The Testimony of The Chuck
I used to think that i grew up in a Christian home, and on the surface you would think i did. Nearly every sunday we were in church and my parents stressed the importance thereof with words. But with their actions the rest of the week they said something different, as did we all. It seems that i can remember more times when there wasn't a fight in my house than when there was. As a result i had a faith that modled this, i believed in God on the intellectual level, yes i believed that he existed, but when it came to my actions i chose to do things that i knew were contrary to Him. There were many times in my young life where i would attempt to live like i thought a Christian should live. The problem was that i never actually was able to get into reading my bible, heck most of the time i didn't even know where my bible was. And as a result my faith always faltered, because though i had the desire, at times, i didn't have the roots to sustain me when things became difficult.
About the time i was a sophmore in high school I decided that faith in action wasn't worth fighting for anymore, and while i retained my intellectual belief in God i no longer tried to match that with my actions. This was partly as a result of the fact that there were virtually no Christians and my high school not to meantion that it wasn't cool to be a Christian, because that meant you couldn't do all the things the cool kids did. In other words i exchanged the truth for a lie because to me it was easier...at least in the short run. The truth being Christ and how he wanted me to live, and the lie popularity. I traded true happiness with Christ to get myself popularity. Consequently at this time i began smoking pot because all the "cool" kids were doing it and i just had to know why. I found that pot was very exciting because it gave you a real high but what it took me a little while to realize was the penalty of this high. I continued to go to church occationally even though i knew i was doing something that God would not like, mostly because my mother dragged me their. From time to time i even attended a bible study and once even attended high, and boy did i think i was cool for doing that.
Another thing i decided was important to me at this time, and even a bit before, was sex. I had all these hormones raging through me and everyone else was doing it or talking about doing it so i wanted to as well. There were even a few times where i began dating girls in order to have sex with them, but i didn't really care for them, so my conscience caught up with me, and i couldn't bring myself to be with a girl that i didn't really care for. At the time if i had had it my way my conscience would have shut up at this time, so i am completely unsure as to why it didn't, but i am very thankful that it didn't keep quiet. Although i had conceeded on these things i still had yet to conceed on the idea of drinking, because my family had a history of alcoholics. My father had been one when i was a young child, and my mother had 12 aunts an uncles on her mother's side of the family who were as well as her mother. But my conscience grew weak in this area as senior prom approached. I figured that now i needed to try out alcohol and prom was the perfect opportunity. I remember the weekend prior to Prom being in church and the whole time thinking, i am lying just by being here since i am planning to get drunk next weekend. Again i thought that this was the one thing i was missing out on. I believe i was missing out on something, but it was far greater than beer. After Prom we went to a party at a friend of mine's place, it was perfect because it was out in the woods and isolated. This experience reminded me in a way of the first time i smoked pot in that it was really awesome, even still i remember thinking that night that i needed something else, so i went looking to see if anyway had brought any pot, when i had done that i still wanted more and went looking for my prom date. Fortunately someone had spilled beer on her and she had left. Eventually i passed out in a tent. I give my parents some credit, they kept me from drinking on all other occations than this, with this incident they kinda figured they had no choice, but i knew that if i did it another time they would not be so accepting. But i had gotten a taste of the party life, a taste that lingered sweet in my mouth and so when i got to college i was free to start if i so pleased. I was a shy kind of person so i didn't really make many friends really quickly and being that i had been placed in the wellness dorm at school, the right type of people weren't really around so i never got into drinking on campus. But i kept in touch with friends back home and we would come home on weekends and party together after football games. I even threw myself a 19th birthday party and got smashed. it was one of the few times i was able to drink beer because of how much i hated the taste.
One night i tried hard to drink beer but just couldn't bring myself to do it, it was too disgusting. I kept getting that bitter beer face that they used to show on commercials about bad beer, except i got it no matter what kind of beer. So i didn't drink much but stayed at the party anyway, and as a result saw some things that caused me to have a different outlook on drinking. One of the things i realized was that everyone was retarded. What an epiphany, drunk people are retarded, duh!! But they were so retarded that it was annoying, and the fact that they thought they were so cool for it just annoyed me the more. I later did some thinking and thought, if these people need to be drunk or high to have fun together then i guess they aren't very good friends. And then the host of the party decided he wanted to leave and go to his mothers house so he kicked everyone out, even though i protested and said that one of my friends wasn't capable of driving, especially since there had been a dusting of snow that night. Again i am very thankful that i wasn't drunk and was capable of realizing this and having my friend spend the night at my house which was only a little more than a mile down the road.
So at this point i began to realize how dumb and pointless drinking was. One of the more interesting realizations i came to is the level of friendship between these people. They are such good friends that they need alcohol and pot to be able to hang out with each other. Now granted these things can be fun, at least while your on them, but how much do you remember and are you really in control? The answer is no. I also came to realize that these people whom i was trying to be like weren't happy. I was chasing after something hoping it would make me happy but those who had it weren't happy themselves. I didn't completely stop drinking after this point but slowly stopped over time.
A couple of months later i made a new set of friends at school through a game called Halo. With our campus network we were able to play Halo over the network link and one of my friends had told me about this. So one night i decided to see if people were playing, and there were! So i joined in the game and had a lot of fun and played into the night. When the other people finally quit i got up and walked down the hall to the bathroom with my roomate talking about the game. As we neared the bathroom a couple of guys came out of the room next to the bathroom and i noticed they were talking about Halo and they asked if i was the one who was playing with them. I said yeah and essentially a friendship was born between me and them. It turned out that there were about 12 or so people who like to play this game and we would play as often as we could. there were a couple of kids from the basement who played as well. These friends of mine i now realize were really friends. My friends in high school were only my friends because they were popular and at times they would treat me like crap to make themselves look cooler. As a result i did this to other kids. As i got to know my "Halo friends" i realized that these guys (for the most part) weren't like this. They were really my friends. They didn't just allow me to hang around with them, but wanted to hang out with me. Of course i wouldn't have been able to say all of this at the time but that is what they were, they were true friends who liked me for who i was. A little while after being friends with these guys i heard that a few of them were Christians because a couple nights of the week they weren't around to play Halo. They were in fact going to IV. Now these two guys were two of the cooler people that i knew. I guess i wouldn't have ranked them or anything but they were really cool. When i found out they were Christians i was rather shocked, because from my high school experience i was under the impresstion that being a cool Christian was an oximoron. I didn't think it was possible. There was a church that i went to at one point who had cool Christians but by this time most of those people had themselves turned away from the church and gone into the world. And in high school Christians were by far not cool because they couldn't do all the things that people thought were cool, such as drinking smoking swearing. So in reality it was my idea of cool that had be tainted. Regardless i was shocked. From this point i guess you could say i observed their live, without trying to really, but it was just something that happened. I saw them continue to be cool while at the same time not compromising their faith to do so. By doing this i realized not only had an intellectual belief in God and Christianity like i had, they had faith in action.
An example of this is how they dealt with one of our friends named Roy. Now Roy was a bit immature and they really didn't enjoy his company, and while they at times expressed their dislike of many of his comments and ideas they were reserved considering how he treated them. Roy liked to get them going so he would say something that he knew they wouldn't like. One time i remember him standing outside their door swearing because they had a rule that you couldn't swear in their room. Roy wanting to spite them would stand in the doorway and swear at them. Their reaction wasn't much, where i probably would have called him stupid or something, and i probably did, they didn't really react. I mean they expressed the fact that they thought him quite childish but left it at that, they didn't make a big deal of it, as i know i would of.
It was around this time that i came to the realization that i wanted to give God another try. At this point though i was a bit afraid to voice, a few times i had already meantioned that i had similar beliefs as Jon(one of the two Christian guys), and this seemed to surprise him. The reason i didn't say anything was because while they were cool even with this, it was still hard for me when i thought about what other people would think about me if i started going, but that was only part of it. I was in fact afraid of having to change my life around. Also i still had it in my mind that you needed to clean yourself up before you could start going to places like this. This however is not true, if we were supposed to be good before we got to church, one there would be no point because we'd already be good and two no one could do it because no one can be good on their own. I am speaking of good in the sense of being able to do all the right things, to never mess up. So i didn't start going ot IVCF (InterVarsity Christian Fellowship) that year.
The summer came and i did a lot of thinking and observing, and talking with my grandparents at their restaurant. When i say observing, it wasn't exactly something i did on purpose, i just noticed what was going on in his life. At the beginning of the summer he was living with our aunt and going to church on sundays, working hard at the restaurant. The more he hung out with his mother and family that lived with her, the more he started smoking pot. As he began smoking pot he gave up on God in a sense. He started going over to his mothers on sunday instead of to church, all for the high. He once commented that the only thing that gave him what pot did was the church, and i was like then why not go to church. He didn't get it and drifted away, i hardly hear from him now, but i hear that he drifts in and out of the church. I also began thinking about my older brother Harry and the crew he used to run with. How they spent all of their time trying to figure out how they were going to get their next high. I mean they went to school at the same time and tried to get by, but it seemed like they thought their purpose was to be high. Talk about slavery, they were inslaved to pot, and it just happened to be the thing they thought was making them free and happy. I also watched as they wasted all of their money on it. My brother even going into debt over $1000 to credit card companies trying to sell pot, but it never worked and he always ended up smoking it all. So i thought upon these things and also realized that when i got high there was always that down time, when you are coming down from your high, and that is one of the worst things. You go from feeling really good to feeling really not so good. Not to meantion that when you get high you are high till you come down. So if you decide you don't wanna be high anymore, it doesn't matter you still have to wait. Pondering all of this i smoked my last joint sometime that summer with my cousin, and really haven't had much of a desire to puff another one since.
Toward the end of that summer and the beginning of the school year, can't quite remember which. I had a dream "that all men were created equal"...no wait that wasn't it, or right now i remember. In my dream i kind of felt like i was suspended in the air, but at the same time rising. There were other people there with me who i had known throughout my life, and it was like we were all on this invisible platform slowly rising into Heaven. I got the impression that we were all on our way to the Heaven to be judged. Now i had learned enough from sunday school that those who don't know Jesus will be sent to hell, so i began feeling sorry for those people i had known from high school who i knew didn't believe. We continued to rise and consequently i kept thinking and as i did i realized that i wasn't living my life the way Jesus would want me to, so how did i know that i wasn't going to hell too. When i came to this realization i woke up. It was a rather scarry experience, the interesting part was that it just expressed some thing i already knew in my heart. I knew that i wasn't living my life the way i should and that just believing that Jesus lived and died wasn't enough if it was only on the intellectual level. I believe i was already on my way back to God and stuff anyway but this definatley hurried the process.
Around the beginning of my sophmore year i gathered up the courage to talk to my Christian friends John and Justin about coming to IV with them. The first week i told them to make sure that i went, but when they went to go i changed my mind. I was nervous about going because all the Christian environments i had been in previously seemed a bit fake and they all seemed perfect and i had so many problems in my life. The next week though i ended up going with them, and i was very shy and only sat next to my friend Justin for most of that year. The first semester that i attended i went about once every other week and made some more observations. I saw how there were other people on campus who were talking about how this group had helped them so much, one in particular named Amy Wilson who said she would have probably dropped out and gone home if she hadn't found IV. Not to meantion i realized that when i went i felt better than when i didn't. And this feeling wasn't like pot, where when you are on it you feel good but when you leave it you don't. It was more of a lasting feeling, yes it eventually went but lasted quite a while and i wasn't down as much.
So slowly, very slowly, i began to change my habits. I used to listen to Eminem all the time, and i mean all the time. Not only did i listen to him but i loved him because was so right about some things that were wrong with society and things of that sort. And i still believe he is, and many musicians are right, but their responces to these problems are either F them, or follow me. Eminem i think said both, and his idea's were more destructive than constructive. He essentially said get mad and don't take crap, but this philosphy only leads to more crap and even things like trouble with police and things of that sort. I realized that even though he was right about the problems his answers didn't work either. I also realized that the answers to these questions that were provided in the bible and through my Christian friends and things like that were much better and worked. This in inself intruiged me because up until this point Christianity had been just a bunch of rules to live by, but they were difficult rules to follow not to meantion i didn't understand why, all i knew were the rules. But as i went through my life i realized that there were reasons behind some of these rules, although a few of the rules i had been taught as a child were not what the bible spoke of but additions religious people had made. I also began to see IV as a church, but unlike regular church this church was completely focused on the needs i had, unlike regular church because its focused toward older people.
So around my Christmas time i decided i would get a bible and start reading it, i also figured it was a good idea to get a Christian CD so i could get some good thoughts in my head instead of only bad ones from Eminem and D12.
About the time i was a sophmore in high school I decided that faith in action wasn't worth fighting for anymore, and while i retained my intellectual belief in God i no longer tried to match that with my actions. This was partly as a result of the fact that there were virtually no Christians and my high school not to meantion that it wasn't cool to be a Christian, because that meant you couldn't do all the things the cool kids did. In other words i exchanged the truth for a lie because to me it was easier...at least in the short run. The truth being Christ and how he wanted me to live, and the lie popularity. I traded true happiness with Christ to get myself popularity. Consequently at this time i began smoking pot because all the "cool" kids were doing it and i just had to know why. I found that pot was very exciting because it gave you a real high but what it took me a little while to realize was the penalty of this high. I continued to go to church occationally even though i knew i was doing something that God would not like, mostly because my mother dragged me their. From time to time i even attended a bible study and once even attended high, and boy did i think i was cool for doing that.
Another thing i decided was important to me at this time, and even a bit before, was sex. I had all these hormones raging through me and everyone else was doing it or talking about doing it so i wanted to as well. There were even a few times where i began dating girls in order to have sex with them, but i didn't really care for them, so my conscience caught up with me, and i couldn't bring myself to be with a girl that i didn't really care for. At the time if i had had it my way my conscience would have shut up at this time, so i am completely unsure as to why it didn't, but i am very thankful that it didn't keep quiet. Although i had conceeded on these things i still had yet to conceed on the idea of drinking, because my family had a history of alcoholics. My father had been one when i was a young child, and my mother had 12 aunts an uncles on her mother's side of the family who were as well as her mother. But my conscience grew weak in this area as senior prom approached. I figured that now i needed to try out alcohol and prom was the perfect opportunity. I remember the weekend prior to Prom being in church and the whole time thinking, i am lying just by being here since i am planning to get drunk next weekend. Again i thought that this was the one thing i was missing out on. I believe i was missing out on something, but it was far greater than beer. After Prom we went to a party at a friend of mine's place, it was perfect because it was out in the woods and isolated. This experience reminded me in a way of the first time i smoked pot in that it was really awesome, even still i remember thinking that night that i needed something else, so i went looking to see if anyway had brought any pot, when i had done that i still wanted more and went looking for my prom date. Fortunately someone had spilled beer on her and she had left. Eventually i passed out in a tent. I give my parents some credit, they kept me from drinking on all other occations than this, with this incident they kinda figured they had no choice, but i knew that if i did it another time they would not be so accepting. But i had gotten a taste of the party life, a taste that lingered sweet in my mouth and so when i got to college i was free to start if i so pleased. I was a shy kind of person so i didn't really make many friends really quickly and being that i had been placed in the wellness dorm at school, the right type of people weren't really around so i never got into drinking on campus. But i kept in touch with friends back home and we would come home on weekends and party together after football games. I even threw myself a 19th birthday party and got smashed. it was one of the few times i was able to drink beer because of how much i hated the taste.
One night i tried hard to drink beer but just couldn't bring myself to do it, it was too disgusting. I kept getting that bitter beer face that they used to show on commercials about bad beer, except i got it no matter what kind of beer. So i didn't drink much but stayed at the party anyway, and as a result saw some things that caused me to have a different outlook on drinking. One of the things i realized was that everyone was retarded. What an epiphany, drunk people are retarded, duh!! But they were so retarded that it was annoying, and the fact that they thought they were so cool for it just annoyed me the more. I later did some thinking and thought, if these people need to be drunk or high to have fun together then i guess they aren't very good friends. And then the host of the party decided he wanted to leave and go to his mothers house so he kicked everyone out, even though i protested and said that one of my friends wasn't capable of driving, especially since there had been a dusting of snow that night. Again i am very thankful that i wasn't drunk and was capable of realizing this and having my friend spend the night at my house which was only a little more than a mile down the road.
So at this point i began to realize how dumb and pointless drinking was. One of the more interesting realizations i came to is the level of friendship between these people. They are such good friends that they need alcohol and pot to be able to hang out with each other. Now granted these things can be fun, at least while your on them, but how much do you remember and are you really in control? The answer is no. I also came to realize that these people whom i was trying to be like weren't happy. I was chasing after something hoping it would make me happy but those who had it weren't happy themselves. I didn't completely stop drinking after this point but slowly stopped over time.
A couple of months later i made a new set of friends at school through a game called Halo. With our campus network we were able to play Halo over the network link and one of my friends had told me about this. So one night i decided to see if people were playing, and there were! So i joined in the game and had a lot of fun and played into the night. When the other people finally quit i got up and walked down the hall to the bathroom with my roomate talking about the game. As we neared the bathroom a couple of guys came out of the room next to the bathroom and i noticed they were talking about Halo and they asked if i was the one who was playing with them. I said yeah and essentially a friendship was born between me and them. It turned out that there were about 12 or so people who like to play this game and we would play as often as we could. there were a couple of kids from the basement who played as well. These friends of mine i now realize were really friends. My friends in high school were only my friends because they were popular and at times they would treat me like crap to make themselves look cooler. As a result i did this to other kids. As i got to know my "Halo friends" i realized that these guys (for the most part) weren't like this. They were really my friends. They didn't just allow me to hang around with them, but wanted to hang out with me. Of course i wouldn't have been able to say all of this at the time but that is what they were, they were true friends who liked me for who i was. A little while after being friends with these guys i heard that a few of them were Christians because a couple nights of the week they weren't around to play Halo. They were in fact going to IV. Now these two guys were two of the cooler people that i knew. I guess i wouldn't have ranked them or anything but they were really cool. When i found out they were Christians i was rather shocked, because from my high school experience i was under the impresstion that being a cool Christian was an oximoron. I didn't think it was possible. There was a church that i went to at one point who had cool Christians but by this time most of those people had themselves turned away from the church and gone into the world. And in high school Christians were by far not cool because they couldn't do all the things that people thought were cool, such as drinking smoking swearing. So in reality it was my idea of cool that had be tainted. Regardless i was shocked. From this point i guess you could say i observed their live, without trying to really, but it was just something that happened. I saw them continue to be cool while at the same time not compromising their faith to do so. By doing this i realized not only had an intellectual belief in God and Christianity like i had, they had faith in action.
An example of this is how they dealt with one of our friends named Roy. Now Roy was a bit immature and they really didn't enjoy his company, and while they at times expressed their dislike of many of his comments and ideas they were reserved considering how he treated them. Roy liked to get them going so he would say something that he knew they wouldn't like. One time i remember him standing outside their door swearing because they had a rule that you couldn't swear in their room. Roy wanting to spite them would stand in the doorway and swear at them. Their reaction wasn't much, where i probably would have called him stupid or something, and i probably did, they didn't really react. I mean they expressed the fact that they thought him quite childish but left it at that, they didn't make a big deal of it, as i know i would of.
It was around this time that i came to the realization that i wanted to give God another try. At this point though i was a bit afraid to voice, a few times i had already meantioned that i had similar beliefs as Jon(one of the two Christian guys), and this seemed to surprise him. The reason i didn't say anything was because while they were cool even with this, it was still hard for me when i thought about what other people would think about me if i started going, but that was only part of it. I was in fact afraid of having to change my life around. Also i still had it in my mind that you needed to clean yourself up before you could start going to places like this. This however is not true, if we were supposed to be good before we got to church, one there would be no point because we'd already be good and two no one could do it because no one can be good on their own. I am speaking of good in the sense of being able to do all the right things, to never mess up. So i didn't start going ot IVCF (InterVarsity Christian Fellowship) that year.
The summer came and i did a lot of thinking and observing, and talking with my grandparents at their restaurant. When i say observing, it wasn't exactly something i did on purpose, i just noticed what was going on in his life. At the beginning of the summer he was living with our aunt and going to church on sundays, working hard at the restaurant. The more he hung out with his mother and family that lived with her, the more he started smoking pot. As he began smoking pot he gave up on God in a sense. He started going over to his mothers on sunday instead of to church, all for the high. He once commented that the only thing that gave him what pot did was the church, and i was like then why not go to church. He didn't get it and drifted away, i hardly hear from him now, but i hear that he drifts in and out of the church. I also began thinking about my older brother Harry and the crew he used to run with. How they spent all of their time trying to figure out how they were going to get their next high. I mean they went to school at the same time and tried to get by, but it seemed like they thought their purpose was to be high. Talk about slavery, they were inslaved to pot, and it just happened to be the thing they thought was making them free and happy. I also watched as they wasted all of their money on it. My brother even going into debt over $1000 to credit card companies trying to sell pot, but it never worked and he always ended up smoking it all. So i thought upon these things and also realized that when i got high there was always that down time, when you are coming down from your high, and that is one of the worst things. You go from feeling really good to feeling really not so good. Not to meantion that when you get high you are high till you come down. So if you decide you don't wanna be high anymore, it doesn't matter you still have to wait. Pondering all of this i smoked my last joint sometime that summer with my cousin, and really haven't had much of a desire to puff another one since.
Toward the end of that summer and the beginning of the school year, can't quite remember which. I had a dream "that all men were created equal"...no wait that wasn't it, or right now i remember. In my dream i kind of felt like i was suspended in the air, but at the same time rising. There were other people there with me who i had known throughout my life, and it was like we were all on this invisible platform slowly rising into Heaven. I got the impression that we were all on our way to the Heaven to be judged. Now i had learned enough from sunday school that those who don't know Jesus will be sent to hell, so i began feeling sorry for those people i had known from high school who i knew didn't believe. We continued to rise and consequently i kept thinking and as i did i realized that i wasn't living my life the way Jesus would want me to, so how did i know that i wasn't going to hell too. When i came to this realization i woke up. It was a rather scarry experience, the interesting part was that it just expressed some thing i already knew in my heart. I knew that i wasn't living my life the way i should and that just believing that Jesus lived and died wasn't enough if it was only on the intellectual level. I believe i was already on my way back to God and stuff anyway but this definatley hurried the process.
Around the beginning of my sophmore year i gathered up the courage to talk to my Christian friends John and Justin about coming to IV with them. The first week i told them to make sure that i went, but when they went to go i changed my mind. I was nervous about going because all the Christian environments i had been in previously seemed a bit fake and they all seemed perfect and i had so many problems in my life. The next week though i ended up going with them, and i was very shy and only sat next to my friend Justin for most of that year. The first semester that i attended i went about once every other week and made some more observations. I saw how there were other people on campus who were talking about how this group had helped them so much, one in particular named Amy Wilson who said she would have probably dropped out and gone home if she hadn't found IV. Not to meantion i realized that when i went i felt better than when i didn't. And this feeling wasn't like pot, where when you are on it you feel good but when you leave it you don't. It was more of a lasting feeling, yes it eventually went but lasted quite a while and i wasn't down as much.
So slowly, very slowly, i began to change my habits. I used to listen to Eminem all the time, and i mean all the time. Not only did i listen to him but i loved him because was so right about some things that were wrong with society and things of that sort. And i still believe he is, and many musicians are right, but their responces to these problems are either F them, or follow me. Eminem i think said both, and his idea's were more destructive than constructive. He essentially said get mad and don't take crap, but this philosphy only leads to more crap and even things like trouble with police and things of that sort. I realized that even though he was right about the problems his answers didn't work either. I also realized that the answers to these questions that were provided in the bible and through my Christian friends and things like that were much better and worked. This in inself intruiged me because up until this point Christianity had been just a bunch of rules to live by, but they were difficult rules to follow not to meantion i didn't understand why, all i knew were the rules. But as i went through my life i realized that there were reasons behind some of these rules, although a few of the rules i had been taught as a child were not what the bible spoke of but additions religious people had made. I also began to see IV as a church, but unlike regular church this church was completely focused on the needs i had, unlike regular church because its focused toward older people.
So around my Christmas time i decided i would get a bible and start reading it, i also figured it was a good idea to get a Christian CD so i could get some good thoughts in my head instead of only bad ones from Eminem and D12.
posted by Chuckles at 6:17 PM
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