My Story - Part 2 - How It Happened
Last time, I described the climate of my early years – having essentially no religious background, being the smartest kid in my class, and growing up in an emotionally abusive family.
The loneliness of my high school years was partially reversed during my college years when I spent three summers as a counselor at a wonderful 4-H camp in Riverhead, NY. For the first time, I felt truly embraced by my peers, and their love of the natural world immediately rubbed off on me. This newly found fascination with nature converged with another aspect of my early years I didn’t mention last time – a strong interest in the paranormal.
All my Hungarian-born grandparents exhibited an Eastern European darkness that included an interest in psychic phenomena. I regularly perused a book on dream interpretation at my grandmother’s house. In high school, several friends and I got dramatic results using Ouija boards. During my freshman year of college, I took an Honors Program seminar on how to draw up astrological charts for ourselves and our friends.
At the end of my first 4-H summer, my enthusiastic embrace of the natural sciences converged with my fascination with the paranormal, and I started down the road of investigating White Magic. As opposed to Black Magic, which admittedly taps into satanic forces, White Magic appeals to goodness and the “light forces” of the universe. Despite its alleged positive focus, it too is ultimately satanic. Paul describes Satan as “an angel of light” in 2 Corinthians 11:14, and I was being sucked in.
This dabbling with the illegitimate supernatural is the context from which I wrote the October 15, 1970 letter to my brother referenced in my previous post. That’s where I said I had found God through nature.
A few weeks later, I started noticing posters going up all over the Syracuse University campus showing a slender, pensive-looking man with a shadowy, ghostly figure standing behind him. The poster was advertising a program called “Do the Dead Return?” This was right up my alley, and I was immediately hooked.
On the evening of November 10, 1970, I arrived at the venue early to make sure I got a good seat. The speaker’s talk leaned heavily on the experiences of the famous escape artist and magician Harry Houdini who promised his wife Bess he would try to reach back from the dead to contact her after his death. Despite ten years of Halloween seances after Houdini died, no contact was ever made. The speaker concluded that if the world’s most famous escape artist couldn’t cross the chasm of death, no one could. So, to my surprise, the punchline of evening was, “No, the dead do not return.”
He then indicated that, despite Houdini’s failure to return from the dead, there was one man who had done just that. And that was Jesus. The reason Jesus died, he explained, was to address the sin problem that afflicts every person. When Jesus physically rose from the grave, he decimated sin’s hold on us, and if we commit our lives to him, we can experience his love and forgiveness. Furthermore, over time Jesus will begin changing our lives and showing us how to live in ways we never thought possible.
I was absolutely riveted by this presentation. There were two things happening in my heart:
I knew what the speaker was saying was absolutely true
I knew this was absolutely for me
When he offered an opportunity to commit our lives to Jesus, I eagerly did. And that was the beginning of my new life. Praise God! This coming Tuesday, November 10 marks exactly 50 years since that wonderful night. If you happen to think of it, you might say a special prayer of thanksgiving on Tuesday, not for me, but for God’s grace in my life.
Next time, I’ll conclude the three-part recap of my story by recounting what I call my first “Jesus moment” that happened a few after that first November 10.