...if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.
John 8:36
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...if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. John 8:36 |
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THE GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD! |
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Man, I could smoke some pot! I don't mean just get high every now and then, I mean I was high ALL the time. And it wasn't just weed, which seems so non-threatening... I was tripping all the time, whether it was acid, shrooms, or anything else, I loved hallucinating. For a while anyway. Oh, but I hated coming down. I guess it seemed worth it at the time. Then there was cocaine. I never really got into the speedy drugs, but this one always seemed to be around. I just used it every now and then because others around me were using it, and I didn't want to miss anything. Of course, I loved Ecstasy... who didn't. I had a pretty bad problem with it for a while, but thankfully, it became harder to get as the years went on, and people charged a lot for bunk, so it really wasn't worth it. At the time, there hadn't been a lot of research about it, and of course now we know it can really mess up your body. Honestly, I don't know if I would have turned it down then, even if I had known what I know now. I just liked being high. Ahhh, but now things begin to get out of hand. Welcome the world of opiates. I first tried heroin at a hotel room on summer tour in 1992. It didn't seem like a big deal. People were snorting stuff all of the time, and this was just another snort. Except I really, really loved this one. I didn't get too out of hand with it at first. I snorted or smoked it depending on which coast I was on. But I vowed to never shoot up! It was not uncommon to get to a show only to find out that yet another friend had overdosed the night before. By the time I was 25, I knew of no less than ten people that had died due to this crap. It had become a real problem on the lot. Not to mention that "heroin chic" had hit the mainstream, so newbie kids were beginning to use the stuff as soon as they got on tour. It got pretty depressing. Then I moved to Amsterdam for a while... yeah, still using lots of drugs. After about a year, I moved back to the states and went back to life on tour. Then Jerry died. Hippie kids were wandering all over the country with nowhere to go! Tour was over! I ended up in the Northwest. I did all right for a while. Then one thing led to another and BOOM, I started shooting up the stuff with some old tour friends. So I was using heroin, still smoking a heck of a lot of whatever I could get my hands on, and drinking like a fish. I was popping pills like some sort of dying old lady. Because of the shift in my drug preference, I had lost a lot of close friends who just couldn't deal with me anymore. I was a mess. And I was lonelier than ever. So one fine Oregon day, I found myself waking up in a trailer outside of Eugene. I was lying face down in some yuck shag carpet, probably in doggie pee. Ewww... So anyway, I woke up and looked around at my life. My life was pretty sad. Here I was living in a beautiful part of the world (Oregon is awesome) and I was too messed up to even enjoy it. My days consisted of getting high, or trying to find a way to get high. I didn't have a job, didn't have any money, my friends had dwindled into a few addicts who would have tossed me out the door for another fix, and to top it all off, I was hungry and needed a bath. And I was still aching with a lonely feeling I couldn't shake. So I decided to do something. I got in my car and drove back to Alabama to stay with family while I kicked a nasty drug habit. Immediately, there was talk of Jesus. Oh great, I thought... these psychos are going to try to covert me! What a joke. I didn't really pay any attention... at first. You see, I met my husband Samuel, who was a professing Christian, albeit, not exactly a practicing Christian. He had drifted into drugs, too, and was just sort of wandering through life. However, we would end up talking about Jesus for hours. He made Jesus sound like a regular dude, someone he had met on tour or something. Not only that, he had some sort of inner peace about his life that I had never known. He never seemed lonely. Even though I had a great boyfriend, and had even mended some bridges with my family, I felt so empty and lonely all of the time, and all of the drinking I did never made me feel any better. Not really. I wanted more... something special that just seemed to elude me. I knew it existed, I knew people had real peace, I just didn't get it. Oh man, I wanted it! You know how you really want something, so you might save up and go buy it? Then after you've had it for, say... two weeks, it just kind of seems to lose it's sparkle? Well, Samuel would get all pumped up about Jesus, and he wouldn't lose the sparkle after two weeks. Actually, he seemed to get more excited about Jesus every time he brought up the subject. I thought he was a little strange about the whole thing, but he was hands down the best guy I'd ever hung out with, so I decided to go along with it. I certainly wasn't prepared for what was to come. Samuel gave me a tape. A live show, actually. The name of the tape was "Fly Me Like the Wind" and it was by a group who is actually not a group, but a worship team for a church in North Carolina (MorningStar Ministries.) Anyway, I'm listening to this really awesome tape where the music just takes you there (I LOVE live music!) and all of a sudden the guy starts singing about some really heavy stuff. He's talking about worshipping God, and I'm thinking back to the church I grew up in where everybody is real sad or bored looking and singing hymns full of words like thee and thou and other assorted foreign sayings, so I'm thinking, "worship, church, religion.... BORING!" I don't need some Jesus-freak telling me I need to get right... I'm just fine, thank you. So I'm immediately on the defensive, right? Well, I'm still driving and still listening to this tape, because, man, it really is awesome, when he starts singing about "You turned my life around" and "You take me higher" and stuff like that. So I'm listening, could just be a love song - rock on, right? Well, then he's talking about "Flying like the Wind" and I just know he's not singing about getting high... I could just tell. He was singing about strength and hope and all these emotions just flooded over me and I started crying and I didn't know why, so I pulled my car over and just sat on the side of the road weeping. I was so sad, and I just couldn't figure it out. I kept thinking, what is it about this song that is making me cry? I'm tough! Come on, I ran with the bulls! Tough girl! Well, I guess it takes a lot of courage to realize that you're really, really messed up. So here I am on the side of the road, boo-hooing, and the music is still playing. This different song starts and I like the way it sounds, so I just sit there sniffing and listening. The girl starts singing about her life. Her past, actually. She's been on the road. She's been a drug addict. She's been sleeping around. She's been lonely for a long time. "Hey," I think, "she's singing about me!" I sit there just totally captivated. Here is my story laid out for me in a great song (with an unbelievable acoustic guitar riff going on in the background, not to mention some super mean percussion) and she's singing about how she finally got set free. Free from drugs, free from loneliness, free from being a whore (a rose by any other name...), but best of all, free from death. And all I can think is "I want some of that!" I kept saying, "I WANT TO BE FREE, TOO!" But I didn't really know what had me all tied up. This was on a Tuesday morning in November 1998. I spend the next two months asking questions about Jesus. I talked to Samuel, my sweetie, and to my folks. I even went to church a few times. But I was bored with it. I keep getting wasted, my language seriously needed some work (I could cuss a mean streak with the best of them.) Most of all, I really didn't want to give up anything. I liked getting drunk, stoned, wasted, etc. I liked cussing and talking dirty with the boys. Okay, so I liked it, but I was still unhappy. Sure, I had good times, but this awful emptiness just kept eating away at me. I was only aware of it when I was totally sober or totally alone, so obviously, I stayed wasted and in the company of my friends, who usually were wasted, too. Not to mention I was now 28 and had absolutely NO future ahead of me. Hmmm... here I was, off heroin mind you, but not much better off than before. The only thing that excited me was talking about some dude that lived 2000 years ago in the Middle East. Jesus' story always gave me this peculiar sense of Hope that I just didn't get anywhere else. (If you're still reading this, thanks - and Bravo to you! I'm finally getting to the good part!) So one day these kids knocked on my door. I was on my way to work, but they said they wanted to give me a Bible if I needed one. They were going around the neighborhood giving them to out to folks. I was like, cool..., so they left it with me. When I got home later that night, I pulled it out and started reading in the New Testament. I didn't know what to read, so I just skipped around a bit, but I ended up in Romans, which is such good reading! (The Bible is anything but boring!) So I read that I was a sinner (duh!) and overall a bad person, because that's just the way things are. We all are. Bummer. But I knew I had problems already! That's what led me to the Bible in the first place, right? Anyway, I'm reading and I get to this verse that says that because I'm this way (a sinner) I have to die. Well, I thought I had to die because we get old and that's just what happens. But I come to find out that this kind of death goes waaaaaaaay beyond just kicking the bucket. This is about Spiritual death. This means die and leave the presence of God forever. Which means if there is a God, and He's the good guy, and I die and I'm not with Him, then I must be going to be with....... okay, that would be satan, which makes him the enemy! Ewww... but still, I'm not totally buying all of this. I'm just reading and thinking, this could just be a plot by some dudes 2000 years ago to fool all of us into believing that there is a hell. This could just be some sort of money making gimmick for the church, right??? Okay, so I'm reading and I've been told I'm a sinner, and that because of that I have to die and spend eternity in hell with satan. Yuck. At this point I just want to put down the Bible and finish my beer, but I'm totally intrigued. It seemed like a mystery novel... why and how could this be? What's the rest of the story? So I'm still reading and it starts talking about Jesus (what a great name) and how that even though I was a sinner, (Jesus knew this from the start,) He decided that He loved me enough anyway, even when I was a lying, drunken, promiscuous hippie chick, that He would go ahead and die for me so I wouldn't have to. I mean die the Big death, the Spiritual one. By doing this, I would be set free of having to pay the piper, so to speak. I could bypass hell altogether and go right to heaven. On one condition. I would have to believe that He is the Son of the Living God, that He died on a cross for me - to pay the price for MY sins, that He rose from the dead (after three days of being dead), and that he ascended to God the Father in Heaven where is dwelling now... waiting for me (okay, actually waiting for all of His kids.) WHEW!!! That's one mighty big condition. There was just this one thing that I kept coming back to... He Loved Me. He Loved Me. Me, He Loved. Jesus Loves Me. How could I be loved by this man, this Son of man, yet the Son of God? Who am I to deserve love from God... the one true God... Okay, fact is, I'm nobody. I'm not deserving. But for some reason, He doesn't seem to care about that. He created me. He created me to love Him and honor Him and look to Him and look for Him. He wants me to love Him! He really does care. And He created a way out. A way out of the yucky cycle I was trapped in. I finally saw a glimpse of the Freedom that I so desperately wanted. There really was a Hope. A real chance for something different in my future besides a hangover or a one night stand. A chance for something real. So, I went to bed. About a week went by. I had drunk myself to sleep every night. All I had read was heavy on my mind, but honestly, it was stuff I had heard all my life. I knew what Salvation was all about. I'd been raised in church. It just seemed different this time. It seemed... Believable. I'd been believing in the world for so long, and had been let down sooooo many times, Jesus just seemed like that friend you had when you were little that was always waiting for you, even after the other kids had made fun of you... waiting to walk you home. Well, on Tuesday, January 5, 1999, it all came together. I got home from work (I was waiting tables at the local brewery) and sat down brooding in a blue funk. Rent was coming up and I just didn't have the money. I had smoked, drank and partied it all away... again. The only friend I had that I felt really truly cared about me was Samuel (sweet Samuel) and he wasn't around. (Sure, I had lots of friends, but the loneliness and the emptiness was so heavy...) So I did what any self-respecting 28 year old hippie chick would do at 10:00 at night... I called my mom. Now my mom is a super cool Jesus freak. She headed to my apartment as soon as I called her. I was in tears and sad... I just felt so defeated, so she drove the 40 minute drive to my apartment so I could cry on her shoulder. She's cool like that. She got there and started taking care of me - then she made me talk. I spilled my guts. She said, "Don't you think it's time you made Jesus a permanent part of your life?" "Yeah, I guess so," said the sad hippie chick. (Yes, that would be me...) Still not totally convinced (she nor I), my mom trudged on ahead with her God-given duty to help me. "You've got to pray, Allison," she said, "and tell Him to come on... come on in and save you from yourself." So I got down on the floor, just like when I was a little kid, and I did something that has become the single most important act of my life. I accepted Jesus as my Savior - my Lord - my Redeemer. It went something like this: "Jesus, I want to know You. I really want to know you personally. I believe in you and what you've done to set me free. Thank You for dying on the cross for my sins. I know I'm a sinner. Thank You for forgiving me of all of the awful things I've done in my life and thank you for giving me a second chance, Take control of my life. Make me the kind of person You want me to be. Show me how to live. I love you, Jesus. Amen." Okay, so we laughed, we cried and then my mom went home. Whew, I was scared. I didn't know what to do. I went to bed and then I got up the next morning. I looked the same. I didn't feel the same, though. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time. I just constantly felt like sighing in contentment. Simply put, I wasn't lonely anymore. I had a new peace, and not just a "Peace, man" kind of peace. This was internal peace. Very, very cool! Now, some people get saved (saved because it's exactly that, saved from the Big death) and immediately have a changed life. Boom! In church, no more drugs, no more drunken rages, no more cussing... you get the picture. Well, not so for me. Within a few days I was back in the cycle. Things were different this time, though. I didn't enjoy it the same way. I just knew I was out of line, but it felt different than just being guilty. I felt like I had lied and stolen from my best friend. And in a way, I had. Here I was, telling Jesus that I believed in Him, and that I loved Him, and thanking Him for DYING for me, and yet, I wasn't even willing to try to live by his standards, which are perfectly laid out for me in the Bible. I was just being selfish... that's easy to do. I compare getting saved to catching a fish. The fish gets caught (the new Christian) then it has to be cleaned. I had been redeemed, yet I had not been cleaned up. I had a lot of cleaning up to do. It took six months and a lot of mistakes for Jesus to finally become real to me. But when He did, there was no mistaking the change in me, or in Samuel. Jesus became more than just a name to me... He became my Lord. He also became my friend. I realized I love Him, I need Him, I can't live without Him. It's through Him that I found joy, hope, and finally, peace. Some say I traded one drug for another. Not so! Drugs are drugs. Jesus is a living being, Son of the Living God. I have a RELATIONSHIP with Him that goes beyond "Dear Jesus, thank you for...(this day, this food, this whatever) Amen." It has become a daily walk, a way of life. I'm 33 now and I'm happier than I've ever been. I've got an amazing hubby (yes, sweet Samuel), two perfect, beautiful little boys, a group of awesome friends, an incredible church family, and I live in a house on the beach, that, well, quite simply... God gave us. He is awesome. I believe in miracles, I believe in healing, I believe that I never have to be ashamed of who I was, because I have truly been born again and I'm a new creation in Christ. I believe that no matter what, God loves me and God loves you. And believe it or not, there are a ton of Hippie Christian Freaks! There is some awesome Jesus loving music. There are some great churches for people just like us, there are even cool festivals! I just got back from a festival where Ricky Scaggs and Kentucky Thunder were ripping it up! It's was cool to see people whipping out the Bible instead of bowls! Talk about kid friendly! I will tell you now... it's not easy to give up the typical life. It's actually quite hard. It's hard to give up anything you like. But there is so much more to being a Christian than giving stuff up. You actually get much more in return. You get: Peace Love Eternal life in Heaven A God who absolutely adores you Joy (versus plain old happiness, which is nice, but definitely lacking in the sparkle category) And so much more! I know there is much more to tell. I really want to thank you for reading this. It's something I feel so strongly about. Jesus is Lord! He's got all the answers. I totally want to share more with you. If you have any questions at all, questions about God the Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Bible (the Word of God), Salvation, prayer, good Christian music, Christian festivals, cool churches, or anything else that you might be interested in, PLEASE EMAIL ME! I really want to share this with you. It's just the most important thing you can ever do with your life! Give it all up to Him and He will set you free, too! I have a document called "The Gospel According to the Grateful Dead" which spells out the Gospel message of Jesus' perfect love using nothing but Grateful Dead song lyrics and Scripture! It is awesome and totally easy to understand, especially if you have trouble digesting the Bible. If you would like a copy, please email me with your mailing address and just let me know. I will drop it in the mail for you ASAP. Jerry said, "If I knew the way, I would take you home." Jesus said, "I AM the way. Follow Me." ...if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. John 8:36 I have started a Hippie Christian Bulletin Board Forum for Hippie Christians and for those with questions and/or answers. Please click HERE and join today. Let's start a community that really can change the world, so we can all be together, forever and ever, when we make it to the Promised Land! The Hippie Christian Forum Board! |