You sensed a call to ministry pretty early too, didn’t you?
It was about a year into this; I think maybe it was the following summer. I was at a Christian camp, and at the end of this camp the speaker was doing one of those smorgasbord altar calls. You know, maybe God’s doing this, maybe God’s doing that. If you hit enough things, maybe somebody will come forward.
When he said, “Maybe God’s calling some of you to ministry,” it was like I was standing under the Hoover Dam of God’s Spirit and it just broke. I knew God was calling me into ministry at that moment, and I was really freaked out by it. I’m like, “I’m going into 8th grade, I don’t really need this now.”
I remember consciously deciding—because we would go back to the cabin after the evening session and everyone would share what God had done—I remember deciding: “I’m not going to tell anybody about this, because if this is something God really wants, he could say this again later.” [Laughter]
Essentially I was saying, “I don’t see what the big rush is. God can decide to say this again at some point in the future. For now, I’m just going to erase this from my memory.”
And I stuck to it. I didn’t tell anybody, and actually, I ended up running away from God in high school for a couple years.
But I never really forgot that call.
So we fast-forward to your senior year of high school.
Yes, which brings me to the next critical moment of my journey. We had a fall break in my senior year, and about that time I was really hitting a pretty low place in terms of all my partying and escapades and running away from God. And I was actually quite miserable. I had a lot of guilt on my conscience. I was really unhappy, and I think I was a pretty angry kid, actually.
Was that directed at anything? Or just kind of free-floating?
I didn’t even know what to direct it at. But I was unhappy. I was empty. I was angry. High school was now coming to an end, so living to party with these friends or those friends was not a long-term solution. [Laughter]
I’m convinced that a Christian who has the Holy Spirit in them and is running away from God is just going to be awfully miserable. That’s what I experienced.
There were two catalytic events that happened about that time, weren’t there? One in the fall and one a few months later.
Yeah. I was in upstate New York with my girlfriend’s family. Looking back, I’m surprised my parents let me go, but they did.
While we were there, we went to a party that her cousin was having and there was no parental supervision or anything. We got to the party and it was very clear, “OK, these guys party a little harder than the baseball team in Mustang, Okla.” You know?
And part of that was there was a sheet of LSD or acid that was being passed around. Now, at this point in the story people say, “Oh, don’t tell me you came to Christ tripping on acid.” No, I didn’t. I never did hard drugs like that. But I just went to pass this sheet on to the next person and I looked down and it was a picture of Jesus hanging on the cross on this sheet of acid. Literally. Someone actually created it that way.
And here I was in a moment that was kind of embodying my running from God and I’m staring down on Jesus, who I knew had died for me. My heart sank into my stomach in that moment and I got really quiet. Ultimately, what was happening was that I was feeling deeply convicted.
Later that night people started talking about God and what they thought about him. Here I was. I actually knew the answers. I knew. People were saying stuff about the Bible and Jesus that weren’t true and I knew it. And I could have spoken up and shared the truth with them, but here I was. I had been drinking and whatever else and I knew anything I said would only be devaluated by what I did. And it just drove it deeper, like, “What in the world am I doing?”
