This post is part of a continuing blah, blah, blah, blah...you know what this is. If you need a refresher, check out the Lord's Prayer posts from September.
"Thy will be done..."
Leslie and I were parked in my dad's Mustang II on Shadycroft Lane. I was seventeen, so it was sometime during our senior year in high school in 1977 or early 1978. We weren't doing anything we shouldn't have been doing that night. No alcohol, no drugs, no teenage groping. Just parked, in the dark, talking. I was 100%, completely stone-cold sober that night, which was unusual because I was at that time a total pothead.
I don't remember what we were talking about, but I remember looking through the windshield up at the nearly full moon. Very suddenly the clouds moved across the night sky and raced passed the moon, like time had been sped up at just the precise moment I looked up. Instantly I was overcome with what I now understand to be the literal presence of God. It was like Spirit of God just blew right through the middle of my soul. I turned to Leslie, weeping (in a manly way of course) and told her that I felt like I needed to know God. I was at a loss for words to describe what had just happened, but I remember telling her, "I need to know God".
Turning the key in the ignition, my eyes filled with tears and snot running out my nose (very glamorous) I motored to my parents house. I was overcome (overwrought?) emotionally by my brief encounter, but it was so real, and I had to get home and tell them what happened.
I'd like to tell you that they wrapped me in their arms, encouraged me in the Lord, and whisked me off to a youth meeting to get born-again. But I didn't have a very good track record. I had disappeared on more than one occasion, shown up stoned out of my gourd on other occasions. My folks knew I was basically a good kid, but they also knew I had a bad dope smoking problem. They could not be blamed in any sense for concluding initially that I was simply blitzed, but Leslie defended the fact that I was straight, and my mom seemed to really believe that I had been the recipient of a genuine spiritual experience.
I told my folks I was done with pot and slacking off in school. I wanted to live right and I wanted to know God. Over the next few days the pot part, the school part, and the living right part would prove far easier than the "knowing God" part. My mom took my to the only church she knew. No one greeted me, no one noticed me, no one invited me to the youth group, no one did anything at all...and none of us knew what the next step was. So the next step was to not take a next step.
I stayed straight as long as I could without God. But eventually it all returned to the way it was before. Except I'd had that experience. I knew it was real. And I would never forget it. But it would be another eleven years before I would encounter God in a tangible way again. Eleven more years before I would pray, "Thy will be done".
