We left SMBI at 5:20 PM… in a Lincoln Town Car stretch limo. Chad was driving. We then turned onto a truly amazing little road that thought it was a piece of 3-D abstract art. It was quite a gut wrenching drive. That went on for 6 miles and then we turned onto better roads. A bridge that was out forced us to take the interstate 4 miles west before turning around and heading back east. Chad didn’t realize that there was a divider between the passenger and driver sections. When someone put the divider up and he happened to glance in the rear-view mirror, he started in terror. “What the…!!” He later said, “I wish I was a lady so that I would know what my emotions were when I looked back, but they sure were something scary! I thought the back half of the car was gone!” When we got onto 81 South, I began to drive. After a few minutes, the heavens opened up and the water gushed forth. It was the second-worst rainstorm in which I have been. (The worst was hurricane-produced when we were driving to TN and every single car pulled over.) At times I could barely see the lines that were right next to the front tires. Furthermore, semis tooling along in front of me at 70 MPH kicked up a ton of spray. It was a quite gripping (I’m talking about me, not the car tires) experience to drive something—with an 8-foot hood sticking out in front of you, a hypersensitive steering wheel, mushy brakes, and an entirely too long body sticking out behind—at 75-80 MPH. Changing lanes was always an adventure. Right after 66 merged into 81, traffic slowed to a halt. The semi in front of us was engaged in road rage with a small white car in front of it. It was difficult to tell which one was the aggressor, but we learned how high (and low) a semi trailer can bounce when the driver slams on his brakes. This went on for some time. Soon I saw flashing red lights reflected in the back of the shiny semi trailer in front of us and soon a firetruck passed us on the shoulder. After a bit we passed a brutal looking accident.
That evening, we went to the house of the pastor of the small mission church that we were going to be assisting that weekend. They gave us some rudimentary orientation and we (us single SMBI guys and Thomas, the son of the pastor) headed to Waynesboro. Waynesboro is at the crossroads of interstates 64 and 81 and is a major drug-dealing center. 90% of the city’s residents are drug users. [Edited to add: The previous sentence is hearsay from the mission workers there in the city.] We pulled up next to a small ramshackle white house and ascended a rotting stairway to the deck. We were met by a 19 year old friend of Thomas’ whom I shall call Luther. Luther was wearing a pair of khaki shorts, a t-shirt, and an open long sleeve button up shirt. His slightly portly face sported a scraggly goatee and fronted a very sharp mind. He led us inside to a small, dim, smoky room. His father, with his big, black beard and stained sagging t-shirt, was slouched in an armchair staring blankly at the boob tube with his 23rd Budweiser of the evening in his hand. He was nearly-chain smoking cigarettes. He had a remarkable tolerance for alcohol in that he was reasonably un-passed-out and fairly lucid. The 22 beer cans sitting beside him on the table made handy ash trays. His wife, Luther’s mom, had a much lower tolerance for alcohol. She had had only a few beers and was drunk silly. She almost ended up doing a face plant when she staggered off the couch to reach down and get another beer. None of the three had jobs and financed their various vices with coke sales. There was a dish of cocaine sitting on the table. (The last time Thomas visited Luther, a drug dealer making a delivery was one of the many visitors who dropped by.) Throughout the conversation Luther’s dad had a couple of rants (”What we need is %@$*ing jobs!” (It’s nearly impossible for Waynesboro area employers to get non drug users; if people choose to not do drugs, employers will jump to employ them.) and “I live here in this $%#* hole!” and “She’s [girl on TV] hot as hell!” (ironically insightful) and “Lust you can trust!”) that he would spout out.
I talked with Luther for a long time. He has been in contact with many spirits in his search for spiritual truth. He had a unique mix of beliefs that roughly integrated agnosticism, pan-theism, eastern mysticism and some of his own theories (such as “cause and reflect”: “god” tosses a universe into existence and sees if it makes a big entertaining boom just as we toss a coin into the water for amusement). He went into recorder repeat mode as he gave a laundry list of political causes he believed in: environmentalism (”The trees have souls man! When you cut a tree down, you can hear its spirit scream.”), world peace (”I am totally into peace, dude.”), fighting corporate greed, etc. It could have been a Dean campaign speech. He believes that some sort of god (a god that is everything: nature, energy, no personality, etc) created us, but that we are no different than animals and that we should follow our animal instincts. He did believe, however, that we needed to treat our fellow creatures (animals, trees, and humans) nicely or we would receive bad karma and bad things would happen to us in return. I say that he believed these things (and he said he believed those things) but he really didn’t. He just said he did. I could tell that deep down inside he didn’t believe them. He seemed to be trying to convince himself of it. I listened and asked questions and pointed out the myriad contradictions in his ideas. I told him about the rebellion and fall of Satan. I explained that in the spiritual realm there are only two sides. I told him that the spirits that he was in contact with were either of God or of Satan. If the spirits were telling him things other than to seek Christ, then they were of Satan. He countered that the spirits told him to do good things. I told him that Satan is the father of lies and asked him what the most effective method of lying was. He responded that the most effective method was to mix a lot of truth with a little lie. I told him that Satan invented lying and that that’s what he was receiving from the spirits with which he was in contact. At times when I was talking, he would affect a laughably fake yawn, but I could tell he was still paying close attention. I punctuated each of these concepts with memorized pertinent Scripture. Whenever I quoted Scripture, he would tremble slightly and an inaudible and barely noticeable sob would shake him. The same went for whenever I prayed for him. He told me that he had good intentions and he knew that he had a pure heart because he still cried about bad things he did to people when he was 12. I explained to him that that was no indication of a pure heart, but rather of guilt. I explained to him how that God was a just God who would hold each of us accountable for our actions and no amount of good intentions or guilt could ever compensate for our sins. The only way that we can get rid of our sins in God’s eyes is to accept the free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ.
At the end of our conversation, I prayed for him that the deceitful spirits would leave him and that the spirit of Jesus Christ would show him the truth and that the Holy Spirit would convict him of the truth. He said at the end that he did believe that what I said was truth and that could sense the “Christ spirit” in me, but he wanted to make “sure, sure” that it is the truth before he puts his all into it. He said he was exhausted by all his contact with the spirits and that he just wanted to sleep for months. He said he did feel the need to get closer to the “Christ spirit” but he said it was so hard because spirits and demons would come torment him at night. He hinted that he wished he would have someone to talk to in those times. I gave him my cell phone number to call any time of the day or night.
We worked on re-modeling a house for an old lady, had a Kids Klub at the Solid Rock Cafe (a crossdenominational youth outreach facility with a big game room (pool, ping pong, air hockey, basketball, etc), cafe, stage, sound system, etc. We did a skit about being accepting of everyone and not being prejudice. We then went to some horrible, greasy, falling-down apartment complexes and talked with people and invited them to church and gave them a tract. We met on older “Baptist” lady with blackened teeth who was high on drugs. She insisted that she prayed to Jesus and that God had already decided whether she was going to be saved or not, so she wasn’t going to do anything about it. Thus we see the havoc the terrible and erroneous doctrine of unconditional eternal security has wreaked. The entire church and us SMBIers (along with Micah H, a guy from Undershepherd and P. Emerson’s church) went out to eat at Ruby Tuesday that evening.
Chad, talking on the phone to his little brother said, “We’re driving a long way… farther than your dentist.” He also said of the pond, “They have one of those slides that you can go from the top to the bottom.”
The next day, we conducted the church service at their church.
On the way home, it was really hot. The limo didn’t have any A/C. So, those that were sitting in the back, beside the doors, would open the doors as we were flying down the interstate and let the cool air wash over our roasting bodies. They would cheerfully wave to mouth-agape (and finger-wielding) drivers around us. Even when our doors were firmly closed, we were the constant object of rubber-necking.
