As mentioned before, the last job I had before leaving New Mexico behind was as an underground laborer in the Johnny Mack uranium mine about twenty miles north of Grants, New Mexico. I could write an entire book about my six months underground, but must limit myself to a few notes relating to my spiritual quest.

I took the job initially because the lowest paid pick-and-shovel man started at over five dollars an hour, good pay in New Mexico in the early seventies.  As an "adventure" it was a radical departure from any previous job. I had been bored out of my mind trying to drive a desk eight hours a day in Santa Fe.  From there I had worked one semester as a teacher at a private school in the mountains near the headwaters of the Pecos River, but pay was low. Then I heard at the State Employment Office that some of the "miners," the guys actually doing the drilling and blasting, were making over $2000 per week.  That got my attention.

So I hired on as a simple laborer, but soon progressed to more responsible duties.  Also I was allowed to park my camper on company land about two miles from the mineshaft, on a dry mesa scattered with petrified wood – a hermit’s paradise.

Working conditions were so bizarre I can’t neglect to briefly sketch them.  The shaft elevator took you vertically down 1500 feet, where all the water not seen on the desert above lived, moved, and had its being.  We wore tall red rubber boots and tough yellow rainsuits, topped by broad-brimmed hardhats with headlamps, the latter powered by a heavy battery worn on a webbed army-belt around the waist.  It rained constantly from the roofs of the tunnels.   (In miner’s lingo, "from the backs of the drifts." Miners had their own vocabulary.  A sledgehammer was a "double-jack."  The end of a "drift" was the "face." "Dynamite" was "powder," diesel train engines were "motors," and so on.)   The ground under our feet was constantly running with water, sometimes diverted to one side in a ditch so the ever-present railway rails were not completely submerged.

In winter it was freezing cold at the base of the shaft but August-hot at the ends of the several tunnels, so that a thick fog bank always lay between the two zones.

The ceilings and walls of all the tunnels were held in place with a mesh of overlapping chain-link fence material, sucked up against the gray sandy shale rock with four- or six-foot long "rock-bolts" pulling an eight-inch square plate tight against the mesh.   This type of soil was prone to cave-ins, so that, often, along the top or sides of the tunnel a great hunk of loose shale would be causing the fence barrier to sag and distort under the strain.

Naturally, if you stepped off a main tunnel, where the rail-cars ran, into a side drift and turned off your headlamp, the darkness was truly total, only the trickling gurgle of water all about as a link to the familiar.    I actually found this aspect of the environment extremely peaceful, even friendly – as if the unthinkable tonnage above was insulating us from the "bad vibes" irradiating the planet’s surface.

This serenity was probably an illusion, however, as we workers brought bad vibes enough of our own.   Tempers were short underground.   For one thing, the miners made their real money through "contract pay," based on how many times one could drill and blast or how much track he and his two helpers could lay in one shift.  Many of the miners were Spanish, a small minority Anglo.   I started out as a helper for an Anglo named Buckmeister.   (The Spanish miners perceptively called him "bucking horse.")   He was making more than anyone else, up to $2500 a week, and no green shovel-jockey was going to slow him down. His pace was forever frantic and his rage white hot.  I got hurt several times trying to keep up, acquiring a nice hernia under his tutelage.   Then once while we were using a second diesel train-engine to force a fully loaded rail car back onto the poorly laid tracks with an eight-foot long 10 X 10 timber, the heavy "pushing-stick" fell, smashing the end of my left ring finger between it and the steel train rail.   When the digit quit throbbing two weeks later, I found the modification made it easier to cover two strings with that finger making a D-chord on my guitar!   One of the helper’s jobs was to steady the six-foot long inch-thick hexagonal drill shaft as it first started cutting into the rock.  Gloves were out for this task because they simply wound up on the spinning shaft; hence many nights I rode the elevator up with the water-shriveled skin on my palms hanging loose from a dozen blisters.

Having passed these entrance exams, a couple of miners took me under their wing hoping to clone me in their image, but I bombed out when I tried to drill overhead in preparation for inserting the aforementioned roofmesh anchorbolts.   Sandy mud and water would invariably come pouring out of the hole being drilled and instantly brown-over my eyeglasses, blinding me.   (My vision wasn’t good enough to work without glasses -- gracias a Dios.)

So next I became a mucker-driver.  A mucker was basically a narrow little front-end loader that ran on rails and lived its life at the end of the tunnel where all the action was, heaving loose dirt and rock backwards over itself into a waiting rail car. You stood on the machine’s left side and had levers for forward-reverse, left-right, and bucket.  It could hurl a boulder the size of a small bathtub up, over, and behind itself, though such maximum effort would cause its 12-inch diameter rail-car wheels to dance a tooth-jarring jig.   Like most of the tools underground, the mucker was air-driven by a three-inch diameter "bull hose" pressurized at 150 pounds per square inch.  A genuine hazard everyone took pains to avoid was a bull hose flailing loose from some tool and beating all within range to death before its supply valve could be shut.

Like all the other air-driven machines operating in that enclosed space, the mucker was LOUD.   But the $2000 LeRoi drills were even more intense, louder than a machine-gun fired inside a small tiled room.  Many of the miners were three-quarters deaf.  The chief underground foreman was deafer still; I also seem to recall he was missing some body parts.   Everyone called him "Bam."

I’d better clarify that term "blast."  In preparation for this climactic event, the miner would drill perhaps thirty holes, each six feet deep, in the face of the tunnel being extended.  Each miner had his own preferred pattern or strategy for these holes.  (I spent several shifts helping a portly Roman Catholic of Spanish descent who always drilled his central holes in the form of a cross.)  Some strategy was necessary because the dynamite, once it had been electrically fused and tightly packed to the brim of every hole, was not set off all at once.  The self-timing fuses came in an assortment of closely graduated durations, allowing control over which went off first, second, and so on – usually up to six or seven detonations.  The goal of the time-patterning, coupled with the careful angling of the lower holes, was to first break up the rock with the earlier charges, then kick the shattered earth out of the new cavity with the final set.   The resultant sound with its multiple shock wave was dramatic.  You could be over a mile away in another part of the mine and not only hear the rapid-fire booming but feel the air shifting back and forth around you with each individual explosion.

Fortunately I was working in a new mine where the tunnels were still being extended out horizontally from the shaft like fingers on a hand.  The actual uranium deposit was primarily a huge untapped mass above these, to be eventually captured by tunneling upwards so it could be dragged down for collection in the horizontal fingers and hauled thence to the surface.   This approach meant that, in an older mine, there might at last be created an underground cavern "the size of a mountain" where ore used to be – a situation ripe for catastrophic cave-in.   We occasionally had workers hiring on from old mines with multiple-fatality stories of these awesome events.  One such self-transferred motor-driver said he quit after stopping his train because he felt the rails quiver abnormally – only to investigate ahead and find the tracks extending out over a bottomless empty space of unknown width.

The contract-pay system created huge anger between shifts.  If a miner were actually fast enough to "cycle" – that is, drill, blast, muck out, put up wire, lay rail – two or even three times in one shift, it meant that he usually had just enough time at the end of eight hours for one final blast before an exhausted walk back to the elevator.   Each blast (as with each length of track or each advance of wire mesh) meant an extra hundred dollars in his pocket for that shift.  It also meant that he often didn’t have time to remove the assortment of drills, shovels, and pry-bars lined up along the wall near the working-face before thunderously burying them in tons of loose earth and rock. Consequently, the next shift would have to borrow tools just to dig out their own, not an endearing activity.

When I started as a mucker-operator, my personal nemesis became the 20-something Chicano driving the diesel "train" which hauled the gunpowder-pungent earth it was my job to pitch into his waiting rail-cars.  These he brought one at a time, positioning the yellow microbus-sized dump-bucket-on-wheels just behind my mucker for easy toss-in.   At least that’s what he was supposed to do.   Recently returned from Viet Nam, he found entertainment in aggravating me.  My ideals of teamwork and efficiency collided with his need to be the controlling factor over this upstart Anglo, whom he addressed somewhat contemptuously as Ese.  When he wasn't sleeping, that is.  Usually about half-way through loading a car – having abandoned the wish that he might simply pay enough attention to keep even with me – I’d have to stop the mucker and walk back to shake him awake so he could move his rig forward fifteen feet, in order for me to continue digging into the dirt-pile from the most recent blast.   A couple of times I watched myself with some amazement – this formerly mild-mannered English prof, who now found himself cursing murderously and hurling stones at a fellow man.   I was getting into the spirit of the mine.

Our hard-as-nails shift boss (not Bam) had been underground for twenty-five years. Easy-going and soft-spoken, he was an anomaly in this environment – an unabashed Christian.  He asked me once where I stood with Jesus. Fighting embarrassment, I replied, "I’m working on that one."  He invited me to a Bible study.   However, that was still too far "beneath me."  (I hadn’t yet learned that those who exalt themselves are humbled – and vice versa.)

Which reminds me of a dream one of the quasi-hippie women in our circle related to me. She herself was on a spiritual search, so that, during the period I was parking my camper at the unsold mansion, I bumped into her at a Sufi gathering.  Then some months later she said she had dreamed she saw me fishing in deep water and realized I had hooked into a gigantic ocean-going fish.  (This was after all the era of the first Jaws movie.)   As she reported this dream, I immediately related the fish to Christ, but came back in a tone of false humility: "I’ll take that under advisement."   I already knew the early Christians used the sign of the fish to identify each other but didn’t in those days know that the Greek word for fish, ichthus, was an acrostic in that language for "Jesus Christ God’s Son Savior."  Of course in one all-important respect the dream had it backwards: the hook was really on my end of the line!  Looking back now, I can see how He was drawing me towards Him.

I’ll come back to my incubation underground, but allow me to emphasize that this "drawing" took many forms.  For one example, the previous Christmas Noreen and I had had one of our heart-wounding blow-ups.  So, in spite of the fact that hard ice and snow crusted all twelve hundred miles from New Mexico to Memphis – not to mention that our VW Bug lacked a heater hose – I borrowed a set of mudwheels, bundled myself in five or six layers and (once more alone) flogged the trusty flat-four the whole distance non-stop, arriving at my cousin’s home on the "sane" side of the Mississippi with the patchwork Beetle wearing a full beard of frozen slush.  After a night’s rest I roared on to my parent’s home in Nashville, where an old Vandy professor (by then head of the English Department) finagled me a two-week stint at the University steam plant, on the graveyard shift, operating a big scoop-loader to recharge the coal-fired furnaces every three hours.   So I had returned to become a termite inside the threshold of the very "Gate to Paradise" seen a decade earlier courtesy of morning-glory slime.  While there I happened to buy a copy of C. S. Lewis’ little dream-fantasy, The Great Divorce.  I devoured this jewel several times during downtimes on my frigid holiday job, inspired by the audacious literary conceit of a tour-bus from hell gadding along the fringes of heaven.  When I got back to Enchilada-ville after this three-week respite, I again found welcome in Noreen’s rustic bed. Eager to share the glory of an ineffable touch from on high, I read Lewis’ entire book to her in one night, in certain passages with unquenchable tears on my part.   I knew somehow I was experiencing God’s wooing, but still didn’t grasp the goal – a narrow sheep gate beneath a cross.

Once again I must beg your indulgence for an extended tangent, but in fact a year and a half earlier I had built a cross-topped gate at the entrance to Noreen’s paddock down where her muddy drive veered away from the river. Nearly all the Anglo newcomers to our valley had been hit by robberies which concentrated mainly on cameras and marijuana. Noreen had even been confronted in her home by a spooky-eyed Latino who asked if she had any "properties," meaning drugs.   His glance having swept her walls spotted with generic "spiritual" prints, he had said, "I know you walk in the desert and talk with Jesus; I respect you for that."   A short time later this desperado murdered his wife and children, then himself.  But the robberies continued sporadically.  On a silly whim I posted a sign at the top of our drive in wry self-reference: "BEWARE OF MADMAN – by Order of Base C.O."  Then I had what may well have been a genuinely holy inspiration: I built a stout gate down near the river that could be locked with a chain – though it rarely was.  But over this gate I raised a high wooden arch topped by a nicely weathered and mortised cross with arms I fashioned from handles off a discarded wheelbarrow. The effect was precisely of an entrance to a monastic retreat. When one of our elderly Spanish neighbors saw it, he asked with genuine surprise, "You likee Christo?"    I had to laugh as I answered, "Yes, I likee Christo."   For whatever reason, we were never robbed after that.

O.K. So back to the Johnny Mack Mine tucked among the treeless mesas in the shadow of Mount Taylor. We had two old yellow mini diesel locomotives underground.  After just a few weeks on the mucker I was assigned to drive the second "motor," a job with more status, perhaps, but ten times the headaches.

The most exasperating aspect of my new duties was the abominable condition of the tracks themselves, especially in the two or three places where they rounded a gentle curve.  Remember these tracks had been "slapped down" by miners eager to cop as much contract pay per shift as the letter of the law allowed.   Given the "lipped" design of narrow railway wheels, maintaining an accurate distance between the two rails when spiking them down was critical. The straightaways, especially the older ones near the main shaft – which had been adjusted numerous times – usually caused no problem; but you had to literally creep slower than a walk around the curves – every nerve alert to detect the first hint of that dreaded rising motion when the heavy machine "climbs the rail."   Once that larger-circumference lip gets on top of the slick rail, eight times out of ten at least one of your four wheels is going to slide off into mud or water.  When that happens, you’re looking at an exhausting two or three hours wrestling with heavy jacks, water-soaked timbers, and often a second engine – if you can locate it – to hop your motor back onto the rails.  When I first started as a motor-driver I managed to get all four wheels off the track more than once.

The motor-operator had only two responsibilities: keep the miners supplied with materials on "outbound" runs, then haul the blasted earth back toward the main shaft, where it was dumped by an overhead hook into a long concrete pit.   This pit featured giant drag-buckets hauled along by a system of one-inch steel cables.  The loose earth and ore got shuffled from the pit into a separate lift system rising parallel to the elevator-cage, to be eventually hauled by truck to a refining facility 15 miles down the highway toward Grants.

So in the supply dock after dumping the ore I would load my cars with rolls of chain-link fencing, a nice assortment of rock bolts, topped off with five or six cases of powder, a few rolls of firing-wire and, last of all, the ever-present attaché-case-sized wooden box holding the assortment of blasting caps or "fuses."   (Occasionally also a brand new drill, since the used ones were seldom repaired but simply left rotting in the mud. [Government subsidy is a wonderful thing.])  I got used to carrying a 50-pound cardboard box of dynamite against my chest.  What a way to go, I couldn’t help but think.  These explosives were not the old-fashioned red "sticks" of popular imagination.  Rather, the units of "powder" were actually flexible transparent plastic bags about a foot long containing a white substance the consistency of thick breakfast grits.   Relatively inert apart from a blasting cap, I was told one "might" be able to set one off by placing it on a track rail and giving it a hefty blow with a "double-jack."   I took their word on this.

More real care was required in handling the blasting caps, which were light metal cylinders about the size of a cigarette, attached to a length of fine wire, color-coded for duration.  When a miner prepared a single finished hole for blasting, he would use some stiff wire to punch an opening in the end of the first "donkey turd," shove the appropriate fuse into the white mush, then feed this fused packet all the way to the bottom of the hole, pushing it down with an eight foot wooden tamping stick – being sure to keep the electrical wire coming all the way back out for later union with its brethren from the other holes.  He would then simply insert however many white packets on top of the first – tamping each vigorously with the wood – until the drilling was brimming with explosive.

I worked in the mine from June through December. When winter arrived, freezing air came pouring down the main shaft.   But out at the extremities where ventilation was poor – unloading supplies or collecting two or three carloads of muck – I’d get all hot and sweaty along with everyone else; it stayed steamy there.  Then, soaking wet, rattling back on that smoky old diesel, I’d hit that fog bank and instantly be shivering in December again until I could dump and reload for another outbound run.  By Christmas the water usually cascading behind the steel ladder next to the elevator cage had become a pipe organ of oily ice.

In any weather, at the end of a day on that motor, I’d be pretty "spaced" from breathing diesel exhaust for eight hours.  Occasionally technicians in unsoiled yellow rain suits would show up for a few minutes underground to test air quality or uranium radiation levels; as to the latter, a little-discussed record was kept of every miner’s cumulative exposure. (Later, when I got back to Nashville, my Dad liked to joke that I glowed in the dark.  I did get a melanoma on my ear that had to be surgically removed – but that could have come from three years working hatless in pure New Mexican sunshine.)

Chewing-tobacco was the on-the-job drug of choice among the miners.  (I missed a day of work and lost ten pounds in ten hours as a result of trying to appreciate this manly buzz.) We did have one ruddy-faced young acidhead with long blond hair and pimples who emerged grinning from the darkness one day, shovel in hand.  He was a good worker and quickly took me into his confidence.  I remember his reporting one of his acid trips, saying, "Hey Jim, I shook hands with my Self last night!  It was far out!  The dude looked exactly like me – strode right up and shook my hand – said I was doing great!"   I accepted his statement uncritically because from a New Age (i.e., Hindu) perspective, it made perfect sense.  The individual spark was one with universal electricity; apparently LSD simply made this formerly hard-to-attain "realization" self-evident.

Alone at night in my camper under the star-canopied high-country sky, the sharp fragrance of desert sage streaming through the 6-inch gap under the leading edge of my roof-hood – which I kept cracked at night with a short 2 X 2 – I was having esoteric experiences of my own. I remember one dream that the occultist Jung would have loved to boil in his alchemical retort:

A huge brownish serpent is twisting its way along the sand, leaving a wavy track like the ones I could see nearly every morning walking to the mine in pre-dawn moonlight. Except in the dream it is broad daylight.  Suddenly the serpent begins to rise from the earth, twists its way higher and higher – until it passes directly through a small blindingly bright cloud, radiant with solar glory.  Then out the other side of the eye-searing effulgence the creature emerges – but it is not the same creature.   It has been transformed into a powerful white stallion that now returns to earth in purposeful relentless gallop, potent and unstoppable, to go racing in mane-flailing, hoof-pounding closeup across the plain.

I kept the dream to myself, but wondered – Is this me? Am I approaching some radical transformation?   Will I be lifted to heaven?   What the meaning of this magnificent white stallion?   Is it an ego-trap to receive this as divine promise?

Not all my visitations were so encouraging. Apparently I was still a candidate for total demonic possession.  First this aside:

If the foregoing dream was a promise to me, I couldn’t help but misinterpret it – being still ignorant of God’s free gift.  In that universal unconscious pride of man, I reasoned that if the "snake" of my present earthy nature was to "rise," it must necessarily be through self-effort.   (All the eastern systems especially harp on this theme, and even supposedly Bible-based teachings are not immune to the salvation-by-performance disease.) Consequently I redoubled my efforts to transcend this lower nature through disciplined subjection of the body . The higher self would ride this donkey, not be controlled by it.  So in spite of the often cruelly exhausting labors in the mine (and discounting a weekly trip to booming Grants to buy food, do laundry – and consume an entire Sara Lee German Chocolate Cake in seven gulps) almost daily strenuous yoga, followed by attempts at serene meditation, became my lonely regimen throughout summer and fall.   After all, parked far enough from the mine that no sight or sound of civilization reached me, I had landed in a classic hermit's hideaway.

My favorite spot in the late afternoons became the brow of a south-facing stone mesa where dozens of curve-winged swallows cavorted overhead for two or three hours prior to sunset.   There, stark naked on a narrow throw-rug, after forty-five minutes of intensely stretching every joint and tendon, I would lock my legs in full lotus on the flat rock, hands upturned on knees in a Boy-Scout-salute mudra, vibrate my skull with the most resonant "Aum" I could muster, and – eyes closed – visualize energy flowing to the "third eye" center in my forehead.      If you had told me that these activities constituted a proven procedure for cranking a tall antenna into the spirit realm that broadcasted "Come and abuse this fool," I would have thought the delusion all on your side.

Jesus, in accusing the crowd that followed Him of simply wanting another miracle-picnic, said in John 6: 27-29:

"Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man shall give to you, for on Him the Father, even God, has set His seal. They said therefore to Him, "What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?"  Jesus answered and said to them.  "This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent."

In the Bible’s frame of reference, my cranking up that yogic antenna falls under the nearly all-inclusive category of work for that which perishes.   The Lord’s answer was a thinly veiled reference to the fact that God’s narrow way of salvation cannot be earned by common-sense efforts at self-purification, but comes only by His free "grace" through the (to us) odd requirement of faith in His unique Son’s "work" on our behalf.  (That work being His sinless life and debt-covering death as a human being; therefore, for us to count any "good work" of our own on a par with His ultimate self-sacrifice, is in reality a subtle insult to God’s demonstrated love.   As a gateway into eternal life, such effort is unacceptable.)

But back during my years in New Mexico, I "knew" I was a uniquely gifted individual of (what Jung called) "the higher type," probably approaching genius in a couple of areas.  All my study of "spiritual" writings outside the Bible had led me to understand that such men strap on their spiked boots, grab ice ax and rigging to strike fiercely out for that peak on which all religious roads surely converge.   (Oh yes, with that one puzzling exception, that single dissenting way – "grace through faith" – which, granted, might serve as a stopgap escalator for under-age children or the well-meaning retarded herd; but the self-competent, the proud proto-superman feeling Evolution’s lofty call in his [hopefully Arian] bloodstream, could not stoop to this much-advertised indignity of a "free gift.")

So God was allowing me to try it "my way."  And with my way, the consequences.  Twice in California I had had to fight off the sudden nocturnal attack of a man-sized spirit-being trying to force its way inside my body as I fell asleep. (I detailed the first of these events in reality – Part 1.)   Now in my isolated camper on the dry mesa, my peaceful drift into unconsciousness was again sliced open by instantaneous life-and-death combat.  I clearly remember dreaming I was in Noreen’s ascetic home and heard a scratching at the door. When I opened it I got a brief glimpse of a shorthaired coal-black dog – then the invisible but hideous entity was on me, pressing full length, backed by that same terrifyingly precipitous void, absolutely intent to steal my identity.   Shocked to be teetering again on that palpable brink of hopelessness, the desperate battle to regain waking consciousness was rejoined; but I was, within myself, defenseless in my ignorance of the towering Name of the Lord Whom I had not yet recognized as Ruler over even this merciless entity now lusting to displace me and ride the physical world ensconced in my thoroughbred ass. (Had I known and trusted in that Name above every name – "Yeshua," Savior, Jesus – the hideous struggle would have ended at once.)

As it was, this third encounter – seemingly an even "closer shave" than the previous two – left me deeply shaken, wondering what I had done to invite such devilish aliens springing out of nowhere, supernaturally potent with an un-namable threat worse than death itself. Strangely, I never really considered that my childhood’s taken-for-granted hedge of protection might be being breached by the very yoga I considered an antidote.  I had read warnings about mixing yoga with drugs.   Was my path being compromised by the super-weed I smoked whenever I saw my compatriots in Albuquerque?    Still flying blind in the Land of Enchantment, I couldn’t guess I had penetrated enemy airspace. Nevertheless, an uneasy suspicion began to nag that I might be "barking for God up the wrong tree."   Nah, impossible – the Devil is a moth-eaten myth.

Through all this I still clung to my sense of "mission," some special role which I reasoned must be implied in having been allowed at age 18 a heart-peek at the absolutely good God of all creation. Nor could I abandon a vague sense of being led, for a larger purpose, to the center of a maelstrom.  I had to trust the process.   Alone in my camper – practicing my guitar or listening to Eric Clapton or stirring up a skillet of cheese-onion-and-garlic eggs – speculations about the future took deeper root.  Apocalyptic rumors a la Edgar Cayce had been percolating through the counter-culture for years. Phil Collins’ plaintive refrain, "I can feel it coming in the air at night – Oh Lord" spoke cryptically to all the tripped-out trailblazers of the Woodstock Nation.  California was going to crack like piecrust and bubble into the ocean.  UFO’s had been seen landing above 7500 feet in the Sangre de Christo Mountains.  The Book of Revelation haunted every dope-smoking seeker like a code to crack.  Maybe I was being prepared to lead survivors of social collapse to a place of spiritual power in the wilderness.   Maybe it was no accident that my path had taken me to this desolate wasteland conveniently off the beaten track of Interstate 40.  In my off-time I began to seriously explore the jumbled canyons and deserted plateaus of the area.  Lack of water might be an insurmountable barrier to habitation.  There were one or two small ranches nestled in the rare valleys where moisture persisted, but no water at all ever collected in these higher, orange-and-yellow-boulder-strewn canyons.  (I did accidentally discover one wide field of soft earth below the mine where my truck bogged wheel-deep in slick shovel-gumming clay and had to be dragged out backwards with a caterpillar from the mine.)  But, hey, if ol' Cayce had it right, I could be standing on the new Pacific Coast!

I must say I found some romantically evocative "places of refuge" in the steep winding clefts of the region.  One temple-like complex of rounded blonde stone punctuated by cave-like depressions became immediately populated in my imagination with dozens of serious seekers detaching from the karmic wheel as we left the world of paychecks and rent behind.  But talk about going off on a tangent: with my delusion stealthily deepening, I actually began lugging heavy bags of cement and jerry-cans of water along a narrow trail up the side of a well-hidden escarpment, to a spot where I fantasized building an invisible hideout among the rocks – there being an abundance of dry timbers on top of the mesa, left by some long-abandoned drilling project.  Wondering how well I could hide the smoke of a fire in winter, I spent several weekends industriously chipping rock to make a flat wall on one side of my projected "holy-man’s" lodge, which would be hidden between the main rock face and a seven-foot tall outcropping where the trail widened and passed between. Looking back now, the whole endeavor seems embarrassingly loco.  But I loved the peace, if not always the solitude, of unspoiled nature, and recoiled at the thought of becoming a city-dweller again.  I longed for a return to the days when a man could claim a spot on the broad earth without obligation to other men for a seemingly harmless privilege.

But I was too tied to the human world to abandon it for long.  I got a pointed nudge when checking my post-office-box in Santa Fe on the way back from a visit with Noreen. Incredibly, the tiny box contained two letters from my two ex-wives, neither of whom I had heard from in months.  (I knew these two weren’t in cahoots.)   Both detailed needs for child-support and/or school expenses.  Ouch.   Reality and responsibility came crashing back with a devastating sense of conviction from beyond myself.   I guess it was then I realized that my five-year "retirement" from the world was over and – however depressing the prospect – that my road now pointed again toward Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida.

I could always get great reception of Albuquerque rock FM.  The next afternoon I carried my stereo from the camper to the brow of the mesa where the swallows played.   I vividly recall – after my yoga session when the cloud-puffed sky had become a soft palette of magically glowing pastels – being ecstatically swept up in a shoulder-snapping dance to Steely Dan’s Do It Again:

…Then you love a little wild one

Circumstances at the mine helped give the additional shove I needed to hit the road.  The miner’s union was threatening a walkout.  The top manager at Johnny Mack, a slender clean-cut young man I’d only seen once when I hired on, showed up unexpectedly outside my camper one Saturday morning to ask if he could depend on me to continue working if there was a strike.  Completely clueless as to the ramifications of his question, I said I’d certainly think about it.  So Monday underground I ran his offer by one of my co-workers. That’s when an alternate definition of "scab" entered my elitist vocabulary.   I was also informed that powder and fuses occasionally walk out of the mine in lunchboxes, and that vehicles belonging to "scabs" have been known to explode without warning.  Far out.   I waited one more paycheck before pointing my angular Conestoga one stage eastward, where I spent a week or two tying up loose ends.  My buddy with the primer-brown ambulance helped me tow Big Blue’s engineless skeleton to a junkyard near Albuquerque, where it brought $200.   Also about six months earlier I had bought Noreen a nice-looking Chevy Vega, our VW having passed to its Teutonic reward.  As with most Vegas, it had a terminal oil leak, so after numerous abortive fixes I helped her sell it for $600 – enough to get more dependable transportation.  We parted friends, promising to keep in touch.

"On the road again!"  Make those mud tires sing, Bubba.  Leaving Albuquerque I picked up a longhaired hitchhiker on his way home to Kentucky.  He immediately produced a baggie of not-so-great weed, which we shared, along with the driving, all the way to Nashville, arriving a scant 24 hours later.  After dropping him off at the I-65 junction, I rested a few days at my parents’, then drove on to Knoxville to visit my two oldest daughters, now ages 13 and 11.  Their mother had married the industrious fellow from the Berkeley communal experiment. This couple was now in the process of restoring a sturdy two-story farmhouse on seventeen wooded acres in the hills east of town.  I always found a welcome there, though a definite coolness was to ensue after I had been born again.

From Knoxville I took Highway 11 south and west to my old stomping grounds amid the cottonfields of north Alabama, where my former student (the one who helped me celebrate my other daughter’s birth in California) now owned a motorcycle shop in the river-city of Decatur, twenty-five miles west of Huntsville.   He and his wife offered a job as an apprentice bike-mechanic and a place to park beside their home, complete with an orange utility-cord hookup through their window.

After the initial joy of reuniting with my hosts wore off, and in spite of the interest I found in acquiring new skills, I soon grew depressed by the surrounding provincial culture, unchanged from a decade earlier.   My emotional low was not enhanced by the nearly constant pain of the mining hernia in my left lower abdomen, for which I now had to wear an aggravating pressure belt.  My yoga practice declined but never ceased.   Often at night I would go back to the shop alone, smoke a killer joint, plug in my heavy twin-reverb amp, then make loud guitar for an hour or two.   This frequent marijuana usage began making it hard for me to do simple mental tasks like count change for customers in the daytime.  Nor was it doing much for my moral sense.  Feeling threatened with regression to juvenile sexual habits – my friend/boss subscribed to Playboy – I "took up with" an older widowed nurse working in the local hospital.  We were both grateful for a temporary ease to loneliness.

I recall my younger friends and I made a special occasion out of getting stoned to watch the initial airing of the first dramatized version of the Charles Manson episode.  We knew deep questions about reality were being raised, but, disappointingly, no answers were forthcoming.   I knew enough to think it incredible that "Charlie" had actually become a hero to a certain stratum of the counterculture . For one personally-encountered sample of that stratum, I had worked a construction job in New Mexico with a pair of lesbians from California who constantly dropped hints betraying an obsession with cannibalism.  Though they were raising a young daughter, one of them couldn’t resist commenting that the flesh of an infant was reputed to be the ultimate culinary treat.   I found such alien inclinations deeply disturbing – and confusing.  The rosy face of flowerchild idealism had somehow, seemingly overnight, waxed vampire green.

Then two things happened almost simultaneously that renewed my hope in – at least my personal – future.  The first was I got an incredible letter from my second wife, now living in upscale Altamonte Springs among the mini-lakes on the north edge of Orlando, Florida. Unmistakably penned in her graceful feminine hand, the letter nevertheless seemed radically out of character.   It spoke glowingly of a "big church beside Interstate 4" she’d been attending and made enthusiastic reference to her new circle of "spirit-filled" friends – whatever that signified.  Such gushing religiosity sounded strange coming from the brazen girl who one day had taken it into her head while I was at work in Atlanta, to drive herself and our composer-friend Shirley to the grocery on my new BMW R69S, having had maybe an hour’s instruction on two-wheeled vehicles – but, hey, no problem!   (I also carried a fond image of her in the shelter of a twilit willow, stretched out on her side, quite naked, along the shiny black tank and seat of said Beemer in our friend’s back yard at our going-away barbecue before starting the long trek to San Francisco.)   Now this church talk!  The letter thanked me graciously for the meager money I had been sending the past few months, gave me news of my daughter – five years old already – then ended shockingly with several Bible verses flowingly written in that tenderly familiar cursive!

These, even more than the syrupy quality of the rest, produced a strange mix of feelings. Of course I was happy my ex was moving toward some kind of spirituality, but I preserved my condescending attitude regarding the rather painfully "retro" form it was taking.   Like I’m supposed to accept the authority of these scriptures over all the sacred writings I’ve been absorbing for a decade!    I both smiled and frowned that she actually seemed concerned for my soul.   Well, I probably needed to go down and give the young thing a first-hand assessment of whatever she was into.  And if she could forgive me – maybe we could start over…  The letter, after all, included a postscripted invitation to come see my daughter whenever I was able.

The second hope-kindling event came within a day or two of receiving this intriguing letter. Once again, to me, it was self-evidently some kind of "touch" or "message" from a higher realm – and again arriving deep in the night while I slept in my camper.   Of negligible duration but dramatically vivid, I am not sure to this day how to interpret it, though at the time its effect was encouraging.   It was simply this: a bolt of heavenly lightning, a soundless band of sheerest white fire indistinguishable in appearance from an actual strike, descended in ragged incandescence out of the black sky, penetrating right through my camper’s metal car-hood roof, blasting the inside of my chest with one blinding painless flash.   And that was all.   Except this was no dream – rather, a unique and inexplicable life happening, never since repeated.

Was this blazing bolt telling me ("the air-borne snake") that I was approaching the "shining cloud" of transformation – to therefore make myself ready?   This unforgettably strange "zapping" colored all my expectations as I fulfilled my immediate obligations in Decatur in excited preparation for a flight south.

As it turned out, that trip south was not a pleasant one.   I had never yet heard the term "spiritual warfare," but I was beginning to suspect something of the sort.  I couldn’t help but be amazed at how assaulted my mind had suddenly become with graphically vivid temptations to turn aside and – almost like a whisper in my head – just find a willing female. My reason knew what a waste that would prove, a fool’s errand sure to end in frustration. But I felt pursued by every sexual demon I’d ever entertained, as though my streamlined metallic quilt of a motorcabin were overshadowed by a determined squadron of batwinged frogs.  Could that really be what’s happening?   For the whole trip until the outer edge of Altamonte Springs all I knew for sure was that my mind was most unnaturally obsessed with images of unbridled lust.   I inwardly screamed, This repetitive game is getting wearisome!  Where’s the damn exit?   Struggling to concentrate on the goal of seeing loved-ones again, I clung to that prospect as a slender thread of rationality enabling me somehow to will a firmer grip on the steering wheel and keep my three-quarter ton monstrosity barreling down the long highway south.

My ex-wife Cherry and daughter Cerese were living in a modest white-plastered apartment complex boasting a small swimming pool.  Late Friday afternoon when I pulled in and found the building number, my outlandish camper with yellow New Mexican plate seemed as out-of place as my head of curls and cheek-fuzzing beard.  I was still affecting the high-country uniform of blue jeans, denim jacket, and vibram-soled insulated boots, topped off by a pair of aviator-style eyeglasses with a blue tint that looked hip enough but made night driving difficult.   Cherry looked different too; she had colored her slightly bobbed hair a plain brown and wore a modest dress with thin vertical stripes of muted colors.  She smiled and shook my hand calmly.  I greeted my long-separated ones with a grin of overwhelming joy.   Little tanned Cerese with her blond close-cropped head beamed up at me gamely.   Thank you, God.

I soon discovered Cherry’s parents were in town for the weekend, and we were all expected to go to church with her Sunday morning.  Fine.  Whatever.  I can swing with that.  Cherry looked me over, inquired about my on-board wardrobe, and decided that tomorrow she was going to treat me to a new suit of clothes.

She did exactly that.   By noon the next day I had a fashionable beige sports jacket with a fake belt in back and lots of pockets, and a pair of coordinated slacks.  I felt embarrassed to have her buying me clothes, but she insisted on it as an expression of her genuine gladness I had arrived.  I don’t remember what I did for shoes, but I’m sure I was supplied with something besides my Redwings laced with 40 inches of rawhide.

I played in the swimming pool with my vivacious young daughter all through that hot afternoon, impressed at what a precocious social animal she was, obviously a favorite and leader among the other children in the complex.   She seemed at ease and competent to handle every situation – even the sudden appearance of her long-lost Dad.  Her nut-brown slenderness encased in an orange life jacket, she repeatedly flung off the diving board with abandon, to churn toward me in a furiously splashing dog paddle.  I was smitten with gratitude and a growing sense of guilt at what I had been neglecting.

Sunday got underway with a flurry of greetings when my former in-laws arrived.   I remember we all rode to church in one car.   Cherry’s parents were as kind as their daughter, making no mention of the five painful years since seeing me.  (I had finished paying off my abandoned Datsun wagon when I got word in New Mexico that these dear people had been shocked with a bill for the $800 outstanding after its sale.)  We probably chatted about the headaches and joys of running their small out-of-the-way motel near Silver Springs that catered to repeat patrons who had been wintering with them for decades.

I could tell Cherry was as pumped about showing off her church to Mom and Pop as to me. She yakked excitedly about the piano-playing pastor and the phenomenal attendance that caused a parking crisis in surrounding neighborhoods every Sunday.   No doubt this was going to be one more disjunctive head-shift from New Mexico and Alabama!

Nor was I wrong. Calvary Assembly was huge by comparison to churches and chapels I’d known as a kid.  Seating 5000, this atypical white structure had gone to three services and still barely accommodated the crowds.  I sensed an excitement in the faces and a sincerity in the animated God-talk that could hardly derive from simple cultural habit.   We were early enough to get seats together midway down the auditorium’s buzzing lower level.

When the service proper kicked off, I grew more surprised. A big attractive blonde in a scarlet dress on one side of the stage began banging out a fast-paced rabble-rouser on a gloss-black grand piano.   To this exciting rhythm a hundred-voice choir came striding in from the left, grinning for all the world like this was the high point of their week and singing:

Most of the congregation had joined in, many spontaneously standing or waving hands aloft.  Everything was a departure from any church I’d ever known.  And I liked it so far. Maybe Cherry had stumbled onto a valid path here.

I don’t remember the tall preacher’s message that morning, though I was impressed with his cultured but approachable fineness as a person, matched by athletic good looks.  What struck me most forcefully that first morning and in subsequent conversations with Cherry’s fellow-believers from surrounding apartments who met one evening a week in someone’s home – was the mind-blowing realization that sincerely dedicated BIBLE BELIEVERS still actually EXISTED – in fact were flourishing and multiplying like hot-house flowers an hour’s drive from Disney World!   My friends in New Mexico and California had no clue such a world existed. These people were undeniably, unabashedly in love with God in what seemed to be a vibrantly two-way relationship.

Cherry had spoken of getting "zapped" or "baptized in the Holy Spirit."   Maybe that was what my lightning-strike had been preparing me for.  My family had always scorned such sects as "holy rollers" – definitely a lower class phenomenon. But these people were clearly upper-middle-class and better, yet, amazingly, "spoke in tongues" and "rebuked the devil" seemingly without embarrassment. Jesus and Satan were evidently living characters in daily life.  This bore further investigation.  Maybe I had short-changed Christianity in my spiritual odyssey.

Cherry’s conventionally Protestant parents were polite but reserved about her newfound enthusiasm for "the Lord."  After they left for home that afternoon, Cherry asked about my options.   I told her I wanted to stay in the area awhile, both to be closer to her and our daughter and to look into this Jesus thing.  She said that sounded great, but obviously – though I had spent Saturday night on her couch – sharing her apartment was out of the question.  I probably swore inwardly at this disappointment but said I understood and was sure I could find work in such a huge city to support myself.   As to living quarters, "Turtles aren’t particular," referring to my pop-top rumblewagon.   Besides, I felt truly drawn to explore this remarkable Christian scene.

So after Cherry left early Monday morning for work, I began scouring the want ads.  Even then in 1976, Orlando and environs stretched nearly 100 miles edge to edge. Surely with my multifaceted resume I’d be able to find a good-paying job.  (I was still smarting from a letter I had received from Cherry in New Mexico in which she nailed me for "demonstrating plenty of downward mobility."  I’d show her I still knew how to land a "real job.")  So began a year of faithfully filling out hundreds of applications for permanent employment – but never quite landing that elusive prize.  (More on this shortly.)  Meantime I was hired as a temporary just two miles from Cherry’s apartments, washing exteriors and cleaning interiors of motor homes at an RV dealership.

Now I was going to Calvary Assembly practically every time the doors were open.   I checked out Cherry’s neighborhood "cell group" that met one other weeknight.  At these gatherings I heard prayers prayed with sometimes agonizing fervor like Someone was really listening.   I heard "glossolalia" and witnessed tears of anguish and joy.  I watched people in the pews who really knew the Bible and trusted every nuance of its phraseology. I heard shocking personal testimony of release from satanic bondage.

I had tried all the other paths to re-establish my connection to God.  Pragmatically, I had to admit these explorations had left me more desperately oppressed than when I began. Maybe I needed to give this Christian approach one last "college try."  But still I wanted to purify myself, get spiritually ready – worthy to withstand that lightning bolt I felt was imminent.   Whenever I got the chance before a church meeting I would steal away to an isolated spot in some citrus orchard and, in spite of the humidity and mosquitoes, practice strenuous yoga for an hour.

It couldn’t have been much more than a couple of weeks since arriving in Orlando that Cherry and I went to her church Wednesday night to hear a traveling preacher named C. M. Ward.  I had spent my hour of intense stretching and "Om-ing" before sunset, taken a refreshing shower at Cherry’s apartment, and felt "ready to seek the Lord."

This preacher turned out to be a gruff old man, probably in his late sixties, with a booming sardonic eloquence.   His message had something to do with "the sons of thunder" and "chariots jostling one another in the broad ways."   Cherry helped me follow along in her Bible as he skipped back and forth throughout the obscure book, ignoring the division between Testaments, tying the passages together in a way that suggested a remarkable unity I had never guessed might actually be there.  But Brother Ward, being an evangelist of the old school, ended his message with a glorious invitation to surrender to Christ – now! Part of me believed I had done that once already at age 10 at a Billy Graham crusade.  Did I need another inoculation at age 36?

Cherry nudged me and motioned toward the aisle.  She said she’d walk me down.  What the hell, I wasn’t one to leave a stone unturned, so I gathered my courage and headed toward the altar, wondering how I’d handle that shattering bolt of divine electricity in front of all these people.   No telling what God had up His sleeve for me now!

All of us penitents prayed the sinner’s prayer – I know I did from my deepest heart.  Then Cherry left me in the hands of a long-haired bearded "counselor" with a narrow pock-marked face who told me he got saved out of a drug-dealing outlaw motorcycle gang, where he "used to have to get mad enough to kill somebody" on a daily basis just to keep his adrenaline level up.   I could relate.

That night back at Cherry’s apartment I found myself enjoying an unprecedented sense of peace, a qualitatively new assurance that all was finally well with my wandering soul.   I actually imagined I could hear angels rejoicing in the distance.  (If I couldn’t hear them, I knew I was feeling them celebrate.)  Cherry seemed to understand.   She went off to bed. Wrapping myself in a sheet, a new disciple, I sat on the couch a long time, listening to praise music on the stereo.  What a curious turn – and all without the expected lightning strike!

The next couple of months were packed with discoveries about "the way" on which I had embarked. I was constantly impressed with the immediacy of God’s working in the lives of Christians I was encountering.   An older woman at one of the studies came up to me afterwards and said, "God told me to give you this New English Bible I’ve been carrying around."  This indeed seemed a Godsend, because in spite of my advanced English-arts degree I was finding King James hard slogging.   (As a faithful translation of the preponderant manuscripts, the KJV is much more trustworthy; but at that stage of my "babyhood" the modern version – since I was still struggling to get a sense of overall structure – better suited my needs.)  Shortly thereafter I had the luxury of taking an entire week off from gainful employment, during which I went on a "fast" of liquid diet supplements and holed up in my camper under some huge moss-hung pin-oaks in a public park, slowly digesting the New Testament, for which I devised a color-coding system with a set of highlighters to separate main subject areas.

The most dramatic evidence that these "spirit-filled" believers were tied into the supernatural came when I sought counseling from several athletic youth-leaders in their twenties who roomed near the church.   I confessed to them that I was still struggling regularly with "lustful thoughts."  One of these football-types had received the godly gifting specified in the New Testament as "the discerning of spirits."   Within just a moment while I (doubtless not without pride) reviewed my detours through psychedelics and mysticism, this quiet young fellow said the Lord had given him "a word of knowledge" concerning me. He said the Holy Spirit just informed him that I had been plagued for years by a "spirit of exhibitionism."   You can bet this dropped my jaw and widened my eyes.   I would have been way too ashamed to admit being actively tempted with such a juvenile foible.   But under the circumstances I had to confess the "diagnosis" spot-on.   My admission consequently allowed the three to pray with appropriate specificity for deliverance from this "demonic influence."

An overshadowing invisible intelligence harassing my mind!   What a world-view adjustment!  But these supposedly outdated categories of "superstition" were beginning to make perfect sense of a confusing welter of subjective puzzle-pieces.   What irony that I should have to adjust to thinking in terms of demonic spirits – when in fact I had three times narrowly escaped total displacement by one.

I admired the courageous audacity of these folk who could operate out of millennia-old truth in the face of armies of pseudo-scientific psychiatric "priests" willing to embrace any theory as long as it promised to eliminate absolutist concepts of sin and divine judgement!

I got a job mopping hot tar on the flat roof of a single-story building the size of a parking lot.  The weather was gorgeous, not a cloud anywhere yet not excessively hot.   Set free from even the desire for drugs, I was feeling great. Just me and the contractor, who stayed on the ground feeding tacky black cylinders into the smoking tar-cooker and hauling sizzling five-gallon metal buckets up to me on a simple hoist.  So I had plenty of time to think as I worked in that glorious sunlight. But in an unprecedented way, I soon recognized the thoughts streaming through me were not my own, but that my mind was being illumined with pure clarifying light more brilliant than this sunshine making sparkles on bubbling tar.  As if the top of my skull had turned to crystal, truth after truth came tumbling from a higher plane.  Dismiss this next statement if you must.   All through that glorious day as I mopped crackling tar over dry-crusted pea-gravel, I knew beyond any possibility of doubt that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the One Who (once only) conceived a second Adam in a virgin’s womb – was delivering succinct revelations by His Spirit.

The central realization hitting me full force was the missing factor that had held me so long on a dead-end path. Eighteen years before, I had been forever shown that God was indeed Ultimate Reality – but simultaneously that He was "Love" in a state of Holiness which words must seem to mock in daring any pretense to convey.   Yet even that certain knowledge, for all its power, had not been sufficient to save me from myself.   However, now that I had confessed my sin, acknowledged my desperate need of the one Savior uniquely qualified to ransom my soul, now that I had gratefully accepted His miraculous cleansing, and – most of all – now that I was indwelt by His very Spirit, I was being introduced to the key missing element in every worldview I’d been so thirstily imbibing for eighteen years.  This single blind spot had kept me locked in a labyrinth without exit.   The startling realization was simply this: that the elaborate philosophical and religious frameworks I was so industriously ferreting out had themselves been DESIGNED BY a super intelligence with the perverse GOAL of BLOCKING the human mind FROM DISCOVERING saving truth!   No wonder nearly everyone misses it!   Given the subtle distortions built into our cultural atmosphere by that same "author of confusion," the reality seems too incredible.   My core revelation on the roof that day was that Father God had a SUPERHUMANLY INTELLIGENT adversary, a rebel creature not His equal but nevertheless a formidable spirit-being crazily bent on thwarting its Creator through whatever avenue seemed to remain open.  Which meant primarily through "messing with" God’s beloved crowning achievement among material lifeforms – human kind.  Satan was not some cartoonish little sadist as he contrives to have himself portrayed.   Rather, as the Presumptuous Chessplayer of History, he has carved out an elaborately pervasive empire on his island of exile, Planet Earth, through seduction, deception, and manipulation – fostering a skewed "world system" over which he has been allowed to rule, for a season.

My New Age friends could only scoff at the idea of a personal Devil commanding legions of similarly "fallen" angelic creatures.   In fact, to jump briefly one year ahead, my first wife was to withdraw an offer to live on her and her husband’s acreage near Knoxville with these words, "Jimmy, if you believe in the devil, you cannot live on this property!" Apparently belief in "Jesus" as exemplar could be sooner tolerated than the possibility that "evil" might have an existential origin apart from the "All."  In other words, if evil were more than a necessary counterweight balancing the cosmic flywheel, God might be Wholly Good after all – from which the uncomfortable possibility of an Absolute Moral Standard logically flows. That, in turn, would imply the reality of sin, judgement, and the unavoidable necessity of a Deliverer, which shunts one’s circuitry back to a Jesus Who is more than a milestone of evolutionary promise – to a Jesus Who might require some radical surrender of Self!  No thank you.   That devil business – what monstrously counter-productive superstition!

But back to my day of enlightenment on the creosote-pungent roof.  The Spirit was also hinting to me of things to come.  The Christian community at that time, especially in future-probing places like California and Florida – which were already experiencing some of the darker aspects looming ahead everywhere – was increasingly, especially via radio, calling attention to signs of "Last Days" prophetic fulfillment.  (In its own distorted way the secular media was beginning to capitalize on this anticipation – or dread – with movies like The Omen, the first of which opened that summer in Orlando.)   Of course the Christian world had gone through "millennial fever" before, but this time things just might be different.

A part of what I "received" on the roof that day a quarter century ago has already begun to evidence itself.  To put it in one word – the very word I kept "getting" so clearly, though not audibly – polarization.    That is, in conjunction with a generalized cultural "darkening down" – a "twilight of the gods" – fence sitting in matters religious (and consequently in political) would become increasingly difficult.  Society would draw apart like a dividing cell into well-defined camps of "dark" and "light," with clueless few left in middle-gray. End-time biblical predictions of the love of many growing cold and of the Devil coming down with excessive wrath fueled by his knowledge that his time was growing short carried new impact.  I had been observing embryonic foreshadowings of these very things in Berkeley and Santa Fe.

The other main "revelation" about the future that came that day had to do with, of all things, UFO’s.   Nothing defined with specificity, only that these elusive manifestations were not "star people" but an end-time phenomenon of Satanic origin intended to deceive billions as the world plunged toward the season of God’s harvest – with the aim that masses might misapprehend prophetic fulfillments and be steered aside from the Father’s narrow Door, His soon-returning Son.   The only concrete clue I was given was that I should re-examine the "landing scene" in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, a sci-fi novel I hadn’t read since high school.   The theme of this 53-printings classic from 1953 also concerns a "spiritual" harvesting of the earth, only this time, in point-for-point role reversal, the saucer-riding "mid-wives," the "good-guy facilitators," are horned, leather-winged ebony giants that look like – you guessed it – the Devil!

The novel’s middle chapters comprising Part Two, entitled "The Golden Age," chronicle the preparation phase for the book’s climactic paradigm shift into collective oversoul.   As this earlier "gestation phase" draws to its close, the barb-tailed "Overlords" have been shepherding humanity for fifty years.   We find that under their benevolent guidance "ignorance, disease, poverty, fear" – even crime – have practically ceased to exist.   Then the writer betrays his monistic bias by adding:

Profounder things had also passed. It was a completely secular age. Of the faiths that had existed before the coming of the Overlords, only a form of purified Buddhism – perhaps the most austere of all religions – still survived.  The creeds that had been based upon miracles and revelations had collapsed utterly…all mankind’s multitudinous messiahs had lost their divinity.   Pp.74-75, Ballantine Books, 1987.

It is also interesting to note the author’s attitude toward sexual mores in this Brave New Age. On page 73, in noting the development of a reliable oral contraceptive in combination with (what we now call) DNA testing, he comments that these inventions "had swept away the last remnants of the Puritan aberration."   After this, in Part Three – entitled "The Last Generation" – psychic powers begin to manifest in certain infant children, destined to constitute the final earthly "crop" preparing for the ultimate evolutionary leap beyond materiality into impersonal "Overmind."   (Teilhard de Chardin would have approved.) Then, finally, who can know the significance of the cryptic note included opposite the title page?  "The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author."   Is this mature embarrassment?   Or could it be humble deference to his "muse"?

But my sudden awakening to the off-scene machinations of what the New Testament calls "the god of this world" had an initial effect more than simply sobering.   Concerning the satanic in general, my primary curriculum had been offered at the School of the Silver Screen.   Hollywood had made it all too clear that mere mortals didn’t stand a chance against the Prince of Darkness.  At the least, decapitation by bizarrely "accidental" means could be expected momentarily by anyone foolhardy enough to get in Beelzebub’s way. Now here I was, having been handed "classified" – maybe "top secret" – information dangerous to the nether kingdom’s plans; therefore, I reasoned, I was probably being upgraded to priority enemy target.

As these conclusions sank in over the next few days, I found myself – in a way not previously experienced – "running scared."   I could sense the hungry growl of the devouring lion in the eyes of a Hispanic stranger at McDonald’s as they seared my own with implacable hatred.  This stuff was way too big for one person to carry.  What was I supposed to do with these revelations anyway?  "To whom much is given, much will be required" had, almost overnight, become a burdensome truth.  Of course I trusted that "God knew what He was doing," but still I felt like no profile could ever be low enough.

I know now I was suffering from a pitiful combination of pride and ignorance of God’s provision in this age-long warfare. For one thing I was still abysmally ignorant of His written Word, which is in itself a weapon in the spirit realm.  I didn’t yet know that – as far as those who are abiding securely "in Christ" are concerned – the lion’s frightening roar came from a jaw remarkably deficient in teeth.   Nor had I yet discovered, as far as the true nature of "saucer aliens" was concerned, that the Lord was seeding the same insights into dozens, maybe hundreds, of His servants around the globe.

But at least my unwarranted fear kept me diligent to pray!  Every night after I parked my ugly sleeping coach in some new part of the metropolis – sometimes in an apartment complex, often in a mall or superstore parking lot – I would kneel beside my four-inch foam-cushion to pray fervently for God’s protection.  Then I’d check the tie-down knots to make sure my roof-lid and rear hatch were secure.   As I slid under the blanket, my ears would remain pricked, alert to every outside activity.   I was sincerely beginning to empathize with Jonah’s heart as he set sail in the opposite direction from the place of God’s assignment.   Some thundering white stallion!   Guess I’d better re-interpret THAT dream!

I tried to take an objective look at my life and talents to discern what peculiar instrument for His hand God might have intended me.  My gratitude for His salvation was growing as, having been restored to my "right mind," I realized that His grace alone had allowed me to survive an extended reconnaissance mission along the borders of insanity.   (A couple of years later my mother confided that for years she had felt powerful impulses to pray for my safety, though she had no real idea what I was "into.")   As far as a practical avenue of "service," I was certainly in no position to use my knowledge of electronic media.  I knew I had a huge investment of time, at least, in the electric guitar.   "Christian rock’n’roll" was a brand new concept.  Maybe I should be writing songs that could reach those kindred souls trapped in pseudo-sophistication.  Inspired or not, this I began to do.  The first of these efforts was produced one night, guitar across my lap, in the front seat of my truck watching incoming traffic at the Orlando airport.  This 12-bar ditty was dubbed the "Third Eye Blues," a tongue-in-cheek exposure of yoga as unwitting submission to demonic control.

I didn’t know it, but I was acting just like a puppy over-eager to please its master.  Sure, I was praying the Lord would "direct my steps" and "open the door He wanted me to walk through," but from present perspective I know I was trying too hard in my own strength to bring "His will" to pass.  (This is known in Christian shorthand as "getting out in front of God.")  I could picture myself as a Christian rock star, alright – never mind that I was still in biblical nursery school and full of corrupt notions gleaned from occult philosophy.

God did send a dream that helped me over the coming years to "chill out" and wait more patiently on Him.  In the dream I was struggling at the controls of a B-52 strategic bomber being tossed like a leaf inside a dark night thunderstorm.  My strenuous efforts at the yoke seemed to have no appreciable effect on the craft’s behavior.   Then I became aware that my calm father (get it?) – who in real life was in fact a master multi-engine pilot – was standing behind my seat.  He spoke two words only: "Let go."   This seemed the height of foolishness, but I obeyed, taking hands and feet away from the controls.  Immediately the huge craft’s wings ceased their flailing as the no-nonsense war machine smoothed itself out straight and level through the unabated storm.

One of Jesus’ more difficult sayings – sure to be misunderstood by the unregenerate but so close to the heart of our truest context – was: "He who finds his life will lose it, but he who loses his life for My sake will find it."  Similarly, the apostle Paul wrote, "When I am weak, then I am strong."  What nonsense is this?

My problem as a young believer in Yeshua was that I hadn’t begun to grasp the fact that the Christian life isn’t simply difficult, it is impossible – if we try to live it.  My load was so heavy because I figured I was supposed to carry it myself.  But the Teacher also said, "My yoke is easy and My burden is light."  Of course the "yoke" referenced there wasn’t the control column of an 8-jet bomber; it was the double wooden yoke for oxen – the point being that He is the mighty other "ox" of that team!  Jesus was making the same point in His "branch and vine" analogy in saying we can do no good thing "of ourselves," but only as we "abide in" Him.   Humble admission of inability is prerequisite to God’s lending us the needed portion of His ability.  I thought I had to direct the B-52 – as if this battle were my own.

But recall, as the dream ended, the storm had not abated. That was only the first of four significant dreams of an approaching storm which I believe the Lord has given me since becoming a Christian.  Nor am I alone.  I could cite several born-again folk, prominent and otherwise, who have received dream-warnings of a coming worldwide tempest.   This prophesied "storm" is the whirlwind of divine judgement which the Old Testament sometimes refers to as The Day of the Lord and the New Testament as the "great tribulation."  Note the treatment of this image in Jeremiah 30: 23-24:

Behold, THE TEMPEST OF THE LORD!   Wrath has gone forth, a sweeping tempest; it will burst on the head of the wicked. The fierce anger of the Lord will not turn back, until He has accomplished the intent of His heart; IN THE LATTER DAYS you will understand this.

In 1979 or ’80, before becoming aware of these and similar verses, I had a dream in which a huge approaching storm was still some distance away, piling up over one segment of the horizon.  Meanwhile the gently swelling hills of the foreground were seen to be overflowing with multitudes carrying banners emblazoned with the single word "JESUS." ( This was a full decade before the worldwide "Jesus Marches" began to catch on.) However, strangely enough, these masses were dressed in robes as brown as the trampled earth on which they stood.   Also, passing slowly overhead from right to left, as if wafted on a gentle breeze, was a swept metallic wing upon which a half dozen Roman soldiers stood impassively in full battle gear, eyes straight ahead.   As if to emphasize the spiritual symbolism, a long narrow banner on one of their spear-tips fluttered out ahead of this flying wing.

Then in 1990 or ’91 I had the following remarkable dream. I was alone, driving a large white truck in brilliant sunlight down an arrow-straight 2-lane through Kansas-flat countryside.  However, dead ahead at a distance of ten or fifteen miles, an incredibly dark storm-front towered across my path like a blue-black wall, horizon to horizon.  My sense in the dream was that there would be no avoiding this darkly roiling barrier.   In its extreme contrasts, the most outstanding impression left by this image was of the inevitably awful suddenness of the approaching transition from intense sunlight to buffeting torrent.

Jeremiah Chapter 23 is a scathing denunciation of self-inflated prophets who, as verse 25 puts it, "prophesy falsely in My name, saying, 'I had a dream, I had a dream!'" Therefore, it is not with frivolous lightness of mind that I publicly record these dreams.  Yet I am encouraged by verses 17-20 in that same chapter:

[These prophets] keep saying to those who despise Me, "The Lord has said, ‘You will have peace’"; and as for everyone who walks in the stubbornness of his own heart, they say, "Calamity will not come upon you."  But who has stood in the council of the Lord, that he should see and hear His word?   Who has given heed to His word and listened?   Behold, THE STORM OF THE LORD has gone forth in wrath, even a whirling tempest; it will swirl down on the head of the wicked.   The anger of the Lord will not turn back until He has performed and carried out the purposes of His heart; IN THE LAST DAYS you will clearly understand it.

So certain am I of the nearness of this monumental global storm, toward which – through a variety of metaphors – so much of the Bible points, that I have chosen to label my ongoing communications "Stormwatch"  This moniker appeared first, briefly, in 1987 as the title of a weekly 15-minute radio broadcast aimed at awaking a sleeping Church to "new age" counterfeit spiritualities.  Funding for that effort was withdrawn by the supporting flagship church when it was discovered that my end-times vision did not mesh with their less literalistic scenario!  (As an aside to fellow Bible-believers – who will understand the shorthand – my "eschatology" is obviously pre-millennial.  As to the "rapture" controversies, let me say that the "snatching away" will certainly be a real event – no matter that the "r-word" does not appear in English translations of God’s record!  Beyond that, I would be delighted if the popular pre-trib analysis turns out to be correct – though a pre-wrath position may prove more realistic.   In any case the Enemy – who I believe is equally uncertain about timing – seems to be "covering his bases" for the disappearance of the Bride at some point well before the Groom’s foot touches the Mount of Olives.)

But back to my year in Orlando, Florida.  My Spirit-illumined study of the New Testament convinced me early of the importance of believer’s baptism as a visible declaration of an invisible burial of the old life and resurrection into "new creaturehood."   The obvious symbolism of complete burial in the "water-grave," from which one then "rises," so vividly taught in Romans Chapter 6, was never mentioned, as far as I can recall, in the churches of my youth.   Maybe getting my head sprinkled as an infant helped preserve me to the point of conversion; but as a believing adult, it became obvious the Lord prefers, when possible, that the entire body, soul, and spirit of every sheep in His flock be thus identified with God’s transformation of the Son of Man from Nazareth.

As it turned out, Cherry and Cerese were also baptized at Calvary Assembly within the very week as my obedience in this significant response.  For all she lacked in years, my little daughter seemed to have a genuine understanding of the gospel and radiated the light of true conversion.  (This is not to say she "spoke in tongues" – Calvary Assembly was not narrowly sectarian on this divisive issue.)   The night of their baptism, after Cerese and her mother’s streaming emergence from the elevated pool, I remember going with a crowd of their friends to a restaurant to celebrate.  I clearly recall slender blond Cerese seated at the place of honor at the table’s head, as maturely in command of the situation as if she were surrounded by age-mates instead of adults.  Again I felt humbled to be allowed to witness this scene.   Earlier in the week I had mailed my own "certificate of baptism" to my two older daughters in Knoxville, now in junior high, hoping to jog their hearts concerning the claims of Christ.

That same evening while we ate, someone passed around a clipping from the Orlando Sentinel detailing a self-styled "Christian motorcycle gang" calling themselves Joel’s Horsemen.  This sounded interesting!  The group – which included women – wore red military-style uniforms and rode "full dress Harleys."  Supplemented by donations from community organizations, they mainly supported themselves through their own health-food restaurant called the Genesis II, featuring live "contemporary gospel" music. As their name intended to suggest, they billed themselves as a Last Days Ministry.   One weekend a month they would ride the highways as a group, ostensibly seeking opportunities to perform good deeds for stranded motorists, to whom they would throw in a cheery witness for the Lord.  A great excuse to roll some chromed-Hog thunder, anyway.

So I began hanging out evenings at this Genesis II endeavor, as did an amazing assortment of saints, seekers, and spiritual crazies.   I even volunteered as dishwasher in their kitchen two or three nights a week, a job that allowed me to wolf down remnants of some pretty exotic desserts.  They showcased quality original music.   These "Horsemen" all lived across the busy thoroughfare in the slightly seedy Flamingo Motel.  Their taciturn leader was a stocky dark-bearded cat in his late forties who spent much of his time away in the ministry’s single-engine Cessna.  Although I was allowed to sit in on a few of his teachings, I was still too ignorant of the Bible to appraise their quality – let’s just say his harangues didn’t turn me on.  I did have my eye on one of the female members, however, a shapely divorcee with two small children who, I observed with some dismay, always slept by the flicker of a black and white TV.   Fortunately circumstances intervened in the form of a more aggressive suitor to thwart this potential disaster.  Now and then I caught the scent of marijuana from a couple of their motel rooms.  Oh well, "sanctification" (I was learning) is a process.  Especially for biker-types.

Anyway, God had already made arrangements for a solidly balanced Bible teacher whom I could trust with endless questions and objections.   One evening at the Genesis II over raspberry smoothies, I met this humble saint from rural North Carolina, whose moderate physical stature quickly evaporated behind a competent self-assurance.  No freaky dude this: rather, even in the sanitized "Christian night spot" he stood out for his 50’s-short hair and neatly pressed sportshirt.  But there was a deep seriousness underneath his relaxed chuckle and southern-coastal drawl that drew me in.  Tommy Bryan was also living in the Flamingo with his generous wife Nancy and three polite young daughters.   A long-time Baptist of the most conservative stripe, he was a genuinely Spirit-taught lover of God’s Word with insatiable curiosity for things of the Lord.  Moreover, his steel-trap logic insisted that every new insight be fitted in proper relation to an ever-elaborating understanding of the Christian scriptures.  Unable to endure more than a semester of dry-as-dust seminary exposition, he had been "told by the Lord" to move to Florida, where God promised to bless his family.  His quiet partner Nancy quickly found work as room-cleaning help at the Flamingo, while Tommy took odd carpentry jobs, often for the Aloma Baptist Church, which I began attending with them most Sundays.

Of course I was still living in my camper, but the Bryans were always gracious to share their meager meals and shower-facilities with me, especially prior to church on Sunday. Soon enough, almost nightly in their tiny apartment, after a simple supper and the children put to bed, Nancy would sweep the day’s debris of three active daughters out the door. Then, fueled by pitchers of iced tea, Tommy would conduct an inspiring Bible study – usually including several other newborn believers.  Up to fifteen minutes of serious prayer would always close out the evening.  These wide-ranging forays into holy writ became my engrossing routine for the next seven or eight months.  Tommy had been "led" into a deep study of "Last Things," which had caused him to question the prevailing "pre-trib rapture" bias among fellow pre-millennialists.  Also in his more general theological investigations – usually conducted one-on-one with representative preachers – of what was being taught across the larger Bible-believing spectrum, he had meticulously checked out every pet doctrine from Charismatic to Seventh-day Adventist.  Accepting the absolute authority of the original texts, he gauged any interpretation against a plumbline of intensive Hebrew and Greek word studies.  Like many old time Baptists, he had serious reservations about the "charismatic shenanigans" going on at places like Calvary Assembly.   But at least he was struggling to stay objective; when we took his visiting mother to observe a Sunday-evening service there, not ten minutes had elapsed before she got up in a red-faced huff and walked out.   Meanwhile Tommy was also becoming an expert on the cultic beliefs of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, one of whose runaway disciples, a former bodyguard to Moon, landed practically in his lap at the Genesis II watering hole. The Joel’s Horsemen made some fun of this, saying Tommy Bryan was drilling his troops with wooden swords to get ready for a Last Day’s march against the Korean messiah.   I had truly stepped into a different world.

Regardless of these tangents, Tommy Bryan had a rock-ribbed understanding of the essential gospel.   He saw right away I had no clue about the all-important distinction between "law" and "grace," not to mention their parallel correspondence to "works" and "faith."   Coming from a New Age perspective where self-effort won the prize, these distinctions seemed particularly opaque to me.   But in his inimitable homespun style – "Great Granny!" being his favorite expletive – he patiently clarified these and other basic concepts.  Like the Trinity, for one.   I remember him saying, "Suppose you had a piece of paper and that was God.  Then suppose you cut a little man-shape out of one corner of that paper and that is Jesus.  Jesus is God in the form of man – but He’s still God, His nature is still paper, get it?"

Meanwhile I was continuing my struggle to find permanent work in Orlando.  During these months Cherry found herself going through a crisis with a brain tumor, which apparently was healed – totally disappeared actually – after an extended concert of prayer.   She meanwhile had found a semi-serious male friend; but I had my biblical pursuits, as well as Cerese, to keep me in the area.  The jobs I did land were so short-term they provided just enough, after sporadic child support, to cover running expenses.

I bought a Skil-saw at a pawnshop for $15.00 and worked several weeks installing rough shelving in a warehouse.   I enjoyed this kind of work, but many weeks I wound up with $10.00 to buy an entire week’s gasoline and about the same for food.  Still I never suffered serious want, even in basic comforts.  For example – daily bathing in humid Orlando being a necessity – I found a unique spot to bathe for free.   One of the public parks near the Flamingo boasted a large, nearly windowless art museum.  Behind this pebbled-concrete building stood an L-shaped wooden fence screening off the air-conditioning units.  Inside the fence I found a short garden hose conveniently attached to a spigot.  On days when I wasn’t employed or job-hunting, after jogging my requisite two miles, I would retire behind this screen, where I kept a bar of soap hidden under a beam supporting the heat pump. I performed these outdoor baths super-quick, as you might imagine, but no maintenance or security types ever showed up to cause a problem.   Also, there were a couple of swimming pools nearby usually abandoned by swimmers after sunset.  With the addition of a towel over my shoulder, my jogging shorts easily passed for swim trunks. Truly, to look at the new me, neatly shorn and shaved, no one could guess I was living in my truck on $20.00 a week.

You may doubt this, coming from one so recently bound in flagrant immorality, but my conscience did smart a bit over these stolen baths.   On the other hand, I didn’t feel particular "conviction of sin" worth agonizing over.  I guess the Lord knew how far I had come from shoplifting economy-size bags of M & M’s in California or pilfering used tongue-in-groove from someone’s lumber-pile in New Mexico.   He was probably cutting some temporary slack on the bath deal.  I was, however, inwardly convicted over a couple of items the Spirit prompted I should make restitution for.  During my year in Orlando I sent money to one of my fellow-pioneers in New Mexico for a half sheet of marine plywood that (he didn’t previously know) had become the floor of my camper’s cab-over section.  I also sent the replacement-value-amount for the Army Surplus sleeping bag that had somehow ended up in my possession, to the private school on the Pecos where I taught one semester.

Please understand that these new ethical scruples were the fruit and not the root of my salvation.  The New Testament makes it clear enough that, while Christians aren’t saved by "keeping the Law," once they have become children of Light – out of gratitude and for the honor of their Master’s reputation – they are to aim at becoming models of good behavior, as broadly defined in the Ten Commandments.   Martin Luther called this post-conversion ethical patterning "the second use of the Law" – the first being to drive home the hopeless unworthiness of every human in the face of the Creator’s impossibly perfect standard.  In other words, initially, the harshness of a Law no one can perfectly keep drives us to see our desperate need of a Savior.   (And don’t blame God for "demanding" an infinitely exalted standard.  In a real sense, "He can’t help it."   The only impossibility for Omnipotence is to deny His own Character – which happens to be thrice Holy.  The Bible expresses this when Habakkuk prays, "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity.")

So God had a "problem."   How can the absolutely "Just" pardon even one of the "unjust" without becoming thereby "unjust"?  An infinite (God-level) debt was owed by every man that no mere man could pay.   The inclination to sin had become ingrained when the first man forfeited his sonship under God in the garden. Therefore, in mercy, a second "Adam" had to be conceived by the Father in a "set apart" human womb; this unique resulting God-man must then live a human life perfect in the sight of the Law. His "ethical perfection" or "righteousness" as a real human being, coupled with His awesome significance as begotten Deity, qualified Him – in acting out a Love beyond human comprehension – to pay humanity’s incalculable sin-debt by a tortuous punishment unto death via crucifixion. Jesus became God’s spotless sacrificial Lamb, now raised into glory.  That accomplished, God’s "deal" (i.e. Covenant) is that, if we recognize and trust in the Fact that the Lamb took our rightful place on that cross, believing also that God confirmed this Truth by raising Him from the dead – then, miracle of miracles, His perfection is "credited" as our personal standing before God!  As baptism portrays, we have become identified with God’s Son.  Likewise, through our faith, His sinless blood in effect cleanses our former "fallings short of perfection" – and will continue cleansing as long as we acknowledge subsequent failings.  This is the Good News.

The Bad News is that, apart from fulfilling our end of the "deal" by appropriating Jesus’ substitution in our deserved place of punishment, just one lifted bag of M & M’s creates a soul-stain sufficient to banish us forever from intimacy with the Holy One.   Moreover, as insurance that no one with integrity could be so self-deceived as to think he was "keeping" the first nine commandments – which might seem on the surface only external – God threw in the tenth about "coveting" to emphasize that these standards apply on every level of our being.  If you have the nerve to see how really bad this bad news is, check out that section of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount – Matthew Chapter 5:17-48 – which forever ripped the rug of self-righteousness from under the merely religious person.

I continued to use nearly all my extra time for serious study.  On days I wasn’t employed, excellent health allowed me to absorb several hundred pages a day, all of it from the Christian perspective.   As my understanding of end-times scenarios grew, I wanted to share this vital knowledge with my friends in the Far West.   I developed a thumbnail summary of probable last-days sequences and Xeroxed copies to all my closest friends in California and New Mexico – who already considered me half cracked anyway.  A quarter century later, having gained more respect for what a daunting maze Bible prophecy can be for the serious student, I recognize that these outlines naively followed popular schools of prophetic interpretation.   Some of these have great merit; but humility, not dogmatic inflexibility, is called for.  Some of the best minds of fifty generations since Christ rose from the tomb have devoted lifetimes to these puzzles.

I also began a cassette tape correspondence with Noreen.  Neither of us found pleasure in the thought of giving up a relationship in which we had so much life invested.  In addition to the usual day-to-day news, these tapes inevitably became a dialogue and struggle in the spirit.  My eyes had been opened to the role evil spirit-beings had played in our lives, and I longed for her to discover the freedom from bondage I now knew was possible only through Jesus Christ.

At the same time I knew this was a delicate area not easily broached with someone whose mind had become murky with layered deception – not to mention actively guarded by direct spiritual oppression, or worse.

Noreen confided to me that year that, upon moving into a slightly larger adobe house in our familiar rural community, she heard a male voice in her head clearly speaking her first name.   She resolutely refused to respond directly to this rather unnerving manifestation. Instead she called a close female friend well versed in the occult, and together they climbed a ladder into the attic of her recently rented place, in order to "exorcise" the disturbing entity, which apparently also had been thumping overhead at night.  They each in turn spoke into the cool darkness under the pitched roof-beams, telling the "occupant" that it was no longer welcome there and must find other quarters.  Whatever the reality of the case, this tactic seemed to work, and Noreen did not hear the voice again, so far as I know.  Score one more point for deception.

Several of the taped dialogues grew convoluted with issues of forgiveness.  My immersion in the gospels had impressed me with the crucial importance of horizontal, person-to-person forgiveness for those who sought right relation to God, precisely because of the awesome cost to Him for our forgiveness.  The billionaire who sprung us from jail looks unkindly when we are harsh with our own penny-ante debtors.   In my communications to Noreen I assured her that I did not in any way wish to "hang her up" in unforgiveness for any of my trespasses against her.   I tried to make it equally clear I retained no acrimony toward her.  I’m not sure she grasped the issue.  Her bottom line seemed to be that she was "releasing me" from obligation as a former lover.

I did get one rather remarkable epistle from her during that time. The letter ran to eight or ten handwritten pages, but midway through – after rising to an emotional crescendo – one particular page became an indecipherable scrawl, except part-way down, the barely discernable word "schizophrenia" emerged from the scrawl in raggedly elongated cursive.   This struck me with peculiar poignancy because I had just finished reading a grass-roots "deliverance" primer entitled Pigs in the Parlor that addressed schizophrenia as a spiritual infestation.

Remember the 1960 movie The Three Faces of Eve with Joanne Woodward and Raymond Burr?  While at UT-Knoxville that impactful film had been my introduction to the concept of "split" or "multiple personality."   The theoretical puzzles raised by this true story so intrigued me that I immediately considered setting my academic sights on physiological psychology.  (That sophomoric ambition expired after extra-curricular reading exposed science reluctantly confessing near-total ignorance how "mind" and brain were even related.)   As to "split-personality," Jesus and his disciples regularly confronted the same symptoms – but did not respond with drugs, electro-shock, or frontal lobotomy.   In their "benighted backwardness" they proceeded authoritatively by direct spoken confrontation to "cast out" indwelling alien "persons."   Pigs in the Parlor was published in 1973 by Frank Hammond, a Spirit-filled Baptist minister who had been thrust into what Roman Catholics prefer to call "exorcism" and Protestants term "deliverance."   Hammond’s wife, Ida Mae, wrote most of Chapter 21, "Schizophrenia," based upon a revelation concerning a woman to whom they had been attempting, with little success, to minister.  Mrs. Hammond writes:

I was still in bed – still had sleep in my eyes – as the Lord continued giving the revelation. He instructed me to put my hands together, palms facing and with fingers laced together tightly.  He said this represented what the schizophrenic nature was like.  Each hand represented one of the dual personalities within the schizophrenic, neither of which was the real self.  They were tightly interlocked.  The Lord said, "Your hands represent the nest of demon spirits that make up schizophrenia.  I want you to know that it is demonic. It is a nest of demon spirits, and they came into this person’s life when she was very, very young.  I will show you how it operates.

Next, the Lord instructed me to take my hands apart VERY SLOWLY.  As my fingers were slowly disengaged the Lord showed me that these demonic spirits in the schizophrenic must be separated, cast out and given up.  The process requires time.  It is a shock to the person to discover what his true personality is.   He needs time to adjust and to fall out of agreement with the false demon personalities, point by point.  He must come to loathe the schizophrenic personality, and fall out of agreement with it.  The Lord recalled to my memory Amos 3:3, "How can two walk together except they be agreed?"

One by one my fingers were disengaged, illustrating the pulling apart of the demonic personalities. (Later, each finger was given a demonic designation.) The last two fingers to come apart were the middle fingers on each hand.  The Lord showed that these fingers represent the core of the schizophrenic – Rejection and Rebellion.  When these are finally separated the person can consider himself healed – delivered and knowing who the real self is.  Pp. 124-125, Impact Books, 1973.

Today I’m considerably more cautious about extra-biblical "revelations," but so much in this chapter seemed to fit Noreen, and so much of the rest of the book presented basic Bible truth concerning "spiritual warfare," that I took the risk and mailed a copy to Noreen as a "Christmas present" in December 1976.   I never learned her precise reactions to it, except that she eventually returned it with the comment, "That was not a holy book."

I responded, "I didn’t say it was holy – but it might be true."

All through the 70’s and ‘80’s the Holy Spirit seemed to be preparing His church for a new level of spiritual warfare.   The reality of demons and the opposing power of Christians united in prayer were made vivid through the novels of Frank Peretti, which spread like brush-fire through the rank-and-file believing world – much like the "Left Behind" prophecy series is spreading today on an even wider front.  Long before teenagers began murdering fellow students, teachers, and parents, the Spirit was preparing those who would listen to face the deepening twilight with effective answers.

I certainly knew in my spirit even as a baby Christian that here was an area of practical knowledge not to be neglected.  I began to understand the believer’s authority through the power of Jesus’ blood to speak or "command" in His "Name which is above every name." My earlier fear of Satan began to subside as I realized what spiritual resources God had placed in His twice-born children’s hands.  There was real security in Christ!   I had been declared legally off-limits to those horrendous sleep-time assailants trying to take over the wheel of my "vehicle."   The Sixth Chapter of Ephesians detailed our specific defensive armor and that powerful weapon of offense: God’s word, the sword of Truth that could free sin’s captives.

Gradually I began to relax about the future, whether it was the next minute or the next decade.   Increasingly, as I realized what it meant that I had "entered into God’s rest," an inner peace deepened.  With amazement I was learning my newfound security extended beyond even the spiritual.  Adherence to God’s plan guaranteed God’s provision, often in the tiniest details.  For one example, my camper-truck seemed to have become immune to flat tires, which formerly occurred bi-weekly!

None of this should be construed to say that I did not still have to struggle against sin.   My battle with garden-variety lust was far from over.  In fact, on the deepest level of my will, it is possible it had only just begun, as I hope to explain shortly.   But during this period I was encouraged by a dream of being tortured by devils while tied to a hot metal grate – an agony that would have been quite intolerable except that some other power periodically lowered the grate into cooling waters that simultaneously refreshed my strength.

In the Bible, the closest thing to a self-contained theological treatise is the book of Romans. This steep trek into high country is, for the first eight chapters, an orderly argument following the chronology of individual salvation.   Chapters 1 through 3 show all mankind shut up in the prison of sin.  Chapters 4 and 5 unveil the stunning possibility of justification in God’s sight through faith.  Chapter 6, as we saw earlier, begins with the symbolic rite of baptism, then plunges into a terrible struggle between opposing aspects of our three-fold being that some contend continues through Chapter 7.  The resolution of victory for the overcoming saint is expounded at last in Chapter 8.

To clarify what I was to go through intensely that year in Orlando, but in lessening degrees for many years to come, we must look at Chapters 6 through 8 more closely.  I include this study because I believe it is key to what an abundant harvest of souls – who are now or who soon will be reborn out of sexual enslavements – must prepare themselves to face.

Remember that Romans 6 begins by specifically paralleling the believer’s "burial" in the waters of baptism with Christ’s burial in a sealed tomb.  The text simultaneously balances this "death" aspect with the opposite "life" aspect of Christ’s triumphant resurrection, symbolized, again, by the believer rising out of the waters of baptism into "newness of life."  This ultimate life/death contrast is carried right on through to its victorious resolution in Chapter 8.

Moreover, along with this polarity goes a master/slave sub-theme. (Incidentally, I checked Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, where slave translates the Greek word used better than the King James’ choice, servant.)  The close tie between these two pairs – life/death and master/slave – is clearly stated in Hebrews Chapter 2, which says that Jesus came to "deliver those who THROUGH FEAR OF DEATH were SUBJECT TO SLAVERY all their lives."  Slavery to what or whom?  Romans 6 makes it clear that the "death-master" is sin and that this sin-master has ruled us through the lusts of our (death-fearing) mortal bodies (V.12). Jesus is already by definition the sovereign "Lord" of the universe, but to the believer he offers to be our new "master."   Moving from death to life thus involves a switching of masters.  Again, the "burial phase" of baptism pictures this sin-enslaved "old man" being killed – crucified actually – with Christ, as in Romans 6: 6, which says, "our old self was crucified with Him that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should NO LONGER BE SLAVES TO SIN."  Then, coming up from the "water-grave," the "resurrection phase" signifies the goal that "we too might walk in newness of life" (Rom. 6:4).

But notice the choice of the word might, which, frankly to me, carries the suggestion of potential.

I emphasize potential because I believe it is at this point that the great inner struggle between what the New Testament calls "the flesh" and our newly-born spirit gets underway – in which our own will seems somehow crucially called to participate.  Up to this point we were literally slaves – or in a parallel metaphor, absolutely dead to the possibility of godliness.  (Using that alternate metaphor, Ephesians 2:1-6 says:

You WERE DEAD in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, INDULGING THE DESIRES OF THE FLESH AND OF THE MIND, and were BY NATURE children of wrath, even as the rest. But God…made us alive together with Christ…and raised us up with Him.

Note next how the following passage in Romans seems to imply that now, perhaps literally for the first time, we have a viable choice of masters to whom we can willingly "present ourselves":

Even so CONSIDER YOURSELVES to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.  Therefore DO NOT LET sin REIGN in your mortal body that you should OBEY its lusts, and DO NOT GO ON PRESENTING the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but PRESENT YOURSELVES to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.  For SIN SHALL NOT BE MASTER OVER YOU, for you are not under law but under grace.

What then?  Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?  May it never be! Do you not know that WHEN YOU PRESENT YOURSELVES AS SLAVES FOR OBEDIENCE, YOU ARE SLAVES OF THE ONE WHOM YOU OBEY, EITHER OF SIN RESULTING IN DEATH, OR OF OBEDIENCE RESULTING IN RIGHTEOUSNESS?  But thanks be to God that THOUGH YOU WERE SLAVES OF SIN, YOU BECAME OBEDIENT FROM THE HEART to that form of teaching to which you were committed, and having been freed from sin, you became SLAVES OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.   (Rom. 6: 11-18)

This language strongly implies that our wills must be energetically involved in "working out" our post-new-birth walk, if not precisely our "salvation."   John 1:12 in the King James reads: "But as many as received Him, to them gave He POWER TO BECOME the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name."   Why doesn't this verse simply say, "He made them sons of God"?   This verse in the stratospheric first chapter of John carries an awesome sense of contingency.  To me it says, "you now have the power to choose the GOOD as well as the evil, but – though I will help you – you must rise to this costly challenge."  The real "fight of faith" is mostly internal.  When Christians talk about "getting the victory," they mean they have succeeded in obeying the spirit rather than "the flesh." "For the mind SET on the flesh is death, but the mind SET on the Spirit is life and peace." (Rom. 8:6)

Verse 22 of Romans 6 puts it in the most dramatic possible terms: "But now having been freed from sin and ENSLAVED TO GOD, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life."   Or as the King James Version renders it: "But now being made free from sin, and become SERVANTS TO GOD, ye have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life."

Romans Chapter 7, sandwiched between the clear progression of Chapters 6 and 8, has proven an interpretive challenge for generations of Christians.   Portions of 7 have been used to bolster pet doctrines or foster denominational division.    Some believers have understood the latter half of the chapter, where Paul says, "I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind, and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members.  Wretched man that I am!" as being a portrait of one’s state before the new birth.  Others contend that it is a vivid snapshot of an immature believer who has not learned to exercise this unfamiliar power to say "no" to the flesh.  Still others see in Paul’s anguished cry not Christian immaturity but the heightened sensitivity of the mature saint of how far short of true holiness even the most spiritual Christians fall in their inescapable fleshly "humanness."   In other words, by his sharpened appreciation for the moral perfection embodied in the law, the mature saint becomes all the more conscious that his completed sanctification must await final release from this mortal body.

Bound up in these controversies are even thornier issues of "free-will" versus "election" which are, at last, beyond the scope even of this eccentrically orbiting opus.  While some Christians argue that Jesus cannot truly be Savior unless we have also "made Him Lord," others say that a person’s spirit is "saved" and therefore secure in Christ even though at this "unsanctified" stage of life he lives on a "carnal" or fleshly level much of the time – for which he will, as a "son" and not a "bastard," suffer chastisements or even an early death. Proof-texts can be marshaled for either view.

These are profound issues with, obviously, manifold – even eternal – ramifications.   I persona