Part 3

As I began to pray, I felt God open Himself to me. The Spirit gave me freedom from guilt and worthlessness. I worshipped Him with my own words. They came straight from my heart. I poured myself out to Him. Very quickly, my mouth wanted to do something that my brain wasn’t telling it to do. My lips began to quiver. What was this? What was wrong with me. Yeah, I was excited. Yeah, I was pumped. God’s Spirit and mine were communicating, but all of the sudden, I couldn’t “talk right.” The evangelist noticed what was happening and told me that it was the Holy Ghost and that I should let it happen. What happen? That I would speak in tongues, if I gave God control of my mouth, that I wouldn’t know what I was saying, that the whole process was perfectly natural. Okay. More prayer. Nope. It’s not working. Keep trying, he says. Okay. Oh, you know what? God’s trying to do something to me. Open up… Let Him…

And then I did. God filled me with the Holy Ghost and I spoke in tongues as the Holy Ghost gave evidence of the baptism.

Oh the Joy that flooded my soul!

After rejoicing and responding to God in a heavenly language for awhile, I got up and jumped into Greg’s arms. That’s what the experience was like.

I felt completely different. Like I had power over sin; not to do it if I didn’t want to. I wish I could say, as many do, that I never went back to my old life, but about a week later, I did sin. I did it on purpose to see what would happen. A sin with which I knew I had a problem. The power that I had felt that night left, and I went right back to my old life.

At Christmas break, I was feeling bad about straying from what I had experienced, and I wanted to go back to church. I wanted to get “refilled” with the power I had felt before. So I invited Greg to go to church with me in Brownstown, and we went. It turned out that they had a special speaker that night. I got so fired up in the Spirit that I didn’t even notice what was happening, but I left there filled with the Spirit once again. When I got up the next morning, I felt the way I felt when I was first baptized with the Spirit. I had power over the decision to sin again. This time, as I returned to school, I was determined to be more cautious about what I did, where I went, and the people I hung out with. I started studying the bible for scriptural basis of spirit baptism, water baptism, and faith healing, among other things. I’m sort of ashamed to admit that all these topics were right there in front of me, black letters on white paper, all along. But there’s a scripture that speaks to this not being able to see the truth even though you look directly on it:

1 Corinthians 2:9-14, “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed [them] unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned.”

And so it was in this tender, embryonic, soul-searching state I entered second semester of my senior year. I had taken the communications course that Purdue requires everyone to take during the summer before freshman year, while I was still in high school. So I had a 3-credit “credit” that I had been saving for this semester. I only had 12 hours, and only one of my classes required any real work. One of the courses I took was The History of Science and Technology in the West since Newton. The course was taught by one of the most interesting people I have ever met. For the course requirements, in order to have a chance at making an A, you have to do a semester project. Because of the size of the class, all projects had to be approved so that no one was working on the same thing. (I’ll try to spare you the details here and get on with it. I could spend hours talking about this part, it was so fascinating.)

Now understand that God has spoken to me many times since the incident with my father, and sometimes it’s through the strangest people and circumstances. It was in this class one day that my professor spoke words that the Lord quickened to my heart. God told me that my poor college performance was alright, when viewed alongside how much I had learned about life and living in the process. And I felt the power of God coming over me — again — and I almost started crying right there in class.

This prompted me to see him about my project. When I went to see him, we started talking about what I could do, and I gave him my idea. It was weak, and he probed me to see what really interested me. I told him about my experience in class. From that discussion, he gave me a list of books to review. I scanned and read them, we met again, and he gave me another list of books to read based on what I liked about the first set. This went on for weeks. (Turns out he read 3 or 4 books a week, and he had all the subjects, titles, and authors memorized for recall.) It was through this process that I became deeply involved in Zen Buddhism.

That’s right, .

I’m not talking about popular Zen. I mean the real thing.

As “luck” would have it, a Tibetan monk was coming on campus to talk about Buddhism. A friend-girl and I went to go see him. To open his short talk, he suggested we all meditate for about 5 minutes. I didn’t know a thing about meditation, but he stepped us through it. In just a couple of minutes, I had what some Buddhists seek their whole life for: an out-of body experience. It wasn’t that my eyes were closed, it was that my vision was disconnected. It wasn’t that the room was very quiet, my hearing stopped working. It wasn’t that I was comfortable in my chair, I was floating in space. But that was just the start.

Now the professor always spoke to me while reclining in his chair. Distant. Reserved. But one day, I related this story: I had been playing racquetball with a good friend, Tom. I was pretty good, but he beat me. I got mad and smacked the wall with my new $100 racket. It was the only time in the semester that I had lost my typically bad temper, and it cracked my poor boron and graphite racket. That made me more upset. So, while Tom was out of the room getting a drink, I bowed to the wall in apology for smacking it, following some advice from some of the philosophy I had been reading, and, surprisingly, all the tension in my gut drained away. When I told my professor that, he leaned up, reached over, shook my hand, and said, “So few people in the West get that far.” This was evidence that I wasn’t just fooling around. I was really getting deep. (See Zen for the story behind this part of the story.)

At this point, my bible study was absent. My prayer life was dead. And I had started drinking again. And besides all that, I was having trouble reconciling Zen and Christianity. Much of Zen boils down to Christian principles; you know, the Golden Rule. But at the end of Zen is “The Nothing,” whereas the end of Christianity is something else entirely. It was at this point that I told my professor that I was going back to Christianity. He, being the proper teacher that he was, only respected my decision, and he took my 110 pages of hand-written notes from studying Zen and philosophy as my semester project for his class. He never pushed me in any direction. After all, his attitude was that all roads lead to the same place anyway. (The bible tells very differently.) And so it was, searching, and still empty, I returned home, graduated and jobless.

Well, after being filled with the Holy Ghost and losing that power very quickly, and after being revitalized and losing it again very slowly, I was determined to get re-baptized with the Spirit and never again let it go.

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