DAVID'S STORY

’ve been a Christian for many years now. I gave myself to Jesus when I was fourteen. It sounds so young, fourteen. It sounds like a time that should be fun-filled, but for me it was a time of intense agony.

I was lost and I don’t mean lost in any glib, religious way. I mean I was really lost. To me the world was an evil, hateful place. I marveled that anyone could bear it and I knew I could not, not for much longer.

One night a friend asked me to come to a party with him. I was expecting a house, parents out for the evening, lots of people, lots of drugs and alcohol. We ended up sitting in a concrete tube in a construction site, just the two of us. We had a small fire going between us. It was a bitter cold night. We had beer and some dope to smoke.

We sat there in the cold smoking and drinking. The fire was crackling and comforting and the more I drank and smoked the more comfortable I felt. I loved my friend and I wished that we could stay hidden in that tube forever.

I couldn’t see anything beyond the inside of our little party place. We were in the middle of a field, late at night. Anything could have happened to us but we really didn’t care and that was the essence of our existence—we really didn’t care. I didn’t care about my grades. I hooked school more than I attended. I thought academic achievement was for the future and I didn’t expect to have one.

The moments I felt most alive were the moments in which I was either stoned, hurt or in some kind of trouble. I had been sent to the principal's office so many times that expulsion was becoming a real possibility. I didn’t care. What did school matter? What did anything matter? We live, we die, end of story.

I went to class one day and the teacher showed us a film. I loved it when they showed films. When I was in elementary school they used to run it backwards after we’d watched it. I laughed at those. I hadn’t laughed in so long. Maybe the film would be funny.

It was about the holocaust. It wasn’t funny. I watched naked dead bodies being tossed in heaps and burned or buried. What life remained in my heart died that day. I imagined myself in their place; a skinny, dead body tossed aside like a piece of trash. That’s what I felt like: the waste of society... a throw away... human trash.

As I watched the film I came to an epiphany of sorts. I distinctly remember the words in my head, “There is no God. If God existed He would never have allowed such atrocity.” And in that one moment the solitary drop of hope that remained alive in me was dead.

I needed to feel something so I agreed to meet a much larger boy for a fight after school. Lots of kids showed up. They always did. I loved to fight but I could never understand loving to watch. To this day, it seems to me that the majority just watch, they never get their hands dirty or their nose bloody. But for me, if I didn’t bleed, something was wrong. So I fought and he was bigger and stronger and I knew that if I went down I was in for the beating of my life.

The friend I partied with was there. He said it was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. I did take a nasty beating. I should have reacted, he told me. I should have cried out. I should have at least tried to get away, but I didn’t care. I wanted to feel every blow. I wanted to see how far pain could take me.

My friend said that while I was being beaten, my face remained expressionless. He said it was as if I was somewhere else. I never flinched, never grimaced, never blinked. I just took it like the lifeless doll I was. I couldn’t see. My lips were swollen so much I couldn’t talk. I was breathing in heaves because a couple of my ribs were fractured.

My friend took me home and put me to bed. As I lay there struggling to breathe, I remembered the words I heard, “there is no God.”

Those words began to inspire me. I had been thinking of suicide for some time. I wanted to die, but I was afraid that God would punish me. I had always heard that suicide was a sin and I didn’t want to go to Hell. I mean life could be bad but surely not as bad as burning in a lake of fire for eternity. I was afraid of fire. It may sound funny but it prevented my own suicide more than once.

But then, if there wasn't a God there could be no eternal punishment. I was free to do it and I knew I could. I got out of bed and got ready. I will not describe my method except to say that I’d given it a lot of thought and was certain my first attempt would finish the job.

I stood there. In a few moments or seconds it would all be over. I was about to sign off when I thought, “what if there is a God? What if He really does exist after all?”

So I sat back and I prayed and I dared God. I said, “if you exist, then show yourself to me. You can do it anyway you choose, but you must do it within the next week. If by Friday a week from now, I’ve received no sign, then you’re a myth, and there is no God. I’ll come back to this spot and die.”

That night I had a dream. I was in an ugly horrible room in a row home in the city. The room was locked and I could not escape. It was several stories high, too high to jump. I looked out to the city street below. Rats scoured trashcans and ate at bums lying in the gutter.

The room was old and it stank. Broken glass was on the floor along with an old shoe. I went to the door. It was locked. I looked through the keyhole and I saw a beautiful field with trees in bloom, green grass and a flowing spring. I heard birds and I wanted to get to that lovely place but the door wouldn’t open.

When I awoke, I decided it must be Heaven. Looking back, I realize how distorted my thinking was but at the time I thought suicide was the way to get from the ugly place to the beautiful place. I felt locked in an old room. I had to get out. But I had given God a week and a week He would have.

The weekend came and went. Monday came and went. Then I went to Tai Kwon Do class. I’d been studying because I wanted to start winning some of those fights. On the teacher’s desk was a ragged up copy of Good News for Modern Man, a contemporary English paraphrase of the bible. In my home, the bible was a sacred thing, treated as holy. It was never touched or mishandled. Yet, here on this man’s desk was a well-read bible.

I commented about it since we were friends. I felt comfortable asking and he felt comfortable answering. He invited me to a bible study on Friday night. I thought, “No, I can’t make it. I’m committing suicide Friday night.” I thought it but I didn’t say it. Then I remembered my deal with God, “You can do it anyway you choose but you must do it within the next week.” Maybe this was His way, I thought. I figured I could always kill myself after the meeting so I said I’d come.

I saw God on every face that Friday night. He might not have been in Germany during the Second World War but I knew He was in that little room. We met in a converted garage. It had some kind of gas fireplace for heat. The leader was a bricklayer. He had long hair and a beard like Jesus and when he smiled at me, I saw love in his eyes.

He told me how I could receive Jesus but I acted as if I already had. “Praise God,” he said.

I went home that night a different person. I cried and I prayed and I said, “I would have taken this life anyway. Take it, it's yours.”

And to this day, I’ve tried to live by that promise.

- David Dellman