Here lies my life: My testimony.

My parents divorced when I was just a few months old, and I was taken care of by my mother. Never one to be wildly successful financially, we lived in projects located in Auburn, Maine. From the get-go there was something inherently wrong with me. I was expelled from two pre-schools, a kindergarten, and kicked out of a karate class for kids – because I was out of control. No one would baby-sit me; no one could keep me under wraps. The pain of a paddle could not cool my ambition to act out and destroy peace everywhere I went. The more pain added to my daily routine, the more fuel was created for my fire.

When I was six years old a few monstrous things happened to me. While my mother was sleeping I crept down stairs to the kitchen. I remember so well the beige counter tops reflecting the orange-yellow light emanating from the stove hood. I gripped the brass handle of the highest drawer I could reach and pulled it open. Stretching up onto my toes I managed to get my hand in and closed it around the handle of a butter knife. As I reset myself I stared at it, the non-descript metal gleamed ever so slightly – I turned it and stabbed at my chest with it. I stabbed and stabbed until I started crying from the pain, and dropped the knife. I hadn’t pierced my skin, though if I had tried hard enough I’m sure I could have.

I slid down the oven front and sat down, sobbing…

A short time later my mother convinced one of my cousins to baby-sit me while she found another school for me to go to. Though I don’t remember the time my mother was away, I do remember when she got home. She was furious, apparently I had gotten angry and scratched my cousins’ arm. My mother walked up to me full of fury, grabbed my arm and dug long scratches into it. I recoiled in an animalistic manner, jumped off the couch onto her shoulders and started hitting her in the face. She managed to throw me off of her, walked to the phone and dialed my father.

“Come get this child before I kill him.”

The next few years came and went. I was living with my father, and a stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister. I don’t remember much about my father until I turned ten or eleven. Every Sunday my father would take us all to church, he was serious about Jesus. As the years wore on, Sunday was the only day I saw my father- he was a workaholic. I endured six days of abuse from my step family and on that seventh day, everything was all right – Sunday school became my favorite past time.

I couldn’t have been older than ten years old; I was told that some people able to speak in tongues. All you had to do was concentrate on the spirit, and ask for the gift from God. Eventually I convinced myself that the gibberish I was speaking was indeed tongues, and I was speaking directly with God. My father never failed to miss a Sunday at church, and as such neither did I.

I did everything I could to make sure I was the perfect Christian. If that meant speaking in tongues, reading the bible, or whatever else was required of me – it was done. If that meant that I walk down that isle and seek some sort of rapture through the divine hands of our pastor – so be it.

I remember the pastor at one of the many churches we ended up attending, was going berserk on stage. People were going up to the podium and he was laying hands on their foreheads – then pushing them down into the hands of ushers who laid them down gently. They would stay still and the congregation would affirm that ‘something’ was happening. With more then a little trepidation I walked the isle and the pastor put his shaking, sweaty hands on my head. I closed my eyes, rolled them into the back of my head and blanked out my mind awaiting ‘something’ to happen…

As the pastor finished his raving, he pushed my head and I free fell into the hands of the ushers. I lay there, hearing, listening – feeling the carpet beneath me. I kept my eyes closed, I waited – what I was waiting for I wasn’t sure. I was waiting for an image, a sound, anything – I was rewarded with disappointment. I slowly got up and walked back to the pews. A pinnacle in my faith as a child – nothing happened. I began to doubt, I did everything my father told me to do, but somehow at that moment God had forsaken me.

I never told my father that nothing happened, I made something up to please him. Suddenly the six days of pain were more important to me than church. Pain I could understand – it never let me down. It was my strength.

As the relationship with my father and stepmother disintegrated at the age of 14, I was traumatized by the announcement of the divorce. I had finally built a world around me that I understood and my father shattered it – just like my mother had done eight years prior.

I turned inward. I always wondered how I made it through my teens without inflicting pain on myself, but I now understand I never needed to – there was plenty in my own home environment to sustain me. I lived with my father for a time in an apartment that my aunt owned. My father bought the bible on tape, and used to play it while we were sleeping. I began to realize that I could not feel emotion at this point in my life. “I don’t care” was something I said almost every sentence – It was my creed. My faith was diminished, but my love for my father was still strong.

He had a nervous breakdown shortly after the Gulf War for reasons I don’t fully comprehend, and my mother came and got me…

My self-image and thread of emotional stability was torn away from me when I began to get attached to my mothers’ new boyfriends, and suddenly they simply disappearing. I was no longer feeling anger or happiness – I was feeling nothing. I turned more and more inward, sociopathic.

Then my father came to the apartment one day to say goodbye to my mother and I. “We’ll write each other, I’ll keep in touch.”

As he walked out that door the last shreds of faith, a God, Jesus – all walked out with him. The cesspool inside me began to boil at a steady pace. I was no longer a disciple of God; I was a blasphemer. I studied the bible not to gain intuition about my relationship with Jesus, but to fuel my desire to disprove his existence.

Even more passionate as an anti-Christian than I ever was as a Christian, I set out to argue, assault, and persecute those with Him in their heart. I fed off the ignorance of young Christians, throwing everything I could at them and calling it ‘fact’. I was on a crusade, and my senior year I won the peer debate against involving religion and education. I had stood upon the Bible and convinced the students in my class that it was just a history book with nothing special about it. That win was so important. I had proven to a panel of mixed peers that religion should not be associated with education.

That win did not do to me what I thought it would. I was empty. The elation of the win was short lived. Now I had a void in my soul where the anger fled – I had won, and had nothing to show for it. I became neutral. I became empty.

For years after that I would not talk about religion in any sense. It was like jumping into a hole and expecting to hit the bottom, but continuing to fall indefinitely. Whether I hit the bottom and broke, or landed softly – I didn’t care, I just wanted to land.

This void combined with an already lessened sense of self gutted me. I didn’t know who or what I was – and so began lying. My entire existence was a lie. I was pathological, keeping careful track of my fantasies, wanting desperately to turn myself into something, anything just so I could identify with people. This lying continued until college, where I met a most unusual man…

While out enjoying myself with some friends, I jumped off a fountain and twisted my ankle. The pain was immense and I was sure I had broken it. I went back to the dorms and saw the physician, who told me I needed to go to the hospital.

That should have been that, however I ended up sitting in his office for hours, talking about my life, confessing all of my lies. This man challenged me to speak the truth, and only the truth for an entire week – no matter what the consequences. Though I didn’t believe it would do any good, I did just that.

When I reported back to him a week later I was elated and disappointed. I reported that I had caused lots of tension between many people and myself, but I also felt completely free. I felt alive.

For the next few years I spoke only the truth to the point of brute folly. I didn’t have the self-image to care about my relationships with people, only that I told them what they needed to hear – not what they wanted to hear.

I felt like a new human – one that didn’t fit in Hell, but also did not fit in Heaven. I began fantasizing about an elite select people who lived on earth and died but did not go to heaven or hell, instead stayed in a neutral zone – used by both sides to accomplish goals. An angel vagabond of sorts.

I knew I had the ability to do ‘good’ inside me, and I knew I could do evil. I didn’t know which I liked better, but I did enjoy pulling from both sides to accomplish whatever goal I had set my mind to at the time.

In my early twenties began describing myself as spiritual, and far to complex for anyone asking to understand. I knew ‘something’ was out there, something that kept me alive, kept me from hitting a bottom so hard that I could not recover….

While I was keeping afloat, I always seemed to take 3 steps back to the one I made forward. From a 3 bedroom house to a simple bedroom in someone else’s house – I was repeating my fathers footsteps and I vowed to break that cycle.

I landed a good job and focused all my energies on being successful. There was nothing more important to me than the tasks at hand. While everything seemed to be getting better on the outside, my roots were rotting away. Instead of watering them, I just continued to pour sod on them until I couldn’t see them anymore – out of sight, out of mind.

I met a girl at work who absolutely tore away all my defenses and settled directly into my heart. The shock of it all put my world upside down, but it wouldn’t compare to the shock of finding out she was a drug user – finding out she had pain more terrible than I did, and used those drugs to wash them away day in and day out. A day without drugs for her was a day not worth living, as could be seen on her wrists and legs.

This idea began to make me see my own roots, and the more I saw my own roots the more disgusted I became with her – with myself. I recoiled from the control she had over me, and the sudden shock of it all removed all the sod from my roots, fully exposing all my weaknesses. Seeing them all at once was a sight to behold. I pried my battered heart and soul from this woman, and the next day got the call. My favorite Aunt had succumbed to breast cancer.

As I sat on my couch, thoughts ripped through my head unbidden. I couldn’t shake them no matter how hard I tried to think of lovely grass blowing in a gentle breeze, ultra violent acts smashed through the façade and terrorized my imagination. All I wanted to do was harm something, someone – I was so sad. They came in the dark, in the light, while I was eating, showering, playing. Like a freight train they paralyzed me and for hours I was not in control of my free thinking mind.

My life was slipping away from me, my entire being was coming under fire. I fully expected the entire world to fall away like a special effect from the Matrix. My Aunt had died, and whether or not it was the trigger to this insanity, it gave me a reason to go home – a place I hadn’t been in years. I called my mother and arranged a flight.

Throughout the entire trip the attacks on my reality continued, I pulled out a pen and paper and began recanting my thoughts – if nothing else for someone to study should something happen to me, or to look back on as a lesson and memory of what being depressed really means.

My whole life I prided myself on being able to stand tall, fix my own problems – I was in complete control of my world and myself. This unbidden depression shattered that reality and on the door to my spirit began a faint knock. Suddenly I was realizing that I’m not in control, that someone or something else was.

During my layover in Washington, I walked into the men’s bathroom - it was crowded. I saw an open spot and took it. I was in the middle of one of the extreme down points, as I had struggled the entire flight to keep my composure. While I relieved myself, the thoughts were battering my soul – I began talking to myself.

Out of nowhere I got bumped hard from behind, temporarily pulling me out of my black hole. I turned around and amongst the crowd of men in the bathroom a black man in an orange coat was staring directly at me, smiling. His smile was gleaming, perfect. I raised my eyebrow at him and could not help but feel the infection of his smile penetrate my foul mood.

I turned around to zip up and just a few seconds later turned around to meet this man. He was nowhere to be seen. His bright orange coat would have shown out amongst the drab and black of most of the individuals currently crowding the tiled room.

I worked my way out of the bathroom and into the hallway, intrigued. Up and down the hallway for hundreds of feet people were milling about, but he was nowhere to be found. I spent a few minutes looking into this shop and that shop, but he was gone. Mystified and a bit shaken, I couldn’t help but feel like there was a reason he ran into me at that particular point. A reason that I couldn’t help but smile a little bit for the first time in days. I wrote about it in my journal and closed it, not feeling the need to write in it again for the rest of the trip home.

Seeing my brothers again for the first time in ten years was an eye opening experience. The last time they saw me I was a petulant child trying to destroy everything in my path. When they saw me they could feel the dark pain, and from brothers that normally teased me, they sat and listened- in that one day that I saw them I became closer to them then I had been my whole life.

I realized that family is absolutely the most sure thing you can count on. I wasn’t ready to accept that Jesus was the way, that only through him anything can be done. But I entertained the idea for the first time in twelve years, and that was a major step.

When I came home I met another woman, and after hearing some of my story convinced me to go to church with her. I was very against it at first, but I eventually meandered my way into Real Life Christian church one Sunday. I sat in my chair and the most amazing thing happened to me.

The following is a description of how I felt, some of the images did in fact pass through my cerebral cortex, but much of the blanks are filled in as I become more able to understand exactly what happened to me that fateful day.

After the worship, I closed my eyes and bowed my head. Through the entire service I fell into a sort of daydream. I was underneath the earth, all the dirt above me being the pain and suffering that I had witnessed and been a part of. I could not move, I could not breath. I suddenly felt the earth above me shift and become loose. I started digging. I dug and dug and dug for what seemed days. I realized at that moment that Jesus was providing me a way to fulfillment, a way to overcome the weak roots inside me – and before my eyes, the roots that lay shown and gnarled began to grow back into the ground.

Though I did not see Him, I could feel him. A warm blanket covering my shivering naked body. I was dirty, but I was warm. I realized that the only way to salvation was through Christ. The door to my spirit opened and he stood there with his arms open, I fell into them.

After all these years of blasphemy, ego-boosted sense of self control, all the pain I had inflicted on others for the sake of ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ – He was still there. He never left the door when I slammed it on him. He stood there patiently waiting for me to come home. Nothing of this world loves anything that much, I am not worthy of such love. He opened his arms after all this time and said to me, “Welcome home son. We’ve missed you!”. I was humbled on my knees crying wondering how such love existed.

My life is dedicated to serving such a loving God. My deep understanding of pain, and my want of love and joy have created a soldier for God who’s will cannot be broken. I feel his presence every day, and I realized that he was there all along, but I never chose to see Him. How can I be so loved when I was so hateful?

If I can show someone even one-one millionth that kind of love, I will still not be worthy of anything I have, own, am, or will become. And no one will understand that previous statement until they have felt the hand of God upon them.

-Jed