money on new clothes to fit the new plumper body we'd acquire.  Maybe we had a bad day, and, no matter what candy we buy, we just want the pleasure to offset the pain.  Maybe, maybe, maybe...all factors swirl around; they present themselves in terms of priority, appeal, attraction.  The uncertainty perceived is just that, a perception based on our lack of full knowledge at our disposal, whether the ignorance is due to forgotten factors or external factors we haven't learned of yet.

From the way I understand it, no matter what candy choice you make, it was the only choice you could make due to that precise constrained weighing of factors that went on in your head at that time.  If later, you suppose you made the wrong decision, it is always because new factors have been introduced into the decision-making.  In other words, qualitatively, your second-guessing is not under the same conditions, and so it's a different decision.  You now have new factors to weigh and prioritize, but, no matter what, when you make the new decision, you are a slave to the greatest desire you have at that new point in time.

When we err, we can fall victim to both failing to weigh all factors, like intentionally disobeying God's Will, and failing to have available to our decision all factors, like not knowing God's Will in a decision.  For many of us, past trauma may override our everyday decisions so much, they seem irrational to others.  If we prioritize fear of rejection over our desire to love someone, or if fear of pain outweighs defending our loved ones, we seem to be making recurring mistakes...for me, I abused drugs and hated myself for so long quite possibly because I was used to being compromised by abuse from others...still don't know all the factors.

Over the years of decision-making, big or small, we build habits and automatic second-natured decisions.  We stop at red lights.  We lock our doors.  We brush our teeth.  We have our money ready at the register, well...most of us considerate people do!  For many or virtually all of us, we also build up bad habits: just reverse all of the above.  Habits are nothing more than a direct or indirect decision to forego the process of weighing our options.  We develop greatest desires to become imperatives:  in such and such a situation, I shall always do A.  Sanctification, for me, is that same process of foregoing the human process of weighing our desires and, instead, always opting for God's Will.  They become identical.  We grow to understand why God's Will is the correct answer for all our moral decisions.  Sinning is nearly the opposite as we opt for the maximum sensual pleasure despite God's Will whether we realize it or not. 

I need not go into too much detail about the genetic factor of many decisions.  We are hardwired to make a lot of our decisions, or at least predisposed to opt for choice A if we decide not to weigh other options.  Our fight or flight mechanism... reacting solely from emotions... having certain genetic defects or addictive personalities...all these and more come to mind. 

God knows every decision we shall make.  He knows our limitations in weighing the factors, or in not weighing them and just doing something out of habit.  He knows our nature.  He has foreordained reality itself.  Our perception of a choice, our uncertainties, our ignorance are all real to us.  Because we don't know what will happen, we have, in that sense, a free will.  But God knows and  has ordained them.  The key factor in all of human decisions is that WE don't know.  God has His Prophets when He wants things to be made known, and He makes future things known precisely because it changes our decision-making.  I know I am saved, and, instead of being a license to sin, this enables me to understand God's grace.  He has provided the Spirit to embolden in me the correct choices and good habits.  I am in a state of appreciation; I obey out of faithfulness as well as gratitude.  God's Will is ultimately logical and rational.  Whenever His Will has seemed irrational to people of the Bible, they were simply ignorant of all the factors.  And I know that the decisions I make are products of ignorance and are also opportunities to let God's Will outweigh that ignorance.  But it's ultimately His Will, not mine.  Our experience is perceived through free will, but it exists through His.  He came to me when I was dead in my sin.  Knowing this doesn't cancel out free will; it just properly defines it, place it in context.  We exist through perpetual opportunities to weigh choices; He operates with omniprescience and purpose and has set up a hypercomplex system of cause-and-effect...often another aspect of the Mystery of God...and that is precisely defined by our perspective, our available degree of knowledge.  He sure ain't mysterious to Himself!

Am I making myself clear here?  As I said, it's all been written before and better.  These first-draft little jots on a blog rarely make my grade.  Feel free to comment!  I prefer dialogue over mere self-expression.  I would also recommend checking out Theopedia's entry on compatibilism and the critiques included.

Anybody else get nervous submitting these things after you thought you had it just right?  Strange as it sounds to me, I kind of wish I had my old English teacher on my list to circle all the tense changes and mid-sentence 1st-person to 2nd-person narrative switches.  Where's the red ink?  We have our handy-dandy spell check nowadays, but where, o where, is my little old lady to polish my rusty literary mistakes?  I hated it at the time!  "You're handicapping my creative flow!"  "This is how people talk!"  I guess blogging, by nature, ought be like that 1st draft handed in at the last minute.  Problem is, in school, no one actually read my papers but the teachers.  I often got penalized for refusing to even write 1st drafts!  See?  Even in crazy teenage depressions, I still managed to summon an artistic pride-monster.  Mrs. Bolhaus, you are sorely missed.

Aside:  Just woke up from a dream...yeah... I know: IT'S 8:30 AT NIGHT!  I had a class in a school I needed to attend.  The doors to the classroom all were blocked with signs posted saying: Use the Cold Room access, or something like that.  Took me a long time in dream time to finally locate this room which was under the school accessed by secret passageways...doors that seemed always to be there, but no one bothered asking where they went.  They took me to a series of winding tunnels with conduits and shelving units, fenced off areas and....uh...the gigantor store room of some even more gigantor Walmart... or at least I assume so, judging by the size of the store room.  Don't think I made it to the class before I woke up.  I've been pretty hard on myself lately for not getting back to school.  Maybe I'm supposed to be accessing some alternative way to get in...the Cold Room, though...it turned out to be a storage room....wasn't really cold temperature-wise.  Maybe cold as in untapped, dormant.  Hmmm...whatever.  Sometimes a cigar is just a stinky offensive poo-smelling carcinogen everyone just wishes you'd keep to yourself.

As it happens, the whole autobiography venture has manifested itself for me long before the blogging experience.  In the infant stage of my Christian experience, a young adult/college age group or two and even a 3-service pastor/new christian interview honed my ability to distill the narrative to a few paragraphs.  A brief and "useful" testimony was a requirement for any new Christian who had spent a lot of his life on the wide, dark path.  I discovered pretty quickly that the tare-to-wheat story had it's dark side.  I seemed to be justifying the possibility of getting away with licentious living as long as you made sure that, one day, God would tap you on the shoulder and pick you for His team.  In NA....Narcotics Anonymous for you who have been fortunate enough to not be required to attend 150 hours of rehab after a DUI, we saw testimonies as having the potential of becoming nostalgic war stories...tales of adventure and excitement, bringing to the surface of both the narrator and the listener their hungers and addictions.  These would definitely include among them addictions to self-pity, remorse, suicidal tendencies.  We realized it wasn't just the drugs that became inadvertently glamorized; it was a whole frame of mind. 

Prior to coming to Christ, or however you wish to articulate redemption, I was actually a fairly regular journalist...personal journal, that is, no national syndication here.  I guess I had the idea of making my last words serve as a deterrent in the long run for any other people in mental distress, the downward spiral of indifference and anguish.  I thought, if I could be as honest with myself as possible, a lesson would be gleaned from the whole enterprise.  Last words?  Oh yeah...I romanced death since about the age of six.  The journal didn't surface till high school; I had written plenty of suicide notes up to that point.  I had this problem, see, of never really knowing, at the moment of writing out the note, what points ought to be stressed or even why it was necessary to write a note in the first place...Even as a kid, I felt a note was somehow standing in contradiction to the act.  After all, I was interested in disappearing, to eliminate pain, not to create pain in others or to justify my act.  So I started journaling just to sort of speak to myself.  It was a psychological experiment.  I guess I also did it to postpone the inevitable:  if only I had something more important to say or do, maybe I wouldn't have to kill myself.

This xanga blog must, then, of necessity contain at least a nugget of how I came to be who I am now.  I'm afraid much of the misunderstandings I have in speaking with others comes from lack of context.  This is NOT to say that people can't recover from bad events and become "normal" functioning human beings with the accompanying accoutrement of proper emotional responses and healthy decision-making.  I have to admit to myself, though, even to this day, that I don't think quite properly.  I tend to take most things very personally; I have a bit of a social handicap that, like a poor soul with a long experience of coping with a prosthetic leg, I manage to hide it for the most part.  I suppose it helps that I only expose myself to scrutiny once or twice a week at the most.  My cat knows I'm weird, but she seems to weigh her priorities and figures that, as long as I'm feeding her and cleaning the box, she'll deal with it.  She does think I'm funny.  She likes the cuddling.

So, here goes. 

Parents divorced at 4, abusive stepfather looming over my every thought and action, my childhood was a bit muddied to say the least.  Broken bones and black eyes; slave-like labor from early mornings to late into the night.  I have memories of lying to teachers, the police, my own father...about what was going on.  Boy, I suppose much of my acting ability might have stemmed from this false-front behavior I was forced into as a kid.  I had teeth chipped from metal posts in the face, a broken syringe needle shoved into the bridge of my nose, kicks in the kidneys frequent enough to change a simple "number one" experience in the bathroom.  I was broken like a wild steer, growing up on one rural plot of farmland after another as frequent as my stepdad could manage to lose jobs.  S'ppose I should be grateful that he didn't smoke; no cigarette burns to mention! 

Whew...OK....got into drugs and drinking in junior high, hard drugs by my junior year, and all this time labeled as an oversensitive class-clown, quite a dangerous combination.  I definitely have no future in stand-up!  I believe a shrink would even have diagnosed me with a mentally divergent disorder if I had went to one....I had a split personality...at least immediately after a particularly large dose of violence.  I would manifest this regressed and somewhat clueless personality that seemed to behave at a 3 or 4 year old level and with this autistic bliss, blocking out my surroundings and circumstance.  He even surfaced if my real dad only scolded me when my bro and I were at his place on the few weekends we'd see him.  I read a lot and spent a lot of time in my own imagination.  I drew a lot.  I made up stories and radio shows with my bro, even little movies...a lot of kids probably did that sort of stuff.  I just seemed to take it all more seriously than my own life.  My little brother and I actually seemed to cope pretty well, all things considered.  We were both pretty confused about reality, looking back now.  Steve mentioned in one of his entries about the effects of divorce.  Well, I thought my mom was just my stepdad's accomplice, and my real dad was a spineless, impotent little man....this even at 5 or 6 years old.  I would definitely assert here that I lived in constant turmoil.  Sometimes the hose I used to water the beef cattle we had, some 300+ feet of garden hose, would freeze at night in winter if I forgot to roll it up and put it in the basement.  I would be woken up at 1am, kicked to the basement and have to spend hours thawing this hose out foot-by-foot and go to school, this all at 7 or 8 years old.  Again, I'm sure many have had worse! 

In my senior year of high school, I guess the combination of strategically consumed hallucinogens and an obsession with an ex-girlfriend piled on top of the already voluminous shit heap of a life I thought I had up to that point got me actually planning out ending my life.  Make no mistake, I fully realize now as I did then that it all could've been worse.  I had no strong opinion that my life was worse than many others in many other parts of the world and of times past or even to others in my class, the guy in the next desk.   I was getting good grades, in accelerated learning classes, football star, track team star, hell, even won spelling bees and JETS competitions.  A lot of girls seemed to be interested, some even overtly so if they had enough wine coolers under their belt!  I just couldn't take it....It comes down to a subjective level of pain tolerance, mental/psychic/spiritual tolerance.  God was a joke to me, a crutch, an absurdity.  He wasn't out there helping me, or protecting me, or even cheering for me from afar.

In my senior year, I decided to end it for real.  No more postponed hypotheticals.  I was going on a trip to France for ten days during Spring Break.  I scheduled the deed for the week after my return.  I did extensive research on the chemical properties of over-the-counter sleeping pills and how many were required to overdose and tripled it.  I was pretty opposed to violence by then, even self-inflicted, so guns or knives were out of the question.  I thought about the carbon monoxide thing in the car, but I was a big fan of Cusack's Better Off Dead at the time, so I was often just driven to a mixture of maniacal laughter and tears any time I approached any of the options he attempted!

So, I didn't die from it.  My dad 200 miles away had an urging to call me that night repeatedly.  His end of the experience found me incoherent on the phone for about a minute, then silence as I dropped the phone and laid back down.  He called like 5 times.  I woke up finding my room in shambles. Broken glass everywhere, everything turned out and upsidedown.  Apparently in one of the minute-long conversations with my dad on the phone, I told him I bought him an expresso cup from Mt. St. Michel and dropped the phone to look for it...then laid back down to sleep.

Skip some months and inpatient treatment, I found myself in college on a football scholarship/grant pumped to the gills on antidepressants and alcohol.  My left guard on my high school football team had called me to say that the coach at the college he was going to attend saw me on the tapes and had asked my friend if I was signed anywhere.  That's how I got into college after spending my junior and senior year blowing off all recruits, pretty confident that I was going to be dead by then.

College was...weed, beer bongs, grain alcohol, cocaine, and LSD....oh, and antidepressants for good measure.  I had a full-body poster of Kurt Cobain above my bed squinting behind a gun pointed at me.  Quite a surreal way of waking up.  Got a DUI during a weekend home...had muscle relaxers in my system from a pulled muscle and a case of beer.  Dropped out after a year, went back home only to begin doing Meth and Heroin on top of everything else, only to get to the point where I was shooting it and maintaining a constant high, even taking it in the bathroom on breaks at mandatory rehab facility. 

Went to live with dad and go to Joliet Junior College for Culinary Arts.  Dropped out after a year, still doing a rainbow of drugs.  Started going to church with dad and stepmom...hot chicks and scored points with dad.  By this time, I was 20.  Started dating girl from work, cocky waitress with a cute smile and good taste in music and drugs.  Found out early on she was pregnant with her ex's baby.  By this time, dad had kicked me out,  and I was living with her at her parents.  Hate to say it seeing as how, even at my lowest points, I still dreamed of finding the girl of my dreams and refused to "cheat" on the idea...I think today that I just wanted to stop being alone and sexless.  Still keeping suicide back-burnered, I guess I figured I ought not die a virgin at least....never occurred to me in high school!  I was always ducking out of opportunities, wanting to "save" myself for my ex!   I know....Cuckoo!  I agree!  I was a friggin atheist!  A Disney atheist. 

This is too long...so....the night I was finally kicked out of my girlfriend's parent's basement/bomb shelter, I planned to end my life ....again!  I was 22.  It was past midnight turning over to my mom's birthday, so, packing up all my stuff, I figured I'd at least go have some subtle closure with Mom and my sisters before I snuffed it.  On the three hour drive to her house, smoking the last of my weed and listening to some tapes my dad gave me a year before on abused kids and God, I accepted Christ.....or more properly, I felt the Spirit enter like the brightest noon's sun...I remember repeating amongst slobbery, snotty tears ",Oh, Shit!  Oh, Shit!  Oh, Shit!" over and over.  I couldn't believe it was happening.  I couldn't believe I had been so wrong!  My pride was crushed.  All this was quickly replaced by joy.  Simple joy.  No happiness, no end of problems, no ceasing of suicidal tendencies, just joy.  I knew God, and He loved me.  HE came to ME.  Not really even sure where I was...somewhere westbound on I-80 between Frankfort and Rock Island. 

So that's me...at least up to Moody Bible.  The rest is a process of maturity and a lot of unfortunate disillusionment.  Growth and regression simultaneously.  S'ppose I should write of Moody some time...Too tired now.  Plus my next entry ought to approach a bit of levity.  At 30 years old, I am pretty sick of my own war stories.  I'm looking forward to what God has in store for me.  Still scared, sometimes depressed, occasionally even suicidal....but I have joy...an internal peace about my relationship with God and creation, and I still want to share that "Oh, Shit!" feeling.