LIFE UNFOLDED

YOU READY FOR THIS?

I thought I was using my brain … I was… using the brain they gave me. And always approved for being “an independent thinker… An Artist, a Problem Solver.” And yet, I couldn’t see what had always been right in front of me… Christian Cultism.

Impossible! It was the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses that were the cults! I knew the material inside and out. My dad had a big black binder of info he’d accumulated on Mormons because we had some close relatives that were deep in it. They eventually left the Mormon cult and never really plugged back into religion at all.

I got saved at 16 after a tempestuous upbringing, several years of contemplating suicide and a final attempt late one night, heading full speed down a huge hill straight into an embankment at about 90 mph in my tiny Honda Civic. With the front axel smashed, and my car rippled like a tin can, I finally came to and realized that somehow I had spidered the front windshield with my face, broken the driver’s side glass with my head, put dents into the dashboard where my arms and legs had hit… and walked away with only a fat lip and a bump on one knee.

My immediate thought was that my parents were going to kill me! But I also knew clearly that God had preserved my life- and if He wanted me on the planet, I was willing to figure out why. Then I made the long trek through the pitch black night to some migrant workers houses at 3am, to find one with a phone so I could call a tow truck and contact the friends I’d spent the weekend with. They had all been drinking, but for once, I wasn’t. I just wanted to be clear headed and I’d really had it with everything. I left the party a couple times to go driving and I knew they wondered if I’d be ok.