From Mushrooms to the Messiah

Imagine opening the newspaper to browse the classified ads. As you sift through the countless sea of singles, free stuff, casual encounters, employment postings, and other services, you stumble across the following ad:

Wanted

Provider of the following: all-inclusive vacations, first-class world travel and accommodations, personal chef, chauffer, graduate school tutoring, counseling, paid mentorship, food stipend, health club membership, debt consolidation, nutritional supplements, tax advising, resume builder, poker, snowboard, tattoo sponsor, and other duties as assigned.

Now, if you were to see such an ad, what would you think of its author?

Some words that come to mind are delusional, narcissistic, detached from reality, deranged, or even mentally ill. I would personally think that the author created the ad while snorting fairy dust with Peter Pan and “thinking happy thoughts.” In other words, this person was in desperate need of an unemployment application and a reality check.

Although posting something so preposterous may seem far-fetched and futile, that was exactly what I received from my ad on a well-known dating website. My personal ad may not have resembled the one above, but I did manage to walk away with all the perks listed and more!

Before we begin, please let me clarify that this is not a story about dating websites, hiking, or a snow-covered mountain in Nepal. This is my personal encounter with the miraculous and transformational power of God—scripted long before I was born, which was created for consumption by atheists, believers, skeptics, and seekers. These experiences are a gift from God so that people can comprehend the very real presence and power of Jesus Christ today.

This is also a story about overcoming the fear of commitment. Let’s be honest—each of us has fear in life. These fears, no matter how big or small, prevent us from actualizing our potential.

My greatest fear was commitment. For me, making and keeping commitments was like climbing Mount Everest: nearly impossible. Each opportunity to make a commitment sounded really good at the time, but as I started to experience any form of resistance, I quickly gave up.

The problem with this particular fear is that commitments are required to complete anything of significance in life. Every good marriage, business idea, academic endeavor, fitness plan, or personal goal begins with a commitment.

For me, to fear commitment was to stifle any potential success in my life. I would be forced to settle for less than God’s best because I was unwilling to face the obstacles standing in my way. Unfortunately, my fear was mountainous. My inability to commit left me with a trail of broken relationships, unfulfilled goals, and empty dreams. I found myself skating through a life of mediocrity, making minimal effort, taking minimal risks, and therefore experiencing only minimal satisfaction and success. Ultimately, my failure to keep commitments left me feeling insignificant, unaccomplished, and ashamed as a result.

For me to overcome this fear of commitment, I would have to embark on the greatest adventure of my life, my Mount Everest …

Despite my growing up in the church, attending Bible studies, getting baptized, and volunteering annually in children’s summer camps, I decided in high school that the Christian life was not for me, at least not yet.

I remember telling my Christian friends and pastor when I first started to break away from the church, that I would follow God again when I was done having fun. Before committing my life fully to Christ I wanted to experience a spring break in Cancun, join a fraternity, have a one-night stand, smoke pot, and do all the things of which college was made and the Bible forbade.

I knew about God, Jesus, and the Bible, but his “plan for my life” would have never aired on MTV, so it was time for us to part ways.

Like for many American teenagers, my path of rebellion progressed from house parties in high school to full-blown ragers and keggers in college. MTV would have been proud; I was an athlete on the lacrosse team, shredded like Jersey Shore, and the “fratiest” of frat boys. I had different girls in my bed, drinks and drugs in my hand, money in my pocket, and not a care in the world.

During the summer before my senior year in college, I started working as a bartender at a resort on the Russian River. On a good day at the resort, I was making upwards of five hundred dollars cash in tips. This money went straight to my vacations in Las Vegas, tab at the bar, and recreational drug use.

That summer, my weekend drinking binges and occasional marijuana use turned into weekly lines of cocaine, tabs of ecstasy, and caps of magic mushrooms. Not only that, but my partying was no longer confined to the weekend. I now found myself using narcotics on Tuesday nights just because they were available.

I realized things were starting to get out of hand when I accompanied a close friend to purchase a large amount of ecstasy to distribute around campus. Just one pill was enough for a felony charge and jail time, and we had enough to lock us away for life.

Also, although in the prime of my partying career, I realized that my drug use was taking a severe toll on my body. I started becoming depressed from the lack of serotonin in my brain. There were even the occasional thoughts of suicide as my highs were decreasing in height and my lows increasing in depth. I hated the feeling of sobriety, but I also hated knowing that I could experience such pleasure and happiness only while I was high. I justified the resulting depression as a “necessary evil” and continued bingeing on special occasions. I remember one night in particular like it was yesterday …