Testimony

I got saved November 10th 1976 when I was 26 years old. What drove me to Jesus was the culmination of 9 years of drugs and ungodliness, and the interest and study of the occult that further opened the door to a demonic attack on my mind.

Sometime in early 1975 after eight years of filling myself with drugs and rebellion against God and most of how I was raised as a child, I began a seemingly harmless interest in UFO’s. It wasn’t long before the harmless interest turned into a consuming passion reading everything I could get my hands on concerning UFO’s.  Much of the material tried to link UFO’s with God, “Chariots of the Gods” (Erich von Däniken), “Spaceships of Ezekiel” (Joseph Blumrich), were two of the many authors that tried to link God to alien beings. Many others did not, but wrote material that attempted to remain entirely scientific. Writers such as J.Allen Hynek who actually came up with the scale of the classifying UFO encounters discouraged giving UFO’s a spiritual or religious tie. The more material I consumed the more I noticed much of what I read veered off into other areas of the occult, witchcraft, and demonology. It was during the last six months of the year and a half occult reading binge that I began to lose control of my thoughts and began hearing voices. I did not realize it at the time but I was beginning to experience the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, a condition my brother was diagnosed with in 1990, 14 years after this time period. Along that thought, if I would have gone to the doctor and told him what I was experiencing, he probably would have diagnosed me with paranoid schizophrenia.   

I’m guessing it was around June or July, I began experiencing thoughts that absolutely terrorized me. The beginning of it was very infrequently, I would hear horrible thoughts or suggestions that would terrify me because they were in my mind, but they were not all the time, but as the weeks and months passed by, they became more and more frequent and in the weeks and months before November 10th,  all my waking hours were filled with thoughts or suggestions of the most horrible behavior of every kind, some of them crimes and blasphemies against God.  

In the days immediately preceding me getting born again I was emotionally and mentally falling apart, with frequent times of being overcome with grief and remorse and terror, deep down my spirit pleading for help, and during which, there were moments of the unmistakable Spirit of God calling me to repentance. The day before I got saved I came home from work and locked myself in the bathroom and cried. One of the things that held me back was my reputation. What would people think, I would lose all my friends. “Hey did you hear, Monk is a religious fanatic now.” I feared I would become a laughing stock. Pride was holding me back. I had a knowledge of God, I went to Catholic grade school and Catholic high school, but I was not born again. I wasn’t a Christian. But I had a knowledge of God.

I really was at the end of my rope, I remember thinking while in the bathroom, that if I did not get right with God that my choices were either suicide end up in an insane asylum. In the days before I had asked my wife to contact her grandmother and have her church pray for me, but things only got worse. On the day before I got saved, Tuesday November 9th I had her ask her grandmother for her pastor to visit me. The next evening, after their Wednesday evening service he came to our house and we talked. Within minutes the conversation led to my need of accepting Christ. We prayed right then. As he was leaving he passed by the library of books I had collected. Occultic books of many subjects. He said, “You’re going to have to get rid of those books!” In my heart and out loud I said, “Done!” After he left I spent the rest of the evening ripping up the books, destroying all my drug paraphernalia and drugs, gathering up my music collection of about 230 albums and prepared to give them away. I knew that to totally leave my former life behind and follow Christ required me to get rid of the books and music that encouraged and helped me descend deeper into darkness. In the days and weeks following my salvation experience I gathered up all my 100 or so copies of Rolling Stone magazine and selected all the album adds that had a spiritual element. It was truly remarkable how many there were.

A disturbing development dawned on me immediately after getting saved, I realized my though life did not change, I was just as tormented as before I got saved. There may have been a miniscule difference but not much. I knew I had gotten saved because there were definitive changes in my life. My desire to smoke dope just left me when I got saved. I had a very filthy mouth that I could not keep in check before I got saved but it too just dropped off the radar. Three days after my conversion I put my cigarettes down and didn’t pick them up again, although the struggle and desire to smoke stayed with me for months, it lost its power over me little by little as the days and weeks passed. It was these victories in my life, in the days, weeks and months of me getting saved and the infrequent sensations of feeling the presence of God that carried me and sustained me. I knew I was saved because there was definite change for the good in my life, but the constant battle over my thought life was a complete rout of me by the enemy and was deeply troubling. I slept with my Bible under my pillow every night. I read the Bible every waking moment I could, at home as well as at work. I read anywhere from 40 to 60 chapters a day and kept this pace for the next seven years of my life.. In the first four months of my new life I attended church in Evendale, pastored by the man who prayed with me.  In March of 1977 I began attending Williamsburg Pentecostal Church.

It wasn’t long after we began attending WPC that I confided in Pastor Jerry  that I was greatly tormented in my thought life. He said “Don, all you need to do is renew your mind in the word of God.” We prayed and he shared with me a couple of Scriptures, Romans 12:1, 2 and 2 Corinthians 10:3-6. I not only memorized those passages, I recited them so often to myself I imagined that I branded them on my brain. During those early years at WPC, good, solid, Christian teaching books were also recommended to me. As I read Scripture daily, I was also directed to intermittently read books by good teachers and Pastors. Books by E.W. Kenyon, Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, Gordon Lindsay, E. F. Bosworth; David Wilkerson are some of the authors who fed me spiritually then and also now I was also  From that moment on, relief began, slowly but surely and eventually I got total victory in my thought life. The total time was about 3 years. No tormenting thoughts, just peace. Looking back, I believe I was healed of paranoid schizophrenia. Praise God for his faithfulness to his word.

Before I draw this to a close, let me say this about music. I am not against all music. Music is a powerful medium created by God that can be used for good or evil. Praise and worship music is a daily part of my every day. I am not against big band music, I love the Star Spangled Banner, the great patriotic songs of the military branches stir me up. I sing Happy Birthday. What I am against is music that celebrates ungodliness and rebellion against God and His word. There are those kinds of songs in contemporary music, music of my generation, rhythm and blues, rap, punk, county music, whatever the flavor. The same goes for movies and T.V. We need to guard our hearts.

I will say one more thing, and it is only personal to me. I  am not trying to apply anything momentous to anything or anybody but  me. Every year as a Christian, and I do today celebrate November 10th as my spiritual birthday, and will do so until the day I die. But the next day every year is Armistice Day, better known as Veterans Day. Originally it was the day to mark the armistice between the Allies and the Germans to end the great war, World War I on November 11, 1919. Spiritually, God was not at war with me, but I was at war with Him and on November 10, 1976 I agreed to the armistice. The peace treaty that he enacted for all of mankind was written in the New Covenant, with Jesus Christ suffering and dying for our sins, our rebellion, our war with God. All we have to do is get born again, repent for our sin, believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and declare Jesus as Lord of our lives. Peace is ours if we want it, but it is only through Christ Jesus.