1. religion and spirituality
2. christianity

A Supernatural Hippy Story: A community tale.
Written by: C. Mooney
Cover Photography: C. Ford
© 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission.
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CONTENT
Introduction: Page 4
Chapter One: Page 7
Where Bob Dylan moves a man to tears; We are introduced to the odd phenomenon
of e Grateful Dead; And we narrowly escape a jail sentence.
Chapter Two: Page 13
Where we are now found pondering wisdom from the Orient; Some of us stop combing our hair;
And a pastor’s wife appears in a puka shell bikini.
Chapter ree: Page 17
We take our last ride on a BMW motorcycle; Discuss algebra;
Watch as a judge gets the shock of her life.
Chapter Four: Page 22
Wherein we meet a vampire, a hippie turned Gadarenes demoniac,
a man selling the Bhagavad-gita and other assorted characters.
Chapter Five: Page 34
Where we watch as the houseplants eat a hamburger;
A sister listens in on a conversation between Jesus and His apostles;
And then one of us gets a heart transplant.
Chapter Six: Page 39
During which time we wait for the Beatles to reunite;
We use eggplant parmesan to pacify a belligerent hippie: A near-disaster with a swarm of bees is averted.
Chapter Seven: Page 46
A very distant relation of Phil Lesh comes to teach the Bible;
We exhibit poor judgment while driving in Texas; And it appears that we are stealing an old red wagon.
Chapter Eight: Page 53
Where King James makes a surprise appearance; We are found begging for the life of a mangy dog;
And we enter a Rasta bar with a raccoon.
Chapter Nine: Page 58
Where we drive to Mexico by mistake; A French-Canadian hippie says “Oui” to Jesus;
And a Harvard PhD student recruits for us.
Chapter Ten: Page 69
During the course of which we hang out with sheep;
A race-car driver dances on streets of gold; And we go hiking with King David.
Chapter Eleven: Page 75
An 18th century theologian helps us to understand hippies;
A young man pays us a visit after dying; And an elbow is healed.
Chapter Twelve: Page 85
A brief chapter wherein one of the sisters wants to punch someone in a video store
but changes her mind and instead, takes the young man to Ben & Jerry’s for a milk shake.
Chapter irteen: Page 89
During which time two kidnappings are proposed;
We contemplate diamonds; And a sister is chased by a man in black.
Chapter Fourteen: Page 117
Where we begin by witnessing an attempted murder;
Someone is found decapitated; But thankfully we end with a love story.
Chapter Fifteen: 121
God speaks to a young man milking cows, We are transported to China;
And a man starts seeing stars.
Chapter Sixteen: 132
Where we are introduced to girls with blue faces; We meet a Swede on a beach making sand castles;
And then we get hit by a Mack truck.
Chapter Seventeen: Page 146
In which we must bid farewell to our faithful and dear readers,
As we leave for yet untold adventures.
In our story you will hear tales of amazing and phenomenal acts of God. People
will be miraculously healed of drug addictions. One young man will be miraculously
healed of HIV. Someone will be raised from the dead. People will hear the voice of
God. People will have encounters with angels.
Like our title says, this is a story about the supernatural.
But our story isn’t really about healing, or about the prophetic, or about any of
the things we most often associate with the word “supernatural.”
This story will focus on the single most powerful supernatural thing that could
ever happen to a human being. Our story will focus on the single most powerful tool
we have for unleashing this supernatural thing upon the world.
But first, a little story about a man who experienced the power of the
supernatural in his own life and who understood how to manifest this power.
Many years ago there was a man named Shaul. He was traveling on a road from
Jerusalem to Damascus. In his hand he held a permit of sorts, which was given to him
by the leaders of the Jewish people. It gave him permission to arrest and bring back to
Jerusalem those Jews who were proclaiming that Yeshua (Jesus) was the Messiah.
Shaul was a very religious man, and he thought he was serving God. But the
scriptures say that his mind was set on threatening and murdering these beleivers. He
was half way to his destination when the Lord appeared to him.
Shaul was blinded by an overwhelming light from heaven. Trembling and
astonished he said, “Lord, what would you have me to do?” He was unmade. He was
remade. All this from a flash of light and a voice from heaven.
Later as a follower of Christ, this man passed his handkerchief to someone and
they were healed. This man spoke to demons and they trembled. This man was bitten
by a poisonous snake and yet was unharmed.
Later this man wrote about yet another supernatural experience he had: “I
knew a man in Christ about fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or
whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knows;) such a one caught up to the third
heaven.”
This man was walking in the Spirit. He was anointed by God. There is no doubt
about it. Few of us have had these kinds of experiences or walked in this kind of
spiritual authority.
And this man was a teacher; like few others before or after him. Arguably, he
was a teacher second only to Jesus. He was such a great teacher that even his letters to
friends have come down to us as holy writ.
And what did he tell us is the most powerful supernatural thing that can happen
to a human being? And what is the tool he gave us for unleashing this power?
Listen carefully. Because this is what our story is really about. And we will
hopefully prove, by the end of it, that this thing works. This supernatural thing
changes lives. It changes communities. It has the power to change nature itself. And
here it is.
Our man, now the apostle Paul wrote this in Romans 1:16: I am not ashamed of the
gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes.
The gospel. (Which means the “good news” of what Jesus has done for us).
Now you know. Our story is about the power of the gospel. It is a story told to
show you that the preaching of the gospel is the most supernatural thing around. It is
a story that will show you that the very telling of the story— when Jesus died for our
sins and then rose from the dead—releases a power. That power not only heals bodies,
not only speaks to the human soul, but also changes those who receive this message
into sons and daughters of the living God. And into priests of the most high God.
Everything else—all the other miracles— they are but the icing on the cake. At
times they might confirm what the gospel says. That Jesus is Lord. But believing that
Jesus is Lord is what saves us. And salvation is better then any miracle that ever was.
Now, we begin our story in San Francisco.
It was 1993. We had just begun a little community of believers who were
spending a lot of time hanging out with the hippies in the Haight Ashbury district.*
Imagine the scene. There was the whiff of marijuana in the air. And Patchouli
oil. Grateful Dead music was blaring from a boom box. And we sat in a coffee shop
with a group of hippies; some with long dreadlocks and some with strange piercings
and blue hair. We began telling them a story about something that happened to a man
many years ago. A man who hung and bleed and wept for his friends.
*In the beginning of David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, the character by that name ask the question, “Will I turn out to have been the hero of my own
story?” Our fear in beginning upon a book like this was that our little community would end up being the hero of own story. In truth, Jesus is the hero of our story. In
order to avoid any confusion on the matter, we have, in most places, left out specific names; especially the names of those who have been a part of our community for the
last 15 years. In a few exceptions, real names have been used when a new believer comes to faith, as obviously they have done nothing that could be considered praiseworthy
simply by accepting the free gift of salvation. At times even these names have been changed, as have the names of all those of our friends yet to come to faith. At times, we
mentioned believers by name who helped our community in some extraordinary way. But by no means all of these people. If you’ve ever been among us, consider yourself a
minor character, or a major one if you please. But in the end, remember who the hero really is.
Chapter One
Where Bob Dylan moves a man to tears;
We are introduced to the odd phenomenon of e Grateful Dead;
And we narrowly escape a jail sentence.
It came as no surprise when we noticed a particular hippie as he came towards
us. He walked with an easy stride, which seemed to say that nothing much bothered
him. His long blond hair swayed with him. He wore sandals made out of hemp rope.
The whole picture (except for the small Labrador puppy leaping along to catch up)
seemed vaguely Biblical.
We began to pray that somehow we would get the chance to speak with the
young man with the flowing hair who reminded us of a character in a Bible story. We
saw him around, but rarely were we able to speak with him; he always seemed intent
on some destination. And so all we could do was to pray for him.
These were the days before our community had found a place to live in the
neighborhood—a place to invite people back to. So instead, we would go to the local
market and buy fixings for sandwiches. We’d then have a picnic at Buena Vista Park,
which at the time, was a hang out for Deadheads. Trying to look casual, we would
invite street kids to join us; like we just happened to bring a little too much food for
our group of three or four—enough for 50! We were excited the day Matthew, the
hippy whose name we still didn’t know, came and took a sandwich. But before we
could introduce ourselves, he was off again. Later that night at the coffee shop, we
were finally introduced to him by some of his friends. For the first time, we noticed
that he wore a small silver cross.
“Do you believe in Jesus?” one of us asked. It turned out, as was the popular
thing, that he not only believed in Jesus but also in just about everything else. It didn’t
seem the time for a serious talk, and since he was rushing off once again we didn’t
push it. We had read that most people are lead to the Lord by a family member or a
friend. If that was the case, then it made sense to become a friend first. This would
take some time, but we believed it would be worth it. Jesus seemed to spend a lot of
time intentionally “hanging out” with people. Besides, we liked these young hippies
and we didn’t really want to be anywhere else. We trusted that we could take the time
to get to know them before approaching the subject of Jesus. We could hang out and
slowly build the relationships, each time going a little deeper, until the point that we
were discussing issues like heaven and hell without much awkwardness.
There were times, though, when we were led to present the gospel all at once—
even at the risk of offending someone. One night, two of us were walking down the
street. We came upon a young Deadhead in the act of selling drugs. One of us got
right to the point, making a very emotionally charged plea to this young man to repent
and follow Jesus that night. The rest of us looked on, surprised by how direct she was
with the young man. As we walked away, our sister seemed deeply troubled and shared
that she had felt led by the Spirit to be so bold. She was somehow worried about this
young man’s life. The next day, we learned that he had overdosed in a dive hotel. His
“friends,” rather than risking arrest, had fled, stealing his new sneakers in the process.
His girlfriend shared all this with us as she asked around the street for his stolen
sneakers. She wanted to bury him with them on.
After that day at the picnic, we didn’t see Matthew again. We worried that maybe
we had blown the one chance we had had to share the gospel with him. We prayed for
him every day and even asked our friends to pray as well. “We think that this kid will
be saved,” we told them with confidence. It was normal for Deadheads to breeze in
and out of town, but sometimes the wind wouldn’t bring them back for many months.
It is, after all, a big world to roam about in.
A month later, we were back at the coffee shop. One of us had a cassette player
and was listening to a Bob Dylan tape, Saved. The words of one song were particularly
moving: “When He Returns.”
“Of every earthly plan that be known to man
He is unconcerned, He has plans of His own,
to set up His throne, when He returns.”
It was getting late and the coffee shop was emptying out, but we felt we should
stay a little longer. Then, in walked Matthew. He was headed for the bathroom. On his
way back he sat next to us and asked if we had some time to talk. He began to pour
out his heart to us. He was strung-out on heroin; he was tired and lonely and felt lost.
He didn’t know what to do or where to turn. We talked about Jesus, and he seemed to
be very touched. The coffee house was closing, so we were headed outside when our
sister with the cassette player remembered the song. “Hey, do you like Bob Dylan?”
she asked. “Yeah, actually he’s my favorite,” he answered. She rewound to the last song
and handed him the headphones. Tears welled up in his eyes as he listened to the song.
By the end of the song, he was speechless. We went home full of joy and hope for this
young man.
A month went by and, as much as we looked, we never spotted Matthew. We
asked around, but no one seemed to know where was. We thought, “Well maybe that
was all we were meant to do; just that one small conversation.” We were okay with that
being the case.
Then on a busy Saturday, we were sitting again in the Coffee Zone when
Matthew walked in. He stopped short in front of us and seemed shocked. “I can’t
believe this!” he said, as he took a small notebook from his pocket. “Look at this,” he
demanded, and we looked at the page he had turned to. It was titled “Things to do”
and under that only a couple of notations, the first one being “Find the Christians
on Haight Street.” Now we were shocked as well. We were sitting in exactly the same
place where we had talked a month before; something that wasn’t lost on any of us.
He explained that he had just come from up north. He had been dropped off at the
coffee shop just a minute before hoping to somehow find us. He returned from the
bathroom a few minutes later and confessed that he was high. He said that what he
wanted to talk about was so important that he thought it was best to wait until he was
sober. We made a plan to have dinner the next night. We hoped he wasn’t so high that
he would forget the appointment. At least he’d written the appointment down in his
small notebook.
The next night as Matthew spoke, we were blessed beyond all expectations to
hear how faithfully the Lord had answered our prayers over the last month. Matthew
had left the city the night we had spoken in the coffee shop and had secured a job
working at an illegal marijuana farm in Humboldt County, about six hours north of
the city. His job was to guard the fields at night with a sub-machine gun in case federal
agents came to check the place out. Since this rarely happened, it was more likely he
would have to shoot a poor hippie trying to sneak in and steal some plants. He had
orders to shoot to kill. Understandably, he was disturbed by the assignment. One
night, he was sitting out by the field, listening to the river nearby, and thought, “I have
everything I’ve always dreamed of. I’m living in a cabin in the redwoods next to a river
with my dog. I have good food and friends. I have all the pot I could ever smoke, but
I’m miserable.” One line from the Dylan song kept coming back to him over and over:
How long will I stay drunk on fear out in the wilderness?
Suddenly a supernatural voice spoke to him and said, “Put the gun down and
walk away. Go back to San Francisco and find those Jesus people.” So that’s exactly
what Matthew did. He put the gun down and hitched a ride south to find us. That’s
why he had written himself the note, “Find the Christians.” He probably knew that
Jesus was looming in the future.
From there it was a pretty easy slide into God’s kingdom for Matthew. That
night he went with us to a prayer meeting. It wasn’t a normal prayer meeting. It was a
time when the Holy Spirit was touching people in very deep and often dramatic ways.
We weren’t sure what Matthew would make of it. In fact, some of us weren’t sure at
that point what to make of it ourselves, but after he went up to the front for prayer, he
came back to his seat as a believer.
Jesus had a new disciple. But what, we all asked, were we to do with him? We
were taken quite by surprise. In the few months that we had been going to the street
and speaking to people about Jesus, we had come to accept the inevitable; that no
one would ever actually come to faith. It may seem now, as we write this, that we
lacked faith. It wasn’t really that. Countless people had told us that San Francisco was
one of the hardest places in the world for the gospel to be heard. We had prepared
ourselves to face any sort of disappointment but still remain faithful to the call. We
considered the sharing of the gospel message to be the end in and of itself. God was
good and had sent His Son to die for us. We loved Him enough to proclaim this to
the city. Salvation was the Lord’s business; we had no control over how many or how
few actually responded to the message. In some ways, this was a healthy way to begin.
We’ve seen so many people start with overly ambitious expectations, only to walk
away before the Lord can accomplish what He wanted to do through them, however
seemingly insignificant it might appear. We would walk down the street and talk about
this subject; “Even if no one ever gets saved, it’s a privilege to be a witness for Christ.”
We all agreed. And indeed it was.
So we were, needless to say, a little unprepared when Matthew told us that he
would follow the Lord. He was homeless and staying with a man who smoked pot
constantly.
We knew that Matt would have to live with one of us.
It was wonderful to see the Holy Spirit guide a new believer and give him
wisdom that was not only beyond his own maturity as a baby Christian, but beyond
ours as well. When Matthew first came to live with us, he was free to listen to all his
old music. But a short time later we found him smashing bootleg tapes of concerts
he had been to all over the country; virtual recordings of his life as a Deadhead. He
had a hammer in his hands and was screaming and weeping as he destroyed his tape
library. His level of intensity scared us. Another time, he came home and confessed
that he had smoked pot, but he had a long list of reasons why he would never smoke
again. He had written them down and read them off to us: “One, I can’t pray when
I am high. Two, I do and say foolish and ungodly things. Three, it’s illegal.” On and
on went the list—a very impressive thesis on the wisdom of sobriety. Those were
good moments. It was obvious that the Holy Spirit could and would make up for
our deficiencies. Our job wasn’t so much to disciple but to provide encouragement,
support, and a safe place as the Lord himself discipled Matthew.
The Grateful Dead was playing across the bay at Oakland Coliseum. Afterwards,
Jerry Garcia was to play with his smaller bluegrass band named, appropriately, “The
Jerry Garcia Band.” Haight Street was packed with young devotees who hung out at
The Coffee Zone, a rustic coffee house that appealed to the hippie types. Most nights
we hung out at The Coffee Zone and got to know the other patrons. They told us
about their strange lives, traveling around following the band.
Our community began with a woman who owned an advertising agency, a public
relations executive, a guy in high-tech, and a nurse. Up until then, most of our friends
were other believers. We looked out of place on Haight Street. That would slowly
change, but for the moment we were on a pretty big learning curve. Most of us knew
absolutely nothing about the odd phenomenon that was Grateful Dead culture.
The Grateful Dead had lived at 710 Ashbury Street in the mid-‘60s, and for
many years attracted generation after generation of young groupies. Most of the year
would find the band touring around the country being followed from town to town
by VW vans and customized school buses packed with their dedicated fans. Many
Deadheads had dreadlocks with glass beads woven into the locks. Some of them made
their own clothes out of scraps of corduroy. They made their own jewelry out of
hemp string. They were very colorful and creative dressers, to say the least.
Maggie was one of the first Deadheads we met at The Coffee Zone. She looked
older than her 15 years. She told us that after the band had played in her hometown of
Rochester, NY several months earlier, she had left home. Wearing a floppy green hat,
she introduced us to some of her friends.
One of them, a 17-year old named Anah (who went by the street name
“Grape”) had already been introduced to us. One day she came into the Coffee Zone
and rudely said to us, “I heard you bought kids sandwiches … Well? Buy me one!” At
first we were startled, but decided to respond—not to her attitude; but to her obvious
need.
“Sure,” we said. By the time we crossed the street to our favorite coffee shop,
she had invited several of her friends to lunch. After ordering the most expensive
sandwich, Anah began attacking us for our faith in Jesus. She claimed that we were
brainwashing people. She stood up to complete her tirade before she ran out of the
coffee shop, leaving us dumbfounded. She was determined to use us and then abuse
us. Little did she know that this would only make us more determined to pray for her.
Soon after we had met Anah, she continued on tour with the Dead and had
a disastrous falling-out with her long-term boyfriend. He not only left her, but took
their school bus and puppy as well. At a Dead show at Shoreline Amphitheater near
San Francisco, Matthew ran over to our car. He said that he had found Anah and
that she wanted to talk to us. We went to meet her with some trepidation, but were
surprised to find that she was willing to talk about Jesus. For months, she had heard a
voice encouraging her to call us. We could tell that her heart had been softened by her
recent experiences. She came home with us that night to a little studio apartment we
had temporarily rented on Page Street in the Haight Street district. A few nights later,
the Lord touched her deeply during a prayer meeting. On the way home she said to us,
“I’m in love with Jesus.”
Chapter Two
Where we are now found pondering wisdom from the Orient;
Some of us stop combing our hair;
And a pastor’s wife appears in a puka shell bikini.
Two very unconventional men influenced our approach to sharing the gospel in
the early days.
The first, of course, was Jesus. Though He was God, the scriptures say He
humbled Himself and took the form of a man. Think of it—the Creator of the
universe (so holy that people would look upon Him and die) becoming a first century
Jew. You’d think He would have preferred to be one of those powerful Romans who
got to wear the fancy armor. But no, the King of the universe took the form of a
servant. He dressed like a Jew, spoke like one, ate their food, and went to their parties.
The religious and self-righteous called Him a sinner and a drunkard because that’s
exactly who Jesus hung out with. He didn’t seem to be taken aback by the fact that
they didn’t have it all together. He expected as much from them. “I’ve come for the
sick,” He said simply.
There was obvious wisdom in His approach. He said that He came first for
the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He had a very narrow focus. His disciples
brought the gospel to the ends of the earth later, but He rarely left a 50-mile radius
overlooking the Sea of Galilee. He spoke the language of a group of people that had
very little influence in the world. He stooped before them and washed their feet. This
confused even His closest friends, like Peter.
The second man who influenced us was Hudson Taylor. He sailed from
England to China in the mid 19th century and found a community of missionaries
there who had isolated themselves from those they had come to reach. They built
enclaves and put walls around themselves. They dressed just the same as in the land
they had left. They had tea at the correct hour, but reached hardly a soul. When
a Chinese man came to the Lord (which rarely happened) they made him into an
Englishman, thereby cutting him off from the culture he was best suited to reach.
Taylor saw all this and took a radically different approach. He grew his hair out, and in
the style of the Chinese, wore it in a ponytail. He dressed in the robes they wore and
lived among them, eating their food, rather then crumpets and watercress sandwiches.
Many other of the Christians in China rejected and mocked him, but in his lifetime,
his group led more than 100,000 Chinese to Jesus. All of the believers who joined him
were required to learn Chinese and live as Asians.
When we read a biography called, Hudson Taylor’s Spiritual Secret, we were
convinced that we should take a similar approach to the one that Taylor had taken. In
the early days of our community, some of us were coming out of the business world,
a culture very different than the hippie one. Some of us were coming out of a world
where designer labels spoke about one’s worth, and into a world where the girls made
their own dresses out of scraps of fabric. But we were convinced that this materialistic
life was meaningless. These hippies were the people we had came to love.
There was some debate in the early group. Some of us had been in the hippie
life before coming to Christ, but not every one of our early community members was
able to embrace this approach. We had to ask ourselves: Was our vision to clean the
appearance of hippies, making them more presentable to the mainstream church, or to
help them to clean up their hearts and make them more presentable to God?
Pastor Michael, an advisor to our community, supported our approach. One
Christmas morning, we presented one of the new believers with his first set of flannel
pajamas. Previously, he had slept in his clothes. That morning he wore his new PJs
to our prayer meeting. We weren’t sure what the reaction would be. Pastor Michael
walked up to him and said, “Nice pajamas. Get them for Christmas?” and left it at
that. He valued the man inside the sleepwear above all else.
Recently we heard a sad story. A man who was ministering faithfully to
Moslems in the Middle East returned home to make a presentation to his conservative
denomination. He was wearing a beard in the style of those he was giving his life
to reach. All Moslem men in the country where he was living wear beards. The
denomination stopped supporting him because of the beard, and he had to leave the
Middle East because of lack of support.
We love the scripture found in Samuel where it is said of the young man David,
“Man looks at the outward appearance of things, but God looks at the motivation of
the heart.” The people wanted a man who looked like a king, and so they got Saul,
who looked the part but was deficient inwardly. David (despite later portrayals of him
in marble) was nothing to look at. Goliath laughed when he approached David. But
God saw David’s heart and chose him to lead the nation.
People sometimes sit smugly in Bible studies and look down at those who don’t
fit in. One of our brothers brought two hippies to a worship service. One was a Jewish
man who had just come to faith; the other was a Moslem man. One of the elders
spoke with our brother, who was known to him. “Are these people with you?” he
asked, “because they are making some people in the congregation feel uncomfortable
and I’ve been asked to have them leave.” It was nothing the two had done; they were
very well behaved. It was just that they didn’t fit in. Who is to say that short, wellgroomed hair is godlier than dreadlocks? Or, as the Rastafarians believe, dreadlocks
are more spiritual than crew cuts? These people saw only the outward appearance of
things. God looks at the motivation of our hearts.
Our friend Diane (Pastor Michael’s wife) likes to tell the story of her own
transformation. She was a young hippie girl not yet out of her teens. It was during the
glory days of the Jesus People movement in Southern California, and hundreds of
hippies were being baptized that day in the ocean by Pastor Chuck Smith. Diane was
baptized in a crocheted bikini made with shells. She said that no one seemed to notice,
and only later was she convicted to cover herself a little more. Surely angels rejoiced
the day of her baptism looking on at her heart totally surrendered to God. Hey, Eve
was pleasing to God and she didn’t even have on a puka-shell bikini!
After reading the Hudson Taylor biography, some of us who formerly wore
business suits, now had stopped combing their hair. They came to love having long
dreadlocks with beads sewn into the locks! Eventually many in our community had
piercings and tattoos. Some of us had even mastered the art of going weeks without
bathing, although, on this one point, others had been known to raise objections.
And some of the guys grew beards. Beards!
With the new disciples of Jesus, we emphasized the heart in relationship to the
external things. “It’s not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out,”
said our Lord (Matthew 15:11).
Often, when we visited a new church (as we do when traveling) we were taken
at first as unbelievers. Once, when we entered a very conservative Assemblies of God
church, the pastor ran straight to us and extended his hand and asked enthusiastically,
“Have you met the Lord Jesus Christ?” He seemed a bit crestfallen when we told him
that we had. Maybe he was hoping for a few conversions that day, bless his soul.
We tried to break down barriers between ourselves and the hippies so we could
share the gospel with them. There were so many places where we had to distance
ourselves from the beliefs and practices of the New Age. We wanted to fight the right
battles; the ones that are life and death. Tell a hippie that you don’t smoke pot and that
you don’t have sex outside of marriage. Then, go on to explain why you don’t listen to
certain music. Next, tell him that you believe that Jesus is God and that the only way to
be saved is through faith in Him. Wow, that’s enough for one conversation. If having
purple hair will help a person hear the gospel, give us the dye. We’re willing to be fools
for Christ.
Once while traveling, we stopped in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. In
the local department store, a woman passed one of our sisters in the aisle. She stopped
abruptly, and without flinching, looked her over from head to foot, crying out, “Jesus
Christ Almighty!” She then ran off. Without knowing it, she had identified the exact
reason for our sister’s long dreadlocks and ragged clothes. She looked this way for the
sake of Jesus Christ Almighty.
We watched a newly-released Jesus film recently and marveled at how the
producers costumed the actors who played Jesus and the disciples. They looked exactly
like the people we meet at hippie festivals around the world. The same long robes,
rope belts, hair down their backs and beards, oh, God, beards! Every one of them.
We hope that, when Jesus comes back, the church is ready for what they will see. He’s
coming back for all of us; even the ones who wear Dockers and Polo shirts. He loves
us all.
Chapter ree
We take our last ride on a BMW motorcycle;
Discuss algebra;
Watch as a judge gets the shock of her life.
By now we had all given up our individual apartments and were living in two
tiny studio flats in the neighborhood—one for men and one for women. Several
young street-kids were now living with us, and the flats were getting pretty crowded.
One brother slept on the floor in front of the refrigerator. We decided to buy a house,
but we didn’t have the money for the down payment. One sister sold her company,
another a classic BMW motorcycle (which admittedly was a little painful) and another
cashed in his IRA’s. We scraped together everything we had, but still didn’t have the
money we needed.
The pastor at the church that most of us attended told us that a member of the
congregation had approached him and asked him if we were trustworthy. This man
had heard that we were trying to buy a house and was willing to make an interest-free
loan of up to $40,000. We were introduced to Larry Wilson a few minutes later. We
had never met before. He offered to make the loan for as long as a year, which was
just how long it would take us to get the money from selling the business one of us
owned. We saw this kind of radical generosity again and again as other believers made
themselves available to the Lord just when we needed funds. His offer was one more
confirmation that God was in our work.
At that point, we had been looking for the “right house” for many months. We
needed something close to the street where the young hippies dealt drugs to the locals.
We knew that time away from the street meant money lost for these dealers, and that
if we were too far from the action, they simply wouldn’t make the trip.
One of our sisters had a vision of Jesus standing in front of a bay window in
an old Victorian house, so besides practical considerations (like price, location and
condition) we depended on her to help us choose the house.
Our sister explained the details of her vision to us many times. Jesus was
standing in front of a bay window and the curtains were blowing. There was a soft and
lovely light resting upon the folds of His garments. He was inviting us into a place of
peace and rest.
For six months we tramped from one house to another. Then our realtor told
us that the owners of a property (just eight houses from the famous corner of Haight
and Ashbury) had just dropped their asking price. We all jumped at the suggestion to
take a look.
The sister who’d had the vision was the first one in the door. She stopped
abruptly in the living room and announced, “This is the house!” We all stopped
and looked at the front window as she pointed and said, “That’s where I saw Jesus,
standing right there.”
Though we were all ready to sign the papers immediately, on the strength of this
declaration, one of us said, “Okay, but we should at least have a look at the rest of the
house.” A practical man. Within half an hour, we were making an offer.
We moved into 509 Ashbury Street on a summer-like day in October 1994. The
house, which had at first seemed enormous, was filling rapidly with numerous young
people who confessed new-found faith in Jesus and asked to move in with us. We were
sure that we didn’t recognize half of our new roommates on moving day, but how
could we turn someone away when they wanted to follow the Lord? We recall a few
conversations that went sort of like this: “Is that girl making eggs in the kitchen living
with us?”
“I don’t know!” came the reply.
Word was getting out quickly. Within a few days it seemed like a revival had hit
our street. The house was full of young Jesus disciples. This was the beginning of a
long lesson in discernment—in learning the balance between mercy and foolishness.
One thing we learned quickly was that drug addicts, particularly heroin addicts,
are amazingly convincing liars. They must lie to survive. Lie to their family. Lie to
friends. Lie to the police. Lie to themselves. Lying becomes easier than telling the
truth. To tell the truth is to face the fact that their life is a mess; something they’d
rather not do. Just because we were nice people, wanting to help them out, didn’t mean
they wouldn’t lie to us.
A heroin addict does something called “nodding out” as the drug is taking
its effect. It looks like a man falling asleep on a bus while reading an algebra book.
His head drifts to the side with his eyes shut, and then his head falls suddenly, which
startles him awake. He shakes off the sleepiness and tries to focus, but the whole
process begins again, and he drifts off. We would have people literally look us in the
eye with dilated pupils, doing this nodding out thing while they swore that they were
sober.
Doug could have been an attractive young man, with long, dark, curly hair
and big brown eyes, but the drugs made him look old and worn out for his age. He
had met Keith (one of the very sincere new believers among us) at a Fourth of July
picnic in the park. Keith shared his story, which sounded much like Doug’s but had a
better ending. Keith had gotten free from drugs with the help of Jesus and suggested
that Doug give it a chance. That same night, Doug moved in. For the first three days
he cried out in agony from his bottom bunk in the downstairs living room. He was
withdrawing from heroin.
After a few days he seemed to be through the worst of it, and there appeared
to be some sincerity in him to continue with the Lord. He had a court date on a
marijuana sales charge. He had sold to an undercover cop. We told him that if he
wanted to follow Jesus he would have to be honest with the judge and confess guilt.
“Did you sell to the cop?” we asked. “If so, then admit it and ask for mercy.”
We were convinced that if they would try honesty, God would come to their
defense; but if they wanted to continue in lies, God would not.
Doug seemed willing to try, and we discussed what he would say to the
judge. But the morning we accompanied Doug to the courthouse, he seemed to be
vacillating. To us, this was a test of whether or not he had really devoted himself to
Jesus. As usual, there were several cases being heard at once, one which took most of
the morning, and we were required to sit and listen while we waited for Doug’s case to
be called. The morning case involved a man who had been busted for growing large
amounts of marijuana in his loft space. Obviously he was growing it to sell, but his
lawyer was trying to prove that he had been growing it only for his own use, which
would significantly reduce the charge.
One of the “expert” witnesses was a man who was a famous proponent for the
legalization of cannabis and who wrote a column for a leading cannabis magazine.
Doug seemed excited that such a celebrity was in the room, which caused us concern.
At the break, before Doug was called, the man approached us and began to ask
Doug about the particulars of his case. When Doug mentioned that the police had
confiscated $1000 when they made the arrest (money he had made selling drugs that
day), the man got very excited and told us of a similar case, advising Doug to plead
“not guilty” and contact a lawyer who could argue the injustice of the arrest to the
court. It was even possible, he said, that the $1000 could be returned.
One of us now spoke up, because we could see that Doug was weakening.
“Look, Doug has just given his life to Jesus, and he is going to be honest with the
judge and plead guilty.” The man became enraged and began screaming in the hall.
He even called us “the anti-Christ.” Doug, meanwhile, just stood quietly and listened.
When the man turned from us and handed him his card, Doug put the card in his
pocket and said nothing. His case was postponed. We took the bus home in silence,
but later told him that he would have to make a hard decision. If he wanted to remain
with us, he would have to be honest with the court. Following Jesus, we told him, had
to be a serious thing. The next day, he packed and left.
We saw Doug a couple of months later on the street. He told us that someone
else had advised him to just skip town and not show up for the court date at all. He
seemed scared to even be on the street and afraid that a police officer would recognize
him. He left town and headed down south and that was the last we saw of him. It was
months later when a friend of his told us that Doug had died of an overdose.
Jesus said that the road to destruction would be wide and easy and that many
would go that way, but that the way to life would be hard. In the early days of our
community we became discouraged by stories like Doug’s. Later, we began to accept
that this was a fulfillment of the Lord’s word. The angels rejoice in heaven when
someone genuinely gives his life to the Lord. It’s a big deal.
On another day, we found ourselves in the same courtroom with a young girl
who had also been charged with selling marijuana. We had told her Doug’s story, and
she was prepared to plead guilty. We met earlier with the public defender, and she
told us that it was absolutely crazy to plead guilty. It would guarantee a jail sentence.
The typical course was to enter a not-guilty plea, which would cause the charge to be
lowered. The penalty would be standard: three months in jail, one year probation, a
court order to stay off Haight Street and a life-time drug offender status. This was the
best that we could hope for, the public defender told us matter-of-factly. She told us
that pleading guilty was simply never done.
“You should trust me,” she said.
“I should trust the Lord,” the young girl replied.
On the court day, we sat on the benches praying while we waited for the case
to be called. We noticed that the judge looked bored—especially when other Haight
Street dealers pleaded not guilty. She would just roll her eyes, tell them to take a seat,
and then call the next case. Finally, our case was called. The lawyer stepped up and
said, “Judge, my client would like to enter a plea of guilty. She says she sold the pot to
the police officer.” The judge suddenly sat straight up in her chair and looked like she
had just been hit by lightning. There was silence for a few seconds, and then she called
the lawyer up to the bench as they spoke privately for a few minutes. Next, she called
the attorney from the District Attorney’s office to the bench. They spoke in whispers,
and then we watched him exit the court as the judge called another case. Maybe
20 minutes passed before the prosecuting attorney returned to the room and was
immediately motioned to approach the bench with the public defender. After another
private conversation, the judge asked the young girl to stand. “The court has consulted
with the District Attorney’s office, and I have decided to drop the charge, if that’s okay
with you.” The judge actually said, “if that’s okay with you.” As the young girl stood in
shock, we noticed another street kid, who was also there to plead his case, turn around
to look at us with his mouth wide open. The judge continued, “If it’s possible, we
would like you only to pay the $100 court fee? How much time would you need to get
the money? Is six months enough?”
Quite a few street kids had to admit that a miracle had happened. That a guilty
person was set free from jail? Well, that was pretty cool, we all had to agree, but we
knew that the real miracle was that the gospel had freed someone from sin.
Chapter Four
Wherein we meet a vampire,
a hippie turned Gadarenes demoniac,
a man selling the Bhagavad-gita
and other assorted characters.
Thanksgiving came soon after we moved into the Ashbury House. San
Francisco, being a very socially conscious city, had dozens of food programs for the
poor, and especially on this one day, there is no shortage of turkey and cranberry
sauce for the homeless. We decided that instead of providing a service like that, we
would have a simpler and smaller family-style gathering down in the basement of our
house. Our family had been growing every day, and at this point, we were planning a
meal for about 20 people.
Two small turkeys were in the oven and people were hard at work upstairs
preparing the meal, so a few of us went down to the basement to begin setting up the
table. We managed to find chairs and benches for all of those invited. But as we began
to set the table, the Lord seemed to speak to one of us saying, “As many chairs as you
set up, I’ll fill them.” It seemed that our invitation list was about to grow.
We began looking in previously unopened closets. As we found odd doors and
sawhorses, the table suddenly grew to be the whole length of the house. We searched
every closet in the house, and found seating space for double the number of our
planned guests. In one closet we had never opened, we found a stack of folding chairs
left by the previous owners. We weren’t surprised. “But what about the food?” we
wondered. We were sure that our food could not stretch that far. God would have to
provide.
That afternoon and far into the evening we didn’t have a chance to sit down.
People from the street kept coming in: old people, young people, drunken people
and (thankfully) some sober people. We piled plates high with turkey and all the
trimmings. We spent most of the day in the basement kitchen. One young man who
came had recently arrived from Mexico. He spoke very little English. He just sat in the
corner looking queasily at his huge plate of food, not taking a bite. We asked him if
everything was okay, and in broken English he finally confessed that this was the sixth
meal he had eaten that day. Much to his relief, we took the plate from him and threw it
in the garbage. He’d come for the company more than the food.
A few of us began to notice that somehow the food was being miraculously
multiplied. At this point, we had fed at least 100 or more people with two small
turkeys. And there were still leftovers. Indeed we had a lot to be thankful about that
day.
When we first started making trips to Haight Street we had thought of having
a coffee house open to the street kids. But when Matthew, Anah, and the other young
disciples moved into our cramped quarters, finding a larger house took our attention.
After Thanksgiving, we began to revisit the coffee house idea. We thought about
turning our basement apartment into an underground coffee house, since it had it’s
own entrance to the street and a garden in the back. Many of the coffee houses on
Haight Street were housed in similar spaces.
As we’ve said, there was no shortage of soup kitchens in the city, but it was a
new thing for a homeless person to be invited to someone’s home for a meal. This
seemed to speak powerfully of the love of Jesus to these people.
We began to regularly invite people over. On those nights, long lines would form
out the door, and our small basement would be packed until late at night. Friends
would come and play music while we served the visitors. Long conversations about the
Lord would sometimes last until morning. Those nights would always end with at least
ten people sleeping on the couches and the floor; we would just shut off the lights and
go to bed.
One night James, a new believer saved out of the Hare Krishna temple, was
cleaning up when he noticed that some Satanist had drawn pentagrams and the
numbers 666 on our fence. He told us he had a better plan than to just paint over it. A
couple of days later, we saw that he had painted over the satanic symbols, but in their
place had drawn (with the same sort of black marker) Christian symbols that looked a
little like the ones he had removed. There was a circle with a trinity symbol instead of
the pentagram and 777 in place of 666. The next time we opened the coffee house we
all wondered what might happen if the artist went to look for his work.
Our neighbors were getting pretty annoyed and understandably so. Kids would
leave half-eaten plates of food on their front steps, and some would curse them
out while they waited in line to get in. As hard as we tried to manage the crowd,
our neighbors were becoming less and less socially conscience and more and more
defensive. One woman continually reported us to the police, who made regular visits
but couldn’t see how we were breaking the law. A rumor was spread that we were
actually a front for a drug ring. Later, we learned that the local precinct had planted
undercover cops in Bible studies and coffee house gatherings before they declared us
legal.
The greatest neighborhood disturbances were made, not from the young hippie
kids, but from the older chronic homeless people who would come over drunk.
One man made a scene every chance he had. We prayed about this and decided that
since we were called especially to the street kids, we would limit admittance to only
people under 30. But we never had the heart to enforce this. Next, we decided to have
people stand outside and prevent groups from congregating in front of the house,
thus keeping people who were obviously drunk from coming in. Unfortunately, this
only intensified the scenes in front of the house as we were accused of being “not
Christian.” Several times we had to call the police, who were becoming regular visitors
to the house when someone became violent. This only added to the frustration of the
neighbors. One elderly homeless man liked to wait until his wheelchair was blocking
our door and then put the lock on and started screaming. Meanwhile, there would be a
line of people waiting behind him unable to enter.
But in spite of the problems, we saw good things happen every night that we
opened our home.
Melissa was a 17-year-old witch from Salem, Massachusetts. She came to our
coffeehouse one night with her black cat. Someone talked to her about the Lord, and
she gave her life to Him right then and there as people edged around her with plates
of food. She had seen some scary things in the time she had practiced witchcraft. She
was surrendering to the other side.
A couple of days later we heard fire engines coming down the street and
wondered what house they had been called to. We looked out the window as the
firemen jumped from the trucks and entered our house. We ran down to the basement
garden to see what was the matter and found the firemen talking with Melissa and
the other new believers. A plume of black smoke came from the barbeque. The
new believers were explaining to the fireman that they had been conducting a book
burning. Melissa apparently had brought several witchcraft books into the house,
which she decided to dispose of. When she mentioned this to the others, they too
confessed to having un-godly literature. On their own, they had organized the event.
Apparently they had gotten to Acts, chapter 19, verse 19 in their Bible studies.
One of the neighbors, whose house overlooked our garden, had witnessed this
and had been the one to call the fire department. In the most open-minded city on
planet earth, on what could be the most open-minded street in the city, book burning
was tantamount to witch burning. And this was a city with many witches. HIGHLY
politically incorrect.
Soon after, a journalist showed up at the door. He had heard about the book
burning and was interviewing some of the neighbors and street kids, determined to
expose us as a cult.
Cults were no stranger to Haight Street. In fact, we had heard that several
religious cults had started there. The Jim Jones cult had begun around the corner.
Several cults still frequented the street. We gave the journalist free reign, inviting him
in and allowing him to interview all of the people living in the house. A week into his
investigation, he called to say he had decided not to complete the article. He disagreed
with our doctrine but we didn’t seem like a cult. “After all,” he said, “your chief
opponent was a member of the Hare Krishna temple.” We were very relieved.
One night after coffeehouse, a couple of us decided to get some air and walk
the street. We came upon a man sitting in a doorway bound by heavy chains. It was the
oddest thing we had ever seen, and we couldn’t figure out how exactly he had come to
be in such a condition. We tried to speak to him, but a strange demonic voice spoke
back, telling us to leave. There didn’t appear to be much we could do for him, so we
prayed and left with heavy hearts.
We came to know this man as Mitchell, a professing vampire.
There was a blackout on Haight Street. It was very scary, and in the complete
darkness, people seemed to be going crazy (although many were crazy even with
the lights on). One of us was out on the street and all she wanted to do was run for
the house. Suddenly Mitchell approached her, wearing the long black cape of his
profession. He began walking beside her in the dark, and not knowing what else to
do, she started to tell him about the Lord. He seemed to become more and more
subdued and so they continued walking all the way to a nightclub on lower Haight
Street about a mile away. Our sister was alone now in the nightclub, and suddenly
aware of her surroundings. But now as she looked around the place, she noticed that
everyone looked like vampires: Black clothing, powdered white face makeup and black
eyeliner. She excused herself and went to the phone to call the house and ask someone
else to come and join her, but no one answered, so she returned to Mitchell. Again
at a loss for what to do, she took out her Bible and began to read the first chapter of
John. Mitchell wasn’t demonically manifesting (which was encouraging), and when
she paused to take a breath, he said very quietly, “Don’t stop. Keep reading.” So she
read many chapters— up to chapter 15, while others at surrounding tables listened.
Mitchell just sat in his chair, the whole time taking it in.
We had a heart for Mitchell and even hoped that perhaps he would follow Jesus.
One night during coffeehouse, he asked if he could stay over. He was sick, so we put
him in one of the back bedrooms in the top bunk. About an hour later, one of our
brothers came downstairs to find the others. “That vampire fellow we let sleep over
has a very big knife and is threatening to kill Christians!” he explained while suggesting
a few of us go upstairs and have a talk with Mitchell. One of the sisters said, “Now
Mitchell, give me the knife and go back to bed,” like she was speaking to a child. And
to our surprise he did just this.
One day, he showed up at the door begging us to help him find his girlfriend.
“She has been taken by a coven of witches and they are planning to sacrifice her
tonight!” he yelled, “You must help me rescue her.” Later we found out that it was
Mitchell who wanted to sacrifice his girlfriend. He had just wanted to use us to find
her so that he could do this. It was confusing to know when to help people and when
to refuse to be brought into their weird games. After we developed better discernment,
we began to feel less guilt at refusing some people, having more freedom to give our
time where it was needed. There was no shortage of young people who seemed so
overwhelmed by the Lord’s conviction and changed by the love of God.
The gospel was having its mystical, supernatural effect.
When we first began going out to Haight Street, a very frightening man
approached us. It was Holloween night, and he had blood dripping from his face,
and his eyes looked very empty and zombie-like. He seemed to know who we were
and began to say that he had come to kill all of the Christians. We began to talk to
him about Jesus, and he got angrier and angrier and kept promising to kill us, but as
we rebuked the spirit that seemed to be at work in him, the man just backed away. It
seemed that as much as he wanted to hurt us, he couldn’t seem to approach within a
few feet before being pulled backwards. Some hippie kids witnessed all of this and
they seemed pretty impressed. No more than we were.
Our first serious encounter with the demonic world came through a young
man named Homer. We met him at a Dead show at Shoreline Amphitheater near San
Francisco. He was on the “Green team” picking up garbage after the show. He was
very concerned with the environment, which was good, but also deeply into all sorts
of New-Age practices, which wasn’t. By New Age practices we mean the study of
eastern mysticism from Buddhist and Hindu traditions, the study of the occult and
the use of drugs to induce a spiritual state of consciousness. He would show up at
our house wearing flowing skirts and daisies in his hair and looked like a flower child
straight out of the ‘60’s. He flirted with Jesus but never made a commitment. We had
known him for a while when one of the new believers came home with a disturbing
report. When we followed her back to the street, we saw the strangest thing we had
ever seen up until that point. Homer was crawling on the street, his clothing in tatters,
his eyes rolling around in his head, stains all over his body, speaking in a strange
language. We called our pastors, who came right over and tried to talk with him. They
had far more experience than we did in these matters but felt unprepared to even pray
with him. They said that these demons were “big guns,” and we’d have to be praying
together before we attempted to cast them out. They left, and we were completely at
a loss as to what to do with this sweet hippie now turned Gadarenes demoniac as in
Luke 8:26. Next, another woman came to the house and made Homer repeat long,
scripted prayers after her. We’re not sure he believed any of them. He did seem a little
better afterwards but not completely free. The worst part was that we came to learn
that Homer had become demon-possessed at one of the renewal meetings at a local
church. He saw some of the pastors laying hands on a man who was manifesting a
demon. In his compassion, he invited the demons to leave the man and come into
himself. Apparently, they did. The poor young man left town shortly after and we
never learned what his life was like afterwards.
We had a lot to learn and fast. It seemed that every day a demon-possessed
person would be assigned to torment us. We saw this as a good sign. We were making
the devil mad.
One night, an older homeless man we knew casually came to the door. He asked
one of the new believers if he could get “some counseling.” It was 10:00 at night, but
she invited him in and went to look for one of the older believers. As soon as some
of the older brothers and sisters began speaking to the man about Jesus, he began to
manifest demonically. Several others heard the noise that was coming from the man
and came into the room and began praying. But nothing seemed to be working. Then
one of the demons said, “You can’t get rid of us, because none of you are fasting!”
Everyone knew that one of the sisters in the community was about 30 days into a
water fast and someone was sent to find her.
When she entered the living room she found everyone employed in trying to
cast the demon out of this man. Scott, a new believer, had his hand on the man’s head
and was saying loudly, “In the name of Jesus, Get Out!” Others were kneeling in every
corner of the room, praying, some in tongues. Another brother, (who didn’t believe
in speaking in tongues) was reading his Bible out loud. We loved to have long debates
about these things, but for the moment everyone was just doing what he hoped might
work. Everyone looked a little shaken. The poor man was rolling his head about as the
demon spoke through him. As our fasting sister sat facing the man, the demon spoke
to her directly, “I know who you are!” he laughed. The demon began telling us that we
couldn’t get him out and that he had total possession of this man. He even mentioned
a few other older street people and claimed to have possession of them as well. Our
sister remembered something a pastor had said once and figured she would follow his
advice. He had advised not to engage in lengthy conversations with a demon, but to
just demand that they be silent as you talked to the person possessed and tried to lead
them to the Lord. If anything was going to work, it would be the gospel. For an hour,
she called to the man by name and asked the demon to be quiet. A feverish battle
ensued as the man tried desperately to speak, but each time, the demon apparently
tried to strangle him. “I can’t breathe,” he kept saying as he grasped his neck as if he
was choking to death. At one point, we thought he was about to vomit and someone
ran to get a bucket and a towel, but thankfully that didn’t happen. Finally we convinced
the man that if he gave his life to Jesus, he could be free. After a long and difficult
time while the demon tried to take control, the man finally repeated the sinner’s prayer,
and when he had finished, the demon just left. Poof. Gone. The man came to himself
and asked where he was and how he had come to be at our house. All he remembered
was that he had been at the park with his buddies getting drunk and felt like he was
about to black out. He had no memory of anything that had happened after that. It
turned out that earlier in his life he had been a follower of Jesus but had later turned
to drugs and alcohol. He asked for a guitar and began to sing the most beautiful
worship songs, ones he had written 20 years earlier and was just remembering. He left
for a Christian rehab a few days later.
What made the difference? Was it the prayers of believers for this man?
Certainly. Was it the fact that one of us was fasting? Certainly. But what was it that
really changed the man? The gospel—the super-natural power of the gospel—and
of God working through it to save and deliver. Unlike Mitchell, our vampire friend
who wouldn’t repent and follow Jesus, and unlike Homer, this man responded to the
gospel. Prayer and fasting can open a man’s heart and it has the power to silence and
even cast out demons. This experience taught us a lesson that we were slow to forget:
Jesus tells the story of a woman who sweeps her house clean, but later the demon she
has swept out returns with several more, and the state of the house is worse than at
first. The house needed to be filled by the Spirit to be impenetrable to the demons.
Everyday, we would encounter demon-possessed people on Haight Street. After all,
this was the city where the Church of Satan was founded and where Anton LeVay
had penned the Satanic Bible. There were covens of witches everywhere, even we
suspected, in the house next door. We were reluctant to try to randomly cast demons
out of people who had no desire to repent and turn to Jesus. We began to see that
only after a person gave himself or herself fully to the Lord and was filled with the
Spirit of God could they be truly free.
Most young people in the scene dabbled in witchcraft for the fun and thrill of
it, but some were drawn deeply in. Misty was a teenage girl who would sometimes
show up to disrupt our Bible studies. She explained that her brand of witchcraft was
called Wicca-goddess worship. We eventually had to ask her to not come back.
As we were leaving for a prayer meeting one evening, a street kid we knew
showed up at the door with a very young girl. She looked to be in her early teens, and
we could tell she was new to the street. They wanted to spend the night. We asked
them to come along to the meeting, since everyone in the house was already there.
They agreed to do this. But they were bored and restless at the service, which turned
out to be a slide show presentation of someone’s trip to Asia. One of us suggested
they take a bus back to the Haight and return to the house later. It was a suggestion we
would all regret having made.
The girl didn’t return that night, or the next. We heard that a young runaway
had been found strangled in an abandoned church in the Mission district of San
Francisco. She had apparently been hung from the steeple by a piano wire. The police,
suspecting that it was a ritual killing, arrested Misty and her friends. We saw the article
in the newspaper but didn’t recognize the photo. Only after a reporter from the San
Francisco Examiner came to interview us for background information related to the
homeless scene and this particular crime did we make the connection to the girl who
was strangled. We were devastated.
Another time, a very large man kept following one of our sisters around trying
to grab her from behind. We knew he was very demonized, and the brothers insisted
that the men in the house accompany her when she went out on the street. The man
claimed to be madly in love with her. She tried to convince him that they had nothing
in common, which was certainly true given his background. He had told us that as a
teen-ager he had given his life to Satan at a satanic church. He told stories of weird
satanic rituals that made us sick to our stomachs. It wasn’t until he was taken away to
the hospital after setting himself on fire that we could finally breathe more easily. A
few weeks later, on Christmas day, he showed up at our house in his hospital clothing
and showed us a letter he had from the psychiatric ward addressed to Greyhound. The
letter instructed the bus line to give him a ticket to San Diego and bill the hospital. He
had come to say good-bye to our sister. Guess that’s how San Francisco dealt with the
mentally ill in those days.
Understandably, we began to be very protective of the kids on Haight Street.
We called them “kids” because that’s what they called themselves, even though most
of them were in their late teens. They called one of our older sisters “Mamma,” and
one of the older brothers “Poppa.” We saw it as our sacred duty to keep predators
away. Demon-possessed madmen weren’t our only problem. Cults had thrived in the
neighborhood since the sixties.
One older man who claimed we had led him to the Lord told us hair-raising
stories of his early days in the Haight. As a 15-year-old runaway, he had joined a
communal house on the next block. Its leader was a young Charles Manson. When
we were house hunting, a realtor had brought us to this beautiful Victorian house.
At the time, we knew nothing about the history of the place, but from the moment
we walked in we all felt a little uneasy. One sister said later that she actually felt like
vomiting. As we walked from room to room and the realtor pointed out various
features, all we wanted to do was bolt for the door. In the attic, she mentioned casually
that this was where the Manson family had begun. Manson was long gone, but
something still lingered in the house. Sorry, but no sale.
The Hare Krishna temple had been part of the community for more than 30
years when we moved in. Devotees were often found chanting and dancing on the
street corners and selling the Bhagavad-Gita, a Hindu holy book and other books on
vegetarianism. One older Krishna man from the Philippines came out with a shopping
cart every night to serve food to the homeless kids. They loved him for his gentle
nature. He would often sit on the street, selling the books and incense and making
flower garlands, and we would sit with him and talk to him about Jesus. But one day he
disappeared. No one would tell us what had happened to him, only that he had left the
temple in the Haight. Shortly after, the temple closed with allegations of corruption.
About a year later, we were leaving a prayer meeting, and an Asian man in plain
street clothing approached us. At first, we didn’t recognize him. “Do you remember
me?” he asked. We were shocked to see him out of his Krishna robes. “How did you
find this church?” we asked, as it was in an entirely different part of the city. “You
wrote down the address for me once, and I found the paper.” Then he proceeded to
tell us a fascinating story, which ended the mystery of his disappearance.
After our many conversations, he had begun to pray to Jesus in the temple.
Quietly and without being noticed, he would pretend to be chanting the Krishna
mantra, “Hare Rama, Hare Krishna,” but instead he would say “Jesus, Jesus.” Each
time he did this, he felt a peaceful presence enter his soul, and so he continued to
pray to the Lord. After a time he approached the spiritual master of the temple and
asked if perhaps Jesus really was the true God. He must have told him also about
his conversations with us. He was immediately transferred to the Berkeley temple.
A few more months went by as he continued to pray to Jesus, and continued to
experience the presence of the Holy Spirit. Finally one day, he told his leader that he
planned to leave for good and become a follower of Jesus. He had been in Krishna
Consciousness for 30 years and knew no other life. He was now training to be a
shoemaker.
That afternoon, he came back with us to Haight Street for the first time in over
a year. Many of the long-term hippie dealers recognized him and were shocked when
he told them his news; “I am following the Spiritual Master of the universe now. He is
Jesus Christ!”
The Christian Science church had a huge brick building that had stood on
Haight Street for nearly 100 years. Next to it was a reading room. This too we prayed
would close, as had the Krishna Temple. A few months later, the building was
condemned by the city. It’s been empty ever since.
There were several witchcraft stores on the street, and as we prayed against
them, they closed one by one. One day as we strolled down the Haight Street, we
noticed that a new shop had opened. We were attracted to it because above the
entrance was a huge angel. We stepped inside and began to peruse the racks and
were shocked by what we found. Everything was a mockery of Jesus. When we came
across one item, we gasped for air and stood paralyzed and on the verge of tears. It
was a “Nail-Jesus-To-The-Cross” game, complete with a little hammer and nails. We
left immediately, too upset to even say anything to the sales person. We would stop
at night after the store closed and lay our hands on the windows and pray that the
store would be shut down. A very short time later, we walked by and saw a big sign in
the window. It told a sad story. The owner of the shop, a long-time resident and well
respected in the community, had, without explanation, suddenly dropped dead. The
store would be closing.
One small group began to frequent the street, and the young girls in the group
would invite young men to come to their Bible study. We had never heard of the
group, but some of the young believers attended a study and came back with odd
reports. “Something doesn’t seem right, we need to check this one out.” The founder
had been a Jesus Movement convert gone astray. The group openly practiced adultery
and prostituted its women to “show the love of Christ” to the lost. There had been
allegations of child molestation.
We were determined to drive them off of the street. Already one young man
we had befriended had been seduced by this false gospel. Our new believers were
wonderful detectives. Whenever the group showed up on the street, we would run up
to distract them from their real mission. The leader at one point became very angry
and pushed one of us against a car. We wrote a paper, quoting from the founder’s
letters to his followers, and began distributing it to anyone they spoke with. When we
saw that they were becoming regulars at an open mike performance, we spoke with
the owner of the café. He read some of the founder’s missals and promised that they
would never get the microphone again. That evening, we stood across the street and
watched as the group exited the café after being refused a chance at the open-mike.
It was quite a triumph. A few weeks later, word was going around that the group was
relocating to Nepal. Thankfully, we’ve never seen them there.
Chapter Five
Where we watch as the houseplants eat a hamburger;
A sister listens in on a conversation between Jesus and His apostles;
And then one of us gets a heart transplant.
Anything that wasn’t nailed down was stolen from the house on Ashbury Street.
Guitars, drums, computers, you name it.
Once, a young man was invited to spend a few nights. Even though he was
living out of a backpack, he had a collection of carnivorous plants. He asked if we
would let him keep those plants in the house while he traveled a bit. Shortly after he
left, one of the sisters noticed that her sleeping bag was missing; so when someone
came home and mentioned to us that he had spotted the guy walking down the street
with the sleeping bag, she went out to find him. She told him that if he ever hoped to
see his Venus fly traps again he’d better return the bag. The next day, he came to the
door with the sleeping bag in hand, but when we took a closer look at it, we realized it
wasn’t our sister’s, but it was someone else’s in the community. “Hey, that’s my sleeping
bag!” said one of the brothers, and went to look under his bunk. Sure enough, his
bag was missing. When the flytrap guy heard all this, he started yelling at our sister,
demanding an apology. He had stolen, but since he had stolen someone else’s bag he
felt violated by her accusation that he was a thief.
Another time, we learned that some of the kids, who we thought were sincerely
following Jesus, had been inviting girls in off the street and having group orgies in the
basement. Now we were the ones feeling violated.
It was easy to harden your heart towards these street kids. But we knew that the
Lord had called us to these people, so we didn’t want to give up so easily.
There was a small antique store on Haight Street, and one day, we noticed a
plaque in the window that was for sale. It said, “GO AWAY!” One of the sisters
suggested we buy it and nail it to our front door. We knew that it was time for her to
take a break.
She decided to take a trip to Europe. When she returned, she seemed like a new
person and told us about something powerful the Lord had shown her as she traveled
around Italy with a backpack and a Bible.
After three weeks of looking at art, our sister was still exhausted and didn’t want
to come home. She decided to take a train to Assisi, Italy, where Saint Francis was
born. We all loved the story of his life and how much he had loved the poor. We had
a copy of the film Brother Sun, Sister Moon, which was worn out from all the use it
got. For a few days, our sister walked around with a little book about St. Francis in one
hand and the Bible in the other, reading through the Gospel according to Mark.
When she got to Mark chapter 6, the Lord seemed to direct her in this way,
“Now as you read, put yourself in the place of the disciples. Notice what was in their
hearts.” She was intrigued. She started to read the familiar story of Jesus multiplying
the fish and loaves.
In verse 7, Jesus sent the disciples on their first solo missions trip. He told them
what to take along with them. Meanwhile, John the Baptist, who was a very close
friend of at least two of the disciples, was beheaded. In verse 30, the apostles gathered
around Jesus and reported to Him all that they had done and taught, but the crowds
were so great around them that they didn’t even have a chance to eat.
Our sister could see what was happening to the disciples. These guys were tired.
They couldn’t even get something to eat. They had just gotten the bad news about
their good friend, John the Baptist.. They were a little burnt out.” “Okay,” she said,
“I can relate to that,” and kept reading. Then, Jesus said to the disciples, “Come with
me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.” “Wow, what an offer,” our sister
thought. “A retreat with Jesus. In a quiet place, far away from the crowds of needy
people. Away from all those people ringing the doorbell at four in the morning. Away
from the guys that eat our food and then curse us. Away from all the lying and stealing
junkies. I’m loving it. Just me and Jesus. Finally.”
Then in the next verse, just to drive home the point, Mark said, “So they went
away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place.” At least, that’s what they thought
they were doing. But wait a minute. Our sister noticed that something had gone
terribly wrong, because by the time the disciples landed, the crowd had run ahead
and crashed the private retreat. There were five thousand men there along with their
wives and screaming kids. She could really feel for the apostles. They must have been
pretty frustrated. She stopped for a moment, close to tears, but then she kept reading
about how Jesus felt as he looked upon the same scene. “He had compassion on them,
because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So He began to teach them many
things.”
“But it isn’t fair,” our sister said to the Lord. “Don’t you have any compassion
for the apostles? They were tired and You promised them a retreat, but now it’s as
though You just forgot about them.”
Then in verse 35, the disciples came to Jesus. Our sister noticed that when
they had first gathered around Jesus after returning from their trip, Mark called them
“apostles”; but now he calls them “disciples.” They were about to learn something
about the heart of God for the lost, and so was our sister.
It was late in the day so the disciples, the students of Jesus, came to Him and
they said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already very late. Send the people away so
they can go to the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something
to eat.” Now our sister realized something she had never seen before. The disciples
didn’t really care about the people being hungry. What they were saying was, “Tell
them to get lost!” She remembered the plaque she had wanted to buy back on Haight
Street, the one that read, “GO AWAY!” She understood exactly what they were feeling
in that moment, and the scripture would bear this out.
Notice also that the disciples “came to Him.” Where were they while Jesus was
teaching all day? They should have been right in front, soaking it all in, but just maybe
they were off on the side, pouting.
So Jesus, in a brilliant comeback line said, “You give them something to eat.”
And the disciples answered, “That would take eight months of a man’s wages! Are
we to go and spend that much on bread and give it to them to eat?” They were
incredulous. Not only would Jesus not send the people away, but now He was going to
make the disciples pick up the tab for dinner. It was outrageous.
Jesus asked them, “How many loaves do you have?” What followed is the great
miracle. The disciples found only five loaves and two fish. They couldn’t have been
looking too hard. Surely they hoped this would convince Jesus to send the people
away. We all know the story. Through their hands, right before their eyes, Jesus
multiplied the food, and after all of the people had been satisfied, there were even
leftovers.
Immediately after this, Jesus told his disciples to get into the boat and go ahead
of Him. After dismissing the crowd, He went up to the mountainside to pray. Who
was He praying for, do you wonder? Maybe He was praying for his disciples. Maybe
He was praying that their hearts would be more like His and that they would look at
the crowds of lost and needy people with the same compassion that was in His own
heart.
From the mountainside, Jesus looked down at the disciples. There was a storm
and they were straining against the oars. He went to them, walking on the water, but
Mark said that He was about to pass them. Maybe He was a bit frustrated with these
guys. But when they cried out, He seemed to soften and said, “Take courage, It is I.
Don’t be afraid.” Then He climbed into the boat and calmed the wind and the waves.
In verse 51, it says, “They were completely amazed, for they had not understood
about the loaves; their hearts were hardened.”
You’d think after they had seen Jesus multiply the loaves, they wouldn’t be all
too amazed that He was now walking on water.
Our sister was shocked when she read this. What does it mean that they “had
not understood about the loaves”? Then the Lord seemed to speak to her, “If your
heart is hardened against the people that I love, I will do miracles in your presence but
you won’t even see it.” Did the apostles see the miracle of the loaves? Were they so
bitter and resentful that they couldn’t even see the glorious event?
Then just in case she didn’t believe what she was seeing in the scripture, the
Lord seemed to urge her to keep reading. In Mark chapter 8 another large crowd is
gathered, and Jesus said, “I have compassion for these people; they have been with me
three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them home hungry, they will collapse on
the way, because some of them have come a long distance.”
And look at how the disciples answered Him; “But where in this remote place
can anyone get enough bread to feed them?” You would think that after seeing Jesus
feed the 5,000, they wouldn’t have to ask that question. “How many loaves do you
have?” He asked one more time before feeding more than 4,000.
We had prayed so many times to see miracles. We wanted to see people healed
and delivered. We wanted to see the dead raised. But if we lost God’s heart for the
lost, would we see these things?
Our sister cried out to the Lord, “Help me Lord! I want Your heart for the lost.
I want Your compassion for hurting and broken people.” She booked the first flight
she could back to San Francisco.
Do you want to see miracles?
This issue of the heart would be one that God would bring back to us time and
time again. Once, we noticed that some people in our community didn’t seem to be
all that interested in talking to the street kids or helping with the food preparation.
We weren’t sure what the problem was, so we just prayed for God to show us. Then
a couple of us were led to go to each person in the community and ask a simple
question, “Do you love these kids?” When we came to one couple, they pondered
this for a minute or so and said, “No, to be honest, we don’t.” We all agreed that they
should move on.
Maybe that seems harsh, but we truly believe that the heart of God for the
lost has to be at the center of any work in presenting the gospel. We can be great
evangelists, have the scriptures memorized in Hebrew and Greek, and be thoroughly
cool people, but if we don’t have love, we are nothing. Ministries can be successful
from the world’s perspective and actually do some good things for society, but if they
have no compassion, they aren’t representing Jesus, no matter how much we talk about
Him.
You never say, “GO AWAY!” to people you genuinely love. You say instead,
“COME!”
Chapter Six
During which time we wait for the Beatles to reunite;
We use eggplant parmesan to pacify a belligerent hippie;
A near-disaster with a swarm of bees is averted.
In August of 1995 god died. Not our God but that of many a Deadhead: Jerry
Garcia, the leader of the Grateful Dead.
Garcia had had a lifetime struggle with drug addiction, particularly with heroin.
In the spring of 1995 he checked into a rehab center in Marin County, California,
where he died shortly afterwards. There were lots of stories flying around at the time.
Maybe he had overdosed, but more likely his heart had failed during withdrawals.
There was even a rumor that the C.I.A had killed him, for what reason we never
understood.
The whole hippie world was about to go into mourning.
Very soon Deadheads stumbled out of doorways and hidden camps in the park,
out of beds in run-down hotels and out of vans and buses. Since Jerry had been closeby in Marin Country, many of his groupies were in the area. The nearest corner to our
house became the epicenter for what would be the largest gathering of mourners we
had ever seen. You can only compare it to what happened when John F. Kennedy was
shot. That’s not an exaggeration, at least not from the perspective of anyone living on
Ashbury Street at the time.
Within 2 days, there were estimated to be 60,000 Deadheads in the
neighborhood. The police had to close Haight and Ashbury Streets to traffic in order
to accommodate all of them. Kids sat on the street in a stupor. They were crying and
in shock and, mostly, confused. Now what would happen to their world?
We asked the same question from a different perspective. Would the whole
scene just evaporate? What about all the promises we had from God for a revival
among these kids?
But those questions would have to wait. Right now we definitely had work to
do. We began cooking huge pots of food, hundreds of gallons of veggie stew. We
couldn’t invite everyone inside, so we opened our garage and set up a table, feeding
people from there. All day, for several days, we cooked and served and pointed people
towards the true God, the Savior who had died and risen.
One girl named Kathy stood out in the crowd because of her beautiful face;
a face like an angel. She hung out with us for several days and slept on the couch at
night. Like all of her friends, she was shell-shocked. We tried to be gentle with her,
given the situation, and were afraid to be too confrontational about her very New Age
beliefs. But then some of us overheard a conversation she was having with one of our
brothers. He wasn’t being gentle at all but quite the contrary. He was preaching at her
with a force we feared would send her packing. He laid it all out: Jerry was a false god,
Jerry couldn’t even save himself let alone anyone else, on and on. Some of us cringed
as we listened. She came slowly up the stairs towards us and sat down silently. Then
she said, “I’ve never in my life met anyone so passionate about what they believed.”
The girl was just blown away, “He really believes that Jesus is the truth.” We quickly
repented before God for misjudging our brother’s sensitivity. It seemed that he had
said exactly what she had needed to hear at that moment.
The days went by and rumors flew in all directions. The Grateful Dead would
do a free concert in the park. The Beatles would reunite for the memorial. Bob Dylan
was on his way. Yet no official news was forthcoming, and meanwhile, more and more
Deadheads streamed into town. The police had a crisis on their hands, and something
had to be done.
Finally, they announced that there would be a memorial at the Polo Fields in
Golden Gate Park. That morning everyone left Haight Street for the Polo grounds,
not knowing what awaited them. We even heard people predict that Jerry would rise
from the dead.
We joined the crowds to find a huge stage with gigantic banners and a huge
illustration of Jerry Garcia. The whole thing had the look of a Hindu shrine. Hours
passed, and the only music coming from the stage was recorded Grateful Dead songs.
Finally, some of the band members gave short speeches, as did some others close to
Garcia, but no one sang a single song. No Beatles, no Dylan, and no resurrected Jerry.
Everyone was terribly disappointed. As one of the organizers announced from the
stage that everyone was asked now to leave town, the groupies took control and began
to sing “Wish you Goodnight,” an old gospel folk song that the band had used to
close many shows. It goes like this:
Lay down dear brothers
Lay down and take your rest
Won’t you lay your head
Upon your Savior’s breast?
I love you, But Jesus loves you the best
And I wish you goodnight, goodnight, goodnight.
It was a profound moment for those of us who believed. Perhaps now that Jerry
was gone, these lost souls would turn to Jesus, who indeed loved them the best.
Everyone noticed the many mounted policemen circling the perimeter of the
field. At exactly 6 o’clock, they shouted for everyone to go home. Suddenly there was
a foreboding feel. The police had had enough. “The party’s over!” a couple of them
shouted. But the Deadheads weren’t ready to leave. Where were they going to go now
that Jerry was dead? They all grasped hands making a huge circle, and circles within.
We sensed heaviness in their hearts that made our own hearts ache. Then one of our
brothers began to sing Amazing Grace. This too was a song that every Deadhead
knew. It was sung at many concerts over the 30 years the band had played, along with
another song called “Friend of the Devil.” Suddenly you could hear all around the
circle people beginning to join in, and then 60,000 people were singing.
Amazing Grace how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now I’m found
Was blind, but now I see.
Thousands of people sang along through every verse and then a few times
“Praise God, Praise God, Praise God …” We then knew that in some ways our work
had just begun. The banners would come down. Garcia’s ashes would be brought to
the banks of the River Ganges in Varanasi, India, a city dedicated to Shiva, the god of
destruction. Hindus consider Varanasi to be the holiest city in the world. We would
find ourselves there soon, sitting by the river, watching as bodies were burned on the
funeral pyres. But that was for a later time. For now the fullness of the plan the Lord
had for us was yet to be revealed. For now we would pack up our things, including
the banner that Rachel, a former Deadhead and now new believer had made, and
go home. Our banner didn’t have a picture of Jesus, only a scripture, “Stand at the
crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in
it, and you will find rest for your souls.” Jeremiah 6:16.
The wisdom of the Lord’s timing for us became obvious. This was the perfect
moment to expand the vision. Disillusionment was sweeping over the scene. Young
people all over the country were asking themselves if life was worth living now that
their god was dead.
That’s when the remaining Grateful Dead band members regrouped and
announced a tour for that summer under the name “The Other Ones.”
We had been to many local Dead shows, but now some of us decided to travel
with the Deadheads.
Knowing we would be traveling many thousands of miles during the summer
tour, we purchased a relatively new 15-passenger van. On June 15th, packed to
overflowing with eight of us, the van rolled out of town and headed for Atlanta,
Georgia, where the first concert would take place.
We sat squished into the van, surrounded by stacks of magazines we had
published especially for the tour. We called our magazine The Miracle Magazine, after
a ritual practiced outside of amphitheaters across the country. Ticketless fans, in the
hope of being “kicked down” a free ticket, would raise an index finger skyward calling
out, “I need a miracle!”
When we stopped to gas up in Alabama, we spotted our first group of
Deadheads in a bright orange VW van also headed east. Their headlights weren’t
working, and night was falling. We watched as they fastened a flashlight to the bumper.
A tall Ethiopian American boy with long dreadlocks and a huge Rottweiler introduced
himself as Craig. Another rider was Ivan, who was known as “Drunk Guy.” None of
them were over 18.
For nearly three months, we drove from city to city sharing the gospel to
thousands of Deadheads. Our magazine was well read, due to a last minute idea. We
called ahead to every amphitheater on the tour to get exact directions from showto-show, which were printed on our center spread, interspersed with stories of other
travelers, like the Prodigal Son, and quotes from Jesus. They would get the gospel
message, one way or another. This addition meant that our magazine accompanied
every car on tour and got read from cover to cover. Most of the magazine was filled
with testimonies from the former Deadheads who now made up our community. We
traveled from Atlanta to Maine and then worked our way back home to San Francisco,
where the tour concluded.
“Drunk Guy,” being true to his name, began taking up a lot of our prayer time
during that first tour. He took it upon himself to insult us at every opportunity. At
one show, he hit one of the sisters with a chain; only a stack of Miracle Magazines
shielded her from the blows. We stayed at every opportunity with believers from
local congregations, where they often lent us their kitchens to prepare food for the
tour kids. At one show, Drunk Guy attacked us because he heard that we had served
lasagna and he had missed out. “What’s your favorite dish?” one of us asked. At the
next show we approached him in the crowded parking lot with a huge tray of eggplant
parmesan. He was so touched that, from that point on, he stopped harassing us and
became a reluctant friend.
All of us had lived communally for some time before venturing on the road, but
we had never lived so closely. We lacked the money to stay many nights in motels and
when we did, we arrived well after midnight and had to leave a few hours later to make
the journey to the next city. Most nights we spent trying to sleep in our cramped seats
as someone continued to drive. We looked longingly at the big, long school buses that
pulled into each show and started dreaming of owning one and one day being able to
sleep horizontally. When we returned home we sold the van and began drawing plans
for our dream bus.
All day at a concert was spent in the heat handing out magazines and speaking
to young people about Christ. Tensions in our group began to build. There were
continual arguments between us. We could see how hard it was for the younger
believers to face temptation day after day. In New York, a young man gave his life to
Jesus and headed back to our house in San Francisco with one of the younger sisters,
who realized that she wasn’t strong enough yet to face the old temptations.
There was an urgency that drove us on and gave us little sleep along the way.
Young people were dying everywhere we went. Most of the young people we spoke
with were addicted to one drug or another. After Jerry Garcia died, many of his fans
began experimenting with heroin. They were usually addicted within a short time. It
seemed that on every concert tour we traveled, at least half a dozen people we knew
passed away. It was all such a waste.
At an east coast show on the trip, our sister the nurse found a young man
passed out between two cars. She could see that he was in need of help. She called an
ambulance, which probably saved his life.
We knew that ours was really a life and death kind of a call. The gospel was the
only thing that could save these souls and lives.
With the increase in heroin use, the scene also became more violent. Old-time
Deadheads reminisced about the good old days, when peace and love prevailed at the
shows. One thing was obvious to all of us; there was very little peace and love to be
had now.
At one show, a young junkie girl seemed ready to leave with us and go into
rehab. She was pregnant and her boyfriend had just broken up with her. She begged us
to speak to him. We insisted that this was a waste of time, but she ran after him with
one of us in tow. She was drunk and screaming at him and, as much as our sister tried,
she couldn’t pull her away. The boyfriend, knowing about the pregnancy, punched our
friend as hard as he could in the stomach and ran off. She began hemorrhaging as she
lay in the dirt. We called an ambulance, but when they arrived she said she wouldn’t go
to the hospital without the boyfriend. We found him hiding behind a parked car, but
he refused to come, knowing that his own child would likely die. Hippies stood around
her saying, “Just send your baby love, sister,” as the ambulance drivers stood on the
side waiting for her consent. It was all so crazy. Finally, she went to the hospital but
miscarried on the way.
After nearly three months on the road, we arrived home in San Francisco to
much needed hot showers and the comforts of our own cozy beds, with only one
more concert at Shoreline Amphitheater. Jeffrey, the young hippie who had expressed
his desire to follow the Lord at a show in New York and had driven back to San
Francisco, was doing well and learning the scriptures from some of the people who
had remained back home. But, as his old friends began coming into town for the
show, he became confused, He secretly packed his bags and loaded them into his car.
The night of the last concert he came running towards our group, screaming in pain.
Jeffery screamed as he half ran, half rolled down the hill towards us. A swarm of bees
had attacked him just as he was heading for his car. Dozens of bees had already stung
him, and several had gotten tangled in his dreadlocks and were continuing to attack.
Having no other option, he came to us. As we picked the bees out of his tangled hair,
he confessed to us that he had been trying to run away from God. He was absolutely
convinced that the Lord had sent the swarm of bees to stop him. He came back to the
house that night, his face swollen, and stayed many months. It was a funny little event
of Biblical proportions.
Chapter Seven
A very distant relation of Phil Lesh comes to teach the Bible;
We exhibit poor judgment while driving in Texas;
And it appears that we are stealing an old red wagon.
We began holding a weekly Bible study in the living room at the Ashbury Street
house, which was taught by our friend Cory Lesh. Every week, many homeless people,
some mentally ill older men and many young hippie wanderers would come for a meal
before the study. We’d pray beforehand that the Lord would lead some to stay for the
study afterwards. It seemed like every time we had the study, a few serious seekers
would stay as the others, satisfied with earthly food, made their way to the door.
Many young people came to the Lord through the simple study of scripture and the
discussions that would last hours into the night.
Autumn was one of the young Deadheads who came to one of the Bible study
nights. Born in Virginia, she had been touring with the Grateful Dead for some time
but had never made it as far as San Francisco. “All of the east-coast Deadheads wanted
to go to San Francisco; it was like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” she
said. “I had been searching for something for many years and somehow I knew the
search would end there, since it was the hippie Mecca.” In June of 1996, just a couple
of months after Jerry Garcia had passed away, Autumn finally found a ride to the city
of her dreams. “I went straight to 710 Ashbury Street,” she said, “the home of the
Grateful Dead in the 60’s and the birthplace of my entire counter-culture. I buried a
crystal I had found in Arkansas in the front lawn. Little did I know that my search for
belonging would end just a few doors down on the very same street.”
“I was sleeping in the park, and one day I woke late and missed the feeding at
the local soup kitchen. I was hungry and feeling overwhelmed by the city I had put so
much hope in. I walked to the Corner of Haight and Masonic and just sat down and
started bawling. Someone saw me and sat down on the dirty sidewalk next to me. He
looked like a hippie and had dreadlocks, but he also looked very clean. After hearing
my plight he went away and then returned a few minutes later with two bean burritos.
He said that if I ever needed anything again, food, or even a shower, I could just come
to the Christian house. ‘Oh no,’ I thought, ‘I’m not a Christian.’ He didn’t condemn
me or use some sales pitch to try to talk me into coming to the house. He just sat there
on the dirty sidewalk and kept me company.”
Curiosity got the better of Autumn and one day, hungry once again, she walked
down to our house on Ashbury. A few of us were downstairs making peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches to hand out on the street. Autumn volunteered to help, and
soon we were listening to her story and her philosophies and plans. We told her to
come back sometime. “When I met the Jesus hippies at Ashbury Street,” Autumn
remembers, “I was left with an impression I could never forget. I didn’t know that
there were people out there who followed Jesus, but looked like me.”
Soon Autumn found herself back on tour. This was also the first complete
tour that we’d traveled on. We were handing out our “Miracle Magazine.” Autumn
remarked, “I used the magazine as a guide, hoping it would get me from show to
show, not noticing the Christian content. One night another tour kid saw me reading
the magazine and said that he didn’t agree with all it had to say. Because of this, I
began to read the articles to see what I thought.”
When the three-month tour ended in San Francisco, the older hippies that
Autumn was traveling with threw all of her belongings onto Haight Street and took
off. She was feeling disillusioned with the whole scene. An older street person asked
her what she was planning to do. When Autumn told her that she planned to go to
the Jesus house, the woman warned her that she might be brainwashed there. “They’re
an evil bunch,” the woman told Autumn. “I knew that other Deadheads would often
pretend to be following Jesus in order to get a bed and food at the Christian house,”
Autumn recalls. “I thought I might try something along these lines.” She stayed for
a few days, even though now she says, “I don’t think I was fooling anyone during
that time.” At another hippie festival a couple of weeks later, she sat with a group of
hippies talking about their own brands of New-Age spirituality. “I felt the contrast
between them and the Jesus house kids. These people seemed so superficial. Their
spirituality and philosophies now seemed rehearsed. Everyone thought they were
saying something unique, but they were all prerecorded soundtracks of everyone
else I’d heard in the hippie scene,” Autumn says. She met up with some hippies who
invited her to start a commune with them in Northern California. “It was a hippie’s
dream, but something inside of me was telling me to go back to San Francisco.”
Back in the city, Autumn continued her life of living in the park and
panhandling for food. Then one of her friends, who was strung out on heroin,
decided to move into our house until we could raise the money to send him to rehab.
Autumn was terrified that her friend would be brainwashed, so she decided to go
with him to protect him. Some of the new believers began complaining to us about
Autumn. They said that we ought to kick her out, because she obviously wasn’t being
sincere about her faith in Jesus and was just taking advantage of us. But, after praying
with some of the other leaders, we decided to let her stay. We felt that the Lord had
sent her to us.
“One night,” Autumn says, “I overheard one of the young believers talking with
one of the older sisters from the community and complaining about me. They didn’t
know I was home. I was in another room with the lights shut off, and I smiled when
the older sister said that they decided to let me stay, all the time thinking spitefully how
naïve they were. Little did I know that my life was about to change.”
Autumn’s whole world was falling apart. She was seeing more and more clearly
the extreme selfishness among the hippies she would meet on Haight Street. Even
smoking pot began to lose its charm. “It seemed I had nothing left,” she says. “For
the first time, I began to feel suicidal. Life was no longer worth living. I didn’t want to
become a walking middle-class zombie, but I also didn’t want to continue living among
this hypocrisy. I just didn’t know what to do.”
Then, one night at a Bible study, Autumn sat as far from everyone as she could.
She sat where it was dark, hoping that no one would notice that she was there. One
of the brothers began playing worship music and the rest of us joined in. “The songs
somehow reminded me of times I had spent in church as a child,” Autumn says.
“I began to cry. My innocence was gone. I felt spiritually raped by the world; I just
wanted to die.”
In a state of spiritual desperation, she began to pray, “I told God that I no
longer wanted my life. I admitted that I had made a mess of it, and that I was a broken
human being. I told Him that if He wanted me so badly, in the state I was in, then He
could have me. I just asked that in exchange He give me peace.” She continued to cry
and, then, suddenly, she felt it—real peace. “It was indescribable. It almost felt like a
psychedelic experience, but I wasn’t on drugs. The void I had been feeling for so long
was filled. My life has never been the same since.”
❊
A friend in Santa Cruz (who would later join us on Ashbury Street) showed us
an old camper that someone had left him. It had been sitting in the parking lot of the
Elm Street Mission as long as he could remember. “Does it run?” we asked. “I think
maybe,” answered our friend. “It’s yours to use if you want it.” We looked inside and
imagined what it might be like to go on tour in what seemed, at that moment, such a
luxurious vehicle. In reality, it was small, old, dirty and run down. The previous owner,
a junkie, had lived in it for a long time. We noticed that food was still stocked in the
cupboards, and we saw this as a good sign. At least we wouldn’t go hungry if we were
to break down along a deserted road. The next day our friend signed the papers over
to us. We drove the camper away and headed for another long journey across the
United States.
Two brothers slept on the lower bunk and two sisters took the upper bunk. We
headed for a tour of Rat Dog, a small band headed by Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead.
There were hundreds of kids at the shows along the west coast and in the southwest,
but by the time we hit Texas, only a couple of tour kids were still headed east for the
shows. It rained all that night and we became discouraged. Normally, we hung out in
the parking lots talking to young people as they waited for the show to end and for
their opportunity to sell to the locals. There were usually hundreds of kids out in the
parking lot where it was quieter and more suitable for deep philosophical discussions.
But that night there was no one in the parking lot and several people asked us if we
wanted tickets and so, with our clothing soaking wet, we entered the small concert hall.
While listening to the last song, we felt a great deal of darkness in the place. Women
danced seductively to a song about an adulterous man. Beer cans littered the floor and
smoke made it impossible to see or breathe. We couldn’t wait to get back outside to
the rain.
It was Saturday night, and it had become our habit to park and sleep in the
parking lot of the congregation we planned on attending the next day. As we drove
late that night to Austin, we passed a hippie smoke shop. One of us had a sudden
impression that the Lord wanted us to speak to someone who worked there. The
next day, we woke to find very few congregants in attendance and a heated discussion
taking place instead of a sermon. It seemed that the small congregation was about to
break up. We regretted having driven so far out of our way to this little congregation
until we remembered the hippie smoke shop down the street. While parking in front
of the shop, we noticed that there were two steel poles in front of the bumper, which
were invisible once we had pulled into the space. The person driving said to everyone,
“Don’t let me forget about those poles.”
Inside, we found a young hippie with long black hair listening to gospel music
on the radio. We casually looked around this typical hippie smoke shop, stocked
with glass blown pipes (bongs) to smoke marijuana, hippie patches and cheap cotton
clothing imported from India. We began a conversation about the music, which went
into a conversation about Jesus, which went on for two hours. We left in a state of
elation; nothing makes us happier than a good conversation about Jesus. We were sure
the Lord had led us to this young man. In our excitement, we got back into the camper
and rolled forward, forgetting the steel poles. All we could hear was ripping and
tearing metal. What had we done? One of us got out to take a look and announced,
“Not good. Not good at all.” One of the poles had bent from the impact and was
impaling the camper. The only thing we could do was continue to roll forward, but, as
the pole came to the back bumper, it began to rip off the bumper and the back wall of
the camper. We were worried that if we continued to try to move forward, the whole
back wall and floor of the camper would fall off. We all looked in amazement and
wondered what options we had. “We have to saw the pole off,” someone suggested.
The pole was at least ten inches in diameter. Fortunately, the hippie we had just shared
the gospel with had a metal saw, and the men got to work. It was hours later when we
finally left the shop. Worst of all, the pole had ripped a hole in the septic tank. The
tank hadn’t been emptied since we had acquired the camper. Everywhere we stopped,
liquid from the septic tank leaked from the hole. It was quite embarrassing.
By now, we were exhausted and discouraged, and we questioned the wisdom of
continuing with the tour. Not only was the septic tank leaking and the back wall of
the camper threatening to fall off, but the engine also had been giving us trouble. We
had already put $2000 into the camper since leaving home, and we were only halfway
across the country. We considered turning back, but that would mean missing one of
the biggest hippie events of the year, Jazz Fest in New Orleans.
A woman noticed one of the brothers reading his Bible at a rest stop. “Did you
know that Billy Graham is speaking in San Antonio tonight?” It was an answer to
prayer; just the thing we needed to give us a second wind. But by the time we drove
the two hours to the amphitheater, people were returning to their cars in droves.
“The amphitheater is full,” we were told. It had, in fact, been full for a few hours.
The overflow area was even full. But we all felt that the Lord had led us to come,
so, undaunted, we approached the front door. At that moment, a man came out and
announced that the fire marshal had just made a decision to allow one person in every
time one walked out. We were first in line and, within a few minutes, had a place right
near the front of the stage. Billy Graham was an inspiration to our small, rag tag band
of hippies, and we were all fired up to continue with the tour.
Heading out of Texas that night, we passed an antique shop in a small town. In
front, we noticed an old Red Flyer wagon. We had always hoped to find one. “Let’s
buy it!” we said. One brother pointed out that it was four in the morning, and the
shop was closed. However, we saw that it was marked with a price, so we slipped the
money under the door and rushed to put the wagon in the camper before someone
saw us and called the police. It certainly looked like we were stealing the wagon.
The red wagon, the first of many, would become a symbol of our food
outreaches. We would use it to distribute meals to strung-out kids all over the country,
as well as the ones back home on Haight Street.
Within a couple of days we were rolling our wagon, loaded with sandwiches,
down Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Crowds of drunken and rowdy people packed
the boulevard, which was lined with bars and strip joints. The evidence of sin and
depravity was overwhelming. Men threw cheap beaded necklaces at women as they
encouraged them to take their tops off. We watched as one young man threw up on
the street and then fell into his vomit.
We stayed on Bourbon Street, sharing our faith until the sun began to come up
and people began to head back to their hotels. Wearily, we would roll our wagon back
to the camper that was parked in “Back-a-town,” the poor neighborhood behind the
French Quarter. It was the only place the police would let us park our old, dilapidated
home. Some nights, churchgoers who felt guilty about coming to party in the
Quarter would make donations to our effort. We would usually turn them down, but
sometimes we would accept a few dollars. We would then chain our little wagon to a
pole and eat greasy hamburgers for breakfast at a small diner. The worker deserves his
wages.
One night we met Evie, a lovely teenage hippie. The first thing we noticed about
her was how well she could dance. Years later, she was found dead at a concert in the
Midwest. No one knew what had happened, but it was rumored that someone had
slipped pills into her glass of beer. We were heartbroken.
But even with all of the heartache, we were beginning to love this kind of
lifestyle. There was something so simple about driving around the country eating
greasy hamburgers and talking to people about Jesus. We always found people willing
to listen.
Chapter Eight
Where King James makes a surprise appearance;
We are found begging for the life of a mangy dog;
And we enter a Rasta bar with a raccoon.
One morning, we left the house in San Francisco for a Phish concert in the state
capitol. We knew that this new band would attract some hippies, but we didn’t think
that there would be very many. We planned to return home to San Francisco after the
show, although we knew that the tour was going to continue on.
When we arrived at the show in Sacramento, we were shocked to see thousands
of hippies. By evening, we had exhausted our supply of Bibles and sat to pray together
on the grass before heading home. It was about one in the morning. Everyone else was
heading that night to San Diego for another show and then on to several other cities
in the Southwest. Our VW van was on its last leg, leaking a quart of oil every few
miles. It had to be push-started. We hadn’t packed so much as a toothbrush between
us. Besides, we were out of Bibles!
Then one of the new disciples said, “Why don’t we just make our own
cartoons.” He reminded us of a parable the Lord had given to someone in the
community a few months earlier when they were having trouble explaining the gospel
to a Deadhead. “That was a good story; someone should just draw it out and we’ll
Xerox it.” With that, we all rolled on the grass in laughter, because we knew without
speaking what we were about to do. We wouldn’t be home for a couple of weeks. We
were going on tour!
While eating at a Denny’s that night, the first of many hippie stories, “The Last
Show,” was conceived. (We also stopped to buy a toothbrush that we shared between
us; we hadn’t brought much money along, and besides, we were all friends.) In the
story, two deadheads held their fingers up hoping to get a free ticket to a Dead show.
But as the concert was starting, they were still ticketless. Then another Deadhead told
them the good news. Jerry Garcia was giving free tickets to all the tour kids. There
was only one condition. He wanted them to all clean up first. He had handmade soap
and Doctor Bronner’s All-One Hemp Pure Castile shampoo. He was offering brandnew patchwork hooded jackets and pants. It was an amazing deal, and one of the two
Deadheads jumped at the opportunity, but the other one refused it. She didn’t think
it was fair that Jerry was making her clean up first. Then at the end of the story we
explained what a free gift salvation is, but first you have to repent from your sin.
Somewhere between Los Angeles and Phoenix, driving in the freezing desert
cold, with not so much as a sweater or blanket between us, we worked out the
narratives for other cartoons. Six frames on each side of an 8 x 11 sheet of paper,
folded in an accordion, made a handy little giveaway. The stories were written so
specifically for our limited audience, that later a pastor had to ask us to translate for
him.
Events that took place in the parking lots inspired new stories. When we
witnessed a fight between two pit bulls on the lot at a show in Newark, New Jersey,
we began writing and illustrating a story that we finished while sitting at a Barnes and
Noble book store in Philadelphia. “The Bad Dog” was the story of a mean pit bull
that was always fighting with the other dogs on the lot. He would terrorize the female
dogs, drink beer, smoke weed and was feared by everyone on the lot. But his owner,
a hippie tour kid, loved him. He didn’t know what to do. He tried talking to the dog,
begging him to behave, warning him of the consequences, but to no avail. Then one
night the dog attacked a cop. The cop took out a gun and was about to shoot the
dog, when the kid stepped in between them and took the bullet. As the kid lay dying,
the dog saw how badly he had behaved and how much his owner had loved him,
even enough to die for him. The last frame of every story had a short scripture and a
concise gospel message, just in case the reader hadn’t connected the story to Jesus.
These stories were well received and some kids even started collections. We were
told about one boy who had framed cartoons on the walls of his apartment; another
kid had a scrapbook on his coffee table. They got passed around and traded like
baseball cards. We’d get letters from kids in jail who had been sent one by a friend and
had gotten saved. One mother, a believer, found one in her son’s jacket (as no doubt
she was searching for signs of drugs) and wrote to thank us.
Once, at a concert, a kid approached one of us and began to scream out all his
grievances with our community. He was angry that we told kids that they had to stop
doing drugs. He was angry because one of his friends had become a “Jesus fanatic.”
He was angry because we said that some Grateful Dead songs were immoral. Finally,
he launched into his most furious complaint, “And the worst thing is that you haven’t
had a new story in two shows!” He was seriously angry about this failure of ours. We
apologized and said we would get right to work on a new one.
Many of the stories were taken from Jesus’ parables, but the characters were
hippies. After a conversation with a particularly arrogant and self-righteous kid, we
wrote a story called “The Hippie and the IRS Guy.” In the story, a young new-ager
with long dreadlocks is bragging about how good he is.” I recycle, I’m a vegan, I
work to save the whales, I, I, I,” he points to himself proudly. “Thank God I’m not
like those loggers and cops and this IRS guy.” Then we cut to the nerdy IRS agent
with a pencil protector in the front pocket of his short sleeved, button-down dress
shirt. “He’s right!” he says. “I haven’t done anything good. Lord have mercy on me, a
sinner!” he cries as he falls to his knees and beseeches heaven. Then Jesus appears and
says, “I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God.
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be
exalted,” just as the Lord had said in the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector
found in Luke, chapter 18.
The stories tried to cut very close to the heart of hippies to challenge them
to think and, most importantly, to present the gospel in a language that they could
relate to. Another story featured two hippies getting stoned. One was pontificating
about religion with someone who seemed less informed. The first explains that King
James changed the Bible to oppress the people. All of a sudden, King James himself
appears and corrects the hippie, explaining that he only authorized scholars to make an
English translation. Next, the hippie says that Haille Selassi was the messiah, but the
emperor himself strolls by and tells them that he never said any such thing and that he
believes that Jesus was the Messiah. “Ok,” the hippie says. “Well, all religions are the
same anyway, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity…” Buddha walks up and explains the
difference between his teachings and Jesus’. The kids wonder what they are smoking.
A young dreadie kid approached one of us at a small hippie festival with the
story in his hand. He was trembling with anger. At the time he was claiming to be a
Rastafarian. A few months later he gave his life to Jesus, the only true Messiah.
On a tour in 1997, we found ourselves in Toronto, Canada. Most of the
American deadheads had chosen to skip this one Canadian show, preferring not to
pass through customs with illegal substances. The parking lot was sparse during the
show, with only a handful of Canadian fans, one with a baby raccoon on his shoulder.
He invited us to a show at a local Rastafarian club, and we soon found ourselves
entering a dark hall filled with Jamaicans with long dreadlocks and knit caps woven in
green, black and yellow. We had just recently introduced a hippie cartoon, “Jah Love,”
which featured one of the sisters who was with us. In the story, she approaches a
hippie and they begin a conversation in which she schools the kid on the true history
of the Rastafarian movement. Haille Selassi, she tells him, was the King of Ethiopia.
He became the hero of the Rastafarian movement but was actually a member of the
Orthodox Church who insisted that people not worship him. We’d come that night
with handfuls of the cartoon and began to casually pass them out, one of us with the
raccoon now perched on our shoulder. Suddenly, the raccoon disappeared, and this
created a bit of a scene as patrons began looking under tables for the little creature.
An Irish dreadie we had met earlier sat down next to us and pointed towards a group
of serious Jamaican Rasta’s gathered nearby having a discussion. In a thick Irish
brogue, he said, “You see that group over there?” We looked over and took note of
how big these guys were. These weren’t your typical little cute hippie kids. “Well,” he
continued, “I just read your little story, and I liked it.” We thanked the man and let him
continue; obviously he was leading somewhere, “But those big guys over there. They’re
reading it now, and I suspect that when they are done, they’re going to kill you.” We
took another look and assessed the situation. We said our farewells to our host, wished
him luck in finding his raccoon and quickly found our way out of the club. Over the
next few weeks, whenever we drove the VW, a horrible smell would come from the
stovetop. It seemed that somehow, en route to the club, our four-footed friend had
urinated in the stove. It was a long time before we forgot about the Toronto Rasta
club.
We handed out several thousand stories at every concert. The cartoons always
had a message, usually a serious one, often delivered with some humor and definitely
with an understanding of what the kids went through. They were never preachy or
condescending.
In one of our favorite ones, “The Narrow Road,” a crowd of hippies are
traveling along a broad road, drinking beer, smoking pot, having sex, you name it. But
one kid is speaking to himself, “I’m so tired of this road.” (We knew that this was true
of so many of the kids we’d met. They were stuck and didn’t know how to get off the
road.) Finally, as he’s having this very serious internal conversation, another girl comes
alongside and confesses that she is troubled as well. She’s heard about a narrow road
that leads to life. She knows a few kids who have gone that way already. “You haven’t
seen them on this road lately, have you?” They spot the narrow road off to the side,
up a steep hill, and head that way.
Kids began asking to be featured in the stories. We began to do this, which made
for some funny situations. One time a drug dealer, who had been featured in a story,
stopped selling drugs for a while and instead grabbed handfuls of stories and handed
them out to everyone he knew.
But another time, the outcome was very tragic. A young man named T.C.
stopped us on the street and asked if we would put him in the next story. We had an
idea for one we had been meaning to draw up so we told it to him. “We think we’ll
call it ‘The Door’.” In the story, a kid comes to Jesus. He then walks around Haight
Street carrying a door. It looks a little weird and people are making fun of him. They
want to beat him up because he’s telling people that if only they will go through the
door, they will be changed. No one wants to go through. His friends are all rejecting
him. Then a hippie comes up and the kid is encouraging him to go through the door.
“So,” we asked T.C., “We’ll make that kid to be you, but tell us now what you’ll do; will
you go through the door, following Jesus, or not? You tell us, how does the story end?
Remember, if you don’t go through the door, you end up in hell.” He said he’d think
about it and get back to us. That night he died of an overdose on heroin. We drew the
story anyway with him in it. We decided to give the story a happy ending; it was just a
story after all. All of T.C.’s friends saved it to remember him by.
Chapter Nine
Where we drive to Mexico by mistake;
A French-Canadian hippie says “Oui” to Jesus;
And a Harvard PhD student recruits for us.
It became obvious that we had outgrown our camper. More team members
wanted to join the tour trips, so we began praying. We’d been dreaming of a school
bus big enough to accommodate both men and women without the embarrassment
of having to wake up every morning to see a member of the opposite sex sleeping in
the bunk beside you. “Enough,” we said, “the Lord surely will not deny us a bus, when
our motivations are so pure.” We were correct. It became clear to us, time and time
again, that if the Lord was truly calling us to do something that He would provide a
way. We drew up a plan for the bus; it would need to have long, built-in couches on
both sides and space to hang out during the day with enough room for four men to
sleep at night. In the middle we’d need a kitchen big enough to make large meals at
the concerts, as well as a small shower and toilet. “Think of it,” someone said, “we’ll
never have to make a rest stop again! We can drive straight through the night.” A
sister added, “Glory, I’ll never have to make a morning trek to a coffee house issue
toilet again!” Behind the kitchen/toilet area, we would build bunk beds on each side,
enough for four women, and, behind that, a double bed space for another two girls or
a couple, if need be.
In those days, we were hard pressed for money. A bus like the one we imagined
would take a lot of cash; first to buy the bus and then to finish it out. We knew there
was only one thing to do: Pray. For a couple of months we prayed daily for the bus.
We set a date, March 30. If we didn’t have the bus by then, we wouldn’t have the time
to finish it out before the next concert tour. A week before the deadline a stranger
rang the doorbell, just as one of our sisters was leaving the house. She whispered to a
couple of us on the way out, “He’s come to give us the bus. He’s the one.” Somehow,
the Lord had shown her this. We invited him in and he explained that he had read an
article about our community in a magazine and decided to visit us on a business trip
from San Diego. Before we could say much, he said, “You are praying for something.
What is it?” Without hesitation, we said, “Well, it’s a school bus.” “A school bus? Why
do you need a school bus?” We explained our dilemma and he promised to have the
bus to us in a week. A few days later he called and said, “Send someone down to
San Diego, I’ve bought the bus.” Apparently this man had a very clever way of fund
raising: He approached his very conservative Christian friends and asked, “Do you
want to bring the gospel to teenagers with green hair?” When they said, “No!” he said,
“Well I know some people who will,” and proceeded to hit them up for the money to
buy the bus. It wasn’t something we would have done ourselves, but it seemed to do
the trick.
When the perfect-looking white school bus rolled into town, we nearly fell over.
It was so big! Could we ever drive such a huge bus? “No problem” said one brother.
“Sell it and buy a smaller one,” suggested a sister. But after taking a walk inside and
comparing it to our dream layout, we saw that it was actually the perfect size. Besides,
could we tell the Lord he had sent us a bus too big?
To this day, some of us look upon the trips we made in our new white bus
as the most fun we’d ever had. Once we had the bus and all of its amenities, we
developed a camaraderie that was rarely surpassed.
Our schedule was usually like this: by noon we would arrive at our destination
early enough to find a space on “Shakedown Street.” This was a tradition for
generations of Deadheads. The first hundred or so buses to arrive would form a street
that became the main gathering place for the multitudes that would come later in the
day. Venders would set up a market on Shakedown, selling everything from handmade
patchwork dresses to falafel sandwiches and overpriced, under-stuffed egg rolls.
Others would walk up and down this temporary street, swinging drugs or selling beer
and water. It was like a huge colorful carnival. Once, in Montana, between one concert
city and another, a local woman remarked on the strangely dressed people who kept
coming into her small rural market. “Has the circus come to town?” she asked in all
seriousness.
We would get right to work passing out our hand-folded stories and preparing
a big pot of curried rice. Hippies would drop into the bus all day, asking after us.
Everyone knew we had come for one purpose, to make the Lord and His goodness
known. We would meet other people at shows sometimes, drinking beer and smoking
pot and claiming to be there to witness for the Lord. We became well known in the
scene for our uncompromising devotion to Jesus. After a while, we were accepted as
an integral part of tour. When we would miss a show, people began to worry. “Oh my
God,” they would say, “We thought maybe you gave up on us!”
We were always the last bus to leave the lot, usually at 2 am, driving between
thousands of beer bottles that covered the parking lot. One of us would drive for a
few hours and then park the bus somewhere on the side of the road while everyone
slept. At 6:00 am another person would wake up and begin driving again. It would
usually take 10-12 hours to drive from one concert to another. Along the way, we
would have wonderful fellowship. Often, while we were driving down the highway, one
of us played the guitar and others drummed out worship songs. We would read our
Bibles and pray for the kids we had the heaviest burden for.
Oh, it was a wonderful time.
Some people wanted to paint it up like a hippie bus, but we decided that it
would stay white. We didn’t want to attract too much attention, especially from
policemen who took one look at a hippie bus and thought, “Drugs.”
Once we had the bus, some of us had to get commercial licenses to drive
the thing. One paragraph in the D.M.V. (Department of Motor Vehicles) manual
that caught our attention stated that if any illegal drugs were found in the bus, the
driver would lose his or her license for life, and the bus and all its contents would be
confiscated.
In the past, we’d found that picking up hippies as they hitchhiked from show to
show gave us a great chance to become friends and to share our faith. We’d always say,
“Hey, only one thing: no drugs.” They would always promise us up and down that they
had nothing on them, when usually they did.
We’d been pulled over many times, especially going over the border of Canada
or Mexico, and many times just driving through small-town America. The problem
was that we looked like drug dealers, so we drew the unwanted attention of police
everywhere we went. Once, in Indiana, we were pulled over because a brake light
wasn’t working. When the policeman got a look at us, he asked that we all get out of
the RV and called for reinforcements. He had that sort of ex-Green Beret, Rambo
countenance and asked us to all line up as he proceeded to make mocking comments
and shine his flashlight into our eyes. “What do we have here?” he asked. “Some pot
smoking hippies, no doubt!” We tried to tell him that we didn’t do drugs, but he just
told us to shut up. Dave, one of the new believers, was wearing those low-rider-type
baggy pants, and when he was asked to raise his hands, the pants dropped down, and
this seemed to further incite the officer. We were all praying as all of us were a bit
frightened about what might happen when the reinforcements showed up. We hoped
that somehow a sympathetic person would come.
Suddenly, two more police cars pulled up, one with the drug dogs. The mean
cop stayed outside, while the others searched the RV with the dogs. We’d heard stories
of drugs being planted in cars by the police and hoped that wouldn’t be the case. We
were glad we hadn’t picked up any of our hippie friends that night.
After a few minutes, one of the canine cops came out of our bus carrying a
Bible and asked us if we were followers of Jesus, “You sure have a lot of Bibles in
there,” he said. “Yes! Yes!” we all said in unison. “What congregation do you go to?”
the officer asked. When one of us answered he said, “No kidding! That’s the same
church I go to.” Suddenly the whole atmosphere changed. He was really excited to
hear about our community. The cop who was harassing us earlier, the one who had
hoped for the big drug bust, was now friendly and laughing along with us. They sent
us off with a blessing and we were on our way. We all thanked God for rescuing us
from what looked like a bad situation.
Another time we mistakenly crossed over the border to Mexico. We had meant
to park on the U.S. side in Texas and walk over to get some cheap burritos. We knew
that taking our hippie bus was a bad idea, but somehow we got caught in the wrong
line of traffic, and there was no way to turn back until we had crossed over into
Mexico. We did a fast U-turn, but it was too late. As soon as the U.S. customs officer
saw us, he motioned for us to pull over. We waited for them to search the vehicle,
and soon one of the officers approached us and said that we had some big problems.
For one thing, we couldn’t bring any food back into U.S. We were pretty “hobbled,”
as they say in the hippie world, meaning, low on funds, so confiscating our food
would have left us hungry later on. We also had an unlicensed dog with us, and they
said they’d have to take the dog to the pound. To be honest, the dog stunk to high
heaven, so some of us were half glad, but the owner, Jamie, loved the thing so, for his
sake, one of the sisters started crying. The officer asked us to explain why we had so
many Bibles in the bus (we had cases of them), and we explained that we were going
to share about Jesus with hippies. He started laughing. He told us that many drug
smugglers pretended to be missionaries, but that we’d have to be pretty stupid to dress
the way we did if we were really drug smugglers. “Maybe you are telling me the truth
about all those cases of Bibles you’ve got in there,” he said. The guy had a head on his
shoulders. He began to warm to us, and after a little more begging on our part, he let
us go: food, dog and all. Once again, we were saved by the gospel message! Even our
smelly dog, Colombo.
So you can see why we were reluctant to take passengers once we were driving a
commercial vehicle. There were some exceptions though.
One day, two guys from Quebec and a girl from Mexico showed up at our
house. We were on our way to a conference in Modesto, a three-hour drive. A then
famous preacher was speaking that night. Those three were entrenched in the New
Age, and we wanted to see if perhaps the famous preacher would have better luck at
convincing them to follow Jesus than we had. We gave them our little speech about
no drugs in the bus and explained that we got pulled over and searched a lot, and,
if drugs were found, we would lose everything. We laid it on pretty thick, but they
insisted that they had nothing on them, so we let them join us. The whole way to the
conference we talked to them about Jesus. We began to realize that their command of
English wasn’t great, and that they were getting maybe half of what we were saying,
if that much. They were into Buddhism, Hinduism, the occult and, definitely drugs
(which made us nervous.)
That night, the famous preacher gave an amazing sermon. Like if we weren’t
already saved, we would have been that night. He seemed to be addressing the New
Age movement’s misconceptions, and we all prayed the whole time that our friends
would get it. Then he gave a rousing altar call. Suddenly, a hand reached for one of
our sister’s, and she realized it was one of the Canadians; the one who spoke the least
English. Praise God, he wanted her to accompany him to the altar. With perhaps 100
other people, he prayed to receive Jesus and repented of his sins. He began to fill out
the card he was handed, but he stopped when he realized he had no address or phone
number. Our sister was honestly a little skeptical.
When we arrived back in San Francisco, one of our community members found
out that our friends had had bags of marijuana with them during the whole trip. It
turned out they were getting high the whole time and even selling drugs along the way.
We approached the kid who had gone up for the altar call. Now we were even more
skeptical. We asked him some pointed questions. His friend who spoke better English
helped interpret. “So you gave your life to Jesus last night?” one of us asked. “Oui,
Oui!” he answered. “And you believe that through faith in Jesus you are saved and
that there is no other way to be saved?” we continued. “Jesus, Buddha, they are all the
same, Oui?” he asked. We asked him why he had gone up for the altar call. “Why not!”
he answered with a huge grin. He explained that he thought it would be a good idea to
add Jesus to all of the other things he believed. We weren’t quite sure if the confusion
was more to blame on the language barrier or the fact that he was most likely high as a
kite the night that he “gave his life to Jesus.”
On two other occasions, we remember giving rides to hippie kids; thankfully,
those stories have better endings.
❊
As we entered the National Rainbow Gathering in Pennsylvania, we saw a young
hitchhiker pushing a shopping cart.
The Rainbow Family of Light and Love is a huge worldwide movement of very
environmentally conscious hippies who are, for the most part, into eastern mysticism
and the occult. They gather in various spots on the earth to sit in the woods for a
month and meditate, discuss topics like environmentalism, all the time hoping to send
“good vibes” to the people who are still trapped in Babylon (the land of very “badvibes”). There are strict rules that govern these gatherings and that make them very
different from the Dead shows. For one thing, no one is permitted to sell anything,
only barter or trade. For another, there is no electricity at these events. Sometimes
you must walk several miles from the parking area to the camping area of a national
park. They call these events “Rainbow Gatherings.” There is a lot of “cross-over”
to the Deadhead scene, but Rainbow attracts hippies that are a little more focused
on spirituality and not so consumed with drug dealing (since this technically isn’t
permitted). This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of drugs at most Rainbow
Gatherings. The hard-core alcoholics are confined to “A” camp — at least while they
are drinking.
We were driving the bus into the National Rainbow Gathering in Allegany
National Forest in Pennsylvania when the brother driving saw the young hitchhiker
pushing the shopping cart. We had maybe an 8-mile ride through the national forest to
the bus parking lot, and he felt sorry for this kid. We decided to break our rule about
not picking up hitchhikers. It must have been an impulse from God because, by now,
we had sorrowfully passed literally thousands of similar kids with their thumbs out.
We had just finished drawing a new story called “The First Rainbow Gathering.”
It was about Noah and the ark, but in this story all of the people Noah is warning are
hippies. Poor Noah is telling them that they need to repent and they are just mocking
him and continuing to run around naked, having orgies, popping mushrooms in their
mouths and smoking bowls of marijuana. Suddenly, just as Noah had warned them, it
begins to rain. One hippie complains because his bowl fills with water. Only Noah, his
family and the animals are saved and later, when his ark lands, they all gather to look at
the first rainbow; hence, the title, “The First Rainbow Gathering.” We decided to offer
the story to David who had just entered the bus.
After David read this story, he asked to read others. One of the brothers
noticed that David was holding a coffee cup that said “Promise Keepers,” and asked
him where he got it. “My father gave it to me,” answered David, and we all shared a
knowing look realizing that David’s parents were probably believers since Promise
Keepers was a movement of men following Jesus. Like so many other kids we would
meet, his parents had raised him in a loving home and had taught him to love Jesus.
But as a teenager, David had rebelled against his upbringing and had left home to find
out the truth for himself. “I had been traveling around to Rainbow Gatherings for a
while. I thought I had found what I was looking for,” David says now. “I had some
crazy acid trips at Gatherings, and I thought they were very spiritual. Once, I wandered
into a Tepee where an older hippie was sitting. It was really weird. It was almost like
this guy was getting into my head, kind of manipulating my thoughts. As I talked with
him, I was feeling some strange stuff, different than what I had experienced on other
acid trips. The man’s face was just transforming. It was weird and scary. I started to
freak out, and he suggested I lay down. I started having these visions of balls of light,
one of them dropped into my mouth, and my body was contorting and I started to
freak out even more.” But eventually David calmed down and felt at peace.
Later when he told some of the his Rainbow friends about this experience
on the acid trip, they said, “Oh, that’s the same spirit as the Holy Spirit in the Bible.
We just call it ‘The Great Spirit,’ but it’s the same. Christians have too narrow an
understanding.” So David said, “Wow, I’ve just found the Holy Spirit. I guess my
parents just misunderstood it.”
Then, at the Gathering in Pennsylvania, he found himself riding in our bus.
David recalls that, “When I got on, I figured that the people on the bus were just
ordinary hippies. But then, when I looked around, I thought, ‘This is different,’
because there were pictures of Jesus on the walls, and I’m thinking, ‘This is weird,’ so
I just sat down quietly, and two of the guys began talking with me. They started asking
me about my parents, because they had seen the Promise Keepers mug, and then they
handed me a couple of the stories. When I read one called “The Door” I just started
bawling; I was so physically exhausted, and I totally identified with the kid in the story.
It felt like the story had been written just for me.”
David, now very interested in finding out more about us, asked, “Where are you
kids from?” Someone answered, “We have a house on Haight and Ashbury.” David
says now, “I was like, ‘REALLY?’ because I always dreamed about going there, and I
even had a T-Shirt from there. I was so impressed.” But then David asked, “So you
guys are serious about Jesus?” When we said we were, he thought to himself, “Well
that just messed my world up.”
When we finally arrived at the “Bus Village” where many hippie buses were
parked, David got out of the bus and walked away. “I was feeling pretty raw, just
emotionally exhausted,” David recalls. “I just wondered, ‘What comes next?’”
Then David went looking for some food. “This one kitchen had this hippie sort
of food, which wasn’t satisfying at all, like they had scraped the bottom of a burnt pot
or something,” David remembers. “Then I was walking on further when someone just
popped out from behind a tree and asked, ‘Hey! Are you hungry?’ and I said, ‘Yeah,
very hungry.’” The young man said that at a bus nearby they were serving nachos and
cheese. Not the kind of food you normally find at Rainbow Gatherings. So David sat
down to eat and he noticed that people were getting into some really heated spiritual
discussions. “I kept out of it all and just ate,” David says. He got up to leave when a
young man approached him. “Hey,” he asked, “Do you have to be somewhere? Would
you mind if I talk to you about Jesus?” (David had wandered into a camp set up by
our friends with the “Jesus Loves You” community.) David thought, “Wow, this has
happened like twice in an hour,” and then he had a shocking realization. “I thought,
I know exactly where this is going and I’m okay with it. I knew I was about to get
saved, and I was okay with it.” “I just thought,” David recalls, “even before the guy
started talking, ‘I just give up.’” So David sat down and leaned up against the bus, and
the young believer, Jason, from Jesus Loves You community, began to talk. “It was
just a simple gospel message, a ‘Jesus loves you, and died for you’ sort of message,”
David says. David started crying. Jason asked, “Do you know what that is? Do you
know what you are feeling? That’s the Holy Spirit.” David just thought, ‘Oh, this is a
completely different spirit then what I had experienced on the acid trip. That was not
the same spirit at all.”
David continued to hang out with the many believers who had come to the
Rainbow Gathering to share their faith. We had told David that our bus was leaving
in a few days to continue on to the Phish tour, but somehow he had forgotten. “I just
went to the camp one day,” David remembers, “and there was no white bus there.” He
wondered, ‘Where did they go?”
But about three weeks later, David was at a Phish show in Camden, N.J., when
someone who looked vaguely familiar walked up to him. “Hey!” the big man with long
dreadlocks asked David, “weren’t you at the Rainbow Gathering?” David looked at the
man, who had glitter all over his face. Then the guy said, “Hey, David!” David thought,
“Wow, he knows my name. Who is this guy?” Then the man said, “Hey, remember
me from the white bus? We’re all here. Come over and hang with us.” David says, “I
had no personal conviction yet about not doing drugs. I was high as a kite, but all of a
sudden I started feeling this conviction come over me.”
Later in the bus, David said meekly, “Hey I just feel like I need to hang out with
you guys, or just be with one of you guys. I don’t know what to do. I have nowhere
to go.” We told David that if he wanted to meet us at the end of tour (which was a
couple weeks away), we would take him home with us.
At the last show in Dear Creek, Indiana, David signed the title of his car over to
his friends. We helped him as he took his bags out of the trunk and jumped into our
bus for the long ride back to California.
❊
Sometimes the Lord would bring people to our community in rather remarkable
ways.
John was working on a PhD at Harvard when he happened upon us on a visit to
the Haight. He was far from being a hippie, but he told us about a hippie friend back
home in New England, who had recently come to faith. “I know he’ll be excited to
know there is a community like this,” John said.
A couple of weeks later we received a letter from John’s hippie friend. In the
letter he gave a little of his testimony. He had been on tour, at one point traveling on
a European Dead Tour, and had gotten heavily into drugs. He was an artist and had
even come to San Francisco once a couple of years before, right at the time the Lord
began calling him. “I’ve included a couple of photos of the paintings I did then.” We
looked carefully at the first photo and were shocked to realize that he had painted our
house without knowing it. There in the driveway was the white 1961 Ford Falcon we
had sold a couple of years earlier. We called him right away and told him, “It must be
that the Lord is calling you to our community; we have little doubt.” A few months
later he met us on a tour after a show in Boston. We stuffed all of his things in the
storage compartments under the bus and continued on tour.
❊
Finally, the day came when our beautiful bus began to give up. The odometer
was broken when we first got her, but we must have put hundreds of thousands
of miles on her over the three years she served us. The Lord would use her first
breakdown to serve His greater purposes.
We had come to the congregation in Farmington, MA that morning and
received a warm welcome. After the service was over, one of the leaders handed us
the entire offering, almost $200, and said that they all felt that the Lord wanted to
bless us. “Come back anytime; we would be glad to have you,” she said. Little did she
know we would be back a few minutes later. As we pulled out of the parking lot, we
heard a small explosion and could see smoke rising from the engine that was under the
floor in the middle of the bus. We called for a tow truck and got the bad news shortly
afterward. The engine was finished, and it would cost $10,000 to rebuild it. We weren’t
sure what to do; we not only had no vehicle, but we had no home. We were just
finishing up a Fall Tour, and it was getting cold in Massachusetts; we had no money
for a hotel or for plane tickets home.
Suddenly, one of the brothers confessed to the rest of us. He said that the Lord
had done this because of his sin. He had called his parents, who lived nearby in New
Hampshire, and asked them to visit him at the show in Massachusetts. They were too
busy to make the drive. They insisted that he visit them. But our schedule left no room
for that. Our brother hadn’t seen his parents in a long while and he was angry with
his father. It was after all, just an hour drive to Boston where the next show would
be. That day at church, the sermon had been about unforgiveness. Our brother was
so angry with his father that he refused to respond when the teacher asked people to
forgive those with whom they had grievances. He refused, but now that the bus had
broken down, he was left with no other option. He had to call his father and ask if he
could come home until we came up with a solution for the bus. His parents actually
seemed glad for the visit, and so it was that 12 hippies joined him at his parent’s home
in Manchester, and our brother made peace with his father.
But it wouldn’t be the last time the Lord would let our bus break down to serve
His greater purposes. But that would come much later.
Chapter Ten
During the course of which we hang out with sheep;
A race-car driver dances on streets of gold;
And we go hiking with King David.
In the Gospel according to Matthew, Jesus told the parable of the sheep and the
goats.
The Son of Man comes in His glory and all the nations are gathered before
Him. He separates the sheep from the goats. The sheep will inherit the kingdom, but
the goats will be thrown into the eternal fire. To the sheep, He says, “I was hungry
and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink,
I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was
sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” Then the
sheep ask Him, “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give
you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing
clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go and visit you?”
They really were clueless. Then the King replied, “I tell you the truth, whatever you
did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
This parable had a huge influence on our community. We all wanted to be one
of the sheep. We wanted nothing more than to feed Jesus and quench His thirst and
hang out with the King. Could we see Jesus in the old bum that sat on the corner of
Haight and Ashbury Streets singing old Dead tunes and drinking cheap wine? Could
we see him in the young runaway girl asking for spare change to get a fix? Or in the
punk rockers that mocked us as they ate our food?
Were these the brothers that Jesus spoke about? Maybe He could see them in
a way we couldn’t. We could only see them in a broken state, but He could see their
futures.
One of the chief characteristics of God is mercy. David sings, “Give thanks to
the Lord, for He is good! His mercy endures forever.” (Psalm 118:1)
We saw many instances of Christians without mercy, and, in every case, it was
a sorry sight. Whenever the Grateful Dead was in town, a group of men would show
up with huge banners. “Burn in hell,” they read. We tried several times to reason with
these people, but there was no love in their hearts for the lost. We began to suspect
that they hoped the people at the show would burn for eternity. But it is written that,
“God wishes that none would perish, but that all would have eternal life.”
We thought it a great privilege to share the gospel with our friends. Being saved
from the power of sin and sanctified is the most supernatural thing that can happen to
a human being. We are all sinners, and yes, we deserve hell, but through faith in Jesus,
in His atoning death and in His resurrection, we can have eternal life.
But when we examine the life of Jesus, we notice that whenever He taught the
people, He also saw to their physical needs. He did this because he had compassion
for them. He feeds the multitudes because He has compassion. He raises Lazarus
because He has compassion. He heals the sick because He has compassion. His heart
is continually going out to the people. Even to people who will not accept him as the
promised Savior.
Could we share the gospel and not practice mercy?
Several times a week, we took food out on the streets. At first we just lugged a
huge pot up to the corner, where a crowd of people would gather around us, and we
served them.
We made the best soup we could. We took turns cooking, but when it was one
sister’s turn, she would remember the parable in Matthew and so the food always had
lots of garlic. Her motto in the kitchen was, “Lots of garlic for Jesus!”
Using the red wagon we had picked up in Texas, we could roll down the street
and have the luxury of stopping and having conversations along the way. It seemed
like many nights we brought someone home with us.
Ahmad came home one night and stayed for many months. We didn’t know
quite what the problem was, but this huge young man seemed to be in a world all his
own. He was sweet as could be but rarely spoke. He would just sit with us and stare
into space. We spoke with a doctor who suspected that Ahmad had had a psychotic
break, which, we were told, occurred in two percent of the male population, usually
at around 19 years of age. That’s about how old Ahmad seemed to be. We would ask
him questions, but he would look at us and not be able to respond. We figured that he
would just live with us forever. We had come to really love him.
Every once in awhile, he seemed to come out of the haze. His body, which
was usually slouched over, would straighten up, and he would suddenly make a short
statement with a big smile on his face and then immediately return to his usual state.
One day as we were sitting together, he suddenly said, “I used to be a racecar driver!”
We figured this must be in his imagination; after all, he was very young.
One night at our Bible study, a large crowd had gathered in the basement. Many
kids from the street were in attendance, including several we didn’t know, so the study
leader said, “Why don’t we go around the room and everyone say your name and one
word that best describes Jesus to you.” People began, “I’m Anah. Jesus is Love.” “I’m
Keith. Jesus to me is the ultimate hippie!” “I’m Rachel. Jesus to me is like a butterfly!”
It went on like that. Then we came to Ahmad, and the room was quiet. No one
expected him to say anything. He was just hunched over and looking off into space.
“That’s O.K.,” the study leader said and asked the next person to respond. Suddenly,
Ahmad came alive. It was like he was transformed before our eyes. A huge grin lit up
his eyes and he said, “I’m gonna dance with Him on streets of gold!” As soon as he
said this, the light went out again, and we all sat with our mouths open. It was simply
the most beautiful thing to have said.
He rarely left the house and seemed afraid to go out onto the street. We would
find him down in the basement many nights, often sitting in the dark trying to read the
Bible. We couldn’t tell if he was able to understand what he was reading.
One day, someone noticed that his very matted dreadlocks were crawling with
lice. His whole scalp was eaten up; they must have been making a home there for a
very long time. We were often infested with all sorts of critters, so it was no big deal,
but something had to be done before the lice moved on to other people. We told
Ahmad that we would have to shave his head. He refused, and so we had to tell him
that he would have to leave unless he complied. Sadly, he walked out. A couple of
hours later, we found him sitting in front of Ben & Jerry’s and asked him to come
home. The new, bald Ahmad was back.
But then, suddenly, he disappeared. We found out that he had hitched a ride to
Mexico, with a believing friend, while we were all away.
A couple of days later, a private detective showed up at the door. “Did we have
an Ahmad living with us?” he asked. He had been looking for him for eight months,
chasing leads all across the country ever since he had disappeared from his family’s
home in Florida. The detective couldn’t believe that he had just missed him by a few
hours. The next day, we got a call from his brother. It turned out that Ahmad was
from a very wealthy family and that he had been a perfectly normal young man, until a
year before, when he just wandered off. The brother told us that his father had bought
Ahmad a formula car, and that Ahmad had driven professionally. The most interesting
thing was that Ahmad family was in The Nation of Islam. Apparently, they were
serious Moslems.
We never saw Ahmad again, but somehow we trusted that the Lord was in
control of the situation. One day, we hope to dance with Ahmad and the Lord on
streets of gold.
❊
It was easy to get burnt-out in this type of life. It wasn’t like we could leave
our work at the office. The noise level was sometimes deafening. At times, our small
kitchen would be packed with people, in deep and heated theological debates that
would last into the morning. We tried to make rules about such things, like the “quiet
time from 10pm-10am” rule, but they never really worked. We were a very lively
group. The adrenaline rush we’d get from seeing people come to faith was incredible
and could keep us going for long periods of time, but then would come the crash.
The house was always full and so there was nowhere to have a little quiet time
with the Lord. We emptied a small closet and set a small table and rug inside and some
candlesticks. We could literally go into our closet and pray to the Father, just as Jesus
had suggested. But we soon realized that the closet was moldy, and strange bugs began
to appear, and worse yet, it leaked when it rained. It went back to being a closet.
It seemed impossible to ever get out of the house. There were always so many
needy people around. There was always someone at the door—hungry or needing a
shower. Forget not answering the door, they would just lean on the doorbell until they
wore down our resistance. If we weren’t home sometimes they would just climb over
the gate and break in.
We would invite the street kids to take showers and would ask them to take no
longer than five minutes as our water bills were astronomical. When we would notice
someone in the bathroom for a long time, it usually meant one thing: They were
getting high. Several times kids overdosed in our house, but fortunately no one ever
died. Eventually we had to take the lock off of the bathroom door. One young girl
came in to use the bathroom, shot up heroin, and as she left the house, fell down the
stairs and passed out. We felt for her pulse, and when we realized that she didn’t have
one and that she wasn’t breathing, someone went to call for an ambulance. A few of
us laid our hands on her and prayed that the Lord would spare her. By the time the
ambulance arrived, she was breathing again.
All of this drama would eventually cause burnout. We had trouble keeping our
community members around for very long.
Part of the problem was a mistaken idea that somehow we were indispensable.
It’s not uncommon for people, especially those working with the poor, to believe this
deception. Sometimes we would feel personally responsible when someone died. Had
we spent enough time with them? Had we presented the gospel clearly to them? The
weight of this was unbearable. Exactly that, unbearable. Something we were never
meant to carry. Jesus is the only one who can save people. The Bible says that God
doesn’t need man to do anything at all.
We came to discover that the number one cause of burnout was an inability to
trust God to save people and a belief that somehow, He needed us to do this.
Life and death are in the hands of the Lord.
Burnout would lead to separation from God. Some of us began feel guilty if we
prayed for our own needs. What were our needs in comparison to those of a strungout junkie who was prostituting himself for dope?
Sometimes the Lord would finally let us reach the end of our own strength.
Only then did we realize that all along He had been waiting for us to come to Him and
allow Him to minister to us.
Meditate with us for a moment on Psalm 23.
King David, a warrior, faced battles that were both physical and spiritual. He
often felt overwhelmed and nearly overcome. In Psalm 23 he says that the Lord leads
him on “paths of righteousness.” In the original language it is clear that David was not
describing a straight path, but a path that is circular; more like a loop trail.
David described a circular path; one filled with dangers. He faced real enemies
in the valley. Many times he came back wounded, exhausted, and needing refreshment.
He was also led to a quiet and still place many times—a place of healing. He knew
what it was like to battle and he knew what it was like to rest. He was intimately
acquainted to the terrain. He was able to face the battles only because he was drinking
from the Lord’s refreshing waters. He said, “My cup runneth over.” He knew that at
some point the battle would be over and he would again find himself lying on the
green grass, beside the still waters. He received the Lord’s anointing which, in the
original language, doesn’t mean the anointing that he received when Samuel anointed
him as king. The Hebrew word used means “to make fat” or maybe even “to fertilize”.
God nurtured David back to health.
But what if David had felt obligated to stay in the valley and never leave? Would
he have survived for long? It’s doubtful. David also understood that after this time of
refreshing he would again continue on the circle; at some point finding himself in the
“valley of the shadow of death.” He had spent enough time going around this course
to trust that, in the valley, God would be with him and that he need not fear the evil
that is in that dark place. He had spent enough time receiving from the Lord to be able
to fight a good fight. This may be the key to David’s sustainability as a warrior king.
We began to understand how necessary it was to spend regular quality time with
the Lord. For some of us this meant long hikes in the forest, just being quiet before
God. Some of us escaped with a guitar to the nearby park. Some of us went to friends
for a couple of days a month. We learned that to stay fit for the battle, these times
were essential. We could occupy hours of prayer time with long lists of intercessory
prayers for all the lost and broken people we knew on the streets. But later, we came
to understand that we were also lost and broken and that unless we allowed significant
blocks of time for the restorative power of the Spirit to work on our souls, we would
have nothing to give to others. Jesus said, “You have the poor with you always, but Me
you do not have always.” (Matthew 26:11). He called us not to just serve Him, but to
be with Him. As Mary did, we also needed to sit at Jesus’ feet and just stare into his
eyes, listening for His voice. We knew that if we wanted to finish the race well and stay
in the battle of fighting lies with the truth of the gospel, we would have to learn how
to rest and be fed ourselves.
God doesn’t love us for what we can do for Him. He loves us for who we are in
Him. Isn’t this in essence the message of the gospel of grace?
Chapter Eleven
An 18 century theologian helps us to understand hippies;
A young man pays us a visit after dying;
And an elbow is healed.
th
Soon after we started going to Haight Street, but before we had the house on
Ashbury, Jackie Pullinger-To came to San Francisco. At that point, we had only two
or three new believers living with us. She said something to us that at the time was
troubling but seemed to be the word of the Lord, and we pondered it in our hearts
wondering what it could mean. She said, “Don’t get disappointed if you see people fall
away from the Lord. Some of them will come back, but it might take 10 or 15 years.”
We looked over at our new brothers and sisters. They looked so sincere; we couldn’t
imagine them ever turning their backs on Jesus. Emotionally, we were investing so
much in them, and our hearts sank. The idea of waiting 10 or 15 years for someone to
repent seemed absurd. We had been together as a community about six months at that
point; 15 years seemed like an eternity.
Over the years that followed, Jackie’s message was a comfort more than once as
we saw kids come to the Lord with zeal and fire in their hearts for Jesus, only to turn
back to drugs and alcohol a short time later. Every time, it was like a fresh wound, and
it never got easier to watch as kids fell away from the Lord. We felt like a mother who
carries a baby to full term, only to have that baby die a few weeks later.
The first week that we opened the house, a young man came to live with us
after he had overdosed and been brought back to life by paramedics the night before.
A friend of his from Dead tour had just come to the Lord and she encouraged him
to follow Jesus. Our guess was, at that point, he was a bit shaken up by his near-death
experience and figured it might be a good thing to do. But a short time later he packed
his bags and went back to his old life. He had been a heroin addict for about two years
at that point, and his desire for the drug was proving to be stronger than his will to
walk out his faith. He said that he still believed in Jesus but did not believe that he had
to live the same radical lifestyle that we had chosen.
We lost touch with him, but for many months we lifted him up in prayer,
especially asking that the Lord protect him from another overdose.
A few months later, he came back to the Haight and came to see us. He
confessed that he was strung out again but told us about a dream he had had a couple
months before which he couldn’t forget. In the dream, several huge angels came down
from heaven to take people from the earth. When they came to this young man, he
said, “Take me,” but one of the angels said to him, “Because of the heroin, you are
tied to the earth, and we can’t take you.” He was devastated when he woke from the
dream, but even afterwards, as hard as he tried, he couldn’t quit using.
One day the phone rang. It was a young man calling from Canada. We hadn’t
seen him in a couple of years and he had news to report. “I’m worse than I ever was,
and I’m afraid that I’m going to die if you don’t come and get me,” he explained. We
took down the address of the youth hostel in Victoria, where he was staying, and hung
up the phone. “Anyone up for a road trip?” Two of us packed backpacks and we took
off for a 24-hour drive north.
When we saw our friend we were shocked because he was so emaciated and had
dark circles under his eyes. He gathered his things and asked if we would help him get
his guitar out of hock. He had pawned it for drug money. Guitar in hand, we went to
the ferry building in order to go through U.S. immigration and customs and then take
a boat to Washington State where we had left the car. The two of us who had come
from San Francisco passed through with no problem but when they checked out our
friend’s Canadian passport, they discovered that he had several felony arrests in the
U.S and refused him entry. He was also an American citizen but had no proof of this,
and they told us that unless he could prove that he was citizen, he wouldn’t be getting
on the boat.
We left the terminal, not knowing what to do, and checked into a hotel across
the street. The young man asked us to give him $15, so that he could get a fix. “If I
don’t do that, I’m not going to be able to sleep and, by morning, I won’t be able to get
out of bed,” he explained. “No way, Kid,” replied one of us. “We’ll pray for you and
ask the Lord to heal you.” For many hours, we took turns praying for a healing, while
the young man slept soundly through the night. In the morning, the two of us looked
a little strung out from lack of sleep, but our friend woke refreshed and astounded
by how good he felt. “I haven’t felt this good in years!” he told us. He remembered
having an American passport issued in Montreal several years before, so we called the
U.S. Embassy there and explained the situation. The woman asked us to call back in
an hour, while she checked into things. When we called back, she gave us good news.
She had found the record of citizenship and promised to call the immigration officials
at the ferry terminal. We packed our things, checked out and crossed the street. The
immigration officer who had refused us the day before met us at the entrance and said,
“Well, I guess you’re going to America.”
We drove as fast as our old car would take us, and the whole way the young
man expected to go into painful withdrawals. He had kicked heroin many times
and knew exactly what to expect, but this time he wasn’t experiencing even the
slightest symptoms of withdrawal. The Lord had clearly delivered him. He joined our
community and began to be discipled by the older brothers. We were thrilled. Finally,
our prayers had been answered after many years of beseeching God on behalf of this
man with so much promise.
But after two months, he began to take credit for his own healing. We were all
dumbfounded. “It was just will power. I have control over this addiction,” he bragged.
He told us that he felt sure he was free from his addiction and that he planned to
return to the street. We begged him to stay, but he left anyway. The next day, one
of our new believers found him on Haight Street and asked him how he was doing.
“Great” he said, “piece of cake.” She noticed something sticking out of a hole in his
jeans. “Then, what is that?” she asked. Obviously, it was a syringe. He was already
using again. But worse than that, he even began to doubt the truth of the gospel.
A few years after he left the community, he called again and asked to meet with
us. We met at a café on Haight Street, and he asked us to lend him $1500 to pay off a
drug supplier who was threatening to kill him. We refused on principle. We asked him
if he still believed in Jesus, and he said that he thought there were thousands of ways
to God and that maybe Jesus was one way, but certainly not the only way. One of the
sisters said, “Great! Now that you’ve tried all these thousands of other ways, you are
still strung out.” He paused for a minute and then said, “You know, the only time in
my life that I felt peace was when I was following Jesus.” Still, he couldn’t surrender
to the truth God had made so obvious to him. It was easier to deny Jesus than to
acknowledge Him and have to face the consequences.
We were confused by experiences like this. We’d have long (friendly) debates
about the question of whether a believer could “lose his salvation.” Some said that
“once saved, always saved.” Others thought that a person could lose his salvation.
There were scriptures to support both arguments. Then a couple of us read a book
by Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century American theologian. Edwards had helped lead
“The Great Awakening,” a revival that for a time seemed to change the very fabric
of colonial America. During the Awakening, Edwards witnessed masses of people
emotionally surrendering to an outpouring of the Spirit of God. Churches were
filled to overflowing, and upwards of 50,000 people would gather in a field listening
for hours as preachers, such as George Whitfield and John Wesley, spoke without
microphones. Even Benjamin Franklin, a scientist, couldn’t understand how someone
could project human voices so far. Bars closed, jails were shut for lack of criminals,
and the expectation was that the emerging nation would be forever changed.
But Edwards was in for a major disappointment. Within a few years life was
back to normal. The bars were open, the jails were full, and the pews were empty.
Many people whom he had seen have dramatic conversions had either reverted to their
former ways or had become lukewarm church goers. Edwards began a long season of
prayer and study, determined to figure out what had gone wrong.
In his masterpiece, Religious Affections, Edwards, considered by some to be one
of the most brilliant theologian America has ever seen, explained to us hippie believers
in the Haight Ashbury of San Francisco what had happened in 18th Century America
and, as a result, what had happened to our friend, the Canadian-American kid.
One particular thing in his work caught our attention. As a Calvinist teacher,
Edwards believed that one could not “lose” his or her salvation (Once saved, always
saved), but he talked about “counterfeit conversions.”
For a true salvation experience, Edwards said that there had to be two things in
place. First, the new believer had to have an awareness of his own sin. Secondly, the
new believer had to have an awe of the holiness of God in relation to his own sin. He
talked about “handmaidens” to a true salvation experience. These handmaidens were
the many good reasons to cause someone to consider following Jesus. He gave a few
examples; wanting to go to heaven and avoid hell, wanting to have a relationship with
God, wanting to know the love of the Father, wanting to be healed, to have victory
over destructive behavior, or to be free of a guilty conscience. The list went on and
on. All of these things, Edward explained, were right to desire. It was true that God
would give good things to anyone who followed His Son, but by themselves, these
things could actually be selfish motivations for coming to Jesus. Perhaps one could
initially come to the Lord for one or more of these handmaidens, but if the person
never progressed past that point to a place of understanding the holiness of God, the
person was not really saved. He described one man who had a vision of Jesus on the
cross who said to him, “I died because I love you.” And yet, ultimately, the man was
not saved. He wanted only the gifts of God, but he didn’t want it to cost him anything.
He didn’t want to have this new knowledge change his life in any way. Dietrich
Bonheoffer would later call this “cheap grace, grace without the cross.”
After reading Religious Affections, we reviewed our own experiences with
people like the young Canadian. He had come to Jesus because he was desperate
for healing. “I’m going to die if you don’t come and get me,” he had pleaded on the
phone. When he was miraculously healed, he received the gift from God with gladness.
But he never progressed to a deeper appreciation of his own sin against God and of
God’s holiness. God was like a quick fix to him, something to dull his pain, but once
he felt better he could toss the “needle.” Jesus had no value other than making him
feel good.
Another young woman (who was also strung out when we met her at a concert
in New Mexico) tried for a season to follow Jesus. She was raised in a Christian home
and was deeply troubled by the idea that she could go to hell if she didn’t repent and
walk with the Lord. However, after a couple of months with us she confessed that
it wasn’t enough to keep her following the Lord. She was being honest. And she was
correct.
A young hippie showed up at our door at 6am one day, having just been
dropped off by an ambulance from the hospital where he had spent the night after a
heroin overdose. He had been pronounced dead upon arrival and was only brought
back to life with defibrillators. He showed us the metal receivers, which were still stuck
to his chest. He told us that when he regained consciousness, he knew that he had
to follow Jesus. That’s why he asked the driver to take him to us. We were the only
believers he knew. We wondered if perhaps he and the Lord had had a little one-onone during the two minutes before he was resuscitated. However, within a couple of
days, he was back on the street using and selling drugs.
On one concert tour, we had taken a much-needed break in the Rocky
Mountains for prayer and rest. A couple of us decided to read a book written by a
man named John Wimber. The book reminded us of how much healing had played
a role in the ministry of Jesus. Perhaps some of us were secretly afraid that if we
prayed for healing and the person didn’t get any better, our arguments would only
be weakened. As we discussed this point, some of us came under a deep conviction.
Many of us had a natural tendency to try to reason with people’s intellects and their
hearts. We would make a clear presentation of the gospel, prove the truth of Jesus by
using the scriptures, and then try to demolish arguments against Him. But we didn’t
pray much for physical healings. We promised the Lord that the next time we came
across someone who was sick, we would ask if we could pray for their healing. We
were excited and scared at the same time.
The next day we arrived in Denver in a torrential rainstorm. As the whole
parking lot had turned to mud, hippies were running to find shelter. Several of them
ran to our RV and asked if they could come in from the rain. We began to speak with
them about Jesus. Since one of the sisters was reading Augustine’s Confessions, she
took it out and began to read to them. As she did she thought to herself, “What on
earth am I doing reading Augustine to these kids?”
Just then, a kid named Pear came into the RV. As he sat down, all eyes turned
to him because he was moaning in pain and grasping his elbow. “I think I broke my
elbow,” he said, and each of us said to himself, “Oh boy, I’m going to have to pray for
this kid.” When we asked him what had happened, he reluctantly told us that he owed
some kids money for drugs and that they had roughed him up a little as a warning.
One of us asked very timidly, “Can we pray for your elbow?” “Sure, why not,” he
replied. We were cornered because there were at least half a dozen other kids who
were witnessing this. “Oh Lord,” we prayed, “Please help us out.” We all came around
Pear and laid hands on him as we each prayed for a healing. When we finished, Pear
yelled out, “My elbow! It’s healed!” and he stretched it out and flexed his arm several
times, amazed. We couldn’t believe what had happened. “Are you sure?” one of us
asked, but before he could answer, he jumped out the door and went running to tell
his friends.
The next day we went into Boulder, Colorado, a huge hippie center, and we were
talking with some kids on the street. A young Deadhead we had never met approached
us. He pointed to us and said loudly, “You’re the ones who healed Pear’s elbow!” We
said, “Actually, it was Jesus who did that.” All the other kids heard the story from the
Deadhead.
As far as we know, Pear didn’t come to the Lord, but we could see how news of
the healing was being broadcast to a very large circle of the very people we were trying
to share our faith with. Certainly somewhere it had an impact. But we were puzzled
why Pear hadn’t come to Jesus right then and there.
We would see this many times. As with the Canadian and with Pear, the Lord
would touch people deeply and supernaturally but they would continue to live their
sinful lives. We saw that in the ministry of Jesus as well.
In Luke 17:11-17, Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem when ten men who had
leprosy stood at a distance and cried out to him,
“Jesus, Master, have pity on us!” He told them to go show themselves to the
priest, and, on their way, they were healed. Luke said that one of them, seeing that he
was cleansed, came back praising God. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked
Him. Jesus said, “Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Was no one
found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” He said “foreigner”
because the man was a Samaritan, not a Jew.
We met a young man named Zev, who was selling drugs on Haight Street.
He had been diagnosed with H.I.V. Three separate tests had confirmed that he was
positive. He most likely contracted the illness by sharing needles. We brought Zev to
a conference where a man famous for his healing gift was speaking. The organizers
asked anyone who needed healing to stick an orange dot on their plastic nametag so
that the healer would be sure to pray for them. Zev attached the sticker to his nametag.
After the man prayed a general prayer over everyone at the conference, Zev looked
down and noticed that the sticker was gone. He went and got another one, and this
time he took the cardboard nametag out of its plastic case and stuck the dot to the
paper, carefully putting it back in the plastic holder. Later that night, he noticed that
the orange dot was gone once again. “That’s so odd,” he told one of our brothers,
“I can’t possibly understand how that sticker could have fallen off.” No one had laid
hands on Zev or had prayed specifically for him. When he returned to the city, he
went to the free clinic to get his T-cell count taken. When the results came back, the
doctor was amazed, “You’ve been healed somehow,” he told Zev. Just to be sure, the
doctor did another test, and this one was negative for the virus.
Later he heard a Bible story, the one where Jesus healed a man at the pool called
Bethesda. Once the man was healed, Jesus said to him, “See, you have been made well.
Sin no more, lest a worse thing come upon you.” (John 5:14) Zev did not heed the
warning and went back to his old life of drugs and dealing. Within a few months, he
had contracted the H.I.V. virus once again.
After we read the Edwards book, our message to junkies changed significantly.
Whereas before we would say, “Follow Jesus and be healed. Look at your life, see what
a mess it is; Jesus will give you a better life,” now we would repeat all of that but focus
more on the worthiness of God to be worshipped.
Jesus healed multitudes, yet on the day the Spirit of God came to the first
believers, they numbered only 120. To be healed cost nothing. But to be saved meant
to give up your old ways and embrace Jesus and all he taught. The gospel is a message
of God’s unconditional love for us in that He died in our place, so that we could be
free, and in that He was resurrected from the dead so that we could be born again
of the Spirit. The gift is free, yet the obligation after receiving such a great gift is
unconditional love for God. For many, this was too costly an obligation.
Some people who had hit bottom responded to a message of “cheap grace” but
never stayed a disciple of Jesus very long. Eventually, when the Lord required them to
walk out their faith, and things got a little harder, they turned back. C.S. Lewis, in The
Screwtape Letters, depicts a demon instructing an underling in the art of luring a new
believer away from the faith. Screwtape writes to Wormwood to teach him something
about how “the Enemy,” meaning God, works,
He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning. He will set them off with
communications of His presence, which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional
sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs
to last long. Sooner or later, He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious
experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand on its own
legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.
In the “counterfeit conversion,” that Edwards wrote about there is willingness at
first to follow Jesus, so long as He provides incentives. However, once these incentives
seem to be withdrawn, the person will turn back to those things he knows will satisfy
his needs in the short term, such as drugs, sex, witchcraft, etc.
Only if the person moves on to maturity and grasps, as Edwards said, “the
mystery of the holiness of God” and also recognizes their own sinfulness, will they
continue to follow. We would hear the same thing many times: “Jesus seemed to work
for me for a while, but then He didn’t seem to be there anymore,” as though Jesus is
our servant, and we are the King, and not vice versa.
Screwtape continued in his instructions to Wormwood:
Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human,
no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a
universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has
been forsaken, and yet still obeys.
Edwards is hopeful though. He reminds us that God is patient and longsuffering, and that, eventually, some who may have been motivated by selfish
intentions will later come to a deeper and more mature understanding of the gospel
and, as a result, be saved. Edwards wrote that if someone is truly saved, they can still
struggle and even fall back to their old sinful ways for a time, but they will never deny
that Jesus is Lord. They will always be miserable sinners.
Once a new believer, who we knew to be sincere, fell into temptation. He began
using heroin again and left our community. One night as he was shooting up with a
friend, he wept and explained that he was miserable because he knew the Lord and
knew how he had been saved and knew that he shouldn’t be there using heroin again.
His friend heard him explain how much Jesus has done by dying on the cross and that
night both repented and followed the Lord.
Maybe our Canadian friend never was saved. Perhaps he had what Edwards calls
a “counterfeit conversion.”
In both cases, God’s mercy and patience are shown forth, in that he never gave
up trying to pursue these young men when they were running from Him. In the case
of the one, the Lord continued to convict him when he sinned and also continued to
offer a means of escape. He found the means of repentance, by understanding the
love of God. In the case of the Canadian, the Lord continues to reach out to him in
the hope that one day he may come to a real understanding of the truth.
The apostle Peter wrote in II Peter 3:9 that the Lord “is not willing that any
should perish but that all should come to repentance.” In our own lives, we see that
the Lord was long-suffering and willing to wait patiently many years until we fully
repented of our sin and chose to walk with Him. Jesus said, “I say to you, there is joy
in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repents.”
Just because we see someone be healed, or see someone raised from the dead,
we shouldn’t assume that this person is saved. We should assume however, that this
is precisely the moment when we must tell them that their hearts and minds must be
similarly healed.
Only the power of the gospel can accomplish this.
Chapter Twelve
A brief chapter wherein one of the sisters wants to punch
someone in a video store but changes her mind and
instead, takes the young man to Ben & Jerry’s for a milk shake.
Most of us had been out of town for a while and had just returned to Haight
Street. It was a sunny, winter afternoon, as we walked down Haight Street from
Stanyan Street to Masonic Avenue. As always, when we’d been away for a while, we’d
notice the things that had changed. Many stores had closed and reopened, selling
basically the same things they had before—bongs, clothing from India and souvenir TShirts. We noticed at least one new body-piercing shop, and one new tattoo parlor.
Several people attempted to get our attention with signs that asked for spare
change or by coming alongside and asking if we were looking for drugs. Some of
these faces seem vaguely familiar, and we asked one prematurely aged man if perhaps
we had met before. “I’m Pie,” he said. “Don’t you remember me?” and we searched
back in time to find the face of a sweet young Deadhead, maybe 15 years old. Twelve
years later, he looked like all of the older homeless panhandlers. While we talked to
him, we recalled the hard heart towards Jesus that we’d encountered in the young waif.
Pie gloried in his sin and debauchery and seemed to get pleasure in reminding us of
the young woman he seduced from our house many years ago. “Do you know what
became of her?” one of us asked, but he shrugged the question off and asked if we
had any pretty young woman living at the Jesus house. “No,” one of us answered,
adding, “none your type anyway.”
We spotted other faces, aged by drugs and street life. One older man sat on the
street asking passersby for money, and, when we declined to give, he mocked us. We
remembered him as we walked past; once respected on the street for his knowledge
of witchcraft. Another older hippie seemed not to have stopped drinking since we last
saw him years ago. He was still sitting on the street making peace signs out of pennies.
We talked about others we hadn’t seen in many years. What had become of them?
Every place we went seemed to bring up a face. When we climbed up the
stairs in a restaurant to use the bathroom, we remembered Charlotte, who we’d met
when she was 14 and living on a Dead tour. Later, when she was 18, she showed up
on Haight Street and looked healthy and clean. “What happened to you?” one of us
asked. “I’ve just spent two years in jail.” That would explain the few extra pounds.
Three days later she was found dead in this same bathroom, overdosed on heroin.
While in the video store, we remembered first coming across Pat and his
girlfriend, Ellen. They were gutter punks, safety pins crudely piercing their eyebrows
and lips. Pat had been looking at the boxes of porn movies and making rude
comments, and one of our sisters wanted to turn around a hit him. They made quite
a pair; Ellen being at least 100 pounds heavier than Pat. He reminded us a little of
Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands. He hadn’t bathed in a year and had massive
scabs covering his whole body, the result of an untreated staph infection caused by
excessive drug use.
Ellen wore torn fishnet stockings and had several chains around her neck. We
passed them many times without ever meeting them. Maybe we were much more
comfortable with the cute hippie kids, like Pie.
Then one night at a service, the pastor asked everyone to pray for the lost. One
of the sisters in our house moved to the back to sit quietly in the dark. As she tried
to focus her mind on the Lord, she saw the faces of Pat and Ellen. “You’ve passed
these two by,” the Lord observed. “Yes, Lord, that’s true, forgive me,” she said. Then
she saw in her mind a cross made of many diamonds. She knew the cross well; she’d
bought it when she worked in advertising and still cared for costly things. It was in
storage at a friend’s house. “Give the cross to that girl,” the Lord seemed to instruct,
“and say this as you do, ‘The Lord says that to Him you are more precious than all the
diamonds in the world.’” “Oh Lord,” our sister said, “I haven’t seen that girl in many
days, perhaps she has left town. How will I find her?” Her heart was very full just then,
convicted by her sin, but grateful that God was offering her a way out.
That night, we returned home to find Ellen sitting in our basement. It was the
first time she had visited the house. Our sister was speechless for a few minutes. Then
she said to Ellen, “Do you know anything about Jesus?” “Not much,” was her reply.
“I know that he died on the cross, but for the life of me I don’t know why.” “Do you
want to know?” our sister asked. “Sure, why not,” Ellen answered. They made an
appointment for lunch the next day and our sister mentioned that she had something
she wanted to give to Ellen.
She retrieved the cross from her friend’s house and marveled at God’s love for
this girl. She had planned to sell the necklace to pay some of our bills. Maybe it would
have fetched $1000, but God had another and better plan. He wanted to use it to
demonstrate His love.
At the restaurant, our sister heard the sad story that was Ellen’s life. Both of her
parents were homeless junkies. She had been brought up on the streets and, in her 17
years, had only lived in a house for a short time. Most of her life had been spent in
abandoned buildings, sleeping in cars or in the park. She’d been addicted to heroin for
several years, her parents having introduced her to the drug as a child.
Taking out the diamond cross, our sister thought, “This is crazy, she’ll sell it for
a few dollars to get high,” but another part of her was moved by the compassion of
Jesus, who “though He was rich, became poor for our sakes.”
The sister told Ellen what had happened at the meeting the night before. “Look,
I know this may seem unusual to you, but the Lord wants me to give you this cross.
The diamonds are real. He wants me to tell you that you are more precious to Him
than all the diamonds in the world.”
“Cool,” Ellen said as she slipped the cross onto one of her many chains, one
with a pentagram pendant.
Over the next year, Ellen and Pat became good friends of our community. They
visited the house often. We talked about Jesus each time but both of them seemed
pretty non-committal. We came to love Pat although he was a very troubled young
man who kept getting high on motion sickness pills that would send him into seizures.
He was five years old when a social worker came to visit him in his kindergarten
class. “I’m taking you to Disney World,” she said. Instead, she took him to a group
home. He was permanently taken from his mother and he never saw her again. At 13,
he ran away from a foster family and had been living on the streets ever since. He had
the emotional development of a small child.
Pat loved vanilla milk shakes from Ben & Jerry. We promised him a milk shake
every day that he stayed away from the pills, but this only worked for about a week.
We visited the local pharmacist who was selling him the pills and made him promise to
stop. Nothing seemed to work, however.
One day we watched helplessly as Pat went into convulsions after taking 50
Dramamine pills. One of the sisters was very upset when she witnessed this, and so
she ran home and locked her bedroom door and began to weep, hitting the floor
with her fist. “Take my life, Lord, and save Pat’s!” she said. At the moment, she was
honestly hoping the Lord would take her up on the offer. Then she had a vision
of Jesus at the most painful moment on the cross. “Now you know how I feel for
everyone who has ever lived,” said the Lord. Our sister stopped weeping and just sat
quietly and pondered what the Lord had done on the cross. Her own compassion
suddenly seemed dwarfed in comparison.
Then one afternoon, many months later, we came home and found Pat and
Ellen frying eggs in our kitchen. As casually as you can imagine, Ellen flipped an egg
as she said, “I wanted to tell you that I know that Jesus loves me.” “What happened?”
we asked. “Well,” she said, “Last night I was walking down the street and suddenly I
got clued in.” “Clued in?” one of us asked. “Yes, suddenly I realized that Jesus loved
me.” She still had the diamond cross around her neck. She hadn’t sold it after all.
We lost touch with Pat and Ellen a little after that. They’d gone to Reno,
Nevada, and never returned, but somehow we didn’t worry about them. The Lord
knew exactly where they were and would take care of these two who He loved so
much, more than all the diamonds in the world.
Chapter irteen
During which time two kidnappings are proposed;
We contemplate diamonds;
And a sister is chased by a man in black.
One night a young woman in her mid-teens came to the house on Ashbury
Street and begged us to take her in. She wanted to follow Jesus and get off of drugs,
and she knew that her friends wouldn’t support her decision. “Don’t let anyone know
that I’m here,” she pleaded, as she ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom.
Within an hour we had a drama brewing on the front steps. A crowd of her friends
were protesting outside, “Let Emma go! Let Emma go!” We tried to persuade them
that she had come of her own free will and that she asked that they leave her alone,
but they refused to believe us. Emma could hear the demonstration downstairs and
gripped the bathtub for dear life and refused to come downstairs and speak to her
friends. This only added to their suspicions. They began to try and force the gate open
as we threatened to call the police. They couldn’t understand why anyone would want
to give up the thrilling life of junkie hotels, squat houses and jail cells. Meanwhile, the
crowd kept growing, and finally, in tears Emma left the house. It was impossible to
stop her.
The next night one of the new believers, Chris, spoke to her on the street and
she whispered to him that her friends were keeping her drugged and that she wanted
to get away but was too afraid. Chris came home visibly shaken and implored us to do
something. We had never considered kidnapping before, but here he was outlining his
plan to do just that. “We’ll just drive up to Haight Street and I’ll jump out and grab
her, throw her in the car, and we’ll take off,” he said as though this was something
we had done before. We stood in front of the house confused, not knowing what to
do. What he was suggesting was illegal, technically speaking, but yet a young life was
at stake. “What would Jesus do?” we wondered, way before the rubber wristbands
became popular. Suddenly, like in slow motion, a police car drove towards us. One of
the sisters jumped in front of it (it was going that slowly) and when the window was
rolled down she was surprised to see two woman officers inside, she couldn’t ever
remember seeing even one in the neighborhood before. She explained the situation
to them as they listened sympathetically, and they immediately volunteered to help us
rescue Emma. “You just give us a couple of minutes and then drive up to the street,”
they said. We gave them a description of the girl we wanted and they rolled on. We
wondered later if perhaps they were angels, because, when we followed in a 1961 Ford
Falcon, the street was empty and only Emma and the two policewomen were standing
on the corner. Everyone else had fled. Emma looked relieved and we drove that night
to friends who lived in the Sierra Mountains, and Emma stayed with them many
months.
But this kind of life was exhausting to say the least. Whenever a young person
made a decision to follow the Lord, a battle would ensue with the others still on the
street. Misery loves company, that much was proven. One young man was beaten
when he walked up the street to give out food to his friends. He came back with a
bloody nose. In some ways this kind of thing provided a good test of someone’s
commitment to the Lord, but the temptation to go back to drugs, especially for those
who had been strung out on heroin for years, seemed almost too cruel a test. As soon
as a young person made a decision to follow the Lord, free drugs and alcohol would
be waved in front of them, and a concerted and unified effort would be made to draw
them back to their old ways.
It became obvious that we had been trying to do too much from our house
on Ashbury Street. It was the perfect location for reaching out to the street kids, just
a stone’s throw from the Ben & Jerry’s shop on the corner of Haight and Ashbury,
where so many young people stood all day offering to sell drugs to a passersby. It was
a slight, downhill incline from the corner to our front door, which meant that even the
most strung-out kids could make the journey without exerting too much energy, but,
for this same reason, it was a terrible place for a new disciple of Jesus to grow and
flourish.
One night one of the sisters had a strange dream. In the dream someone
handed her a deed to a property. She knew it was for a safe place in the country to
take the new believers. As soon as the deed was in her hands, it turned into the largest
diamonds she had ever seen, maybe half a dozen of them. Immediately a man dressed
in black, with a big black hat, was chasing her and trying to take the diamonds. After
what seemed like hours of running from him, through fields and cities and airports,
she hid the diamonds in the ground.
About that same time, one of us had a “vision,” if you can call it that. We were
all on Haight Street, but the street also looked like Vietnam, with jungle all around.
There was a fierce battle raging around us. Stores and cafes were being blown up. We
were dressed like MASH doctors and trying to help wounded kids who were being hit
by bullets and grenades. As we would bandage someone, they would get hit again by
another bullet and die. It was a strange picture and so we asked the Lord for a meaning
and thought He was trying to say something like, “You should have the common sense
to move the wounded soldiers off of the front line.”
Just a few days later Teddy came to see us. We had known her for a couple of
years. We had first seen her passed out next to a garbage can overflowing with beer
bottles at a Dead Show. She had a Bhagavad-Gita in her hand that a Hare Krishna
devotee must have given her. She was in and out of jail all the time. Her boyfriend was
“in” at the moment, which gave her an incentive to get herself cleaned up. She had
been using heroin for several years and we knew that she would go through hell trying
to withdraw. For two nights, we stayed up praying for her, massaging her when she
experienced cramping, reading to her and encouraging her to stay and see it through.
We had made a deal that she couldn’t have visitors and also that we would forcibly
prevent her from leaving. We had even made her sign the paper agreeing to the latter,
although we knew that it was probably an illegal document. We envied our friends in
Hong Kong, who could legally do that sort of thing, but this was America and there
were laws against such things. So when Teddy made a bee line for the door on the
third morning we went running after her, all the way down the street and around the
block a few times. She seemed to possess supernatural strength. We saw that there was
no way we could keep up. We spotted two other street kids on skateboards and made a
quick deal with them, “Go after her, throw her to the ground, wait until we get there,
and we’ll give you $50!” With that, they skated off in her direction. “What are we
doing?” we asked each other a moment later. When we got to them Teddy was on the
ground screaming “Help, kidnap!” at the top of her voice. We realized that we were
fighting a losing battle and asked the boys to release her. We walked back to the house,
a couple of us in tears. We had been up for three days and were exhausted. After
paying the skateboarders, we were broke. We told the Lord that we would never help
a kid kick heroin in the house, again. It just couldn’t work. When we got to the house,
we noticed something in the mailbox. It was a check for $500 and a note saying, “Use
this for discipleship.” We saw this as a sign that God was in agreement and had a plan.
From that point, we began to have the faith to believe that God would give us
a place outside of the city to bring these new believers. We began a serious campaign
of prayer and fasting. We had no money, which didn’t concern us in the least. We
knew that if we kept our hearts before the Lord and looked for the right situation,
eventually the money would be provided. We would remind ourselves of the diamonds
many times.
Together we examined a map of northern California and decided to begin
looking for property within a two to four-hour drive of the city. There was only one
place we wouldn’t look, and that was Northern Mendocino and Humboldt Counties,
where we knew all the marijuana farms were to be found.
For nearly two years, we drove at least once a week to look at property.
Strangely, we never saw anything that struck us as the perfect place. The places we
looked at were either too small or too residential, or too run down. On one trip east to
look at an old camp, we also visited a local congregation and spoke to the pastor. He
said he saw a huge X in his mind and that he knew the Lord had a place already picked
out and that when we saw it, we would know immediately that it was the right place.
This seemed right to us.
Meanwhile, we had young believers who needed a safer place to be healed and
grow.
We didn’t watch television in the house and frankly most of us were sickened by
so much of Christian broadcasting that seemed so worldly, asking for money for more
and more elaborate sets.
But on a warm spring day, a few of us were upstairs when the phone rang. A
new believer answered it and told us that someone representing a very well known
Christian T.V. evangelist was on the phone.” One of us flippantly answered, “Tell
them that we are already Christians and that we don’t want to buy anything.” A minute
later he came back again, “They say they want to do a show about our house.”
Some of us had backgrounds in advertising and P.R. and were aware of the
dangers of “hyping” a work of God. We told the producer that we didn’t want to be
featured on a program, but he asked us to pray before we gave a final refusal.
As we prayed, we felt the Lord leading us to do the show. One of us said, “You
know, I think that maybe the person with the land will see the program. That’s what
the Lord just showed me.”
We called the producer back and explained the situation. He promised me
that he would mention that we were praying for land to open a Bible school for new
believers, “I’ve written this right on the front of the folder so that we won’t forget.”
A few months after the crew had come to San Francisco to film, they called
to say that the program would air the next week on stations around the country. We
began to fast and pray. We’d never seen such fervor and faith for anything in our
community life. Everyone was so expectant.
Meanwhile, we had rented a small house in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where
one of the brothers was teaching a handful of young men. The landlord notified us
that the house was being put on the market. We considered buying it, but then we
thought better of it. It was already too small for our needs. We were encouraged to
continue to believe that God would provide something better. Meanwhile, the little
house in Santa Cruz was sold. We were given a few months notice; September 1st was
the date we needed to be out. The night before the broadcast we all met at the house
and were joined by many friends who had heard about our situation and had come to
join us in prayer. It was a glorious night of worship and prayer. There was only one
thing we requested from the Lord, that He “let the person with the land see the show.”
We were that sure that we had heard from the Lord, so this was the only thing we
prayed for.
The next day, we were worried for a short time after seeing the program because
the producer had forgotten to mention that we were looking for land outside of the
city. But we decided that if the Lord had really spoken, this was even better! It would
have to be God now.
We waited for the phone to ring. By 10 pm we still hadn’t gotten the call from
a landowner, so we called an emergency prayer meeting in the living room. “Let’s not
answer the phone now, we have to focus!” someone suggested. All of us huddled
in the room, the older brothers and sisters and also many new believers. The phone
began ringing in the kitchen and someone said, “Don’t answer it, let’s just pray,” but
finally one of the new believers couldn’t stand it any longer and he went to answer it.
He came to the living room in shock and said, “I hate to interrupt everyone, but the
lady with the land is on the phone.” Everyone followed him into the kitchen to see
what would happen.
The caller introduced herself and said, “I saw the show about your community
and want to know if you could possibly have any use for a resort my husband and I
own in Mendocino County?” We nearly dropped the phone. Was this really happening?
She explained that in the morning the Lord had encouraged her to watch the program,
but she was in a rush to get to work and didn’t have the time. Later, she got into bed
and was half asleep when she suddenly woke up and was led to turn on the television.
The program was being shown again. She was in Wisconsin. “My husband and I have
been trying to sell the property in Leggett, California and just this morning we got the
news that a potential buyer had backed out of a deal, I’m sure the Lord wants us to
give you the place, but I’ll have to speak with my husband first. Maybe if he agrees I
can fly out to California next week and drive you up to see the place.”
She gave us the website address for The Bell Glen resort, and we ran to the
upstairs computer to see what the place looked like. We were all stunned. The place
was beautiful, 10 acres on a river, 17 charming wood shingled buildings surrounded
by redwood trees and a restaurant. It even had a Tepee, something Anah had been
praying for all along. She seemed more excited by the Tepee than anything else. She
knew that in this small way the Lord had heard her personal prayers.
It was beautiful to see the looks on the faces of the new believers and we knew
that this was more about increasing their faith, and ours, then about getting a piece of
property, although we were more than glad to have it.
❊
But there would be a few days between the time we could occupy the property
and the time we had to vacate the house in Santa Cruz. One of the sisters suggested a
trip to Yosemite National Park.
It was to be a long weekend.
Two of the girls were fighting like cats and dogs the whole way there. They were
getting into fistfights, and one of the older sisters was thinking, “I thought these kids
just got saved? I mean, where was the love, where was the fear of God?”
One of the new believers got on a bike that was resting on the side of a gas
station they stopped at in Yosemite Valley. “Stop!” one of the older sisters yelled,
“What do you think you are doing? You’re stealing someone’s bike!” Another kid was
pacing around with a wild look in his eye, due to the fact that he was withdrawing
from cigarettes. He was yelling, “Rah, Rah!” He was so irritable. Knowing that he
wasn’t allowed to smoke, the other kids were mocking him and saying “Why don’t
you just get a cigarette?’” One of the kids, a wiry 17-year old with red dreadlocks
was saying some of the foulest things—just saying the most disgusting things he
could think of. Meanwhile, the other young men were egging him on. But the worst
thing about it all was that they were all claiming to want to follow Jesus. “It was all
unbelievable,” recalls one of the sisters, “I was just about to blow a fuse.”
The next morning two of the older believers called everyone in a circle and said,
“You guys are just so pathetic. You say you want to escape the world? You are the
world! If you are going to follow Jesus, then follow Jesus. If not, then just get over it.”
On the drive home, Valerie, a girl just off the street, started asking about Jesus.
An older sister began telling her more about what had happened during the last week
of His life. Valerie had never heard anything like this before. Valerie was just sitting
there with her mouth open. “WHAT?” Valerie said, “They did what to Him? Are you
serious?” She just couldn’t get enough. She was practically in tears when she heard the
details of the crucifixion.
❊
On August 31st, just one day before we had to vacate the Santa Cruz house, we
all drove up to Leggett to wave “goodbye” to the former owners, Gene and Sandra
Barnett. They pulled out in a small pick-up truck filled with a few personal possessions
and headed back to Wisconsin. They had left us everything we needed to begin our
school— pots, pans, bedding, furniture, and even an old mangy cat. We called the
place “The Land of the Living.” We figured that was the perfect name for a place in
which to bring new believers who had formerly been following The Dead. But soon
everyone forgot the longer name and began calling the place by its simpler name: “The
Land.”
Over the next 10 years that we occupied The Land we would see some healed,
some delivered, some die, and some just walk away. Just simply walk up to the road,
stick out a thumb, and drive away, never to be seen again. It would be an experience
that would bring sorrow one day and rejoicing the next. We imagined that there was
sorrow and rejoicing in heaven as well.
The Land was situated smack in the center of the largest marijuana-producing
region in the world. The very place we’d avoided looking during our two-year search.
One day we walked into the local market and noticed that an entire aisle was stocked
with huge bags of fertilizer and plant stakes, grow lamps and other things necessary
for the crop. We overheard the man at the cash register talking to his friend. He rang
the cash drawer open and said, “Man, I’ve got more bud in this drawer than money!”
It was harvest season, and it seemed that marijuana had been replaced normal currency.
We were moving to a town that had previously been home to 27 residents—
at least that’s what the sign coming into town said. Many of these residents were
suspicious of newcomers and especially a group that seemed to be religious. Once
again, we were forced to confront rumors of being a cult. Understandably, many
people viewed communal living with some trepidation. We would think of Acts
chapter 2 and get all inspired, but our neighbors were thinking Waco, Texas, and
getting scared. When we had to put sandbags around the front of the restaurant to
stop the stream of water from eroding the foundation, the neighbors claimed that
we were sandbagging the place in preparation for a battle with the Feds. It was really
funny; the sandbags were no more than 5 inches high and maybe 20 feet long, at
most. A baby could have crawled over them. Early morning worship became “strange
chanting” to long-term Leggett residents. To stop the rumor mill in its tracks, we
decided to hold an open house. We put signs all over the towns surrounding The
Land. We invited the fire and police departments and even the mailmen. The day of
the open house, a huge thunderstorm kept all but two residents (a mother and her
son) away. They stayed for hours and were very friendly. We insisted that they take a
tour of every building, even the tool shed. The open house did the trick, and from
then on we were part of the community.
But naturally the location of the Land, right in marijuana growing country,
caused some difficulties for the young believers, most of whom had been selling
marijuana before making professions of faith in Jesus.
One day the young man who was leading the school took all of the students on
a day hike at the State Park that bordered the Land. It was no surprise when the group
came upon a secret marijuana crop. It was near harvest time, and the students were
warned not to go anywhere near the plants. The group leader said to the new students,
“I know from my old days that this is a dangerous discovery and if the growers know
we have stumbled upon their crop, we could find ourselves in some trouble.”
That night the young school leader, himself a former Deadhead and pot-
dealer, woke from a dream. All he knew was that at that very hour, something was
happening that was affecting the spiritual climate of the Land. The next morning
he confronted the group at the early morning devotions. “The Lord showed me last
night that something was going on that was very disturbing to Him,” he announced.
“Does anyone have anything to confess?” he asked. There was silence. He noticed that
there was “incredible tension,” in the room as everyone looked around at each other.
Suddenly, one young man spoke up. “Last night myself and two others returned to
the marijuana crop we had found while hiking and dug up three plants and brought
them back to The Land,” he said. The dream had occurred at exactly the hour that the
three students were stealing the plants. The one young man was genuinely repentant,
but the others insisted that they had done nothing wrong. “Hey, they were planted
illegally anyway,” one of them said. The third man implicated in the theft said nothing.
The young group leader prayed for the Lord to guide him. He imagined the possible
ramifications of the situation. He knew that people got themselves shot for messing
with someone else’s crop. He also knew that the other students were looking to him to
see what he would do. Finally, he was led to ask the two unrepentant students to leave
the community, but allowed the repentant one to remain. One of the students left with
a plant. The group was more than a bit in awe that the Lord had revealed the theft. A
fear of God came upon the whole group.
❊
Curtis, the young red-headed man who had been so rebellious much that
weekend in Yosemite, said that when he was a little boy his mother would come in the
room as he was going to bed, pat him on the head, and say, “Curtis, one day you’re
going to go to heaven,” but immediately he would think, “What do I have to do to get
to hell?”
Curtis remembers his childhood like this: “My mother would take me every
week to the Unitarian Church. Church was extremely boring for me so one day, I
turned to my mom and said, ‘If this is God, then I hate God.’ I couldn’t understand
why anyone would want to be a Christian. I thought, ‘when I’m old, and I can’t walk
very fast maybe I’ll go to church.’”
When Curtis was forced to go to church he would find some way to register his
discontent. “I would dress up, but underneath my shirt I would have some vulgar T-
shirt,” he explained.
At age 16, Curtis was arrested for grand theft auto, burglary, and three counts of
theft. In Juvenal detention he tried to read the Bible. “I started with Matthew chapter
one, the genealogy of Jesus, and couldn’t get through half the list. I thought, ‘If this is
the Bible, this is stupid.”
When he was 17-years old he took a bus from his hometown in Indiana to a
Rainbow Gathering in Oregon. After a few days he headed south for Santa Cruz. “I
heard that the Elm Street Mission was feeding people. But I also heard that they made
you sit through a sermon and listen to hymns before you could eat. I just hated the
idea of it because I thought it would be like going to church as a kid,” Curtis says.
But one day, he showed up at the Mission very hungry, “I noticed that there were all
these hippies there, playing drums. I figured, ‘that’s cool, they let the hippies go up
and play drums.” But as Curtis began to converse with these hippies, he realized that
many of them were Christians. One of the young women who volunteered at the
Mission pulled out a big bag of fabric and a sewing machine and helped Curtis to sew
a backpack. “She talked to me the whole time about Jesus,” he remembers.
Some of our folks come down to help at the Mission on weekends. One of
the older brothers particularly stood out to Curtis. “His eyes were just on fire, and I
was just kind of puzzled. I thought maybe he was high,” Curtis recalls. “I thought to
myself, ‘Whatever is making him look like that, that is what I want.’ But then he sat
down next to me and said, ‘Do you know that Jesus loves you?’ I thought, ‘Oh, man,
that’s not what I wanted to hear!’”
One night Curtis stayed at the Mission. “They told me that if I spent the night,
I’d have to go with them to church the next morning. I said, ‘Okay,’ but I won’t ever
stay the night again.’” Curtis was angry that he was being forced to go to church, and
so he decided that he would find some way to be rebellious. He showed up at church
without shoes. “I thought maybe that would get me out of it.”
“I remember” Curtis says, “that I thought the church was pretty cool because
there weren’t any pews. Instead of a choir, they had a band playing guitars. And they
didn’t seem to mind that I was barefoot.”
That morning when the pastor asked if anyone wanted to follow Jesus, Curtis
raised his hand. “I wasn’t even planning on raising my hand, because I thought, ‘I
don’t have any interest in this.’ But then something spoke to me and said, ‘You have
to make this decision right now.’ I know now that it was God. Finally I just thought to
myself, ‘Well all these other hippies are happy following Jesus. They are happy living
this life that seems to me very boring. So if I have to do this to be happy, I’ll give it a
try.’ So I raised my hand.”
But Curtis was still not entirely convinced that he was ready to follow Jesus.
When someone suggested that he come along to another Rainbow Gathering, Curtis
considered going. His friend was leaving in two weeks.
“I had eaten more acid that month in Santa Cruz then I had ever done in my
life. I was so fried,” Curtis recalls. “I had no concept of time.” When one of the new
believers with our community mentioned that Curtis should come to The Land for
six months of Bible school, Curtis thought, “Okay. I’ll go to The Land for six months
and I’ll also go to the Rainbow Gathering in two weeks. I was a little confused. I’m
amazed that I wasn’t permanently retarded because of all the acid I had done.”
That day, Curtis came up to the house in San Francisco. “I had to sit in a Bible
study,” Curtis says, “and I just thought, ‘I don’t want to do this kind of stuff. That’s
why I dropped out of school. I hate reading and writing.’” Curtis was sitting in the
study and thinking, “Okay, this is boring.” “It sort of seemed the same to me as going
to my mother’s church, but then I thought, ‘Well, I guess this is different because I’m
not with a bunch of old people.’ I was wondering, ‘Why are all these young people
happy doing this?’ I just didn’t understand.’”
Curtis looked down the hall and noticed a little closet that we had set up as a
prayer place. Curtis thought to himself, “You know what? I’m going to go into that
closet and ask Jesus into my heart. Because I’m so stinkin’ bored but yet all these
people are so happy with being bored, so there actually has to be something to this.”
Curtis entered into the closet, shut the door behind him, and in the dark started
praying. “I didn’t read any pamphlets or read any long prayers,” he says, “I just said
to God, something like, ‘Lord, I accept you.’” He came out of the closet and he
told people, “I guess I just accepted the Lord!” Everyone was happy, and he was
introduced to everyone in the community. One sister remembers meeting this cute,
energetic, skinny, redhead saying, “I’m following Jesus!” and she just said, “Cool.”
Curtis remembers now that right before he had given his life to Jesus in the
prayer closet, someone had asked him a very profound question: “What do you really
want in life?” He recalls saying, “What I want is love and attention.” He was really
feeling that void. At the time, he figured that the answer to that need would be in the
form of a woman. “I really wanted someone who would love me and who I could
love. I really wanted a companion.” But then a month later, when the Lord introduced
Himself to me, I thought, “I think now that maybe the only one who can really fill
that void is God.”
Curtis was in the first group of students at the new Bible School in Leggett.
“We’d have all-night worship sessions and other new believers, kids who were
sort of mega-hippie emotional, would talk about Jesus with tears in their eyes. I was
sort of wondering why they were so emotional, but one day I was just sitting there
during one of these sessions and I heard the Lord say, ‘Curtis, I love you.’”
That changed Curtis’s life. From that point on he was hungry to know Jesus.
“In the early days,” says one of the older sisters who first lived at The Land,
“we would all sit around a big table, pass around a Bible, and everyone would read a
chapter. But then we’d always have to skip Curtis because he couldn’t read fast enough
and he didn’t want to. That’s when Curtis realized that he needed to learn to read. It
wasn’t so much that he wanted to learn to read, but that he wanted to be able to read
the Bible. He would say, ‘I need to learn this stuff, which happens to be in a book.’ We
would encourage him and say, ‘Just take it at your own pace,’ but he decided on his
own that every day he would sit down by himself and read one chapter from the Bible.
No matter how long it took him. He was really committed to that, and really diligent,
because that was what he wanted to do.”
Through that experience Curtis learned how to read, but even more importantly,
he learned how to have personal time with the Lord. Finally, Curtis would take a
turn reading the Bible in the public meetings. At first it was a little scattered, but he
gradually became more literate.
Curtis says, “So many times I wanted to leave, but I didn’t. The Lord just had
His hand on me, It was just the fact that I knew that God loved me and that he was
showing Himself to me in the Bible that kept me.”
Another woman who joined the community to help teach the new believers says
of Curtis, “When he first came to The Land, he was this skinny 100 pound kid, and
was nothing but energy. He was the poster child for ‘BAD.’ He was just annoying to
the maximum, and would always be talking about perverted things. But he just kept
growing day by day.”
Curtis started going down to the river alone to spend time with the Lord. “I
knew that this time was changing my life and my outlook. I would go down to the
river to pray at least three times a day.” “Suddenly,” he says with a chuckle, “I realized
that I hadn’t had any vulgar thoughts in about two weeks. I hadn’t been angry. I hadn’t
cussed or been mean to any one. I thought, ‘Wow! I must be perfect!’”
“More and more, as he came to know Jesus, Curtis began to mellow out. He
was becoming more responsible and kind. He was still Curtis, but he wasn’t annoying
anymore.
“I thought” Curtis says, “when I was first saved that I must be retarded because
of all the LSD I had taken. I was really spacey and it was hard to have a conversation
with someone and not just walk off in the middle. I had terrible communication
skills.” But as Curtis started reading the Bible more and more, the Lord started to heal
his mind.
Curtis was also getting a vision for his future. At the beginning, none of us
guessed that one day he would serve as a leader at The Land and help many others
grow in the Lord. One of the older brothers at The Land would walk around with a
clipboard. Clipped on the board were things like the schedule of classes, the chore list,
and a list of all the things that needed to get done. Curtis started to follow him around
The Land, watching his every move. Then one day someone overheard Curtis say to
himself, ‘Some day, I’m going to hold the clipboard!’”
A year later Curtis was asked to join us on a tour that started in Los Angeles,
and would stop in Las Vegas before heading east. It was on that tour that we met
Scott. Later, somewhere on the East Coast, we met an angry young woman who wore
her baseball cap backwards on her head with her oversized jeans slung low on her hips.
This was the woman who would eventually become Curtis’s wife and the mother of
his children. But we’ll save that love story for later …
❊
For now, we’ll introduce Scott.
If you meet a man named Scott and he finds out that you’re not a believer, it’s
likely you’ll hear this story. It’s a story about the power of the gospel to change a man
in an instant.
Scott came from a good family in Michigan. He was the only child in his
extended family, so he was used to getting his way. He was your typical “swinger kid,”
meaning he sold a lot of drugs, marijuana and sheets of acid. We can’t remember
when we were first introduced, but for a long time he wished we hadn’t been. Actually,
it might have been at a Bob Weir Show at the Fillmore Theater in San Francisco. At
least that’s the first time we recall making a clear presentation of the gospel to him.
And, by the way he listened quietly and thoughtfully, we knew (without a doubt) that
Scott would one day follow Jesus. The Lord had put a huge burden on our hearts to
pray for him, and, as Scott would tell you, nag him. Scott would be on Haight Street
trying to make a deal, and one of us would be following him, telling him more about
Jesus and also warning him that he might even go to hell if he didn’t stop.
One day in Las Vegas a couple of us approached him in front of his friends
with the same message. He told us to leave him alone. We went back to the bus and,
during our prayer time (while Scott and most of the others like him went inside the
amphitheater), everyone prayed for Scott. One sister said, “I think he’s close to giving
his life to the Lord, even though he just cursed me out.” You just get this feeling
sometimes. It always means: pray hard.
All night, we dodged the police, who circled the parking lot on horseback,
kicking out people who didn’t have tickets. We had paid to park for the night, but we
didn’t have tickets into the show. Our bus could stay, apparently, but we’d have to go.
At about one in the morning, Scott came running to the bus in a state of excitement.
He was screaming, “He spoke to me! He spoke to me!” We all knew he was talking
about God, that much seemed obvious. He came into the bus and could hardly speak;
really, he could hardly breathe.
“It’s all true! Jesus is true! Oh my God, everything in the Bible, it’s true. Give me
a Bible!” We were watching as he had one revelation after another. It was like speed
discipleship. “I’ll never touch drugs again!” Then he told us what had happened. He
had gone into the concert hall shortly after we had spoken and began to dance and
revel in the music and in his success selling acid that day. He had about $400 in his
pocket and patted it. Life was good. He could get a good hotel room in Vegas and
“style” his friends out. Suddenly a voice spoke to him from heaven, “If you don’t
take those drugs and throw them on the ground and follow Me, you will go to hell.”
(How nice of the Lord to back us up!) Scott felt an incredible power come over him
and grabbed his friend’s hand to steady himself. Even the friend could feel the power
coming through Scott and was scared. Scott reached into his pocket and took out one
of our stories called “The Treasure.” Inside the folds he had hidden his drugs. He read
the cover. It began, “Once upon a time, a kid found a treasure.” He ripped the cover
off, threw the drugs on the ground, and, for good measure, reached into the other
pocket and threw the money in the air. He turned to his friend and said, “We need to
go serve God!” Another friend ran up to him and said, “Oh my god, you’re glowing,
you’re glowing, there’s like a bubble of energy around you that’s glowing,” and the
friend started crying and Scott told him, “I just talked to God!” and then ran out of
the building to find us.
That night Scott got into his car and drove to Santa Cruz to turn himself in
on an old warrant. In fact, he had several warrants out for his arrest. He had a felony
charge in Berkeley for selling drugs and five felony charges in San Francisco. He was
also facing three years of a mandatory prison sentence in Michigan for running from a
court date. It didn’t look good.
“I got to Haight Street and by then everyone knew what had happened to me,”
he relates. “All the kids were calling me ‘Jesus Boy.’” He lived in our house on Ashbury
while he was settling his court cases. He had to do a work-release program in San
Francisco, and, one day while working with some other parolees, he noticed something
tattooed in Russian on another man’s arm. Scott had never studied Russian, but the
Holy Spirit led him to point to the tattoo and say, “Emanuel. God with us.” The man
was impressed because this was exactly what was written.
Unlike other new believers, he was never tempted to do drugs after that night
when God encountered him in Las Vegas. Scott was growing stronger and stronger in
maturity and faith every day. We were all amazed at what the Lord was doing.
After a few months, Scott had settled most of his cases without having to spend
any time in jail. We asked him to come with us on a three-month tour and share the
gospel with his friends, but Scott said, “I don’t think I’ll be able to go because I still
have one more court date pending.” The day he was to schedule a court date, he asked
his attorney to help get the date pushed back. The lawyer told him that it would be
impossible, saying, “ You’ll have to be back here in two weeks.” So Scott waited for
his name to be called and for a trial date to be set. “The District Attorney,” Scott says,
“was just saying to everyone, ‘Be back in two weeks, be back in two weeks,’ but when
I got up there she started sort of tripping out and she stepped back confused and
started flipping through this huge book. She then said, ‘He needs to be back in three
months.’ My attorney was shocked and said, ‘I’ve never seen that before.’ I got exactly
the amount of time that I needed.” Now, instead of running from the crazy Jesus kids
in the white bus, he was coming along with us.
After the tour, Scott took up residence at The Land, and, along with Curtis and
the others, studied the scriptures daily and grew in his love for Jesus. And also, like
Curtis, there would be a love story in Scott’s life as well, when a young woman with
straight blond hair and a voice like an angel would come to be a student. But that love
story, like Curtis’s, will have to wait a little while longer too.
❊
It seemed as though every few days a young street kid would decide to leave
everything and go to The Land. Most of them, we thought, sincerely wanted to
follow Jesus, even if it’s true that few knew yet exactly what that meant. The Land was
getting a reputation on Haight Street, and in the larger traveling scene, as a place you
went to only if you were nuts about Jesus. Or maybe just plain nuts. For one thing, a
hippie just couldn’t understand why anyone would want to volunteer for what looked
a lot like a drug rehab. Getting up before noon, having to work, and sit in classes had
appeal only to someone who had gotten a glimpse of Jesus and had been transformed
by the power of the gospel message. For many of the new students at The Land, this
was their first real taste of living a disciplined, structured life.
Jacob G. says now, “Everything in my life was set up to tear me down. It put
me in a place of being wretched and broken.” Jacob’s dad left the family when he was
15 months old and moved from Central California to Colorado. Jacob was bounced
around between his parents, who were both drug addicts and alcoholics. “I smoked
pot for the first time when I was 11 and did drugs with both my parents.” He says
that he never lived anywhere for more than six months. When he was in the fourth
grade, the state took him away from his mother. His dad got custody of him and
tried to clean up by going to Narcotics Anonymous. “I got super into Bob Marley
in the seventh grade,” Jacob recalls, “Bob was my hero.” By the time Jacob ran away
from home at age 17, he had dreadlocks, and, as he puts it, he was “fully engaged” in
every sort of drug. “I was a burn out by then,” Jacob says, “doing acid, drinking, and
smoking pot.”
Jacob left his dad’s home in Colorado for California. “It seemed like the grand
place to be,” he recalls. Some hippies, on their way to a Rainbow Gathering, picked
Jacob up hitching to California. “These kids,” Jacob recalls, “were telling me all about
Rainbow, and it was just, like, magical. They were telling me that people at these
gatherings walked around with big plates of acid.” Jacob decided to go see for himself.
As was the custom at Rainbow gatherings, he was welcomed by people exclaiming,
“Welcome home, brother!” “That’s all I needed to hear,” says Jacob. “That was the
beginning of my long experience with Rainbow, learning to meditate and doing the
whole New Age thing.”
After the first Rainbow Gathering, Jacob ended up selling drugs in Berkeley,
mostly to college students. During this time he hooked up with a girl who was, as he
says, “super spiritual.” She was into Jesus, but everything else besides. “She just added
Jesus to her smorgasbord of gods,” Jacob explains. But she got Jacob really interested
in Jesus. That seems to be the moment in Jacob’s life when God started really showing
Himself. “I would open up a Bible and it was like light and energy would just jump out
at me, like ‘BAM!’” he tries to explain. “But also it was around this time that I started
seeing demons,” Jacob remembers. “I’d be walking down the street and just see this
sort of vicious thing in people’s eyes.”
He began having crazy dreams. One night he had a particularly scary one, where
demons were following him and he was running from them as hard as he could. In
the dream he was trying to say, “Thank you, Jesus,” but he couldn’t. His mouth was
clamped shut. But when he woke up suddenly, to his amazement, he was yelling,
“Thank you, Jesus.” Suddenly, now fully awake, he felt the presence of a man sitting
next to him, caressing his head. “I felt,” he says, “that in the spirit, there was a body
next to me, and I felt peace and was able to go back to sleep.”
He headed down to Santa Cruz and met up with some believers who were
running the Elm Street mission. The volunteers, some of them former Deadheads,
ran a soup kitchen for the homeless. Jacob says, “I remember one guy skipping down
the street playing his mandolin and worshiping the Lord, and, although it was weird, I
thought, ‘he’s got something that I want.’”
They decided to let Jacob move into the Mission, and from that point his resolve
to give everything to the Lord just strengthened. “I started reading the Bible like a
mad-man,” Jacob recalls. His friends heard rumors that he was following Jesus, and
they came all the way to Santa Cruz, from wherever they were, to steal him away from
the Mission. “One friend,” Jacob remembers, “showed up with the cutest little hippie
girl, and she was all over me, saying, ‘Let’s go smoke a bowl.’ But I would just say, ‘NO
WAY! JESUS!’”
Finally someone suggested that he move to The Land in Mendocino County. “I
called and left messages every day for three weeks,” Jacob remembers with a chuckle,
“I guess they were pretty overwhelmed with what was going on there. Finally someone
called me back and after asking a lot of questions, they said, ‘Just come on up.’”
In the early days at The Land, it was one older brother and two sisters to teach
and lead all of the new believers. Yet at least once a week we were sending up a new
believer who had come off of Haight Street. “Everything was so over our heads,”
recalls one of the sisters. “We had so many fires burning at once that things were just
falling through the cracks. We needed more help, and mostly we needed men, since
almost all the new believers were guys.”
The two sisters would often sit in the cabin they shared praying, “Lord, please
send us guys.” The Lord spoke a scripture to both of them from Psalm 118:8, “It is
better to trust in The Lord, then in princes.”
The Lord was planning to raise up leaders from some of the baby believers
coming out of the Haight Street scene. In a few years, Curtis, Scott and Jacob would
be leading Bible studies and work projects around The Land. But to see into the future
sometimes took a lot of imagination.
Jacob G. had just arrived at The Land from Santa Cruz.
One of the sisters says of her first impressions of Jacob, “He had a pretty good
grasp of what was up with God, I mean, he wasn’t trying to worship the trees or
anything like that, but he was just hard to be with.” The sisters would sometimes just
stand back and watch Jacob, turn to each other and say in unison, ‘Raised by wolves.’”
Jacob wasn’t able to engage with anyone, without it becoming confrontational. “He
wasn’t intentionally trying to pick fights with everyone; it just seemed to happen.”
Jacob would freak out at times. He was often found curled up in a ball, weeping
uncontrollably.
Jacob could be belligerent about very godly matters. The students were required
to do some extra Biblical reading, which Jacob was unwilling to do. “I’m not going to
read your Dietrich, “F”ing, Bonheoffer!” He yelled once.
On a cold wintry day, the new believers staged a mutiny at The Land. They
commandeered the main house, and ranted and raved about how bad the older
believers were. “They don’t love us enough. They don’t listen to us,” they went on.
One of the older sisters happened into the room without knowing what was taking
place. “I’m pretty sure,” says this sister, “that Jacob was the mutiny’s instigator.”
All of the students went down to a conference in Southern California. Jacob
seemed really discouraged. He had heard so many wild stories of people getting
touched at these conferences, and other students seemed to be experiencing the
presence of the Lord, but not him. “I don’t feel God,” he said to everyone, “Where is
God?” Jacob was allowing himself to become overwhelmed by his feelings.
“I was so hurting,” Jacob says now. “Just going through all this emotional drama,
inner turmoil and depression. Before I was saved, I covered up these feelings by
getting high, but now it was all out there for everyone to see.” Many people attending
the conference tried to encourage him. Some zealous attendees tried to cast demons
out of Jacob. “I probably needed it,” Jacob says. But nothing changed his situation.
The others challenged him, “Jacob, God doesn’t have to do what you want him to do,
whenever you want.” This time he shut off from everyone, even saying, “I’m not even
sure I believe in God anymore.”
The group had met a couple at the conference that owned an avocado farm in
Cambria, California, and they had invited our group to stop and camp at their place
on the way home. Jacob set up his sleeping bag outside one of the older brother’s tent.
They were preparing to go to bed when Jacob said to him, “I really need to see God.”
The brother said simply, “Well, then pray.” Jacob went to his tent and prayed, “God, I
just want to see you. I want to see something real.”
All of a sudden the heavens opened and a light came flooding down. “I looked
up into the light, and said, ‘What is that?’” It was a dark night, but in the light I felt
a sudden revelation of God’s love. I felt the Lord smiling at me. It was intense.” The
older brother stuck his head out of his tent and looked up into the sky, and said,
“What is that? An angel?” “At that point, my life changed,” Jacob says. “Everyone
could see it.” Jacob says that from then on, many things were settled in his heart. The
overwhelming pain that had been there before just went away.
“Up until that encounter, I always was into wanting to experience the power of
God. I really wanted to see ‘The Power’”. But after that I just wanted to experience the
love of God. It never seemed important after that to talk about the angel.”
“The community,” Jacob says, “was always a sort of disorganized thing. God
always seemed so faithful to show up to save people, in spite of our ability to be on
top of it.”
❊
We met Elena Lincoln somewhere on the East Coast in the summer of ‘98.
Some of Elena’s friends introduced her to us one night. Like the kids she was traveling
with, she was a tough girl; no flowery hippie dresses for this one. She wore jeans about
20 sizes too large slung down on her hips, a baseball cap turned backwards on her
head, and we seem to recall that she was chewing gum and drinking beer at the same
time when we met.
One night she came running into our school bus in tears. “Can I have a band
aid?” she asked. “What happened to you?” we all inquired at once, noticing that she
was bleeding and looked pretty beat up. “I just had a fight with Sarah!” she explained.
Sarah was her best friend. “I just felt like the Jesus hippies in the white bus were
people I could go to, that they were safe,” Elena says, thinking back to that summer. “I
remember that two of the sisters gave me a tuna fish sandwich and put band aids on
my cuts.”
“My parents would let me come and go from their house in Connecticut,”
Elena says. Between concert tours, she hitchhiked out to San Francisco. “I
remembered that the folks with the white bus lived in San Francisco. It was one of the
first times that I was sober in a while, and the first thing I thought was, ‘I want to go
to their house.’” Elena came to the door one day and we welcomed her in. She told
us that she had just gotten out of jail, and that she was praying the rosary every day.
“Somehow,” Elena says, “I thought that they would be glad to hear this, but they just
looked at me and said, ‘Oh. Great.’”
Redheaded Curtis had graduated from the year long Bible school at The Land
by then, and was living at the house in San Francisco. “I remember now how I met
Curtis!” says Elena excitably, trying to recall the details. “I heard that some people
were giving out sleeping bags and socks in the park, because it was Christmas. So my
friends and I went up there and someone introduced me to Curtis,” says Elena. “He
just sat next to me and my friends and said, ‘Want to go play on the swings?’ and I
said, “Okay.’”
The Lord was giving Curtis a heart for Elena, which at this point was only a
desire to see her come to Jesus. “I loved everyone at the Ashbury Street house,” says
Elena, “so when my friends would want to go out and drink, I’d say, ‘Well, maybe
Curtis wants to come hang out.’ I knew he didn’t drink, but I thought, ‘He’s just a
cool guy. Maybe he just wants to come hang out.’ Maybe I sort of liked him, but I was
also thinking, ‘Jesus Boy. Off limits!’” Curtis would sit with Elena and her friends as
they drank 40-ounce beers, waiting for a moment to share his faith. “I knew that what
Curtis was telling me was the truth. I had grown up Catholic, but I just wasn’t done
sinning yet,” says Elena.
But more and more she was getting disillusioned with her life on the streets. “I
was getting drunk all the time and selling drugs,” she says with a sigh.
As tough as Elena was on the street, we had already seen her sweeter side. We
remember one night when her boyfriend had just broken up with her. She came over
to the house and asked us if she could cry on someone’s shoulder.
One day she was up on the street and asked herself, “What do I really want
to do?” and the answer was, “I think I want to go up to the Christian house and ask
someone to read me the Bible.”
Elena rang the doorbell several times but no one answered the door. She
decided to ring the bell as long as it took to get someone’s attention. Finally, one
of the sisters came to the door and Elena said, “I just want to read the Bible.” She
was invited up to the attic where we had all gathered for a prayer meeting. One
of Elena’s friends had come to the meeting. “Bobby Boy is upstairs now, and he’s
decided to follow Jesus!” the sister who’d answered the door announced breathlessly.
Elena walked into the large cavernous unfinished attic and saw all of us sitting in a
circle holding hands and praying. She found Curtis and sat down next to him, and
he grabbed her hand. Suddenly Elena said, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever said
the “Sinner’s Prayer.” Inexplicably, Elena started crying. “I just suddenly knew that I
needed out of my life.”
“I’m going to follow Jesus too!” Elena told the whole group. “I’m serious!” she
added, “I’ve made up my mind.”
Together, Curtis and Elena went to tell their friends that she had decided to
follow Jesus and move to The Land. “Curtis was also going back up to The Land,”
says Elena, “and so I thought, ‘Well, at least I’ll have a friend up there,”
“We would watch this tape series at The Land, by Dean Sherman on
relationships and courting,” says Curtis. “They were so funny. For one thing, the guy
wore the same shirt through ten episodes.” All of the students loved the tape series
and watched them over and over. Dean Sherman taught that dating wasn’t the Biblical
way. He taught that a man should announce his intentions for marriage and not play
around with a woman’s feelings. So one day Curtis walked into Elena’s room and
shut the door behind him. “That’s against the rules!” Elena shouted. “Marriage!” said
Curtis and then walked out.
But shortly after this one of the older brothers took Curtis aside. “Curtis, you’ve
been with us now for almost two years, and it seems to me that you’re not really
growing anymore. Maybe it’s time for a change,” he suggested. The next morning,
Curtis went down to the river to pray, and the Lord confirmed this assessment.
A few weeks later, he moved to the Jesus People USA community in Chicago,
and stayed there for more than a year.
“At first when I heard Curtis was leaving,” says Elena, “I was so mad. But later I
realized that it was so good that he had gone. I couldn’t focus on my relationship with
God until Curtis had left. Curtis was out of the picture, and it was just me and Jesus.”
Meanwhile they wrote casual letters to each other. “I remember once getting
a letter from Curtis, and at the bottom he had written ‘Love Curtis,’ but then he had
scratched out the word ‘Love,” and instead said, ‘Your cool friend Curtis.’”
Elena was growing in her faith. “I grew up Catholic,” explains Elena, “At first I
had to relearn what it meant to be saved. I knew that I needed Jesus, and I knew that
He was the Way, but figuring out all the in-betweens, that took some time.”
A year later, Curtis returned to The Land. We hardly recognized him. “It was
like he came back all corn-fed,” says one of the sisters, “He was all buff.” Our little
skinny Curtis had grown into a man. He was also now a mature believer. The first
thing Curtis did was to ask Elena if he could court her.
On May 12, 2001, we all gathered a little north of The Land in a grove of old
redwoods as Elena, in a frilly hippie-style white dress with flowers in her hair, wed
Curtis, her “Jesus Boy.”
❊
Devon knew loss from an early age. Even when she was in her mother’s womb,
circumstances were conspiring to bring pain into her young life. By the time Devon
was born, her parents had already divorced. Her father was diagnosed with Multiple
sclerosis shortly thereafter. Trying to cope with her situation, Devon’s mother returned
to the Jehovah’s Witness faith she had been raised in. When Devon was four, her
mother drowned in a boating accident. Unable to care for his children because of
his progressive illness, her father’s parents became guardians of Devon and her older
brother. Then Devon’s father succumbed to his illness and died when she was age
twelve.
Devon’s grandparents were Christians, and raised her in the church. But the
weekends that she spent with her mother’s parents were sometimes spent going doorto-door handing out the Watchtower magazine. “We’d go to Kingdom Hall, and it was
really like being programmed,” recalls Devon. “Hard-core programming because my
grandmother felt like she had to make up for the time I spent in the Christian church.”
In Christian school, Devon gravitated to the most troubled students. “Once
some of us had cars, we’d drive into San Francisco and Berkeley and have fun.” Devon
confesses that she would do anything to have her way. “I was very manipulating
towards my grandparents, and pretty soon they were fed up with me.” When she
was 15 she went to live with her aunt in Los Angeles. “It was great. My aunt was a
backslidden Jehovah’s Witness and she’d take us out to clubs and coffee houses.”
Devon’s introduction to the Grateful Dead came through a boyfriend in Los Angeles.
“It was 1995 and I was 16 years old at the time. I was all about the Dead. The music
seemed so happy. The kids were just floating along in life, doing things that I thought
made them free. It felt so good, taking acid and listening to the lyrics.”
But then Jerry Garcia died. “I came up to Haight Street right after the memorial
in Golden Gate Park. I sort of missed the whole thing. I’d never been to a Dead show.
It was a real wake up call. I said to myself, ‘what are you doing, and why?’” There were
still tens of thousands of Deadheads hanging out on Haight Street. “I felt like I was
with family,” Devon says. She thought about her life back home, “About my boring
job at Baker’s Square, and said, ‘my life is here on the street.’ These kids were the only
ones I thought could understand me.”
Devon visited our house on Ashbury Street. “My dog went to the bathroom in
the laundry room!” she says with some embarrassment. “The kids up on the street had
told me about the house, saying, ‘oh, they’re really nice, but just don’t let them talk to
you about Jesus!’” One day her friend came with her to the house, but when Devon
left, her friend stayed behind. “He got saved, and we all thought, ‘Dude—he got stuck
in that house. They’ve got him now.’ We were so mad.” Rumor was out that when kids
decided to follow Jesus, they would turn themselves into the police to take care of old
warrants. “We thought, ‘if you follow Jesus, you end up going to jail.’ We could not
understand why anyone would do such a thing.”
Despite her desire not to come to the Christian House, things kept conspiring to
bring her to us. “Once we were hitchhiking and the guy with the car left us somewhere
and went on to San Francisco. When we finally made it up to the city, we found out
that he’d left our stuff at the Jesus House.”
Devon would come to our Thursday night coffee house. “I remember people
serving soup behind the counter, and it was so rad in there. It was dark, and cozy, and
everyone was sitting on the floor in little groups and people were playing music. All
these kids who were bad talking the Jesus House were there—all of them having a
great time.”
Eventually, this life came to an abrupt stop when Devon was arrested for selling
marijuana. “The jail was so bad. I’d given them a false name and age, but they figured
out who I was from the name on my backpack. Because I was so young, they sent me
to Juvenile Hall, and afterwards to a group home. I thought, ‘what have I done? This is
so messed up.’”
As soon as they released her, Devon bought a bus ticket to Point Arena, a little
hippie town on the coast of Mendocino County, California. “I knew that I couldn’t
go back to the city and sell drugs.” But a lot of people in the Point Arena grew
and smoked pot. “People were living in tepees and taking peyote, a hallucinogenic
cactus used in Native American spirituality. We’d just stay up all night playing drums
and chanting.” As bad as this may sound, for the first time Devon was praying to
the Creator. “God wouldn’t leave my mind, although it was messed up with all this
goddess worship stuff.”
Devon says, “Everyone thought I was so happy. They’d say, ‘she’s got it good,’
but I would go by myself to the beach and try to cast out all this pain that was inside
of me.” Devon was getting deeper into goddess worship. Devon believed that inside
every woman was a goddess. “We’d go to a birth, we’d all be half naked, and would
worship the woman who was giving birth. We believed that we were all goddesses.
There were caldrons there and circles of witches. Luckily, I wasn’t welcomed in.”
One of Devon’s friends went traveling in India. At a trance party in Goa, she
took drugs and began speaking in a weird voice. “She became so crazy, that some
other travelers were forced to hold her down for two days. She was so different
when she came back from India,” says Devon. This friend invited Devon along to
San Francisco. After a trance party she gave Devon some LSD. When Devon started
tripping out, they went for a walk. “We were talking as I was getting more and more
high. She started telling me about India, and all of a sudden, her voice started to
change into a very deep, dark voice. I was scared to look at her. When I did, it was like
I was looking at a demon. I actually don’t think it was the drugs. I had done a lot of
acid but had never experienced anything like this. I heard a voice say, ‘Devon, you are
going down the wrong path!’ I wasn’t sure who the voice belonged to.’”
“All this time,” Devon says, “I was trying to be a good person, but I was so dead
inside, and hallow. So many lies—one on top of another. I knew that what the voice
had said was true, that I was going down the way of evil.”
On the way to a keg party, Devon picked up a hitchhiker walking along the road
with his puppy. “He was a struggling believer. I think he was maybe smoking pot at
the keg party, but I opened up to him and shared with him how I was so in the dark.
He told me that Jesus was the light.” A day or two later Devon drove the young man
down to San Francisco, and they talked about Jesus the whole way down. Devon
decided to visit our house.
That’s how she ended up parked on our sidewalk.
“It was discouraging,” says Jacob. “After being a student at The Land for so
long, I went to the house on Ashbury Street expecting to see a lot of people get saved
but it just wasn’t happening. People would say, ‘Jacob, you really share the gospel well,’
and I’d say, ‘well, maybe.’”
“I came by the house and parked my car on the sidewalk, because there were
no spots on the street,” says Devon, remembering the day she arrived back in San
Francisco wanting to talk with us. “I saw one of the women who lived in the house
walking up and she said, ‘Come on inside.’ As I was walking up the steps, there was
such a presence of God. I started crying, ‘Oh, my God, you are so holy!’” The sister
just smiled. “I couldn’t come in yet, and so I told her that I had to walk my dog. At the
park, I just started crying. I was bawling for like 45 minutes and then confessing all my
sins to the Lord. I’d never done anything like that in my life.” Then suddenly I couldn’t
even cry anymore, even had I wanted to. I just felt so much at peace.” Devon walked
back to the house and there was Jacob looking at her car.
“You know, Dude—you can’t park here!” Jacob said to Devon as she
approached. Devon said sweetly, “Oh really? I thought this was a parking spot.”
Jacob’s anger subsided, when he noticed Devon’s tear stained eyes. “Have you been
crying?” he asked. “Let me help you park your car.” Finally they managed to find
a parking space, and by then Jacob recognized that God was doing something in
Devon’s heart. “Have you renounced all your sins?” he asked. “Yes!” said Devon, and
then added, “I’m going to go all the way with this.” Jacob remembers Devon saying,
“It feels so good to be forgiven.”
They came back to the house and found some other believers. When one of the
sisters heard what had just happened, she said, “Wow, let’s just get into the presence of
the Lord.” So they put on some worship music and started worshiping.
“What should I do now?” asked Devon. Then they told her about this place
called The Land. “They would never take someone like me,” Devon said sadly. “It was
so real to me that I was a sinner.” Jacob laughed and said, “Don’t worry, they took
me!”
One of the sisters drove with Devon up to the Land, passing Point Arena, so
that Devon could pick up some belongings. “My boyfriend was so mad that he broke
my glass pipe,” says Devon. He no longer wanted anything to do with her.
But no matter. God had another plan for Devon’s future. Scott was about to
meet his future wife.
“In the morning we would all meet in the restaurant for devotions,” recalls
Devon. “We were only allowed one cup of coffee,” she says. “Otherwise the guys
would be bouncing off the walls.” The students would read the Bible together and
discuss what they were reading, most reading the scripture for the first time. “God was
speaking to me with every word,” says Devon.
After devotions, everyone would have half and hour of quiet time to reflect on
what the Lord was showing them. The new believers kept a journal of the impressions
they had as they read the scriptures, and they were encouraged to be creative as they
journaled. “God was totally speaking to me during these times, and it would just make
my day.” Then there would be a class. Sometimes they would play a tape of one of
their favorite teachers. “Oh my, sometimes the voice was so monotonous, I would just
want to die!” recalls Devon. In the afternoons there would be chores and work duties.
For some of the students, this was the first legitimate work they had ever done. In the
summer, everyone would take an afternoon dip in the river.
One night a week, believers from the local community joined us for a night
of worship. The new believers would be filled with enthusiasm and loved to dance
and jump up and down. The building would shake as the worship continued into the
night. When we noticed that the foundation of the building was weakening, we moved
the worship night to another more stable building. “I would be transported on these
nights, into the presence of God. It was so healing,” recalls Devon.
Devon recalls one particular service at a local congregation. The teacher was
teaching from Acts about giving to people who were more needy. “It happened to be
a scripture that God had just shown me during my quiet time. I thought, ‘I’m so poor,
I have nothing to give.’” But then a couple came up and asked for prayer. Their family
car had broken down, and they needed a new car. “I still had my car, which I didn’t
really need. I couldn’t wait until after church. I asked them if they could use my car. It
was so perfect. I was getting more confidence about hearing God’s voice.”
On the weekends, the students would go out to a park in nearby Garberville and
bring lunch for the hippies that hung out there. “I met this one kid,” says Devon. “I
told him what had happened in just two months of my life, since I’d been saved. He
said, ‘you’ve got to be kidding,’ because he was so amazed, ‘God must be real.’” Devon
offered to pick him up on the way to a Bible study the next day, but when she came to
the appointed spot, he wasn’t there. “It was my birthday and I was so disappointed. All
day I prayed fiercely, that the Lord would answer my prayer for the hippie kid. I was
believing God that this kid would meet Jesus.”
Later that night the kid called The Land and said, “You won’t believe what
happened today. I got arrested, and I spent the night in jail. When I got out I was
sitting outside a gas station, and this guy drives up and says to me, ‘did you just get
out of jail?’ Then he said, ‘you know that I’ve been watching you as I pumped gas and
I think that God has been speaking to me about you.’ And I said, ‘really, what’s He
saying?’ and then he said, ‘God says that today you need to get saved.’” And so the kid
gave his life to the Lord right there. It turned out that the man was a pastor, and he
offered to help the kid out with a job.
“This was all on my 20th birthday,” says Devon excitedly. “I thought, ‘God, you
are so great!’”
Chapter Fourteen
Where we begin by witnessing an attempted murder;
Someone is found decapitated;
But thankfully we end with a love story.
Todd’s story was a classic traveler saga. He had been on the road a long time
when we met up with him in San Francisco, genuinely searching for the truth, but in all
the wrong places. He had spent time at a Tibetan Buddhist meditation center outside
of Boulder, Colorado, had spent a while with witches in New Orleans; then at a Hare
Krishna center in Hawaii. In between he frequented dozens of Rainbow Gatherings,
adopting a cornucopia of eastern philosophies and practices. At some point along the
way, about a year before we met him, some friends had brought him to our house. He
was either drunk or high, he can’t remember now, and waited outside. He had grown
up in a Christian home and felt guilty entering our house in that condition.
He went on after that to travel some more. In Hawaii he began to ask himself if
maybe he had better check into Jesus. He remembered our house on Ashbury Street
and wondered if we were still there. He bought a plane ticket back to San Francisco
expressly to find us.
When one of the sisters answered the door Todd said, “I was just in Hawaii and
I was reading this comic book about the end of the world, and I thought, maybe I
should know about these things. I should probably know God.”
A couple of days later, Todd announced to us that he had decided to follow
Jesus. One sister remembers, “He’d brought all these New Age books with him, and
he was really intensely trying to reconcile his new faith in Jesus, with what he’d read
in the books. He’d say things like, “Are you sure that trees don’t have spirits? Are you
sure?” Someone answered, “Todd, look, if Jesus is true, then focus on that. If the
trees have spirits it really doesn’t make any difference. You need to forget about all this
other stuff for now, and just waste yourself on Jesus.”
Todd still anguished over the conflicts he was having in giving up his old ways
of thinking. But as he read the Bible, and received prayer he began to get more clarity.
“Pretty soon,” one sister says, “he wasn’t this bewildered guy anymore.”
And then one day, a couple of years later, Todd found himself standing on the
top of our white bus with fire in his eyes. How he got there is the subject of our next
story …
Jerry Garcia’s death left a void that other bands began to fill. Within six months
of his passing, a small college jam band from Vermont, named Phish, began drawing
thousands of Deadheads. Other bands drew the former Deadheads as well, bands
with odd names like “String Cheese Incident,” and “Rat Dog.” We were now on
the road about half of the year, following the kids as they followed the bands and
encouraging them to follow Jesus.
Out in the Southwest, we were sitting talking to some people about the Lord
when a friend of theirs came over and said happily, “That kid is going to die!” We
asked, “What are you talking about?” He pointed to a crowd of hippies who were
kicking another kid to death. Apparently, he owed someone money for a drug deal and
hadn’t paid on time. A crowd of hippies took turns kicking him in the head, meaning
to kill him. One of our sisters tried to push her way to the center, screaming for them
to stop, but, as much as she tried, she could not stop the attack. We ran as fast as we
could to our bus and called the police on our cell phone. They came and took the
unconscious kid to the hospital, but we heard the next day, in the next city, that he
hadn’t made it.
The tour continued onto the next town, and Todd Will, who had come to
faith at our house back on Haight Street climbed up to the top of our white bus as
hundreds of hippies looked on and wondered what he was planning to do. By his
own initiative, he called all of the kids in the parking lot to come to our bus. Everyone
was talking about what had happened the day before, and worried that police would
show up to arrest the people who had willfully kicked the kid to death. Todd, his voice
shaking with indignation, yelled at the crowd, “You talk peace and love, but that is
clearly not what is happening here. You guys need to look into what peace and love
truly is and follow Jesus.” Quite a few of the kids who had planned to travel on the
whole tour left. One said after hearing Todd, “That’s it. I’m not going to be a part of
this insanity anymore.”
That night, Todd also approached the man who played lead guitar for the band
whose tour we were following at the time. “It’s because of your lyrics, because they
glorify drugs, that all of this violence is going on. You are responsible for every kid
that dies on your tour,” Todd said with authority. “Their blood will be on your hands
when you have to stand before Jesus.” We wondered what this famous musician
thought as this skinny young hippie, with his long dreadlocks and big, baggie pants,
called him to repentance.
At another show we heard about a kid who was found decapitated; his death
was probably the result of a drug deal gone bad. These events were becoming
commonplace. Ambulances would lift people onto stretchers, and everything would
continue around them without many people noticing.
Later we learned the kid that had been kicked unconscious had actually survived
the attack. We were glad for it, and also thankful that we had been able to challenge
some of the evil that we were encountering on tour.
Grabbing a handful of our handmade hippie gospel stories we went out to the
main part of the lot at a Phish show in Portland, Oregon. No one wanted to take a
story. They were all too distracted by the hubbub of “Shakedown Street” before the
start of the show. Then finally a group of girls wearing handmade, flowing, hippie
dresses passed by, and they all took a story. The last girl began reading it as she walked
on, and then she turned around and approached us. We expected that she meant to
hand it back, because that had happened before. Instead, she asked if the story was
about Jesus. When we said that it was, she asked if we could help her follow Jesus.
Later in the bus Sara told us that this wasn’t the first time she’d seen us on a lot, “You
know, a year ago I saw all of you in Vegas, standing in front of your bus, singing
‘Jesus I adore you.’ I was on acid and the whole lot looked so sinister and evil, not
to mention that it was in Las Vegas, which is sinister and evil by itself. You all had a
golden light surrounding you, and you looked so beautiful. I tried to go to your bus,
but my friends pulled me away, and that was that. But then later I found one of your
stories in a bus depot in Detroit. That memory has stayed with me and sustained
me—how brave and full of love the singing was.”
A few months later Phish was coming to town, so we made invitations for
a party and handed out hundreds of them in the concert parking lot. That night,
our basement was packed with about 200 “Phishheads.” The next morning we
found a few people crashed out on the couches and on the floor, so we made a
big batch of pancakes as we got to know our new friends. Waking up was a sweetlooking kid wearing a long, homemade, corduroy coat. It was a little reminiscent of
something from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, but it had dozens of Phish and
Grateful Dead patches sewn everywhere. Before I knew it, Nathan had decided to
join our community. Everyone loved him immediately, because he had such a sweet
countenance. The next thing we knew, he had the jacket off and was removing all of
the patches. Over the next few months, as he grew in the Lord, we notice that more
and more patches began to appear on the coat, but this time they were Jesus patches.
Nathan came to study at The Land where Sara, then a Land graduate, was
visiting. A little later they ran off to Ukaih, CA and were married. “We were madly in
love, and just couldn’t wait,” says Sara.
It turns out that going to hippie concerts is not only a great way to reach young
people with the gospel, but also a great place to do a little matchmaking.
Chapter Fifteen
God speaks to a young man milking cows,
We are transported to China;
And a man starts seeing stars.
Jacob J., who now goes by the name Israel, was raised on a dairy farm in San
Luis Obispo, California. “My parents,” he says, “were hippies and had been saved in
the Jesus people movement, but they just hadn’t found a place of fellowship, and my
Dad ended up slipping back into drugs and things got crazy at home. Eventually the
family broke apart, my mom had a nervous breakdown and my Dad took off. My
mom didn’t know how to cope with what was going on.” Israel remembers that his
mom was always having to work. “She’d come home,” he says, “and put hotdogs in
a pot and some buns on the counter and say, ‘dinner’s in 20 minutes’ and then just
disappear into her room. From the time I was 11, until I ended up at The Land, I
spent most of my time alone.”
Israel smoked marijuana the first time when he was 11. “It was just crazy,”
he remembers. “I would have dreams where someone would tell me that Satan was
coming to get me, and I would sometimes see demons in the house.” In his loneliness,
he began to talk to God. “Once, I remember getting off the school bus and walking
to an empty house and saying to God, “If you really are God and you are allowing the
world to be like this, I want nothing to do with you.”
By the time he was 16, he bought himself a car and took off. “I kind of lost
all hope,” he recalls. He traveled around the West Coast, attending new age festivals,
partying and selling and doing drugs.
It wasn’t until he was 18 and in college in northern California that the Lord
began to stir his heart for what the truth was. “I was studying botanical gardening,”
Israel says, “planning to live in Humboldt County and grow weed.” As he was learning
about nature and the complexities of creation, he began to see a divine order. “I
was so frustrated,” he said, “because I saw all these holes in these theories they were
teaching in science classes, but when I would go to the professor, he would say, ‘I don’t
even know what you are talking about.’” Finally a professor said to Israel, “Look, I
only get paid to teach this class. I can’t answer your questions.”
On a trip to Southern California, Israel was pulled over by the police. “I was
arrested transporting two pounds of hash,” he says, shaking his head, “It was really
stupid. But even though he didn’t know who God was, he prayed a lot in jail. “I knew
that there was something there,” he says.
He returned home after he was released. “I remember that I was just so
emotionally wrecked after that, as a result of all the choices I had been making,”
Israel says. He would just sit out on the dairy farm weeping. “I just realized that I
didn’t know what the truth was, and that was devastating to me. I decided then that
I couldn’t do anything else with my life until I knew what the truth was. I realized
that I didn’t know who God was, and that was like pivotal, that realization, because if
there was a God, I realized that there was a necessity to know who that was. So I just
stopped,” Israel remembers, “and I said, ‘God if you are there, I’m here. I don’t know
who you are— if your name is Buddha, or Allah, or if your name is Jesus—but if you
give me the truth, I’ll give you my life.” From that point Jesus really began to work in
his life. Suddenly his prayers were being answered, and one day a few months later, as
he tells it, “A revelation just came into me—that Jesus was the truth.”
But all he knew was Bob Marley songs, which he figured were about Jesus. “I
just started reading the Bible and trying to find a church, but I had a really hard time
there. Nothing felt right, it just felt really religious and not alive; meanwhile, I was
having all these experiences in prayer and reading the Bible, where God was just so
alive,” Israel explains. But he was still struggling with drugs. He just kept himself busy
with school and work, so that he wouldn’t get into serious trouble. He hadn’t totally
surrendered everything to Jesus, yet.
Then, one day he was working on the dairy farm, and he heard someone call
his name. “I was on 300 acres,” Israel remembers, “and I look up and there was no
one around, and I knew that it was God. I got scared and just said, ‘God, I’m trying
to be good, I’m just working and going to school.’ And then God seemed to say to
me, ‘Don’t be afraid. I know what you’ve been doing.’ Then the Lord asked ‘But what
are you doing?’ I was working so hard, but nothing I was working for was eternal.”
Israel just stopped and realized that the Lord was calling him to leave home and leave
everything behind. He just needed to walk away.
So, he packed a small backpack and took off. He didn’t know where to go, so
he got up at four the next morning, got on a Greyhound bus and headed north to
Arcata, about an hour and a half north of The Land in Leggett. “On the bus,” Israel
remembers, “the presence of the Lord was so strong and so liberating. I just thought
to myself, ‘God, I feel like I have wings’ because I felt so free.” Later on in the day,
a woman who was acting crazy, got on the bus. That night, Israel learned that she
was a porn star. “There was just suddenly so much spiritual warfare going on in the
bus,” Israel says. “I was so tired,” Israel says, “and leaned my head against the window
and shut my eyes and started praying to myself, and this woman, the porn star, starts
talking to me and she says, ‘You don’t look like you have wings to me!’ and it was
so weird, because she wasn’t even on the bus when I had prayed that. And so I just
looked at her and thought to myself, ‘I know who you are!’” He had realized that the
enemy of his soul was speaking through this woman.
At about two in the morning the bus stopped at a small convenience store
somewhere in northern California. “Everyone got off the bus and people were
smoking and I didn’t know where we were. We were just at this little red convenience
store and gas station in the middle of nowhere, and I felt the presence of the Lord
come. I felt the Lord say, “I need you to trust me, and I need you to walk two miles
up the road. This way you’ll save my people time and money.” But Israel said, “God,
no way!” “I was thinking to myself, ‘I’m somewhere in Mendocino or Humboldt
County and you just don’t walk into the woods here in the middle of the night. You
just don’t.’” He thought to himself, “Okay, I’ll just get back on the bus and if I see
something two miles up the road, I’ll just get off at the next stop, which would maybe
be in about 30 miles, and somehow make it back.” He asked the Lord, “What does
that mean, ‘Save my people time and money?’” He would understand later.
As the bus left the gas station, Israel moved to the left side of the bus and tried
to gauge the distance so he would see if there was anything two miles down the road.
Suddenly, Israel saw all these lights go by. “What was that?” he asked the Lord. He
knew instantly that this was the place that the Lord had wanted him to walk to. Only
later would Israel realize that he had just passed The Land. But the next stop, when
he began to get off of the bus, he saw that the porn star was the only other person
getting off. “It was the middle of the night,” says Israel, “and I just didn’t want to be
alone with this woman.”
So, instead of listening to divine instruction, Israel kept to his plans to go to
Arcata. There he found himself back in the hippie and drug-dealing scene. He said
to himself, “This is not me,” and to the Lord, he said, “God, what should I do now;
I’ve left everything for you.” Then he felt the Lord lead him to walk to Weaverville.
He bought a map and saw that it would be about a 60-mile walk. He thought, “Well,
I guess I could walk there in about three to five days,” but he had no idea that he was
going into the Trinity Alps, a huge mountain range. As Israel just started walking out
of town, it suddenly started pouring rain. Then he looked up the road and saw the
mountains. He thought, “Oh my God, those mountains are like ominous! And there’s
mountains all up in the mountains.” He was on the side of the road crying out to the
Lord, saying, “God, I don’t know what you are doing.”
All of a sudden, a van full of hippies pulled up alongside of him, and Israel ran
to the van. “Where are you going?” asked someone in the van. “Weaverville,” Israel
replied, and he was invited to get in the van. “We’re headed past there,” said someone,
“but we’ll drop you in Weaverville.”
When someone in the van asked Israel, “What exactly are you doing?” he
answered, “Well, I’m kind of on this spiritual journey.” The hippies in the van thought
that this was very cool. Israel thought to himself, “They probably think I’m just some
sort of New-Age hippie.” Which was confirmed when one of the guys said, “I just
got back from India.” So they started talking about spirituality, and Israel realized
that these hippies were really into Jesus. “What are you doing driving on this desolate
road?” Israel asked them. “Well,” one of them said, “we were at a youth conference
and our bus broke down. We’ve had to ferry everyone back to our land in Leggett,
about a 5-hour drive, where we have a Bible school. This is actually our last trip back
and forth.” Suddenly Israel figured out what the Lord had meant when he had said,
“Save my people time and money.” Israel confessed later, “That the bus breaking
down was probably my fault. If I’d gotten off the Greyhound when the Lord had
instructed me to, He wouldn’t have had to work this elaborate scheme to have these
people pick me up.”
Unfortunately, that was the end of our wonderful white bus.
By the time the van reached Weaverville, Israel says, his heart was burning, “I
don’t want to go to Weaverville, I want to stay with these guys,” he prayed. “Take me
with you to your Land,” begged Israel.
❊
After six months in our community, Philip went home to Louisville, Kentucky
for a visit with family and to put his new faith and lifestyle to the test. “It was hard
for some kids to go home to their old friends who were still just sitting around all day
listening to the Grateful Dead and puffing nugs, but I was determined to stay true to
God,” he says.
One afternoon, Philip decided to take a look in his favorite record shop. He
spotted a small, strawberry blonde young woman with wire frame glasses as she sorted
through the selection of Grateful Dead albums. Suddenly he had an inspiration. He
walked up to the young woman, and said, “Your name is Candy, isn’t it?” The young
woman looked confused, because she didn’t ever remember meeting this man with the
bushy beard. “God, just showed me your name,” said Philip. For the next few minutes
Philip repeated what the Lord was showing him. Candy says now, “It was like he knew
my whole life.” As he left the record store Philip said, “Well, I’ll be praying for you.”
Candy’s life at that moment was a mess, just as the Lord had shown Philip. She
was in an abusive relationship. She was homeless. She was a drug addict. And, she was
about to find out that she was pregnant.
“I was raised in a very conservative, Bible Belt Christian home.” Candy
explains as she begins speaking about her background. “My parents were involved
in a charismatic church, but the pastor turned out to be crooked. When all that was
exposed, my parents went to the most conservative church they could find. I was
raised in a church, never knowing that God could talk to you. It was basically legalistic
religion, which really turned me off.”
By the time she was 15 years old, Candy rebelled against her religious
upbringing. “I started to get into drugs,” she says. “By the time I was 16, I would be
gone from home for weeks at a time traveling to Grateful Dead shows.”
“I remember seeing a young hippie girl with long dreadlocks at a show in
Chicago.” Candy remembers clearly. She was standing on a chair and crying out, “Jesus
is real and you know it’s true!” Candy was trying hard not to listen, but it seemed like
the girl was speaking right to her. “Then I overheard some of my friends talking about
the Christian kids who were on tour with us,” recalls Candy of her first meeting with
people from our community. “Later that night the same girl was walking with two
other guys around the parking lot, playing the guitar and singing songs about Jesus.
I was sure that they were following me! They had this weird light that seemed to be
on them and when I turned around they sang out, ‘Jesus!’ Later Candy found one of
our hand-made hippie stories on the pavement. “For some reason, I kept this story
with me for four years, even though I was homeless most of the time. It was just this
annoying little piece of paper that ended up wherever I went.”
At 17 she was legally emancipated, which meant that now she was free to do as
she pleased. Homeless and floating around to shows for a year, she says, “My life was
consumed by drugs and partying.” She found herself in abusive relationships. “My
boyfriend had been a heroin addict for 11 years, and probably had been doing speed
for about five years.” He would get into an abusive state and say to me, “Why are you
alive? Why don’t you kill yourself while you have the chance?” Candy says now, “It was
all directed at me, and my heart. I would be crumbled up on the floor, crying and then
he would snap out of it and say, ‘I don’t know what happens to me, you’re so beautiful
sister, I really love you.’”
About a month after the conversation with Philip, Candy found out that she was
pregnant. “I was doing so many pills and drugs without knowing.”
Candy was scared for her life. When she found out that she was pregnant, her
boyfriend said, “If it’s a girl, you’re on your own, but if it’s a boy, you’re mine and the
baby is mine.” The situation was getting worse and Candy realized that her life was in
danger. “He’d say things like, ‘we’re out here in the woods alone and no one can hear
you screaming.’”
“I think I’d always known that God was real,” Candy says. “When I was on
LSD, I’d have these crazy visions of hell, and weird things would happen, like pictures
turning into Jesus.” Candy knew that she needed help. “I knew I had really screwed up
my life and that I needed God.”
All alone, Candy committed her life to Jesus. “That night I had a dream. I was at
a big banquet with God, and there was gold everywhere. I knew it was a confirmation,
that I was going to be okay.”
In the Bible belt there’s a church on every corner so it wasn’t hard to find one.
“There I was—homeless, pregnant, and I had just given my heart to Jesus. I wandered
into a little church.” Candy remembers worrying that she’d be judged, but in the little
church she was warmly embraced. “Everyone really loved Jesus. There were even
punk-rock kids and skaters.”
Candy had left the abusive relationship, but was getting threatening calls from
her ex-boyfriend. “It was a twisted cycle, one call would be so abusive, and in the next
one he’d say, “I love you, you’re going to be such a good mamma.”
She was back home, and one day her mother sat Candy down and said to her,
“We love you, but you can’t be here anymore. You need to go to a Christian girl’s
maternity home.” Candy wasn’t very receptive to this idea, “A lot of those homes—
once you have your baby, you’re out. I needed to find a place where the people
understood me and what I had experienced in the whole Grateful Dead scene. I
wanted to find a community, where I could raise my child.”
A young believer at Candy’s new church suggested that she check out a group he
had visited on a trip to San Francisco. “I think you’d really fit in, and I think they have
this land or something.” Suddenly she made the connection to the young hippie girl
she had seen standing on the chair at a show in Chicago, and to the hippie Christians
who had followed her around the parking lot in Chicago. “Oh, My God!” cried Candy.
“I think I have a cartoon from those guys.” She found the story in a box of junk, and
called our phone number. The first person she talked with was Israel (Jacob), who had
just come to the Lord himself. “I told him my story as I was crying, and he prayed for
me on the phone,” says Candy. Then one of the older brothers called her back and
after they talked for a long time, he invited her to come out to The Land.
That night he announced to everyone at dinner that a new believer was coming
out from Kentucky. Philip was back at The Land by then and was just finishing his
dinner. “What’s the girl’s name?” he asked, as an odd thrill came over him and he
wondered, “Could it be the red-headed girl in the music store?” He had been praying
for her ever since their conversation.
“I got a phone call, and the guy opened the conversation up by saying, ‘I just
heard about your new walk with the Lord!” Candy was thinking to herself, “Who the
heck is this?” Then Philip said, “Do you remember a couple of months ago at the
music store in Louisville?” Now Candy was sure that the Lord had found a place for
her.
A few months after her arrival in California, Candy delivered her baby girl
surrounded by a group of sisters from The Land. “They were massaging my legs and
telling me that I could do this; it was awesome. I had finally found friends who were
family.”
❊
Israel had been at The Land a few months when an odd series of events began
to unfold.
He went to his cabin one evening planning to pray a little and then go to bed. As
he entered his cabin room the Lord seemed to speak to him and say, “Are you ready?”
Israel describes these experiences like this: “Immediately I would be in Africa. I
thought it was a dream. The Lord would take me into a village and tell me what to say
to the people there. Then, the next thing I knew, I’d be waking up the next morning in
my cabin at The Land.”
Israel just thought he was having really fun and vivid dreams. But the next night
a similar thing happened. “Again, I’d walked into my cabin that night, and the Lord
seemed to say, ‘Are you ready.’ Then the next thing I knew I was in China preaching
the gospel. Next I was being chased by the police in China and being beaten on the
head with clubs, as they demanded that I deny Christ.”
The next morning Israel wake up in his room at The Land thinking, “What a
crazy dream!” Then he noticed that his head ached, as though someone had hit him.
Then another time, as he entered his room, he suddenly was standing in Santa
Rosa, California (about an hour and a half drive south from The Land). “I was
standing on the side of the road in Santa Rosa and it was freezing. I thought I was
dreaming, and I said, ‘Wow, it’s cold,’ and I wasn’t dressed warmly enough, and it
was dark. All of the sudden a man approached me on a bicycle and I knew that the
Lord had me there to talk to this man about Jesus. I said to the guy, ‘You want to go
somewhere warm? Maybe we can find a diner or something.’ Then the guy said, ‘Okay,
I have a bike; do you have a bike?’ and all of a sudden out of my mouth came, ‘Yeah, I
have a bike,’ and when I looked again, I had a bike. I was thinking in the dream, ‘This
is weird!’ So we rode into town, and the whole way it was so cold, that my eyes were
tearing. Finally we got to a Denny’s. It was all warm in there and I was talking to this
guy about Jesus for hours. But I could sense that even though the guy knew that Jesus
was real, he was hardening his heart, because he didn’t want to let go of some things.
I was so mad. I stood up and said to the guy, ‘You know what the truth is, and I’m
not going to waste my time anymore.’ But I had promised to buy the guy a meal, and
now I realized that I had no money. I heard the Lord say, ‘Reach into your pocket,’ and
when I did, there was the exact amount of money to pay the check. I put the money
down on the counter.”
Then Israel says, “The next thing I knew, I’m waking up in my dorm room at
The Land.”
Israel thought that he had been having strangely vivid dreams, and thought no
more of them. But a few years later, he found himself in a ministry school, which
took him to Africa for three months. “It reminded me so much of the dream I’d had
where I was working with orphans in Africa.” After the trip Israel was at a church
conference and a man walked up to him. He looked vaguely familiar. The man said to
Israel, “I know you from somewhere.” And Israel said, “Yeah, you look familiar too.”
Then the man made the connection, “I remember! You’re the guy I met that night in
Santa Rosa.” Israel didn’t quite understand, “When was this?” he asked. “Don’t you
remember,” said the man, “I was stranded in Santa Rosa, and I had just cried out to
God when I saw you on the side of the road. We biked into town. It was a really cold
night, and you bought me dinner at Denny’s and talked to me about Jesus. You got
really upset with me and walked out.” Israel was stunned. “Yeah,” the man continued,
“It really shook me up, that conversation. A little while after I gave my life to the
Lord.”
After the resurrection Jesus appeared in one place, and shortly later in another
place miles away and impossible to reach by foot in such a short time. Later in Acts 8,
Philip, one of the first deacons in the church, was sharing the gospel to an Ethiopian
eunuch on a road leading to Gaza. Once the man received the Lord and was baptized,
Philip’s job was over. The scripture says, “The Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip
away.” Next he appeared in Azotus which was about 20 miles down the road. (Acts 8:
39-40)
Once again, we witnessed the supernatural way that the Lord worked to bring
the gospel to a hungry soul. Israel’s passion was to see people come to faith, and the
Lord provided a means. Too many believers run after the supernatural, more than after
God’s heart to save. If you dream about seeing the supernatural, start by dreaming
about seeing people come to faith. Then maybe one day you too will hear these words:
“Are you ready?”
❊
In the winter of 2001, one of our older brothers lead a group of young Land
students up to Arcata, California, in our white school bus hoping to establish a
communal house. They buckled down for a long cold and wet winter in the white bus.
“Fortunately, there were churches in the area that took pity on us and let us use their
showers,” he says.
Their specialty was chocolate chip cookies. Some days the small group of
believers would sit in the town square with the cookies. On other days, they would
head up into the woods with basket loads of goodies and a big thermos of Chai tea.
They would make friends with the many young people who came to town for it’s
mellow atmosphere, while stocking up on a supply of marijuana, which after harvest
in the fall, was distributed throughout the United States.
Joe was 18 years old when he left his parent’s home in Los Angeles. “My mom
was into this form of east Indian science, following a guru. My Dad was an electric
motor salesman, not religious in any way,” says Joe. His mother taught Joe about
reincarnation, karma and enlightenment. “I don’t know that I ever believed any of it
though,” Joe says as he ponders his path towards true enlightenment.
Like many young people we were meeting, Joe had left home on an intentional
spiritual quest. Joe had seen a picture of the redwoods in Humboldt County,
California. “I ultimately wanted to end up in the woods, by myself, so that I could seek
God.” Joe was excited by what he describes as “the magical Rainbow culture” he was
meeting in the small hippie community.
“I wanted to seek the truth, seek what was real,” he says. “I would just smoke
weed all the time, and meditate on things, but even in that, God was showing me
stuff.”
One night Joe was laying down at his makeshift campsite up in the woods, and
for the first time he spoke to God. “Are you there?” he asked. “Just take my life.” A
day or two later Joe was lying again in the woods, trying to go to sleep. “A little star
appeared to me. It was a little blue star, not a real star, but a small speck of light right
in front of my eyes. I didn’t know what to think, I wasn’t high or anything. Somehow I
knew it was from God, and that something was about to happen.”
By then, we had rented a little craftsman style house on “G’ Street, where the
newlyweds Scott and Devon were also living. “A week after I saw the star, the “G”
Street people came up to the Redwoods,” Joe recalls. “Devon was talking to me about
the Bible, and something just rose up in me. I just wanted the Bible.” Devon gave Joe
one, and over the next few days, Joe began reading. “I started with the Old Testament,
and I couldn’t understand anything. So I decided to skip to the New Testament, and
suddenly I came across the word ‘truth’ and it just hit me. Everything opened up
to me, and I knew that Jesus was the truth.” Joe felt the presence of the Lord. He
began weeping and repenting of his sins. “I just felt His love inside of me.” The next
morning Joe woke up and felt like a new person. Just as Jesus promised to those who
search for truth, Joe had found it.
Scott invited Joe four times to come to The Land. Joe says, “I kept saying, ‘No’
because I thought it would be like this big institution. I think I thought this because
Scott had said something about dorms. I imagined this big college campus.” Finally Joe
was convinced to come.
The new believers would have powerful times up in a tree house that one of
them, who we called “Little Derek” had made out of the remains of an old redwood
water tower built into a ring of redwood trees. Joe remembers, “Sometimes I would
be sitting up in the tree house and I would drift into dream states, it’s hard to explain,
but I would just feel elevated to God.” But it wasn’t the mountain top experiences
that kept Joe at The Land for so long. “It was the sweet worship times we would have
every night, where I would feel the tangible love of God,” says Joe. “The biggest thing
was just getting the heart of God, like for children and the needy. Just feeling His
heart and taking it on.”
One day, Joe’s mother and his older sister showed up unannounced. “I think
maybe they thought I was in a cult,” Joe says. Joe sat with them for a long time at a
picnic bench explaining the gospel and the life of Jesus. One of the older brothers
remembers that, “Joe’s testimony to his family was becoming more and more
profound. They could see Joe living out his faith, and we could see that it would have a
tremendous impact on them.”
Joe remembers, “There was a new believer at The Land who was having
these wild dreams. One was a dream about hell, and when he shared that with me,
it really stirred me up to pray for my own sister. I suddenly felt this urgency to call
and encourage her to give her life to Jesus.” Joe called his sister and shared with her
what God was doing in his life. “I felt the Spirit of God come on me during the
conversation, in the most powerful way I’d ever felt,” says Joe. “Then I asked her if
she wanted to pray with me to receive Christ, and she said ‘Yes.’ After we prayed, my
sister said that she also felt God on the other side of the phone.”
Chapter Sixteen
Where we are introduced to girls with blue faces;
We meet a Swede on a beach making sand castles;
And then we get hit by a Mack truck.
How did it happen that one day we loaded up our backpacks and headed for
India?
In June of 1998, as we were returning home from the annual Haight Ashbury
Street Fair, we passed a table displaying illustrations of various Indian deities. Two
young women, who represented an ashram, stood behind photo scrapbooks. Both had
their faces painted blue, mimicking the gods in the photos. They looked to be in some
sort of drug-induced trance. Before we had walked a couple of paces beyond them,
we had somehow formed a definite plan to visit the East.
The same afternoon of the street fair, Steven, a Swedish hippie, was invited
home by one of our housemates. He stayed the afternoon while arguing with some
of the believers about the validity of the Bible. When he left that day to continue his
travels, we didn’t expect to see him again.
But years later we came across him making sand castles on a beach in South
India. “I know who you are,” he stated bluntly, “I’ve been to your house in San
Francisco.”
Steven was like so many young people who had journeyed to India searching for
enlightenment. He was 30 years old when we got to know him in Goa and by then he
was convinced that Christianity could offer nothing to him.
After a short bout with malaria, Steven’s body was burnt on the River Ganges as
a sacrifice to Shiva, the god of destruction.
But that would come years after that afternoon of the fair, as we came home
and stated our plan to visit India in the near future. There was something about those
two blue-faced girls that had shaken us to the core.
We visited the local bookstore and began to peruse the Lonely Planet guide, the
Bible for budget travelers.
Funny thing, in looking back, at the time we had absolutely no idea that there
was still a hippie traveler scene in India. We knew that in the 60s and 70s there had
been, but those were the days of the Beatles and the Mahareshi, Baba Ram Doss and
Rashnesh devotees who shaved their heads and jumped up and down in orange robes.
We found McLeod Ganj, home of the Dalai Lama, on a detailed map of
northern India, and Varanasi, the holiest of Hindu cities, an inch or two to the right.
But why actually go there?
We knew that many of the philosophies coming from India were creating
obstacles for many of our hippie American friends as they search for the truth.
Without even knowing the origins of what they believed they would routinely say
things like, “Well, we are all God, you know. I’m God, you are God.” Or they’d talk
in very loose terms about karma and reincarnation, all ideas that had their origins in
Indian spirituality. Maybe we were simply meant to go to India to learn first hand,
bringing our new knowledge to bear as we confronted world-views that differed from
those we were taught from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Or, we thought,
maybe we were simply called to go and pray in these places. And certainly there were
many practical ways that we could serve the Lord among the poor. But to be honest,
we knew we were to go, but were uncertain about what the real purpose for going was.
As the three of us lugged our heavy backpacks from the taxi to our guesthouse
in the Paraganj District of Delhi, we were in shock. Things appeared out of the
pollution only when they were about to crash into us. Rickshaws veered around cattle
while small and bony women carrying sickly babies cried for rupees. Lepers were being
trampled by the masses shopping for spices. It all seemed surreal. Men without legs
rolled around on wheeled carts.
We had picked up a stray 18-year old English traveler at the airport, he being as
“green” to Indian travel as we were. The only room available was a large, windowless,
bright pink room with two beds, two leaky toilets and a sink that spouted dirty water
onto your feet. We tied a rope between the two beds, and hanging an Indian tapestry
one of the brothers had dragged from America, we divided the room into boys’ and
girls’ sections. We all sat on the beds in silence while processing what we had just seen.
The next morning, the four of us ventured out to find something edible and
crammed into a booth meant to fit much smaller people. One of the sisters was
already feeling sick before we’d eaten anything. As we waited for the order to arrive,
she grabbed the stainless steel cup in front of her and vomited into it. We each quickly
handed her every other available container, which she likewise filled. When the waiter
arrived with the food, dal (a watery lentil soup) and chapatti (a flat bread), none of us
had much of an appetite.
We began to see hippies everywhere. Hippies from France and hippies from
Germany. We met a hippie from Iran and a group from Japan. Places we never knew
had hippies, in a place we thought had been long devoid of them.
We headed north to the former British hill station that had served for more than
four decades as the seat of the Tibetan Government in exile. After a cliff-hanging
overnight journey up into the Himalaya Mountains, we arrived the next morning to
fresh air, the smell of pine trees, and a stunning view of the snow-capped mountains
of Northern India, Tibet, and beyond.
Monks scurried about in maroon robes and shaved heads. They were
predominately Tibetan, but a handful were of European or American origin. Other
travelers ate muesli and fruit at small restaurants along the main road, which was in
the process of being paved for the first time. Wood fires heated paving tar and the air
around it, which made it nearly impossible to pass from one side of the small village
to the other. Cows lounged in the smoke to escape the flies.
Most of the visitors were young, international travelers on a budget. Oddly, they
looked not much different from the kids who would visit us back on Haight Street.
It seemed that everyone had an audience with the Dalai Lama, who was at home
that month from his world travels. Almost every traveler would start a conversation
with us by asking, “Have you met the Dalai Lama yet?” We began to reply with, “No,
but I have met Jesus Christ, have you?”
In Manali, we spent most of our time befriending the many small children
who approached travelers with small dirty pieces of paper, which explained in several
languages that they were orphans. Most days we would walk downtown, and a street
child would give a call to all of the other children. Smiling faces would surround
us. Six-year old Karen was the only child who could speak a few words of English,
and, over many lunches (which would sometimes find us with 12 of her friends), we
learned that the children where actually those of poor migrant workers. We would
usually order too much food for these small stomachs, and often recall our mother’s
admonitions when we wouldn’t finish our dinner, “There are children starving in
India.”
A day or so later, we found ourselves at the railway platform waiting for the
night train from Delhi to Varanasi. The Indian rail system has a genius for paperwork
and detail. On each of our tickets was printed our car number, bunk number, age
and sex, but when the train finally pulled in, we noticed that the car numbers, which
had been written in chalk, were now illegible. It seemed impossible that everyone
on the platform could fit into the train. A mad race to board quickly ensued, and we
frantically sought help to locate the correct car. It seemed that people had brought
whole families and all of their worldly belongings as well. After climbing over people
and packages, we came at last to our seats, only to be informed that we had entered
the wrong car. Somehow, the Indians all seemed to have the thing figured out.
Exiting the wrong car was harder than getting in, as the tide was flowing against
us. Some Indians were actually climbing on top of others to get in. People without
tickets were climbing up the sides of the train to find a place on the roof. Mothers
with small babies cried out for help as the crowds threatened to crush them. When our
brother tried to make his way past the car’s exit, a man pulled a knife and threatened
to kill him. We couldn’t understand why, since he was speaking in Hindi. As we were
defending our lives, others were trying to sell us samosas, peanuts and bananas for the
journey. Who could think of food at a time like this? At last, we found our place, only
to discover that we had been robbed in the process. Getting on a train in India would
take some practice.
We had purchased our passage for a second-class sleeper car. Six bunks formed
one section, and it seemed that our companions for the trip were two French travelers.
At least, that’s what we had thought at first. They introduced themselves as we settled
in, locking our backpacks to the bench frames. One of us remarked that there seemed
to be many other French travelers in India. One of the young men laughed and said,
“We’re not from France, we are from Israel.” They were the first Israelis we’d ever
met, and one of us said confidently, “Oh, in Israel you believe in God, right?” They
laughed and one of the young men said, “In Israel we don’t believe in God; we believe
in Israel.” His simple words hit us with the force of a Mack truck. One sister said later,
“That must be the most tragic statement I have ever heard.”
Both of the Israelis, we learned that night, had just been released from army
service. Like many others they had journeyed to India and Nepal and would stay until
their money ran out. This had become a rite of passage for Israeli youth. Later we
came to learn that, at any given time, there were as many as 100,000 Israelis, most just
out of the army, traveling in India. Many stayed longer than six months and returned
to India repeatedly afterwards. What we didn’t realize at the time was that these
pilgrims were changing the face of Israel. Buddhist and esoteric Hindu practices were
making their way back to the Holy Land with these devotees.
That morning, we arrived in Varanasi, the holy city of Hinduism. Blackouts were
common in the city, and that night we walked through the nearly pitch-black, narrow
alleyways that line the River Ganges. We felt like we had been transported to an
ancient time. Weavers worked on spinning wheels, and carpenters used the same tools
that their ancestors had used before them. Small oil lamps gave off faint light in shops
selling silver-foiled candies. Men and woman, who knelt in tiny, but elaborate, shrines,
brought offerings to Shiva, a god to whom the city was dedicated. Small women in
colorful saris sat in the dirt street leading to the main gate selling fruits and vegetables.
Steep steps led down to the river, where travelers sat watching bodies being burnt on
hot wood fires. Day and night, mourners carried bodies wrapped in silk trimmed with
gold tinsel, placed on wooden pallets, down to the river’s edge to await cremation.
Others, many old and feeble, rested during the stifling heat on rope beds, waiting for
their own deaths to come. To die in this holy city, they believed, would assure a better
reincarnation.
Travelers from all over the world packed dirty, dark guesthouses. Trance music
blared from the rooms as people paced around with chillums, enjoying the cheap
hashish. Some had come to study music (Varanasi being world famous for its sitar,
tabla drum and percussion teachers), while others had come to escape sansara, the
curse of having to keep returning after death to this world. They sat along the Ganges
River in the lotus position, chanting mantras or frequented the many temples where
Shiva and Kali were worshiped. Most of the travelers suffered with some form of
dysentery, and many spent days in health clinics hooked up to IVs to stave off the
effects of dehydration.
We had come during the beginning of the hottest season, when it becomes
unbearable to sleep at night, and so, like most of the travelers, we booked a passage
north to Katmandu.
We had befriended two American Deadheads on the bus from the border of
India. They joined us for the trek in the mountains. It turned out that we knew many
people in common, kids we had met on various trips around the United States. They
had even read some of our handmade hippie cartoons. One night, through the flimsy
walls of a guesthouse at about 10,000 feet, we heard one read the Gospel of John to
the other. It was the first time they had ever read the Bible, and one stopped reading at
one point and said to the other, “What is a Pharisee, anyway?” “I’m not sure,” said the
other, “Obviously not good.” We tried to stifle our laughter as they continued to read.
Three months after leaving home we found ourselves headed back through
Bangkok, where we assessed our journey. In the East, we had traveled with young
people from almost every nation under the sun: hippies from every country in Europe,
even from Malta; young people from places only recently accessible in eastern Europe;
hippies from Japan and Israel; even hippies from Iran.
“It was the spiritual orientation of India that was what made this trip so
attractive to me,” says one of the believers on our first trip to India. “I’d traveled
in Europe, which was so materialistic, but when I got to India, the preeminence of
spirituality was incredible. There were so many spiritually hungry travelers who had
come only to seek truth. There was no shortage of people to talk to about Jesus.”
By the time we reached home, we were planning our return.
❊
Less then a year later, another group from our community made it’s way back
to India. On route in Bangkok, we went up to the main market area to have dinner.
Koa San Street was packed with cheap hotels accommodating young travelers from all
over the world, many who had just spent months in India and were unwinding at the
many bars and dance clubs. Vendors selling clothing and accessories that appealed to
a hippie market lined the long street. Thai men with little carts sold fresh fruit or Pad
Thai, a delicious noodle dish. It was quite a party scene.
We noticed a young dreadlock man walking towards us. He had obviously had
a few too many and his friends were trying to keep him from falling down. “Are you
alright?” one of us asked. He explained that he had just taken some pills on top of
alcohol. We had seen other young people overdose on this sort of combination. A
couple of us stayed with the German giving him an impassioned plea to turn from his
life of addiction and follow Jesus. One of the sisters started weeping, and the kid was
really touched by that and said, ‘No one has ever cried for me.’”
“I noticed that there was a girl sitting near by,” recalls the sister who was then
the newest to our community, “I guess she had been hanging out with the German
hippie. I sat down next to her and began sharing with her. The girl was from Japan,
and when I began to talk about Jesus, she just said, ‘Yes, I want that. I want Jesus.’ I
said, ‘Really? Really?’ because I was so surprised, and she answered, ‘Yes, tell me what I
have to do.’” So right there on the curb, the Japanese girl was lead in a prayer to accept
the Lord. The next day our sister met with the Japanese girl, hoping that the girl had
understood what it meant to become a follower of Jesus, “She was from a Buddhist
family, as it turned out,” she explains, “Fortunately we had brought along some New
Testaments in Japanese, and I gave her one and we went through some scriptures,
while I explained the gospel in more detail. She was really sincere, and I thought to
myself, ‘this has never happened to me before, I mean, I’d never helped lead someone
to the Lord. It was wonderful.”
By now we were in love with India, and the opportunities to share our faith that
we found there. It was good stuff and we were hooked. We had to keep going back for
more.
One sister puts it this way, “You almost never had to bring up spirituality in a
conversation. It was always the main topic with the India travelers.” Unlike in America,
where religion was a taboo topic in polite society, among the travelers it was the main
topic. “If you sat down in a café in America, you’d have to work hard to find some
way to introduce Jesus into the conversation, but there it was so easy.” A brother
adds, “Almost every thing a traveler does or sees in India is connected to something
spiritual. Like if they have just visited a Hindu temple, or just come from a meditation
workshop, or yoga. Everything has a spiritual connection. It’s so easy to get in the
door.” Especially in McLeod Ganj. “Basically, the Dali Lama lives down the street.
Everyone is talking about him, and things he’s just said.”
We would often hang out at a coffee house run by Jewish-American Buddhists
(Called aJuBu). One of the brothers was an outstanding guitarist and the owner was
impressed by his talent, and asked if he would do a concert on the Jewish holiday of
Purim.
The night before he was to perform, our brother sat on the bed in his
guesthouse room as he watched his guitar literally inch itself off of a shelf and crash
to the floor. “There’s no way it could have fallen unless something supernatural had
pushed it off,” he explains. “It was perfectly broken in half.”
Borrowing an even better guitar from another traveler, our brother played the
next night to a crowd of about 70 travelers, most of them from Israel. Between songs
he shared about his love for Yeshua, the Messiah. One girl was heard to say afterwards,
“I was so riveted, that I couldn’t even get up to have a cigarette.”
On one trip to North India, we heard that there was a Rainbow Gathering and
quickly packed our bags and began the long trek to the site, using a map that someone
had drawn on a napkin.
“We had to hike about six miles from McLeod Ganj,” remembers one of the
brothers. “And somehow we kept getting lost. At one point we just decided to turn
back and return to McLeod Ganj and start again in the morning.” Once the group
arrived they found that there were only 30 hippies at this Rainbow Gathering. “It
so typified everything in the scene that I love and hate,” says one brother. They
would wake up in the morning and start talking with the travelers. “Inevitably the
conversation would turn to Jesus.” He says. There was an ashram right up the hill,
and the guru’s disciples would come down to where the hippies were camping and
do kundalini yoga, a form of chakra manipulation. They believed that you have these
points on your body that control energy, and spiritually. The idea was to get your
energy from the lowest chakras to the highest, which would lead to enlightenment.
The yoga devotees would sit and wave their hands on someone’s back, feeling to see
where the energy was located and then to move it up. “I don’t know if they were
focusing, or chanting, or projecting,” recalls one brother. “But the travelers were saying
that they could feel energy rushing up their spines.” They believed that the kundalini,
symbolized by a snake dwelling at the base of your spine, was being awakened.
The day that our group arrived and saw the situation, they began praying against
the dark spiritual forces that seemed to be at work among the other Rainbows. “We
were praying,” says one brother, “Just shut this down, Lord.” A sister adds, “We
didn’t want the travelers, who God had a heart for, to get caught up in all this stuff.”
The day after the group had prayed, some of the hippies returned from the ashram
with startling news, “Today when they did the yoga exercises on us, we felt nothing.
Nothing at all.”
Our group camped together, and the unity we were experiencing came to
the notice of the others, who would come and sit as the Jesus hippies worshipped
together. A brother recalls, “The main leader, Amit, an Indian hippie, wanted me to
teach him the words for a Waterdeep song, ‘You are beautiful.’
He wanted to hear the song over and over, which said about Jesus,
You poured out all your blood,
you died upon the cross,
you are my Jesus who loves me.
Soon everyone was singing the song.
A couple years later we met Amit, who had grown up in a Catholic family, at
another small Rainbow Gathering in the south of India. He was still playing the song.
Some of the words had been changed, but the main idea remained:
He poured out all His blood. He died upon the cross. He is our Jesus who loves
us.
❊
We were finding our time in India to be different then our experience with
hippies back home. One sister put it this way, “On tour, the American kids were all
strung out, and they knew they were messed up. They’d go out of their way to tell
you just how messed up they were. But in the international scene, travelers were a
little more pulled-together. A little more sure of themselves. It was like they were
thinking, ‘we can buy as much drugs as we want, shack up with whomever we want, go
wherever we want— everything is for our pleasure.’”
On one of our trips, two of the women decided to go trekking in the mountains
of Nepal, knowing it would be a good way to make new friends. These were the
Himalaya, after all, the hardest trekking in the world, and misery loves company.
“We connected with an American couple who was trekking with their newborn baby
and another American guy. They weren’t your normal hippie types; they were highly
educated and had well-formed ideas about spirituality and religion. Nights after
long and excruciating hikes, the two sisters would find the three travelers in a warm
guesthouse sitting by an open fire. They would talk to them for hours into the night
about their faith in Jesus. “It didn’t seem to me that they were very open, especially not
the baby’s father, yet they were willing to discuss it for hours.” says one sister. Then
one morning the woman confided in her. “I really think that you are getting to my
boyfriend,” she shared. “Oh, really?” said our sister, surprised. The woman continued,
“Well last night after our conversation, he was trying to fall asleep, when suddenly he
shot out of bed and yelled ‘B-TCH! I knew he meant you!’”
It was, strangely, these kinds of reactions that excited us. “You could see God
really confirming the things that we were sharing about Jesus. It was really cool.”
❊
On another trip to India, three sisters traveled to Goa. We had come to share
our faith with the travelers who frequented the all-night, outdoor trance parties—
famous since the 1970’s. Beginning at midnight, huge speakers the size of small
houses would blast trance music, a sort of electronic thumping beat, to thousands of
travelers, most of them high on LSD or ecstasy. Indian women laid out grass mats and
sold Chai tea and stale baked goods, for those weary of dancing or just plain tired, as
they waited out the night for the sun to come up and the party to end. Travelers from
all over the world sat in circles, passing around bongs filled with hashish, which they
offered up to Shiva before inhaling.
Once, we had a chance to speak with an Englishman who mixed music for the
Goa parties. He explained, in his view, that the purpose of the music was to create
confusion inside of your brain and to enhance the weird effects of the psychedelic
drugs. Many young people had lost their minds at these parties and in Israel there was
a special mental hospital for young people who returned from India—some who had
freaked out at these parties.
Many nights, the three sisters would walk up to six miles to find one of these
parties, carrying little hand-made gospels of Matthew. Most mornings they would
return discouraged, because so few people seemed interested in anything but drugs
and dancing. One sister remembers, “One night I was trying to speak with a European
hippie about the Lord, while he dropped acid into people’s hands and collected
money.” Only a few people seemed willing to take our little hand-made Bibles, and
often we would find them in the mud later that night. The music was so loud and
rhythmic; it was hard to hear yourself think after a while. It was even harder to speak
to each other over the music.
Our new friend Janice introduced us to a local believer who played the guitar,
and we invited him to join us at a trance party so that we could worship the Lord
there. He was a little reluctant, having grown up in Goa and having heard so many
terrifying stories of the drugs and violence found at the parties. After a bit of
prodding, he agreed to come. We couldn’t imagine how on earth we would be able to
worship the Lord with only an acoustic guitar, and so we prayed that God would find
us a quiet spot, even if it was far from where anyone could hear.
The next night, we all rode on motorcycles to the spot where the party would be
that night, on a deserted beach called “Disco Valley.” As we approached, we noticed
that there was no music playing. It was already after midnight. Of all the parties we
had ever been to, this was the first one that was not in full swing by this hour. It
looked like the Lord had arranged things for us. There were hundreds of travelers
just sitting around on the sides of a small valley. We asked some of them what had
happened to the music, and they said, “We don’t understand. Something has gone
wrong with the sound equipment.” All of the believers looked at each other and we
asked our Indian friend to take out the guitar. As we began worshiping the Lord, our
voices filled the valley, and everyone turned to listen. Some came closer and began
to ask questions, and others just clapped at the end of each song, not understanding
that we were worshiping, not performing. This continued for about an hour, and then
the sound system came to life and the trance music began. The atmosphere changed
instantly from peaceful to chaotic, from heavenly to, well, very earthly. Our friend
went to put his guitar back in the case, but we all felt thankful that the Lord had made
a space for us to worship Him. But after only a few minutes the music stopped once
again, and some people requested that we sing some more, which we were glad to do.
Our Indian friend finally said, “I’ve run out of songs,” so we passed the guitar around
the circle of believers and each of us played a few songs, even those of us who could
barely play. It was getting very cold, and our hands were freezing; it became difficult
to hold the strings down. Finally, we felt like we were ready to go. Our Indian friend
was tired and so were we, tired and very happy. Just as we put the guitar in its case, the
music began again, this time continuing until the sun came up.
A couple of nights later, we were at another party, this one in a forest. That
night there was a wonderful heavenly event; a total eclipse of the moon. We were told
this was the first one seen in that part of India since the 1700’s. Yet all of the travelers
were so high on drugs that no one even cared to look up. Again we were feeling
discouraged and at a loss to know how to reach these young people with the message
of Jesus. Suddenly a young man approached us and pointed us out to his friends,
“These are the ones I told you about!” he said to them, very excited to have found
us. “These are the ones who were singing like angels at the party the other night,” he
explained. His friends greeted us as if we were minor celebrities. They all sat down
and introduced themselves. They were Moslems from Kashmere in the North of
India. “Do you know what we were singing about the other night?” one of us asked.
“No, but it was the most beautiful thing, and I told all of my friends about it,” the
young man said happily. “Did you realize that we were singing worship songs to Jesus,
who we believe to be the Savior of the world?” a sister explained to them. Suddenly
his countenance changed. He was embarrassed now that he had bragged about us to
his Moslem friends, but out of this experience we were able to share the gospel with
his group. One of our sisters happened to come from a Moslem family and she did a
wonderful job of presenting the message of grace and forgiveness offered by Jesus to
those who would follow Him.
There were many older hippie travelers to be found in Goa, some who had
come in the 70’s and never left. One man named “Howy” was from Bosnia and was
actually in India on a refugee visa. One of the sisters struck up a friendship with him
and began to share the good news about Jesus. He had been indoctrinated into many
Hindu practices over his 11 years in India, particularly into Krishna Consciousness.
We would often find him in coffeehouses, reading out of a book stuffed with many
smaller pamphlets and flyers, all about Hindu rituals and adorned with colored
illustrations of the Hindu gods and goddesses.
Our sister had mentioned that she wanted us to offer Howy a New Testament.
One day, one of the other believers was walking alone and saw Howy approaching.
They began to talk, and she remembered that she had a Gospel of John in her bag.
“Would you like something new to read?” she asked, as she noticed in his right hand
the Hindu book bulging with papers. She reached into her bag and began to hand
the gospel to Howy. Just as his left hand was about to grab the gospel, his right hand
suddenly shot into the air and the Hindu book went flying. Little clippings rained
down on the ground. “Wow!” she said, as Howy looked stunned at this literature
strewn on the dirt road and then to the gospel. “What happened?” she asked Howy.
He answered, still a little shaken, “Just as you handed me the little book, a bird pooped
on my other hand.” Our sister said, “Hmm, Howy, maybe it’s a sign or something.
Think about that.”
A couple of years after that Goa adventure, two of our sisters found themselves
at a Tel Aviv coffee house speaking with a man who organized huge New Age festivals
in Israel. Before coming that night, we had found one of the little handmade gospels
we had handed out at the parties in Goa. It was a little book printed on recycled paper,
with a picture of Jesus looking like a hippie, and in hand-written Hebrew letters the
cover read, “Sar Shalom”, or “Prince of Peace.” We had only made about 100 of these
that winter in Goa, and this was the last one left. For some reason, we had brought it
with us to Israel. During the conversation, we asked this man if he had ever read the
New Testament, and he told us a very interesting story.
“I was in Goa, India, a couple of years ago,” he said. “I went to a trance party
one night in Disco Valley. It had been raining that day, and the place was very muddy.
Sometime during the night, I had looked down at the ground and I saw a little book
stuck in the mud, so I picked it up and cleaned it off on my pants and took it with me.
Later in my travels, I began to read it and saw that it was all about Jesus. I was about
half way through when I lost the little book.”
One of the sisters reached into her bag and pulled out the little book. “Did
it look like this, by any chance?” she asked him. “Yes! That’s the very book!” he
answered. We were all amazed. We asked him if he would like to finish it, and he said
“yes,” so we gave him this last copy. We wondered what had happened to all the others
we had handed out. Perhaps our time at the parties in Goa was not a waste after all.
We are hoping when we get to heaven someone will show up with one of those little
books in his hand.
❊
We are reminded of a hike we took together a few of years back. We were
in North India, staying for about a month in a small village at the foothills of the
Himalaya, a village made up mostly of small guesthouses and restaurants catering to
the international traveler scene. Some travelers just came for a few days, but others
had lived in the village for a few years. We were getting a bit frustrated with the crowd
in our guesthouse; they just sat and smoked hashish morning to night, and they never
seem interested in holding any conversation that didn’t include instructions for making
a better bong. Someone mentioned that there was a hot spring up the mountain that
was frequented by the more spiritually minded travelers, due to its designation as a
Hindu holy site. “Let’s see what it’s like up the mountain,” one of us suggested, and
so we put on our hiking boots. The day-long trek first took us through cannabis fields,
with plants 20 feet high, and then past waterfalls and deep forests. On the way, we
came upon Shmuel, a solo traveler from Israel. He told us that he was frustrated by his
pot-smoking nationals. “I couldn’t get any of them to come with me; all they want to
do is get high,” he said, and then he asked if he could join us.
That evening after dinner and a swim in the very murky hot spring, we all sat
around a campfire talking about spiritual things. “Have you ever read the teachings
of Jesus?” someone asked Shmuel. “No,” he answered, “but I would like to. In fact,
if you have something with you, we can read a little now,” he suggested. One of the
brothers had a New Testament in Hebrew, and Shmuel asked us to suggest something
good to read. We turned to the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew,
and found the beginning of chapter 5 and handed him back the book. Shmuel began
reading to us. He stopped every so often to translate into English and to explain the
text in his own words. “This is a very Jewish book,” he said somewhat surprised, after
having read a couple of chapters. We looked around the circle and could see tears
welling up in the eyes of a few of the believers. One of the brothers said later, “I
felt like I was watching the first Jew ever read the New Testament, almost like I was
watching Apostle Matthew reading the story for the first time, and we were the first
ones to hear it.”
We were watching a man discover his Messiah.
Chapter Seventeen
In which we must bid farewell to our faithful and dear readers,
As we leave for yet untold adventures.
Our story has no real ending, but our book must have one.
In 2001, we sold the house on Ashbury Street, renting a flat in the
neighborhood for a long season, before moving out of San Francisco indefinitely.
Alas, we had to do it, as the neighborhood had become more gentrified and the hippie
scene had moved elsewhere.
But please, don’t be sad, cherished reader. And fear not.
In the past few years we’ve continued to meet up with these hippies, but often a
long way from the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets.
We would find ourselves on a beach in Egypt, sitting in a circle of young
Moslem men who were smoking pot. We asked their names. Two introduced
themselves: Mohammad and Osama. “Call me Sammi,” the one says. They invited
us to take a jeep trip into the desert. The whole way, the Doors and Pink Floyd were
playing from the tape deck, and they were smoking joint after joint while we talked.
Here we were driving in the Sinai telling Osama and Mohammad about what Jesus has
done for them. Who would have thought?
We would be found walking down an unpaved street in Guatemala towards the
bar where most of the travelers hung out. Along the way, we caught bits of worship
music coming from the local shops. The small town boasted 13 evangelical churches
and a large Bible college. Scriptures in Spanish had been stenciled on the sides of
buildings and one large sign that said, “Repent and be saved”, faced away from the
lake and towards the bar. It appeared that the travelers were the only people in these
parts that hadn’t yet been touched by revival. We sat with an Israeli as he and his
friends passed a bong. “I’m getting into ancient Mayan spirituality,” he explained.
“Well,” one of us said, “It would seem that you are a little late. Most of the Mayans
seem to be getting into Jesus Christ.” “Really?” he said a bit incredulously.
On a sweltering afternoon in Thailand, we met a hippie who said he’s from
Lapland. “Where in God’s name is Lapland?” we had to ask. He explained and then
added, “Yeah, we actually use dogsleds at home.”
In Jerusalem, a young man walked towards the Old City holding the hand of
his girlfriend. They almost looked like flower children transported from Woodstock,
wearing tie-dye shirts and flowing pants. Only two things looked out of place for
normal hippie attire. The young man was wearing a kippa. They both had Uzi’s
strapped to their backs. Not your normal hippie accessory for sure.
A few of us were on a boat headed to a remote chain of islands in the Indian
Ocean where there’s another Rainbow Gathering.
And one brother was sitting in the French Alps, sharing his croissant with
hippies who had come from as far as Australia to yet another Rainbow Gathering.
Later we sat around a campfire in the mountains of Turkey with some hippie
friends who had taken the bus from their homes in Tehran, Iran. They told us about
underground clubs in Tehran where hippies clandestinely sing Dylan songs. We sang
worship songs for days. One of our new Iranian friends said, “Your songs are like
music for our souls.”
And hopefully by now you know what our little community is all about: getting
to know these dear hippies and introducing them to Jesus.
We’ve seen along the way that when the gospel is spoken, signs and wonders
follow. People get healed. People hear the voice of God. Sometimes people are even
raised from the dead.
But the most astonishing thing we’ve witnessed is this:
That sometimes ordinary people become lovers of God. And sometimes
extraordinary people—people with dreadlocks, tattoos, piercings, and blue hair.
And how much more supernatural can you get?
If you would like to learn more about our community and about what we are up to these days,
you can write to Elena Neff at [email protected]. Or you can write to us at:
11 Cook Avenue, Enfield, CT 06082
We are always looking for people to join us in the next chapter.
We would like to thank a few key friends who gave invaluable help in forming this book:
To Michael Brodeur who insisted we write it. To Habakkuk who also helped convince us
to record this story in Chapter 2:2-3 of his book. To Nancy Bramwell, Kevin Mooney and
Evan Howard for reading the first drafts and offering wise suggestions that made the story
more readable. To Nancy and Linda for first corrections of the text. To Gayla G., Jeff W,
and Karen H. for reading later drafts. To R. Ford for modeling for our cover. To all the
former and current community members who sat for lengthy interviews that became the
story. Some of the book is directly quoted from these interviews, and the author is thankful
for the help.
Finally we want to thank Jesus, the Word made flesh, without whom there would be no story.
You are our hero.