My Testimony

Hey all. I’ve been wanting to share for quite some time my salvation experience and the testimony of my life that led up to it. Here you go.

Believe It Or Not
Some folks may have a difficult time with aspects of my salvation encounter with the LORD. All I can say is, “I’m sorry and it isn’t my fault.”
The way He intervened was definitely supernatural and has a lot of speakings sprinkled throughout the story. I didn’t know that people believed that God doesn’t talk to people anymore when this was all happening in my life, so I had nothing to bias me from being dealt with. I had no theological presuppositions to gaurd me from Him. That being said, here it goes:

Back In The Day
My mom was 17, my dad was 19. They were both raised in church and were in rebellion and in the drug scene pretty heavy. My mom found out she was pregnant and her and my dad agreed to schedule an abortion. Now, in those days folks didn’t have the knowledge that we have today about the human-ness of a fetus, so they really didn’t know I was anything more than a blob. They were both druggies (by their own admissions) and were not living well at all. Bad company, bad living….just the kind of atmosphere that most bleeding heart liberals would say is not right for bringing in a life. In other words, mom and dad being wrapped up in speed, coke and weed means I should have not been born. Oh, and they got pretty involved with Hell’s Angels a few years later. Yeah.

God intervened and convicted both of them and I came to be. My mom actually laid down on her mom’s couch one day and closed her eyes and suddenly saw two little blue eyes looking at her. That is what shook her and caused her to want to keep me. My saintly Gramma walked into the bathroom where mom was weeping and asked, “Sherry, are you pregnant?”. Mom broke. She talks with my dad (who tells me he had been feeling that he didn’t want to go through with it either) and they decide to keep me. Yay!
By the way, I’m glad to be alive…even through the hard years early in my life. My wife is glad, my kids are glad and a few kids in Clearlake, CA are glad to (old youth group I shepherded for a time). I turned out not too bad for being born into a life that many today would say is reason enought to kill a baby.

When I’m about 8 years old, my dad is at the end of his rope. He’s coked out and wants to stop, but can’t. He said, “Jesus, if you’ll help me sleep and not have to do this stuff anymore, I’ll give you my life”. He crashed quickly after that with no “come down” (he was deathly afraid of that), no withdrawls and woke up born again, as he describes it. He has pretty consistently served God since then, aside from a few bumps in the road later.
My memories for the next few years are of bible studies, Keith Green’s music always playing, a sweet spirit in the home, parents who love Jesus and each other…oh, and Leon Patillo’s first album. Awesome stuff. Life is good.

Fast forward about 6-7 years. For some reason, things sorta cool off spiritually in the house. I don’t want to get into too many details and dishonor my parents publicly because they have both gotten right with God since this time, but suffice to say that what I began to see was Christian culture, a facade, churchianity. My parents both, in my retrospection, backslid severely and grew apart from each other. Divorce was filed, home was split and all that used to be a sweet christian home was death in my soul. My parents standards dropped as well. Movies we never used to be allowed to see, we were now going to the theatre to ingest. Both parents were consumed in either school and work or drugs and had no idea I was going the way I was going. Well, they knew, they just didn’t realize it was happening so fast.

I end up at a continuation school and meet a group of stoners. These guys are always hugging each other, saying, “love you bro, let’s smoke a bowl after school at my house”, and just enjoying great times together. They became to me all that the church should have been. Here I found love, community, acceptance and common ground around marijuana, my new found love. We jammed Red Hot Chili Peppers, Primus and other bands and just had a lot of good times together as friends.

I also got into Slayer and Tool. Why mention them?
Well, the severely demonic influence in both bands got a major grip on me and I drifted to pagan spirituality. Not any formal kind…no, no, no! That’s too religious and I was sick of that already. I just wanted to make up my own beliefs and get stoned and just…whatever. In fact, I kinda pulled a kind Solomon manuever, i.e., I had a knowledge that drugs opened you up to things and used that knowledge in that way. I would open myself up with drugs knowing full well that whatever spiritual element was in the music would also inhabit me. I started to find that by opening myself up to these spirits through drugs, they would come in and stay. I thought it was cool to have that presence, that powerful feeling inside. Only problem was that it would sometimes convulse me in anger fits without me even having any provocation.

Then The Girl
I meet someone named Tracy (not the real name). She had a very…uh, well, extravagant look to her. She was a combination of tough chick who could beat you up and yet looked like someone who could run the catwalk….or dance around a metal pole, but I digress.
We begin a physical relationship. After a short while I see she is very unstable mentally and I was just about to leave her (two months later) and found out she was pregnant. My heart smotes me and I stay. She never knows that I was going to leave. I never told her. Nine months later our daughter Tina (not the real name) is born. Tracy and I live together, all in all, 4 years. This relationship is full of severe marijuana smoking (mostly on my part) and a continuing fall into wierd spiritual phenomena beyond my control. There was physical abuse in this relationship as well, on both parts. Sometimes she threw the first punch, sometimes I did. It was bad every way you slice it.

Like A Wind
During these years of drugs and hellish living, I have several encounters with the Lord. One that stands out in my mind is when I’m rolling a joint and about the lick the gum edge of the paper. Suddenly I hear in my head, loud and clear, “THAT is SIN!”.
What? Excuse me?

I knew who it was. I had a very tender spirit as a young boy toward the Lord and was very familiar with His presence because of the once very Godly life my parents modeled in front of me. I knew this was God; Satan didn’t want me to quit smoking weed. I shook it off and smoked it anyway. Several months later I was driving back from my homeboys house, lit up like a christmas tree. I have very poor nightime eyesight as a result of taking LSD in a welding class in highschool and forgetting to put down my mask and did not have glasses at this time. I’m stoned out of my gourde, the lines are blurry and suddenly I’m about to hit a curb on the right side of the road that has a sort of ramp build to it at its beginning and then goes up to almost a two foot tall curb. If I would have hit it I would most certainly have gone into the ravine on either side of the bridge and likely died in sin and gone to hell. Before I can jerk the wheel, the car moves.

The hair stood up on my neck like you wouldn’t believe. I had a nano-second mental picture of a giant angel moving my car just a few seconds after this happened. I remember asking, “God, why would you save me like that when I’m living like this?” I had a silent kind of answer. Hard to describe, but the sense was like having a quick thought go through your head. It was as if that thought was telling me, “If I hadn’t, you’d be in hell right now and I have plans for your life.”
You’d like to think that this changed me, but it didn’t. I was glad to be alive, but still addicted and couldn’t quit.

The Pressure Cooker
Fast forward a couple more years. I now move from the East Bay up to Lake County. Nor Cal is beautiful baby! I’m still smokin’ more weed than ever, only now something is changing. I’m coming under constant conviction, not just sparse moments sprinkled here in there. At least once a week the Spirit of God is dealing with me heavily. I’m finding Him unavoidable and quite inconvenient. I remember one night being out in my driveway smokin’ a fatty (that’s all I did back then) and lifting it up to God and saying, “I keep hearing that knowing You is supposed to be better than this thing. If that’s true, then prove it. I can’t just join a church club, buy a bible and try to be christian; I have to come into direct contact with you…”
I didn’t know what I was trying to tell Him. I know now that I was telling Him that I had to be born again to be free. I also told Him, “I need something to happen to me that can’t be faked. When everyone starts asking why stoner Mark goes to church, I have to have more to tell them than that I’m just trying a new thing. I need reality!”
About 6 months after this, I met Him. No, He met me.

It’s a Wednessday night, August 14, 1998 and it’s about 9 o’clock at night. I just smoked a huge joint…so big that all I could do was lick the gum edge and flip it over and hold it til it dried. I think I had a gram and a half in it. It was as big as my thumb.
Anyway, I burned that bad boy and went in to watch the Simpsons. About 20 minutes later, I got hungry. So I started to fry up some potatoes, onions, garlic, mushrooms and green beans (I kid you not…and it was good!) in the kitchen. After about 5 minutes of cooking, I was enveloped in a very strong…I don’t know, like a force field or an invisible grip. Very strong. I felt like the Lord was just standing there holding me very tightly. Then I heard Him ask me, “Mark, what are you doing?”
My genius reply was going to be something stupid…I was halfway through thinking, “just smokin some weed I guess”. I didn’t even get to finish that thought. The Lord interupted me and asked, “what will you do if your life is required of you and you are living this way?”.

At that point, the kitchen disappeared. I was suddenly seeing myself at a concert, like a Lollapalooza atmosphere, smoking a joint and laughing it up. While I’m getting ready to hit the joint, Jesus comes back on these huge clouds and He’s staring at me. At that point, the chill of death entered my soul. I came back to my senses, but the sting of eternity in hell was causing me great anguish. I don’t know how to describe this, but I can say with absolute certainty that I know exactly what it feels like for every human who has ever died outside of Christ and came to the realization that they have entered eternity and it’s their own fault. I still can’t articulate it, but as I type this the feeling is somewhat revisited. I’m reminded of the revivals of Wesley, Whitefield and Edwards and the Salvation Army early days, when people shrieked at the revelation of God’s holiness and the reality of hell. People actually felt that they were sinking into hell and gripped chairs to hold on. This is exactly what I felt.
I wept in terrible pain and cried out, “Lord, what do I do?”. He said, “you have a window of opportunity. Walk through it and I’ll take it away.” By “it”, He was refering to my marijuana addiction. When He said “walk through it”, I knew what He was asking me to do. He wanted me to flush it all down the toilet.

Okay, at this point your thinking I hallucinated this. After all, I smoked a bunch of weed just minutes before all this “supernatural” stuff happened, right? I thought the same thing. I even told myself that, or perhaps it was whispered by a demonic agent in my head. But I thought, “no, this seems like the thing I’ve asked God to do…that thing that can’t be faked. If this isn’t real, I’ll buy more weed, but I gotta see what He’s going to do first.” So I walked down the hall, lifted my mattress, grabbed all my weed and flushed it. In my head I’m thinking, “dude, you’re a wake-n-bake stoner; you’re gonna miss that in the morning!” And while I’m watching it flush, I’m still so stoned that I’m staggering and swooning.

So it swirls around in a circle for a few eternal seconds, then it goes down. The water starts to rise back up in the bowl.
You know that sound a toilet makes when it’s just about done refilling the chamber and then finally stops? Kind of a, “shhhhhhhhhT.”, and then it stops? Well, as soon as it did that, I physically felt all the chemicals begin to leave my body from the top of my head down through my feet. It was a very strange and slow feeling.
All of a sudden, I was sober!
“What? No way!!!” I looked at my face in the mirror. My eyes weren’t slanted anymore, the redness was gone and they weren’t glassy. I couldn’t believe it; something that I couldn’t fake just rocked my world. I was confronted with the power of the living God and made clean. “He’s real….He’s really real!!”. I can’t describe what joy came through me. I was clean and sober and it felt good.

So I walked back to the kitchen. When God had stepped into the kitchen earlier, I took the frying pan off the front burner and forgot to turn it off so it was glowing red when I came back. I reached over it to get my food and finish cooking it and the heat from that stove top was really hot. It almost burned me. I thought, “man, this thing is that hot with my hand 12″ in the air over it?”. Then the Lord spoke to me and said, “just imagine having your hand on it and never being able to take it off forever…”. Whoa. As a side note, biblically speaking, I believe in the doctrine of the eternality of hell as conscious torment, but that belief didn’t come first from bible knowledge; it came from God’s mouth.

The next day, two of my stoner buddies from the East Bay came to visit me. This was a spur of the moment deal. They wanted me to score them some weed. I told them I quit. They pressured me and I actually caved in, but was praying to God and feeling sick. I called a guy and he wasn’t home. I pretended to leave a message with another guy and got off the phone. God held to His word; I walked through that window and He kept it away. I actually ended up downing a 40 that night. Keep in mind, I’ve met the Lord but not born again yet. The house is swept clean and in order, but unoccupied.

Next sunday I went to church where I had been attending for some time. Actually, it was a mandatory condition that my mom required of me if I was to live with her. You see, I had broken up with “Tracy” about 3 months before I met the Lord and had to live with moms. There, I was subjected to a constant barrage of repentance preaching, sin preaching, judgment of God preaching from the Brownsville Revival. I hate coming home stoned and hearing that stuff; what a buzz kill!
Well anyhow, after the night service was over, I went to leave and the Lord arrested me in the aisleway and made it clear that I was to go up front, in front of everyone and get saved! Specifically he said, “you and I have business to take care of.” I walked up to my buddy Brandon Rice and asked him to pray with me. I never uttered a word audibly and have no clue what he said either because as soon as my knees hit the carpet, I ruptured internally, in my inner man, and wept and sobbed uncontrollably. I didn’t know that would happen. I repented to the Lord profusely for my wasted life of sin and begged Him to make something out of me for His glory. I didn’t say “the sinners prayer” either. No, I just wept for about an hour and passed from death to life.
Now, while I’m on the far side of the altar weeping, my mom and brother Phil are on the opposite side weeping over another issue and have no clue that I’m getting saved. Phil was leaving to go to Brownsville Revival School of Ministry and he and mom were crying together. As my mom retells it, she heard the Lord tell her to “look”. She turned her head and saw me and Brandon; I was in pieces, in snot and tears. Phil came over to me while I was kneeling and weeping and just said very calmly, “the Grace of God”. He didn’t push me or spaz out; he just put his hand on my forehead. I didn’t “go down” per se, but I just felt an enormous peace and just laid down and began to laugh and thank the Lord profusely. It wasn’t some bizarre Toronto laughter either; just real joy overlflowing because of the Life of God washing away the death in me. After a few moments, I suddenly had the urge to speak but it kept coming out wierd…like, not English. I covered my mouth and cupped my hands to my right hear and started speaking in tongues. Absolutely incredible!
After my upbringing in the Assemblies of God, I thought it was fake. All I ever heard was a bunch of jibberish that was easy to make up, and repetitive at that. Nothing that sounded like an actual language with sentence structure, intonation….uh, a regular flow of different words.

I thought, “Dang, this thing is real too?”
Yeah, it sure is. The reality of this encounter with God has kept me through some horribly rough times. I can’t turn my back on a God who is this real.

And I won’t. He’s kept His promise to keep me. Oh, and there’s never been the slightest urge to smoke weed again. It’s gone.

So there you have it. I didn’t get saved because of apologetics, though that has been a great encouragement and source of reinforcement in my faith. No, I met God. I met the resurected Lord Jesus Christ, maker of all things, the only way, the only truth, the only life, Creator and Sovereign Lord of the universe which He spoke into existence. I told the Lord I couldn’t believe the bible if I couldn’t know Him, but that if He’d make Himself real to me I would believe anything it said, no matter how crazy it is. My faith is in the bedrock of Christ and the reality of His existence.

He met me. He saved me. I am His. I am alive and eternally secure in Christ, forever.

mark jr.