From darkness to light

The Brothers here in Romania have asked me to give my testimony briefly, and when I think of that, I always think of this verse where Paul says

That was the purpose of the apostle Paul’s ministry. He was speaking about those who would turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God. When I think of that verse, I think of myself. I think of the fact that before I was saved, I was in darkness, I was under the power of Satan.

I was born in 1952, I wasn’t brought up in a christian family. When I was about 15 or 16 years old, I got involved into drugs, solvent abuse, sniffing glue and so on… I guess you could say I had a very low self esteem, and you might say I was, in a sort of way, suicidal. I remember when I was doing this, I was thinking ‘I am killing myself, but I'm not worried about it, I don’t care.’ That was the thought in my mind at the time, as a 15 year old or 16 year old.

And so, from there of course, I went on (it was the hippie era) the psychedelic drugs, hashish, and LSD. Gradually I started reading more books about eastern religions, and the occult. A particular one was by a guy named Carlos Castenada. It was about a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, and how he used psychedelic drugs to contact the spiritual world. It was during this time that I felt my life was getting increasingly dark.

I remember myself and my friend Steve, who’s a part of the story, in 1971, we hitchhiked up from Nova Scotia Canada to Toronto, and we went to a Led Zeppelin concert. Led Zeppelin was a rock group from England, and they were singing for the first time their new recording “Stairway to Heaven”, and I was thinking ‘OK, the stairway to Heaven, well, how do you get there, you know? Like… these things were on my mind for sure, and I was very curious about spiritual matters. But simply I was on the wrong path, I was under the power of the enemy.

That summer, when we went to the Led Zeppelin concert, my friend Steve and I were in a hippie hostel, and I took a dosage of LSD, and it was a potent dosage. It was a really heavy trip, as we called it, and I remember sitting in the corner of the hostel trying to piece my brain back together from the trip, and some Christians came in. I think it was a minister, with young people. They were handing out literature. The guy had a suit on, he looked something like I do now. I remember him looking down at me and saying “how can you people live in this filth?” And I was thinking “I don’t know”. I actually felt more dirty inside than outside. It felt like I was going down, even as a very young person. These Christians had given us a little paper, a Christian paper. It was the story of a girl who was on a trip, on a bad LSD trip, and she called out to the name of Jesus, and Christ came into her life. And I remember reading that, and looking at the name of Jesus Christ, on the Christian newspaper, on this tract, and how I felt that there was something really solid about that name, something that drew my heart and gave me a sense of peace. But I wasn’t converted then. I went back to Nova Scotia, tried to finish my education, get my grade 12. I managed to do that somehow. But my turning over a new leaf didn’t really help. I got more involved in the whole thing.

Then eventually, in summer 1973, we Hitchhiked to British Columbia, Canada, on the west coast, and we were out there, Steve and I were together. We were picking cherries in the fruit region of British Columbia. We were in the migrant workers' shack, staying there. The farmers provide these shacks for the migrant workers to work the orchards, and there was a guy there, by the name of Jerry. Jerry was from Vancouver, and had been a heroin addict. And we usually just called him ‘Jerry the junkie’. And of course he had all the needle marks inside his arms, inside his legs. For a while he had been with the Jesus people army in Vancouver, but he had backslidden. He was on methadone treatment, and he was there working on the farm where we were. One day, I was in my little workers' shack, and I was meditating on a chart on the wall, a mandala, you know. I was just meditating on it, trying to connect with whoever or whatever I didn’t know. Jerry came into the shack, and said

“Hey Brian, what are you doing?

I’m just meditating

You’re a fool.

Why?

Because Jesus said

This is so strange, because I keep running into Christians that keep giving me literature. I keep hearing statements like this, but I’m getting deeper and deeper into the occult and searching Hinduism, Eastern religions, and so on.

It was almost like a battle pulling me in one direction or the other. And I remember going up into the orchard and looking up into the sky. I didn’t know how to pray. I just looked up. It was just sort of an inner prayer. I said “God, if you’re really here, show me. Like… is it the way the Christians are speaking about? You know that there is death and judgement, salvation or am I just going to blend into the cosmos, you know, Nirvana, like we become one with the universe.” These types of thoughts. So that was my prayer, but I felt at that time that I was really going down. I was 21 years old, and I was down, just like I was going down a spiral. And I remember one night, in the migrant workers' sack, I had been asleep, it was dark in there. I woke up, and there was an evil spirit in my room. I was getting visitations by evil spirits and I was really really frightened by this.

Then a few days later, Steve and I were at a rock concert. I had picked up some Christian literature, and we were sitting there, listening to the music. We were stoned. I took out a book called “The good news by a man named John”, it was a little booklet on the gospel of John. I opened it up, and the first line was

When I read that, there was something again, the same feeling I had in the hostel in 1971, a real sense of peace and some type of solidity, or security. There was something powerful about those words. And then I took out another pamphlet that I had picked up from the Christians, and there is a picture of a man’s hand coming up out of a quicksand, another hand going down grabbing the hand and it said “here was a legend once that a man was drowning in quicksand, and a Hindu would say ‘Don’t worry, you’ll come back in another form’. Mohamed would say ‘Alas it is the will of Allah’, and Confucius would say ‘Man shouldn’t go near such places’, and Buddah would say ‘Let that life be a lesson to the world’, but Jesus would say ‘Give me your hand brother, and I’ll pull you free’.” When I saw the name of Jesus again, and I realised. Everything sort of fell into place of all the things I’d been reading from what the Christians had given to me, and when I was hearing: everything else was like a path to heaven, you know, I was trying to find my way to some type of peace or something, but this was different. It was not that I could find my way, but that someone had found me. He had found me right there. He loved me. I had the sense of the overpowering love of the Lord Jesus, that he was real, he was living, and he loved me. And I turned to my friend Steve, and I said “Steve, it’s Jesus.” And he almost fainted, the blood went out of his face. You know, I could be hindu one day, Harikrishna the other day, this another day, another day. In fact I was headed for a Zen monastery in Vancouver, I was going to join that to try to get my head together. Steve couldn’t care less. But when I said “Steve, it’s Jesus”, that had an impact. The name of Jesus is powerful. And so that’s what Paul says

Jesus can still do that today, and I believe he still does that today. And if you read this, call upon the name of Jesus and see that he died for sinners. It’s not us trying to find our way to God but he has come down, and he has sought the lost sheep.