3. A Time of Darkness

© 2019 Daniel Yordy

July 1972 - December 1975

My Father
I now know what my Father is about in this experience of discovering memories I had not placed into the Lord Jesus. As I worked through the spiritual warfare required to place the Lord Jesus Christ upon my childhood, I came to understand what was missing.

The truth is, I had a heart to know the Lord, even as I was turning away. And so I know personally that the single most important NEED in human society is that the hearts of the fathers be turned towards their children. My own father’s heart was most certainly turned towards me. The problem was simple; I did not know it.

It was as I became a father myself that I came to understand the agony of my own dad’s heart, in that he could not share himself with his children. Yet I have done the same as he; I have covenanted with God that He would keep that which I cannot.

As a boy, I was enthusiastic, adventurous, always heading out in one direction or another, and utterly alone in an unsafe world. There was no one protecting me.

Because I have had so much help since, I was able to extend a measure of protection over my children. Protection does not mean “control,” in fact, control is abuse, not protection. It means first, making sure that each one knows that I regard them as a person of respect and integrity. It means second, that I prevent any words of shame from entering into their self-story. It means third that, as they pass through normal human difficulties, I show them the same things in me, that I also went through these difficulties and that it is normal to being human and carried entirely inside of Jesus. And it means fourth, that I ensure that they are not placed into environments that would be destructive to them. That fourth is the hardest, and I was not always successful. Nonetheless, here is the difference. When my son ran from religious abuse, he ran to me, his father, where he found full safety inside of Christ. 

I share this, because it is only by this contrast that I am able to place my childhood into Christ and to understand what went wrong and why.

I remain ashamed of one thing in my life. I am ashamed of my attitude towards my father, an animosity that began somewhere in the transfer from grade school at Lacomb to high school in Lebanon. By placing me out into the arena of the public school and the Sunday school classroom, my parents had placed me into great danger and into continual spiritual assault.

Because I had no protection from that assault, I blamed the one person who “ought to” have been my protection, my father. This connection was not conscious, that is, I had no idea of anything, just confusion and pain and an empty place where terrible things came against me and no one helped me at all.
The moment when I forgave my dad will come in a much later chapter of this story. I now know that my dad would have done anything to have protected me, if he had understood and been able to do so.

Yet I also realize that it was this lack in my life that was the surface reason why darkness prevailed through these years. The real reason, however, is that my Father required me to KNOW the critical importance of turning the hearts of the fathers towards their children, what that means and how it must be.
Experiences with God

Although twenty years ago I created a time-line of events in my life, there are still many things the timing of which I am not certain. Sometime around ninth grade, I began to smoke pot. I also began to smoke cigarettes, though not steadily. I had my first taste of alcohol sometime in here as well. This was the negative part of Henry Miller’s involvement in my life. It’s not that he influenced me in this direction, but rather, that I influenced him, that is, he was available to get what I requested from the store. 

Then, I attended a revival service with my parents. When the preacher gave the call to come forward, something in the Spirit grabbed me by the shirt collar and sent me down to the front immediately. It was a good experience with God, but it could not last. That evening, in repentance, I gave my dad the pack of cigarettes I had. When I found it still in the pile of stuff on top of his dresser several weeks later, I interpreted that as meaning that he did not care. This interpretation was one hundred percent false, but it was all I knew.

I stopped going to church in August of 1972, so my other strange experience must have happened several months before. Our youth group had a get-together over the weekend at the Albany Mennonite Church, from Friday evening to Sunday morning. We slept in the classrooms and ate in the dining room below the auditorium. It was an incongruous experience because we listened to the Rolling Stones in the church and several of us smoked pot in a hiding place outside. Nonetheless, as I went home from this experience, something inside of me sang, over and over, “This is right, this living together inside the house of God is what it’s all about.”

In June of 1972, my brother and his wife, Franz and Audrey, were fellowshipping together with Del and Virginia Buerge whom we knew from the Albany church. Del’s older brother, Jim Buerge and his wife had received the Baptism in the Holy Spirit a few years earlier and were attending a Spirit-filled church. As Franz and Audrey, Del and Virginia were seeking God together, the Holy Spirit came upon them. As they joyfully shared their new knowledge of God with my parents, both mom and dad received the infilling of the Holy Spirit along with my older sister, Frieda, and her husband, Tim Louden.

In July, then, as all this excitement was bubbling all around me, though I was pretty oblivious to it, I got into an argument with my friends, Larry Jensen and John McKinney. You see, it was normal for Larry and I to side together against John, who was younger and smaller than we were, but who was also a bit “stuck up.” This time, Larry sided with John against me.

I went home in a huff, feeling cut off and lonely – a very good place to be.

For some strange reason, I grabbed a book my mother had bought recently, took it up to my bedroom and read it through in one sitting. The book was Prison to Praise by Merlin Carothers. By the time I finished it, I was filled with such JOY beyond measure. I did not know it then, but my Savior had planted His most important seed into my heart, a seed that would grow of itself without any further input from any direction, a seed that would turn my heart into His pathway time and time again from then until now.

That seed is – give thanks. In all things give thanks.

This was an infilling of the Spirit, though I did not speak with tongues. Yet in the joy of the Lord, I cast off all the things of darkness and enjoined my parents to take me to every fellowship meeting there was. I even had the sensation of actually loving my little sister, Jenelle, something quite uncommon to a fifteen-year-old boy. 

Turning Away
Sadly, there was so little understanding of the ways of God and so little teaching available. This experience with God lasted about three weeks.

Then, sometime in August, I went on our scheduled camping trip with Larry, this time up Crabtree Creek near where the logging bridge goes across. While I was with Larry, whom I now know was a bit less than just unregenerate, the “feelings” lifted. I wanted to smoke, but I had no cigarettes. I searched along the rocks where people came to swim, and after awhile I found a cigarette butt with enough remaining for me to light up and get a few whiffs of smoke.

When I did that, by my own decision, a light turned off inside of me. I entered a time of darkness that would last for three-and-one-half years. From that time on, I disconnected fully from my parents in going to church. I simply hid out in the woods until they were gone.

I went back to smoking, a habit that would soon grow to a pack a day. I smoked pot and drank beer with my friends from high school every chance I could. Besides Andy Wyatt and Larry, there were two other friends from my classes at school, Tim Steele and Tim Greiner. Actually, we were a foursome, Andy and I and the two Tim’s. Larry was along with us, yes, but he returned to California for his senior year, so there was a period of time without him.

Andy was a bit older than us, so he was a driver first. The three of them would come out from Lebanon to Henry’s house. Then we would drive Henry up to the store in Lacomb where he would buy beer for us. We would return to his house, then, to drink and smoke.

Drugs were plentiful at school in the 1970’s. In fact, Tim Greiner, who was the president of the honor society, was also the guy with the pot for sale which he carried in his hollowed-out textbook. We lived in a world that could end any moment by nuclear destruction. We lived under the horrors of a war that took the young men a few years older than us and turned them into hard and hate-filled men. Young people protesting this war at Kent State were shot dead by the government. Yet we were free as kids today are not.  We would never have tolerated a policeman inside our school. Yet our freedom was now going in all the wrong directions.

Ignorant of Asperger’s
I want to place a brief look at my final two years of high school inside this title, “Ignorant of Asperger’s.” There are many things inside this entire time period that are of no relevance. The time when the Lord took all this into Himself is pertinent here, however. As I was sitting waiting for my turn to experience prayer for deliverance, some fourteen years later at the Blueberry Christian Community, I was very apprehensive. My mind went back over this time of darkness. I heard the Lord speak, “Son, even in the darkness, you were still My son.” I knew in that moment that He had taken all my iniquity upon Himself. I had imagined myself to be “unregenerate” during this time. I had not known that I have always belonged to Jesus.

I must warn you, however; I am opening a can of worms. Some might say, “Now that you know Jesus, don’t  open such a can of worms.” But the worms are there, eating away, whether we open the can or not. Jesus said, “You are clean.” God told Peter, “Do not call what I have made clean to be unclean.” Being made clean, however, has never done anyone a bit of good unless we KNOW that we are every whit clean. We have not known such cleanness, not in those parts of our lives we have kept unopened because of the worms.

High School was easy for me. Whatever mental abilities I might have had, however, were devoted to gaming the system, to doing the least amount of work in order to maintain a B average. I always did my English class work, however, because I enjoyed it. I never did any Geometry homework, which meant straight F’s on the daily grade. But we had a quiz every Friday, so I read the chapter on Thursday and got an A on Friday, which meant a C for the course. Matched with my A’s in English and Band, that resulted in a B average – and so it went. So much of school was uninteresting; I never really connected with uninteresting even though I take great interest in many things.

I devoured books. In tenth grade we were required to read A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. At the end of the first week, I had finished it, but the other students were still crying over having to read chapter 2. I talked my dad into subscribing to a complete works of Charles Dickens in leather. By the end of high school I had read all his books, many of them twice. I became a student of WWII. I devoured history books, but I detested history class. 

I have always loved being with other people, even though I’ve never been good at conversation except with Andy and Larry. And that was problematic. I did not understand until years later that both of them lied to me on a regular basis, Andy to get a rise out of me, and Larry, because he lived only in lies. It was years later that I realized that little that Larry claimed about himself was actually true. Yet I believed him at the time, with no reason to doubt. These relationships became very confusing to me.

A great darkness opened itself inside of me. I would sneak over to Henry’s every night to watch TV (we did not have TV at home). I would sit there feeling deeply black about everything. I realize now the event that triggered this deep depression when I wasn’t with my friends. Early in my eleventh grade year (if it was in October, I would still have been fifteen), I had occasion to purchase a tiny piece of paper that had been soaked in LSD from a girl at school. She told me that it was a “four-way” hit, but I had no idea what that meant. My parents were away at a church event that evening; only my foster brother, Ricky Bozek, was at home. 

I swallowed the entire “four-way hit” around 11 PM. Within twenty minutes I was feeling wonderful. Then I was feeling TOO wonderful. Then it was way, way too much. I wandered around the house hollering for help. Ricky was in his room, but he never said a peep about it. I do not come under the control of anything, however. So when it became overwhelming to me, I took myself firmly in hand, went into my room, laid down on my bed, held the covers over me tightly, and refused to move or to do anything in response. For eight hours, I lay there in absolute FEAR to the sound of motorbikes gunning down the road and to the continuous swirl of fantastic images. 

The fear was thick and palpable. On LSD, one finds oneself in the dimensions of the heavens with dark things all around. Through these hours I saw the gates of the heavenly city, and they were closed shut against me. In that moment, I believed that I was utterly and forever lost. When it faded at the end of the night and I arose to go about my day, I pretended that nothing had happened, though that was hard. My parents never knew. But from then on I believed that I was lost. This was the cause of my despair. For the next fifteen years, that darkness wrenched my gut in pain much of the time. None of my experiences with God removed it. But it became the whips that drove my darkness through the next three years. 

It is so wonderful to me now as I place this experience into its context in my life. You see, no human lives by the truth, even though Jesus sustains each one every moment by His good speaking. All live by what they BELIEVE to be “the truth.” I BELIEVED that I was lost, even though there was no truth in that belief. The Lord Jesus had shared with me every moment of that night. He did not intend my distress, but He did intend me, and He carried me through it far more safely than what I understood. But of course, I did not know Him then.

Yet it was this false belief that I was lost that drove me into seeking anything that could make me feel “not lost.” My fantasy world, the structured and vastly complex daydreams I conjured up in my fierce mental drive became extensive. I figured out, not only how to conquer the entire world, but then also, the entire universe. I dreamed up how I, by science, could become “god” in my knowledge and power. To be honest with you, I came up with scenarios, in the early seventies, that would not become known as possibilities until the age of the Internet thirty years later. 

Here is one of many places where Asperger’s comes in. Although Asperger’s often imagine the worst when it comes to how people think about them (mostly because they don’t understand who or what these other “people” are), Asperger’s are rarely dishonest with themselves. I have never confused my extensive fantasizing abilities with practical reality. What I did not know for many years is that this quality is not at all common. Most humans do mix fantasy with reality and never think twice about their confusion and dishonesty. It was this quality in my friends that so often threw me into further confusion; I did not know that they did not know the difference between make-believe and reality. 

Seeking refuge in fantasy did not cease for me until I knew my precious union with the Lord Jesus Christ. Since the Lord sealed me into Himself in the summer of 2013, I can no longer find those fantasy realms that once were so important to me. I no longer have any need of them. And when I look back now, all I see is that I had done nothing more than turn the way God designed me into the wrong directions. I am the same person now, filled with Christ. I have always belonged to Jesus; I just did not know it.

A Bleak and Lonely Year
I want to give an overview of the year or so following my graduation from high school. It was a bleak and lonely year. I had designed my senior year to require doing no homework at all the entire year except one large project for English which I wanted to work on anyhow. And I had filled that year with involvement in activities with those classmates in my same literary bracket. My senior year was no work, all fun, and lots of doing things together including many quite imaginative pranks (or so I thought because most of them were my invention, including driving a Volkswagen Beetle into the school where it was pushed down the hall to the principal’s office and successfully getting away with it, etc. etc.).

Graduation was another big activity together, also filled with, if not pranks, at least the dreaming of and laughing about the pranks we could pull. This was the age of “streaking,” but only the president of the student body ever dared to do it. And so the morning after graduation came to me as a total shock, one for which I was completely unprepared. All that activity which had filled my life ceased, and it could not be regained. Larry was living in Southern California at the time, and my friends from school lived many miles away. I was alone. I did not like being alone. I don’t quite understand myself. I love solitude, and I never get bored. But I also love doing things with others. I need both in equal measure.

I was not working, so I slept twelve hours a day and read books or drew maps and fantasized the other twelve hours. I almost became bored. The only way I could visit with my friends was if I borrowed money and the pickup from my dad, or if they got together and drove out to Henry’s (whether he was in jail or not). I had little relationship then with the kids of the Lacomb area. 

I had worked at the Stayton Cannery the fall of my senior year because Larry had gotten a job there. I disliked that kind of repetitive work, but it was money in one’s pocket. The cannery opened up again in August, which brought the almost boring summer to an end. I worked the swing shift, from 3-11 PM, then I had the money to drive to my friends, wherever they were living, where we smoked pot, etc., until I came home around 3 AM. I will talk about that drive home night after night a little later.

Tim Steele, Tim Greiner, and Andy Wyatt had signed up to attend Linn Benton Community College. I had zero interest in any more school, for which I am grateful. College was not a worthwhile experience for anyone with whom I related. They did poorly because they took useless classes and partied most of the time. But Tim, Tim, and Andy had rented apartments right next to the college, and so that’s where I went after work through the fall of 1974. 

During this time we tried speed, that is, amphetamines. I always reacted to drugs a bit differently than most. Speed made me talk – non-stop, even while everyone else was talking non-stop. I shared everything about myself, things that should never be said. When the “high” left, then, I was utterly ashamed of the things I had blurted out. This became a dark pattern in my life that would last many years, that I would talk too much and then become deeply ashamed afterwards. It is still a foolish characteristic, but now I put it all into Jesus when I awake in the middle of the night; I no longer know shame. Needless to say, it was not long before I became utterly sick of amphetamines and stopped using them.

Sometime in December or January, Tim, Tim, and Andy found a large old house for rent with many bedrooms. A number of people who had lived at the apartment complex next to LBCC joined with them and they all rented it together. I was there many evenings, but I had no interest in staying overnight. We called it “Mad Hal,” taken from the initials of those who lived there. It was a form of “community,” but it did not end well. It was a very bleak winter. 

By the time I started working in construction with Jimmy Barkley in May of 1975, Mad Hal had long since disbanded. But at that point I was working days, at a job that fitted me and that paid good  money. Working with Jimmy became the first stability in my life since high school. 

Through the summer of 1975 we drove up to Portland often to attend rock concerts, etc. I was usually the driver with quite a few piled into my car. I had bought an old 55’ Chevy from my brother-in-law, Tim Louden, and had put a new engine into it, etc. My dad did not let me make it into a hot rod, however, so it remained a clunker. I wanted so much to buy a 1968 Triumph Spitfire after my income became regular, but dad refused to co-sign. He was willing to co-sign on a brand-new 1975 Honda Civic hatchback, however, so that became my car after I sold the 55’ Chevy. My dad was right, because the two-seater Triumph would never have served my needs. I still dream of it to this day, however, when I’m out with my children, looking at cars for them to buy.

I remained at home in Lacomb. My friends lived in Albany and Corvallis and later Salem, so I drove long distances there and back most every day. I had dreamed of leaving home until I could. Then I realized that I had everything I needed at home at no cost and with no requirements. I had little relationship with my brothers and sisters; I was so far apart in age from my brothers; Franz was nine years older and Glenn nine years younger. I had little to do with my sisters. My parents placed no obligation on me. Dad always made sure I knew that I was free of him, that he would not control my life. My parents also received my friends as their own children, regardless. Andy even found refuge living with them for a few weeks after I went north to Canada. We were safe at home. Yet I was seldom there. 

Following the Map
I want to bring in two more things before going on to that momentous fall of 1975 when I began to perceive the hound of heaven chasing me through all the dark ways of my life. First is the role of the map and the mountains in my life, and second is my places of work.

All through my childhood I had looked up at the mountains, and especially up the logging road with deep longing to see what was up there. But my dad never drove me up that road; I don’t know why. I once went up the logging road all the way to Crabtree Lake with John McKinney’s dad. I was utterly enthralled. Then, in May of 1972, I sold my  awesome Schwinn bike in order to buy an un-awesome Honda 90 from Larry’s dad. Larry already had a Bultaco, and so the logging roads that cover the Oregon Cascades were now ours.

The Honda just was not up to mountain inclines, so by August I sold it and purchased a second Bultaco from Larry’s dad. We now had two equally matched bikes and oh, how we explored. I was in heaven. Give me a mountain road with a cliff on both sides, and a five speed manual tranny under my hand, and I am soaring. 

I have over a hundred thousand miles of exploring the gravel logging roads of the mountains to the east of our home, primarily Snow Peak and Crabtree Mountain, fifty thousand miles in my Dad’s pickups and fifty thousand in my Honda Car, plus several thousand miles on our Bultacos. I soon found maps of the logging roads. I love maps. I trace out a road on the map, and I must follow that road, regardless. I have been stuck many, many times, in mud and snow and water. I know how to get out of being stuck. But if that map says that this road goes over that hill, then by gum, I must follow that road over that hill regardless of what might be in the way. Larry and I started a number of the bike trails that became popular to many others later on until the logging company had to close them down because the bikers were gouging out the hillsides.

The mountains remained a huge part of my life until I moved away from Oregon to Christian Community in other places. Even when I returned to Oregon for two years with Maureen and our two little ones, I still took them often up into the mountains to drive and to hike and to explore. We even had a service together at a favorite spot. 

I loved going up in the mountains with Gollum, my Chesapeake Bay Retriever. We climbed and explored so many places, just him and me. 

Mad Hal was such a ridiculous caricature of “community”; nonetheless, it spoke to something deep inside of me, the same calling to community that I had experienced earlier. I would find this place or that in the mountains and sit there and dream up a community, many living together, and where our homes and gardens would be.

My Places of Work
Working at Stayton Cannery was not what I was designed to do, tedious work, doing the exact same thing over and over. I divided the clock into 15 minute periods and looked forward only to break, to lunch, to break and then to the quitting bell. Only in the most mundane of tasks could I find relief because then I could disconnect my mind from the useless task and into fantasy. One time I sang Jesus Christ Superstar, every song and every word. Weird, eh?

But I had one experience at the Stayton Cannery in my second season there that fits into the topic of the incredible protection in which I walked. My job for two weeks was “spotting” corn trucks as they came in from the local farms to dump their ears of corn. I would direct the truck to where it would drop its load, and then wait with two baskets to be filled with corn for a testing sample. One time a rickety old farm truck backed up, and it’s tired mechanisms creaked as it slowly lifted up. My eyes were down on the baskets so that I could snatch them back after the first ears of corn came out. In that position, I heard a slight crack. Something registered in my brain that this “crack” was not right. I did not think. Instead, one second later I was turning around twenty feet away from that truck, which by this time was lying still on its side, having crushed the baskets where I was. That was the same careful instinct that kept me safe many times before and after, yes, but now I suspect that there was some angelic help involved. 

Then, in May of 1975, Larry had returned from his final year of high school in Simi Valley, California. He was staying with his sister and brother-in-law, Jimmy and Sharon (Jensen) Barkley, who lived just a few miles from our house, on Ede Road – in the old Ede house. Jimmy was a carpenter, working as a sub-contractor framing houses for Republic Construction, a builder in Lebanon and Albany. Larry thought that we could get work with him. I went to his job site and, for some reason, Jimmy decided that I was worth hiring, since I was familiar with construction, having grown up inside of it. Larry came along as part of that package, but he lasted only a month before Jimmy decided that Larry was not a builder.

I took to construction; it fitted me as a creative and worthwhile occupation. Jimmy soon made me a junior partner with him and I worked with Jimmy through the next few years, even in-between my times at Graham River and Bowen’s Mill. But when I walked onto the job site, my eyes saw the blueprints. I immediately asked to take them home for study. I had discovered one of the great loves God created me for – designing and building homes. In ninth grade I had taken an introductory occupational course that included nine weeks each of electricity, drafting, wood shop, and metal shop. The drafting was mostly mechanical drafting, but the work had sung all through me. I did not like “occupational” schooling however. I prefer to learn by doing it first.

Jimmy was about my older sister, Frieda’s age; he was the first steady and good influence in my life. Jimmy always treated me as an equal, taught me all that he knew, and put up with all my nonsense. I have not seen Jimmy since the summer of 1979, though I have searched for him on the Internet without success. I miss him and would love to connect with him again.

The Hound of Heaven
By August of 1975, Andy and Tim Steele had found an apartment in Salem, Oregon. I drove up to Salem after work much of the time and then back home to Lacomb in the wee hours of the night drunk or stoned. But in August of 1975, I became aware of a shift in the heavens around me. There is no better metaphor to describe what I sensed than “the hound of heaven” baying down the paths of my life, haunting me with the calling of God.

 I panicked, spending the next five months running from that insistent 'hound' on my tail. No matter what I did or where I went, I could not escape it. By this time I had become sick of chemical drugs and no longer used them. I became tired of alcohol and stopped drinking it. But I never tired of marijuana. I smoked a lot of pot, but although it could dull the baying of that hound, it could never silence it.

I want to talk about the wall of protection which I could often sense in the heavens around me and in physical circumstances. I want to relate a number of instances, though not necessarily in chronological order. 

First, still during my high school years, I had watched a TV program about “mind over matter,” using psychic power to heal. I became intrigued with the idea and thought all day at school about researching the topic more. When I got off the bus at home that day, my mom came right up to me. She said, “Daniel, I had a dream last night and the Lord warned me that you were touching something dangerous that will destroy you.” My parents never tried to control me, so this statement from my mom meant something to me. I dropped the idea like a hot potato. Later, when my humanities seminar class were gathered at one of our homes for a class project, the rest of them decided to try to lift a table by levitation. I said, “No, I’m not interested,” and sat and read a book while they failed at their attempt. My refusal did not bother them or me. I never did anything I did not want to do, and they accepted that as a given. By that one word from God through my mother, I have never touched spiritual evil.

One time, when we were up at Portland standing in line for a Pink Floyd concert, I was, of course, stoned on pot. Nonetheless, as we stood there in that line, a group of Hare Krishna dudes in orange robes went by us, chanting. As I stood there watching them pass, I knew that a wall of angels stood between me and all evil. I knew that I was safe, even though I imagined that I was lost. I had a number of opportunities to commit fornication, but every time my mind went blank and I could not see or hear until the opportunity had passed. God kept me, even against my will, from all those things that actually destroy.

I went three times down to Simi Valley, next to Los Angeles, to visit Larry. The first time was in October of 1974. I spent the night of my eighteenth birthday sitting all night in the Greyhound bus station on my way back home – not a very comfortable experience. Then, I went down with Larry for several days in July of 1975 after Jimmy had fired him. The last time was in November of 1975 when I spent another week in Los Angeles with Larry. During that visit, Larry and I went to a city park with a whole bunch of kids he knew. We were smoking pot and talking loudly. It was after dark. We were in a city neighborhood, but we did not care. Then, all of a sudden, I knew it was time to go. Larry easily agreed, and we left the others still making a lot of noise. We walked to the far corner of the park, went around a yard fence and down a quiet street to Larry’s car, got in and drove to his home. We found out later that, at the very moment when Larry and I turned the corner, the cops came out of the woods behind the group and arrested everyone remaining. They all spent the night in jail. The truth is, I should have had a police record many times, but I never did. I could never have gone to Canada if I had.

One time I was driving up the logging road in my dad’s pickup. It was crowded in the cab, so I suspect that it was Larry with Andy Wyatt and Tim Steele. We had just crossed the logging bridge and were on the narrow stretch between a deep and wide ditch filled with water on our right and a steep slope down to Crabtree Creek on our left. A logging truck came around the corner ahead at full speed. This was his road, and he was not about to move over in that too-narrow spot. If his wheel had gone off the pavement, it would likely have hurled him over the edge into the Creek. There was not enough room for us on the right. In that moment I knew that there was only one option. I gunned it as hard as I could. Just before we would have hit the logging truck, I swung the wheel hard to the right and then hard back again. Whoosh, we were back on the logging road on the other side of the truck. I cannot imagine it if I did not know it was true, but our right-side tires must have been above the water of the ditch as we went around the logging truck. Whether there were angels there holding us up, I don’t know, but we were kept. 

I imagined that I was “very good” at driving long miles home successfully in the early morning hours drunk and stoned. After the Lord received me back into Himself, I learned something different from my mom. Time and again, the Lord would wake her up in the middle of the night with me on her heart, she would drop to her knees and pray until she heard me driving in. I was not kept because of any virtue of my own; I was kept because my parents covenanted with God to keep me. I realize now that “knowing” just what to do, many times, must have come from the Spirit and through my parent’s prayers.

I learned later that, sometime possibly in August, my dad stood out on the front steps of our home with his hands raised and tears streaming down his face and did what I have done for my own children. He placed me utterly upon a God who keeps covenant with us. The Lord spoke to him in that moment, “Daniel will return to Me before Christmas.”

And so through these months I would swing back and forth between weeping on my way home in order to somehow find the Lord, to running towards evil as fast as I could. Yet no matter what I tried, evil things vanished from my reach and I could not touch them. Yet I could not find faith either. I stopped going to my high school friends as much. Rather, I spent many evenings smoking pot with Dural Sylvester, with whom I had been together in school since first grade. He was the only kid with whom I had tussled. He was taunting me once, so I threw my bicycle at him, after which he promptly knocked me and the bike into the ditch. That was the extent of any “fighting” I ever did, except that I hit my sister Cheryl in the back once, when she made me mad. Please, forgive me, Cheryl.

Dural, however, was the only one from my elementary school years at Lacomb with whom I maintained a relationship even after I was living in Christian community.

A Faithful Savior
On Saturday, December 20, I spent a quiet evening with Dural smoking a lot of marijuana. I drove home before midnight, and when I laid myself down upon my bed, I saw a vision. I saw two huge steel doors, like great bank vault doors, swinging shut with a clang that rang with all finality. I knew, without any question, that my life of running from God was finished and that I would never return to such a thing.

I got up the next day inside that certain knowledge. Yet I could not find faith; I did not know how to connect with God or what might be the path forward. That Sunday, I took all my drug paraphernalia and wrongful books, put it all in a large gunny sack and drove up into the mountains, this time to the west slope of Green Mountain, to an area I never went. I threw my gunny sack behind some bushes and sat there waiting, hoping God might show Himself by fire or something. Nothing happened, so I drove home in utter disconsolation.

The next day, Monday, I drove again up into the mountains, this time to one of my favorite areas, the west slopes of Crabtree Mountain. I had my Bible with me and, for some really strange reason, read the book of Job. Reading Job did nothing for me, and I finally went home in deeper despair. I could not go back, I could not go forward, and I did not know what to do.

Several months earlier, I had visited with my parents at Jim Buerge’s home. Jim and Del both had purchased properties on the north slope of Thomas Creek several miles north of us. Thomas Creek drains the entire north slopes of Rogers Mountain, Snow Peak, and Crabtree Mountain. Jim Buerge was the only Christian figure in my childhood whom I respected. 

That Tuesday morning, as I drove out from home, I decided that I needed help and that the only person to whom I could look for help was Jim Buerge. I drove up to his house and knocked on the door. A strange woman opened the door. When I asked about the Buerge’s, she told me that they had moved to Canada a few months earlier.  

I was alone. But I was also near the northern access to Snow Peak. This was a winter of little snow in the Western Cascades, which was unusual. Typically, “Snow” Peak is covered with snow during the winter months. You see, that morning, before I went to see Jim Buerge, I had attempted to drive again up the Snow Peak logging road which ran below our house. This time, however, when I had tried to cross the logging bridge, I found that the gate was closed and locked. Their would be no passage up that morning.

So as I left Jim’s former home, I took the northern route up to the western shoulder of Snow Peak, looking out over the Willamette Valley. I stopped there at the highest point and sat in my car, unable to connect with the Lord. In my despair, I opened my Bible and read these words.

For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame (Hebrews 6:4-6 – KJV).

I had tasted the good word of God and partaken of the Holy Ghost. These words, then, were the final axe. I was eliminated from God. 

“Lord Jesus,” I said, “Would You do the impossible for me? Would You be willing to be crucified and to be put to open shame again for me?”

I heard the words, “My son.” Instantly I sat up, threw my pack of cigarettes out the window, and grabbed my Bible tightly to my heart. In that moment, I saw the closed logging gate. I knew that if I found that gate open when I came down the southwest slope of Snow Peak, I could be saved. Jesus would receive me.

I drove down the long and windy gravel logging road in trepidation. As I came down to the main Snow Peak line, I saw the camp watchman’s pickup driving by just ahead. I knew I could be saved. Sure enough as I drove through, the gate was opened, and I could proceed the remaining three miles home. 

You see, the problem was never on the side of my Savior, who had always been carrying me utterly inside of Himself. The problem was in my own mind, that I could not believe. The Lord gave me that picture of the open gate so that I could believe.

It was December 23, 1975, two days before Christmas. God is a Keeper of covenant.

~~~

Well, I did it. I opened that can of worms. And what did I find? I found no worms at all. Jesus has already taken to Himself all my loss and filled every moment of my life with all His gain. Yet seeing Jesus there with me through those eight hours of horror and fear when I overdosed on LSD brings an even further healing than I have yet known.