No More I’s Capitalized… Just the You’s.

I’ve realized in the past few months that I feel my calling on this Earth is to be a storyteller, whichever avenues that might include. I’m usually not very good at telling stories with my mouth, but when it comes to paper and piano, I feel at home.

So, I think it’s only right that I tell my own story: one that I don’t have to create, but rather, someOne has created for me. It’s a story that I don’t have to gloss over with my own imagination. I can just tell it like it happened, down to every detail.

Just a little warning - some of this stuff I don’t think I’ve told anyone… Please don’t be offended if you read something about me you never knew before…

So here it is: my story.

About the same time the children in the small town of Lamar, Colorado were hurrying out of their schools on January 5th, 1989, I was hurrying my way out of my mother’s womb. She had a little bit of difficulty with the process, but it none of it mattered once she had me in her arms, with Dad right beside her. Two new parents welcoming their son into the world.

They were both independent, free-thinking people. They met in high school, my mom the head cheerleader, my dad the star football runningback. Could things have been more stereotypical?

They pushed through the stereotypes, though, and set out to prove such labels wrong. He proposed to her in a big brown van on their way to his parent’s ranch. They’re still together, and still haven’t been able to give up that van.

Being the liberated souls they were, they decided that religion was not for them. Both had had rough experiences with the likes of spirituality in the past, and didn’t feeling like playing with it again. They would do their best to protect their children from the hypocrisy of the church as well. They realized that ultimately, when it came to religion, it was up to their kids to choose for themselves. But they would gladly share their wisdom from rotten past experiences, should the subject ever come up.

I was taken from the hospital to a big brown house across the street from the local high school. There were no houses around then: just the high school in front, and vacant lots with a few trees to the sides and behind. It’s the house I still run back to in between the years of college. My family has never lived a day anywhere else.

The next three years were just about as normal for me as for anyone else. I spent my time learning to walk, eat, drink, go to the bathroom, and all the other daily functions of modern living, either at home or the babysitter’s house down the street. Twila was her name. She was much older that my parents, with a husband, Earl. Their house became my home away from home while my parents were busy making money to raise me with.

I learned to tackle in those first few years. My dad was excited to see his son excel in sports one day, and he decided to start early. He would lay down on one side, and wait for me to run at him and hit him as hard as I could, knocking us both down.

A few months before my third birthday, my sister was born: Mandi. We butted heads from the beginning, but always loved each other dearly just beneath the surface. When she was old enough, she accompanied me on my adventures through the lots around the house. She watched as friends of mine built two giant dirt bike ramps, one right behind the back alley, connected to the other, which was closer to the street on the next block down.

That place was where I found my imagination. I built a treehouse, with a zipline, and a dug-out basement as well. Through a shadow of the trees, there was a secret garden, and when I wasn’t busy defending the sacred ground from imaginary enemies, I was making friends with neighborhood kids and recruiting them for my cause. Whether it was ridding the treehouse of wasp nests, or pulling out all the roots from the walls of the basement, we did our duties as keepers of the area

The imagination that I gained from the territory behind my house translated into my schoolwork, and at home and on the field. Soon I was writing stories, playing music, drawing, painting, acting in children’s plays, and any other creative outlet I could find. I started in a the town baseball league at age 5, and made the “All-Stars” after every season. I loved reading, and gobbled up the first series I came across: the Chronicles of Narnia. Once in 4th grade, Harry Potter followed right after. It was also that year that my baseball teammates and I won our first state championship. I became a child of fantasy, complete with my alley sanctuary, and creative ambition. I had created a new world, and then invited the people closest to me to inhabit it.

I remember the day they cut that world down. I woke up to the sound of machines, and the blood in my veins became twice as heavy. In ten seconds, I was dressed and standing on my back porch, watching the trees that held up my empire fall to the ground.

I spent that day sitting in the alley, watching as modern housing developments replaced my childhood playground.

We retreated to the lot North of my house, and even built a three story clubhouse with another basement nearby. There was a rope swing and Christmas lights and even some old door frames. But it wasn’t the same. And in 6 months, they would become a grand set of low-rent apartments anyway.

About the same time, the neighborhood friends that had accompanied me through one adventure after another had moved, and I was left to keep my creative devices to myself, and make new friends as middle school started

I was still outgoing and fairly popular, but felt unfulfilled. I played football, basketball, and even more baseball, as our team looked for tougher competition in more elite leagues. We were on the road almost every weekend during the summer months, playing tournaments in dozens of cities. And although I gave the impression to most in the sixth grade that I was just another scholar athlete, I continued to develop my creative abilities at home.

As my mind continued to develop, the many religious avenues that were out there suddenly became evident to me. At first, I was very interested in Greek mythology: in Zues and the other gods that sat with him at Mount Olympus.

That religious curiosity turned to obsession in early seventh grade, though. I had never experienced any dimension of any kind of spirituality before then - I had never set foot inside of a church, not even for Christmas or Easter. I realized that there had been some sort of necessary spiritual factor missing in my life. I knew that it was something I wanted filled; I just didn’t know how I was going to go about filling it.

About that time, I met a new neighbor who had just recently moved into the new low-rent apartments beside my house. She was a self-proclaimed Wiccan - a word that had no sway in my mind then. She had me convinced the first time she told me about it. About they way she would cast spells, and speak with nature. I’m not going to lie, that concept was very appealing to me, and who was there to tell me any different? It’s not like I was rebelling against my parent’s wishes.

Soon, I found myself caught up in the great mystery and excitement that was Wicca. I learned incantations, I bought candles, I made a pentagram cloth to set on my floor to put the candles on. I made staffs and wands out of sticks, and other ornaments also made their way into my collection, all with the help of my new spiritual advisor, Tiffany.

I still remember the things she would do. Why I wasn’t scared to death then, I don’t know. I remember her changing the color of her eyes after almost a straight hour of chanting over her candles. I remember her making other candles in the room suddenly flicker to life without even touching a lighter. And I was never afraid. I wanted to be able to do what she did.

I ended up buying more and more spell books and wands, as well as other accessories, and my parents started to take notice. Like I said before, they had never really cared which religion I decided to follow, but they didn’t like my obsession over what my dad later called “the Occult”. I was surprised at first to find my parents with an opinion about a religious subject. I kept doing it despite my parents’ distaste.

One day in October, when I was done with football practice, Tiffany told me she really needed me to be with her that afternoon to help her perform a very important spell. When I arrived at her house, she explained that her current boyfriend had hit her, and she was very angry with him. She wanted to get even.

We both chanted a curse we found in one of her spell books, and burned a picture of her boyfriend over a black candle in the middle of her pentagram. After the spell was done, I went home.

Her boyfriend wasn’t at school the next day. I remember her skipping up to me as if with the best news in the world: her boyfriend had come down with a serious case of pneumonia overnight. He was in the hospital. She smiled and walked off, but I couldn’t really meet her enthusiasm.

When I first got into Wicca, I never really expected something this big happening. I didn’t think that such things were possible, and I certainly didn’t want anyone to get hurt, no matter what they had done to me or my friends. That’s when I started to get scared - when I started to feel like I might have been in over my head.

After football practice that day, I went straight home, and didn’t talk to Tiffany at all. She didn’t call either, and I didn’t mind one bit. I was starting to wonder if I had what it took to handle this religion; to call it mine. I was about to find out that things were much further from my grasp than I expected.

That night, after I had gotten into bed and was almost asleep, the doorbell rang. My mom came down to my room and said that there were two crying girls at the door asking for me.

A bit bewildered, I went upstairs to the front door, where two of Tiffany’s other friends were standing. In between sobs, they asked me to get everything that Tiffany ever gave me or bought me and hand it over. They also wanted any other “Wiccan object” that I had. I asked them why, and they said that something was wrong with Tiffany. They wanted to take the objects and burn them, because they thought it might help Tiffany ‘get better’.

I ran downstairs and got the stuff, and gave it to them. It was evident on their faces that they expected my help in all of this. I didn’t know what to do, but I followed them anyway.

When I walked into Tiffany’s apartment, she was kneeling on the living room floor, her hands straight above her head, her whole upper body rigid, and blood running down from her hands. He mother (who was disabled and in a wheelchair) was in the kitchen crying. She had no father.

Tiffany was bawling and occasionally screaming, and her two friends had both gone home. All at once, she would be forced down by invisible hands into a bowing positions, her bloody hands slamming into the carpet, staining it. Her fists were clenched so tight that she was drawing blood from her palms. Up until that point in my life, I had never seen anything more frightening.

Occasionally, she would be released from her fits, at which point she would fall to the ground, exhausted, and then retreat to her bedroom once she had regained her strength. I followed her once to try and make some sense out of what was going on.

She was curled up in her bed covers, bawling uncontrollably. I asked her what was happening to her.

“They’re mad at me,” she said.

“Who?” I said.

“They won’t say,” she said through her sobs, “They’re coming from the mirror. They said they’re going to kill me!”

I still don’t know how I kept myself from losing it with all the fear and confusion flooding my brain. I talked to her a bit more, trying to get more information about these people from the mirror, but soon, whatever had a hold of her earlier took a hold again. This time, she immediately stopped crying, sat up in her bed and walked out the door.

I followed her back into the living room, where she dropped to her knees again. And now, I realized that she was facing a big, oval mirror in her living room. She was bowing down to the mirror.

I ran into the kitchen and tried to explain it all to Tiffany’s mother, who used to be a devout Catholic. She wanted to call the priest, and ask for what she called an ‘exorcism.’

I had heard this word before. I had seen the movie, and the thought that Tiffany was being ‘possessed’ by some demonic force suddenly weighed upon my mind.

After a lot of sweet talk, Tiffany’s mom persuaded the priest to come over and at least look at Tiffany to see if an exorcism was in order at all.

About the time that she hung up the phone, Tiffany started doing the scariest thing of all. I heard her from the kitchen start to chant. At first it was in English, in her normal voice. I don’t remember all of what she said anymore, but it was something like, “Thrice the blood, thrice the bone, etc….” Her speech changed, though, and suddenly she was talking in a language neither me nor her spanish-speaking mother could understand, in a deeper, man’s voice.

That was the last straw for me. I had seen enough. It took every ounce of courage I had to run across the living room to the front door and open it. I’ll never forget the sight I saw before I closed the door. Tiffany was still bowing, chanting, but the oval mirror she worshiped had suddenly become filled with greasy hand prints. Some were big, and some small, but they were growing more numerous by the moment, as if a group of invisible hands were pressing up against it in turn.

I slammed the door and sprinted to my house, locked the doors, ran down to my basement bedroom and slept with the lights on. But I didn’t sleep. Constant fear kept me awake. Tiffany had reeked revenge on her boyfriend with my help. I figured that it wasn’t too long before whatever happened to Tiffany happened to me, too. In the months that followed that accident, I actually ended up staying upstairs in my sister’s bedroom so that I could get any sleep at all.

All I knew was I was done casting spells and burning candles.

The morning after the accident, Tiffany arrived at my doorstep and apologized for what had happened. She was bruised on her face, and her hands were bandaged, but it seemed like whatever had tortured her the night before was now gone. I still don’t know if it was indeed the work of an exorcist or not.

In the weeks that followed, nearly every day Tiffany would burn the items that I had given her along with her own, and every morning, they should all be back in a bundle in front of their front door. Once, they even turned up in my bedroom closet again, and I made sure to go burn those myself.

Tortured by memories and the items that wouldn’t leave them alone, Tiffany and her mother moved out of Lamar to Las Animas, a small town about 40 miles West of Lamar. I don’t know if the items followed them there, but once Tiffany left, so did they.
That particular part of my life was the scariest. I was haunted by the possibility that any moment I could be taken over by some evil force of nature that I didn’t even believe existed a few months before. But how could I deny them now, after what I’d seen?

Switchfoot sings a certain inspiration song called, “The Shadow Proves the Sunshine”. Those five words lie at the very center of my story and the pivotal moment that they came into my life (even though the song hadn’t been written) happened in the aftermath of that horrifying experience with Tiffany.

There was no doubt in my mind then that I had seen the devil. I had experienced evil firsthand, and couldn’t deny the existence of things like demons. One day, I remember the thought dawning on me: if I was acknowledging the existence of Satan, how could I deny the existence of God? If there was no good, how could I have discerned evil? If we had never seen any sunlight, would we call the darkness ‘night’?

At that point, I realized that I did indeed need to switch sides. I just had no idea which road I needed to take to get there.

Luckily, the road came to me.

After Christmas had come and gone, I stepped foot in a church for the first time in my life. I had been invited by a friend to what was called “Redeeming Love”, a charismatic Christian church outside of town. To be honest, that first Sunday I was very uncomfortable. In my home, personal spirituality was something that was kept locked up. It was private, and wasn’t meant to be shared with others, especially in such a way that I was suddenly exposed to.

I went to that church a couple Sunday mornings, and was then invited to a youth group at a First Baptist Church. A bunch of my friends went there, and of course, the service was directed at kids, so I felt much more comfortable there. I still didn’t like the idea of speaking about such spiritual matters so openly, though.

I stuck around despite my feeling uneasy. The creative part of me was very interested in the worship band, and I could also satisfy my competitive jones through the games we played. The youth pastor at the Baptist church, Terry White, kept his eye on me every Sunday, and once the summer came, he asked if I would like to attend a summer camp in the mountains with the youth group.

I was very hesitant at first. Every Sunday I got my fill of Christianity. I didn’t know if I could handle a whole week of people telling me how I should live my life.

I learned later, though, that the camp was a music, art and drama camp, and incorporated Christian teachings along with other activities. That sounded more like the kind of thing I wanted to be a part of, so I sent in my registration form late, and was lucky to be accepted. More lucky than I knew then.

Or maybe it wasn’t luck at all.

All week I heard the raw message of Christ, the savior. And after running for nearly six months from my fear of what had happened that night in October, a savior was just what I needed. “He is bigger than your fears,” they said. If I had known what Hallelujah meant then, when I heard that phrase for the first time, I would have shouted it from the tops of those mountains. I changed my life course and ran instead to Him that Friday, and He was more than glad to take me.