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Here’s my testimony. It was the summer after my freshman year in college and I was staying at my parents place for a few days visiting some old high school friends. I had been out smoking weed with a couple guys and was just getting in at one in the morning. My parents’ house is a one story with a long hallway and bedroom doors all along one side and a bathroom at the very end. As I was walking down the hall to go to my bedroom when I suddenly snapped back into consciousness, my eyes focused and I realized that I had just been standing still, not moving, in the middle of the hallway for about thirty seconds. Not the kind of zoning out people sometimes do during a boring conversation or even the kind of zoning out that occasionally happens when you’re high but actually out, unconscious, not there for about thirty seconds, then back again. I thought ‘that was weird’ then went and got in bed. I laid down on my back and as I laid there my whole body was flushed with an intense tingling sensation. It was like soft needles running all over my body and I felt as though I was floating. I knew I wasn’t moving but my body felt as though it was lifting off and spinning about eight feet in the air above me. Almost as though my brain was a ball bearing and my body was rotating around it. In my mind I knew it was God.
Now, I grew up in a very Christian high school in a very Christian state in a very Christian area of the country. Most of my friends said they were Christians and I regularly got invited to church though I usually declined the offer. My parents grew up in Sand Diego, California and were not regular church attenders by any means. I had of course gone to some church services but it just never did anything for me. I didn’t understand the whole thing and I really wasn’t too curious. I wasn’t searching for God or for answers and for the most part I was pretty happy. At the end of the movie The DaVinchi Code Tom Hank’s character says “faith is a gift I haven’t been given yet.” I feel as though this statement really illuminates what happened to me in the hallway and in my bed that night. I was not searching for God, I had not been praying, I did not have any great pressing need. It simply happened.
The next morning all the tingling was gone except for a single band around the base of my ring finger on my left hand. It was like a ring of sensation right where a wedding band would be. I was a lifeguard at the time and as I would sit on the stand I would say to myself and to God ‘if this is real, if you are real make that sensation stay there,’ and it would. For about two weeks my wedding band stayed with me and anytime I felt it fade or needed confirmation I would just think about it and the feeling would return.
I knew, in my heart, that this was God. Beyond that I really didn’t know anything else. So I began to think about what it meant to have a relationship with God. I prayed and asked God to deliver me from my addiction and sometimes I would be flooded with that sensation of tingling but in large nothing changed in my life. I still went out and smoked and I still slept around with an occasional girlfriend.
I thought more and more about how to have a relationship with God and I thought a lot about religion. Something the Christians in high school had always said was that religion was a set of rules and something completely different from an actual spiritual relationship with God. I liked that a lot but when I thought about how to become closer to God, how to let Him influence my life I was somewhat at a loss. To be blunt I didn’t know what I was doing. I needed a teacher, a guide, a purpose, something to put me on the right track. I also realized that religion is just a cultures manifestation of the generally accepted means or way of connecting to God. Religion is, in essence, a guide for becoming connected to God.
