"Jesus in a Jail Cell"

The church I grew up in was big on “testimonies,’’ where someone gets up and tells all about how horrible their life was before they came to know Jesus. And apparently because we didn’t have enough people within our own church who’d lived horrible enough lives before their conversion, we often brought in special guest speakers to share what they’d done before becoming Christians.

Today, in hindsight, I realize the purpose was not to talk about all they’d done before becoming Born Again. But at the time, all I seem to remember was all the stuff they did before whatever crisis occurred in their life to turn it all around.

I can remember former gang members, former Hell’s Angels, former band singers … just to name a few. I remember going to watch the movie version of “The Cross and the Switchblade” at a time when we weren’t allowed to go to movies (going to movies supported Hollywood, you know, and all that Hollywood represented), which led me to read the book. And the book was more graphic than the movie, and all I could think of was, “I’d like to see some of that!”

Yes. Mostly what happened to me in church in those days was being envious of the guys who’d ridden with motorcycle gangs or run with New York City street gangs or been some kind of Mafia insider.

What I needed, I decided, was not Jesus. Not yet, anyway.

What I needed was an honest-to-God, crime-and-horror filled, edge-of-the-seat exciting testimony.

The trouble with that was my upbringing. I didn’t know any motorcycle gang members, or Mafia dons, or how to get a switchblade (there was a rumor that you could buy them in Panama City, but we didn’t go to Panama City for vacation; I did find a knock-off knife that “looked” like a switchblade in a souvenir store in Gatlinburg, Tenn., and I bought that because it was as close as I’d ever seen to the real thing).

I did, later, know some guys who did drugs. But, honestly, I was so terrified of drugs that I just knew I’d be one of those guys who overdosed on the first “hit” of whatever I took. Even when, in college, I was confronted with the opportunity to smoke some dope, I couldn't shake the feeling that if I did there was a good chance it would be the last breath I ever took.

Being a drunk was out, because I couldn’t stand the taste of alcohol. Still can’t. Every now and then I try, just to see if my taste buds have changed, but they haven’t. Beer, wine, liquor, those fruity drinks with rum – can’t stand any of them. Once, when I was working a summer job for a billboard company outside of Athens, Ga., we went to a company picnic. I reached into the cooler for a drink, pulled out a beer, dropped it, and got a Coke. Later, one of the guys I worked with told me, “I knew you were a Christian when I saw you drop that beer.” He was Pentecostal, and often talked about demon alcohol. In fact, later in the summer he took me with him to go cast out a demon that had taken over one of his church-members. I never told him that I dropped the beer because I don’t like the taste; just like I never told him that “demon’’ we were trying to cast out was really just a guy suffering the “D.T.’s” (delirium tremens).

Someone told me you had to learn to like alcohol, and I guess I’ve just never been dedicated enough to want to do that.

That lack of dedication has been a struggle for me, all of my life.

But I have dabbled around the edges of a lot of that kind of stuff. I had good friend in college who was basically permanently stoned (but he was a heck of a foosball player).

I worked construction one summer in Atlanta with a guy who was working just long enough to get his bike fixed, who was part of some Southeastern United States motorcycle gang whose name I can’t remember and can’t find on any google search of biker gangs. It seems like it was the Cherokee Outlaws or something like that. Interesting guy who told me a lot of great stories, who let me know how the gang would ride through small towns by going in groups of three but always allowing a car in-between because if they rode in bigger groups the small town police would pull them over and, at the very least, charge them with parading without a license. He also told me something I’ve never forgotten, that there were two books I needed to read: the Bible, and the Count of Monte Cristo. “They are both really long,’’ he told me. “But at the end, they both have a great message.”

The first time I was ever offered a rock of cocaine was on a golf course. It wasn’t some fancy country club; in fact, it was on a Monday when the course was closed but we knew a guy who would let a bunch of us play on Mondays when no one else was there (kind of like the CaddyShack kids at the swimming pool). The guy was nice about it: he offered, I declined, he said he didn’t mind if I wanted it because he had more, I thanked him for his generosity (I might have even said something like, "Not this time, maybe later" because my mama taught me to always be polite when offered a free gift) but told him I just couldn’t, and he said ok, and then we finished the round we were playing.

I’ve seen some stuff and … well, mostly I’ve seen some stuff; a lot of stuff, from years of traveling the country as a sportswriter. I haven’t done hardly any of it, but it now occurs to me that I was close enough that if something had gone wrong, I might have found my “testimony” story (“See, I was in this county prison where I first met Jesus. Not Jesus of the Bible, but a Hispanic guy named Jesus. I always thought that was kind of a sacrilegious name, but it turns out this guy was a Christian. At least, he had all these tattoos of crosses on his arms and chest and back …” or so my story would go).

I’ve actually never been locked up in prison. I did visit a county prison once, for a story. I've got a friend who did time in a minimum security prison. And I’ve ridden in the back of a police car a time or two in Panama City - but not while I was looking for a switchblade. The police just took me back to the hotel where we were staying and told me and my friends to stay out of abandoned sea-side motels. (It’s a long story).

All this time, I was never far from a Bible. I was a Christian, a Jesus-follower, born-again, washed in the blood, whatever you want to call it (but I have come to reject “evangelical” because it’s become so politicized). I always went to church, more or less (meaning not every Sunday, but enough to be able to tell my mama I went). And I always read a lot.

I’d studied some other religions, like Islam and Buddhism and Mormonism and the like. I recognized they could all be wrong, but they couldn’t all be right (including Christianity). I tended toward Christianity, maybe because that’s what I was raised in and my family was what a friend of mine called “off the deep end” - but in a good way, not the offensive way that is all self-righteous and “us vs. them” and always needing someone to look down on somebody else to feel morally superior and closer to God.

Lord knows – and I mean that literally – there were enough people in the church I grew up in who did practice self-righteousness and ‘us vs. them’ and looked down on just about everybody that wasn’t in “the club.” Heck, the pope was the antichrist; dancing was vertical fornication; long hair on a guy made you a homosexual; “mixed bathing” was out (that’s boys and girls swimming together for you heathens unfamiliar with the phrase); most books, movies, rock music, art, and just about any entertainment other than John Wayne and "Gunsmoke" was “of the devil.” (And while we had a few deacons that smoked, at least their wives didn't chew!).

I had all this Christianity in my heart, but my head kept telling me something just didn’t fit. I felt like you had to lock your intellect on the other side of the door (in fact, I once heard a preacher say just that: “you’ve got to listen to me with your heart and not your head, because God talks to your heart and the devil talks in your head").

Then one warm spring day I sat down on the front porch of a house I was renting and started reading “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis.

When I finished, it was early afternoon. I was sun-burned. And hungry.

But it was like someone had opened the barrier between my heart and my head, and I felt like I actually believed and understood, at the same time. That was big for me, to have my brain and my heart actually agreeing with each other. I don't know that it had ever really happened before. Side note: my oldest brother developed a Ph.D. program at Golden Gate seminary in order to "develop competent professors and well-informed, capable pastors who can address the complex social and religious environments of the West in particular." I was hardly alone in this idea.


Just to be sure, I also read Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not A Christian.” Russell and Lewis were contemporaries, and both considered among the leading "thinkers" f their day. I wanted to give the other side equal time. But Lewis seemed to have all the answers for Russell.

I have read a lot of other stuff, too; a lot of philosophers and thinkers and believers and atheists and so forth. None of it has convinced me that options other than Christianity are anything but poor reflections of the truth.

And so, that’s my testimony. No drugs. No guns. No gangs. Just the beginning of how I came to believe what I believe.

I did run alcohol across the Mexican border back into the US from Juarez to El Paso one time, but that’s another story and not nearly as adventurous as it sounds. (“See, I was in this jail cell in Juarez where I met Jesus. Not Jesus from the Bible, but ….”)