We know this author’s story is a candid one, but we wanted to let him explain it in his own words as much as possible – and to show exactly what it was that God, through His sovereign grace and mighty power, saved this man from. This series is lengthy, but an amazing reminder that God STILL works!
In case you missed the previous posts in “Out of the Darkness” series . . . the links are as follows:
I write it in the hope it may be of value to those who have not experienced what I have and also to chronicle another puzzle-piece of the falling away of the church.
Out of the Darkness {Personal Testimony} – Part 4
When I turned 18, I gained access to a small college fund and decided to do a language study in Japan. I started with two summer semesters of intensive Japanese language at UC Irvine. My mother was no longer able to prevent me from driving a car or leaving the house, so I purchased a car and got my driver’s license. The program was four hours of classroom education each day for two months with a few hours of homework every day. It was my first real
driving commute.
One day while driving to Japanese class, I hit a large truck on the 57 to 5 freeway connector, disabled my car and blocked a very significant traffic artery at the busiest time of the day. The truck driver gave me a nasty look and drove away. I climbed out of the car to survey the damage to be met by a seemingly endless queue of angry people yelling and honking at me. To this day, I have no memory or understanding of what transpired prior to hitting the truck.
As I tried to get back into my car, I realized I locked the keys in the car with the engine running. The lady in the car next to me was generous enough to let me use her cell phone. We chatted for some time while the other drivers were expressing their anger and she asked me out on a date. She did clerical work at a company by the college and her family was even more dysfunctional than mine. I was inclined to say no as I wasn’t looking for a relationship, I was looking to leave the country and not come back. But, I was isolated, lonely and depressed, and she was extremely attractive and seemed friendly.
Linda and I went to Balboa Island by ferry. She insisted we both needed to get piercings for the occasion. I ended up with a barbell in my upper-right ear. We rented a boat to tour the island. She remarked my back and neck were hard as a rock and she had never seen anything like that before. I was still felt very sad and felt dead inside, I couldn’t even bring my facial muscles to smile. Later that night, we went to a rave in LA and took ecstasy. At that point, I was smiling and feeling ecstatic all over. The next morning I felt fully alive and had a new passion for life I had never before experienced.
My flight to Tokyo was in another few weeks. That high from the rave lasted days if not weeks. The sadness did not immediately return. There were other signs of my body feeling different in ways I couldn’t explain and I just had this intimate connection built with her that seemed to defy explanation. She agreed to visit me in Tokyo for Christmas and I bought her a plane ticket, wished her well, and gave her what remained of my earthly possessions that wouldn’t fit into an overhead luggage bag.
However, all was not well. Linda was a seemingly insatiable party girl with a drinking problem and I had built an emotional connection where I could feel her presence and emotional state despite being a few thousand miles away. I was in phone contact with her once a week and she had arranged for time off work to tour Japan. One night, I felt an extreme pain in my stomach that I knew had something to do with her. The pain was agonizing and just kept going on. She didn’t answer the phone. Emotional pain followed. I couldn’t sleep, focus, study or eat. I felt horrible and didn’t know why.
At night, I practiced lucid dreaming. Ned regularly sent cryptic poems by e-mail. I looked to my daily horoscope for guidance.
A week later, I finally did speak to Linda on the phone. That day she was indeed in the ER room with stomach issues. She claimed health problems, needed to cancel the trip and then abruptly ended phone and e-mail contact with me. I continued with my Japanese studies for a while but was unable to focus. After declining a few job offers as an English teacher, I concluded I had no future in Japan and promptly flew back to the US.
Back in California, she was somewhere in my mind, every waking minute of every day. I just wanted the apparition of her and the feeling to go away, but it wouldn’t. One day, I was in traffic and she just drove by me. The odds of my seeing her were nearly impossible. She had moved 40 miles away to live with family in Ontario and just flew back from visiting family in New York. We spoke cordially for a little while, hugged and I never saw her again.
A while later after many strange supernatural manifestations, I had a vision. It was extremely vivid and came from a spirit who called himself Bill. Bill was mourning the violent murder of his sister, Jamie. They lived in Orange County during the turn of the century in a well-to-do family. Jamie was murdered and buried in an orange grove field to prevent an inheritance and the details were never publicly discovered. Linda was the reincarnation of Jamie, and her brother Bill, in spirit form, wanted justice, exposure and understanding for her untimely death. Every time these details would come to me I would start shivering as though my body was ice cold.
It became crystal clear to me I was under a curse, so I visited a spirit medium. She confirmed the accuracy of the Bill and Jamie story and told me Linda was my soul mate as well as Ned. She just needed money to intercede to the spirits on my behalf and perform a special ceremony. The spirit medium made the bad situation worse. One day, I visited Linda at her family home in Ontario. She was not at home, but her 300 pound brother who just got out of prison was, and my visit concluded with him pointing a gun at me. At that point, I lost all interest in the story and whether it was authentic.
I continued my regular meditation practice and that led into yoga. One of the books I read was Autobiography of a Yogi. I bent a key after reading Uri Geller’s book. Supernatural spiritual manifestations became a regular occurrence. There was also some exploration with voodoo. I found myself under stress again. I was done with academia and decided it was time to enter the workforce.
Working with computers was always a hobby for me. While I was in the hospital, my parents brought me computer hacker books of Kevin Mitnick and Steven Paulson as well as the Wall Street Journal. I was somewhat of an amateur hacker at the time. When I was in junior high school, the principal would call me out of classes to fix computers. As I grew older, I developed a reputation in this area, and was regularly in other people’s homes working on their computers. This was in a time where computer ownership and internet connectivity was rare.
It was natural for me to start working in the computer/information industry. Before I left for Japan, the dot-com bubble was still inflated and people working in IT were making obscene amounts of money and IT stocks had gone to the moon. However, by the time I started looking for a job, the bubble had burst, wages dropped sharply, layoffs ensued, and I found myself competing against very experienced people for lower-wage, entry-level jobs. I had also considered a career in travel or tourism, but concluded IT would be a more solid career decision.
The first thing I learned was that IT jobs were not stable. I moved from one company and dead-end job to another, endured long commute times and low pay just to build a work history. My finances were a comedy of errors. I was hired as a full-time network administrator in Los Angeles with benefits, then after three months, my benefits were taken away and the job was reduced to part-time with extra hours on an as needed basis. After a while, the president wanted to see if he could just keep me on call, but not on their regular payroll. I struggled to pay my car insurance and almost lost my drivers license due to a traffic violation going to collections that I could not afford to pay.
My next job was an even longer commute with a dot-com startup in Santa Monica. On paper, this job paid a semi-living wage, however there were always excuses when it came to receiving the paycheck. The management of the company used “flying by the seat of your pants” as a business strategy and it was not a successful one. My bank account balance was consistently in the negative and I had a hard time just putting food on the table and getting to work. One time, I needed to drive to a data center to perform maintenance on a server and simply didn’t have the gas in my car to make it there or the funds to fill the tank.
I didn’t feel it was the right time in my life to have a girlfriend or a wife, however I did complete a form I found on the internet related to the Law of Attraction on finding your soul mate. I wrote the answers on a piece of paper and subsequently discarded both the paper and the idea . . .
To be continued . . .
Out of the Darkness Testimony Series
We believe in the inerrancy and sufficiency of the Scriptures. Jesus said, “Thy Word is truth.” And so we not only believe it, we also base our worldview upon it.