Chasing God Until He Caught Me: Chapter Three - Turbulent Times

The Compelling Story of God's Relentless Pursuit To Rescue One Lost Soul

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For the next ten years, I never darkened a church door except for a couple of funerals and weddings. Everything was focused on having fun.

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It was during my teens that I hit the turbulent years of the late sixties. Complete cultural upheaval forced itself upon society.

The Vietnam War was becoming an albatross and generating huge protests across the country.

One thing I can now look back on and see with more clarity is that many parents became more lax in consistent discipline or just stopped altogether.

Most didn’t know how to handle what was happening. Perplexed, they just gave up. With hardly any restraints, those of my generation did things that were unheard of in previous generations.

Sexual promiscuity and other moral taboos were becoming acceptable, or at least tolerated. I began smoking and drinking alcohol when I was barely a teenager.

Occasionally we would be able to get an older friend to buy booze for us. Also, we knew the places where we could buy it ourselves with no questions asked, but that cost more.

One Sunday afternoon when I was around 16, my friend Billy and I drove out into the country to visit Robert, a man we worked with at the local hardware store.

Robert told us that he had some “white lightning”, better known as Moonshine, that he would give us if we wanted it.

By the time we left Roberts, both of us were so drunk that neither of us remembered driving home.

When I finally got home and tried to nonchalantly walk into the house and go up to my room, I discovered that my parents had company whom I had never met before.

As soon as I walked in, my parents tried to introduce me and immediately saw that I was drunk as a skunk.

I made some excuse about not feeling well, turned around, and went up to my room. I'm sure they all just stared open-mouthed at my back.

My parents must have been terribly embarrassed, but they never brought up that incident. It was the first of many times they saw me drunk.

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Integration began changing cultural demographics in ways that many of us in the South (white or black) had never dreamed possible. Not in a bad way. It was just that, culturally speaking, we couldn't conceive of it.

The “Rock Music Revolution” hit simultaneously during this period, fueling an “anything goes” attitude. This contributed to huge cultural upheaval.

Societal norms that had been around for decades, even centuries, were completely swept away by this tsunami of cultural change.

Drug use became acceptable as a means of achieving an “altered state of mind.”

“Question authority” became the mantra of the era.

All this was driven by a rapidly growing number of rock groups and concerts, events such as Woodstock, popular movies such as Alice's Restaurant and Easy Rider, and authors like Ken Kesey, Carlos Castaneda, who was deemed by Time magazine as “The Godfather of New Age”, and Dr. Benjamin Spock, who challenged the status-quo of raising children.

Millions of American young people began throwing out the God who had from the beginning of time declared Himself as not only Creator but also Redeemer.

In turn, they flocked to Eastern mystical “Gurus”, made popular, in particular by the Beatles, and those who preached what became known as the New Age philosophy: God was within each of us.

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During this time, many of my generation began to lose their moorings and were left to drift.

We were torn. Desperately trying to cling to the safety of our cultural roots while being drawn like a moth to a bright light, we embraced this new and exciting way of living.

We abandoned anything that resembled traditional authority. Each of us became our own authority.

Nothing like this had ever happened before. Or so we thought.

I found out much later that Judges 21:25 gives a perfect description of this era -

In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

Our colleges and universities were being filled with professors who were throwing tradition out the window and students who revered them as gods.

After graduating from high school in 1972, I began a slow descent into a decade of debauchery.

I had no real desire to continue in school, but my mom wanted me to go, so I enrolled in a small Junior College in upstate South Carolina. Actually, because my grades were so poor, it was the only one that would accept me.

Unfortunately, even that endeavor was very short-lived due to the fact that I took my party habit with me and failed to show up at most of my classes. At the end of that first semester, I was not invited to return for a repeat performance.

Of course, Daddy was pretty upset with me. He told me that I could not come home unless I had a means of support. I was able to find a manual labor job at minimum wage ($1.60/hr at that time) working for a power line construction company driving a bucket truck.

One of my jobs was to be what was referred to as a “grunt”. This was the guy who stood on the ground next to the pole being worked on and sent up whatever the lineman needed to get the job done.

I had been doing this for around six months when one day the lineman I was working with was trying to bypass the electrical feed around the pole he was working on and somehow connected two different voltage lines.

He lit up like a Fourth of July celebration.

While the electrical burns did not kill him, he spent the next month or so in the hospital receiving therapy and skin grafts.

Since that was more than likely the next step in this line of work for me, I quickly realized that it was not what I wanted to do. The next week, I headed down to the Navy Recruiters’ office as if an unseen Hand was guiding my path.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. - Psalm 139:9-10

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