faith unfaded

As I’ve been giving my testimony there’s one story that horrifies people. I tell it today as if I’m merely recapping the latest Law & Order episode but that hasn’t always been the case.

For years I wanted revenge!

I was 17 and had been doing cocaine in a local motel with an older man I’d just met. Apparently I overdosed because the next thing I knew, I was waking up to him tying bricks around my ankles about to throw me into the Red River.

“Oh, sh—! You’re alive….” he stuttered as my eyes fluttered opened.

Quickly taking in the scene around me, my mind tried to process what was happening. “You were going to kill me?!” I’d screeched.

Calm and collected, he replied as if my life held no value whatsoever. “I was pretty sure you were already dead and I couldn’t be caught with no cop’s kid.”

He simply untied the bricks and we rode in silence back to my car at the hotel where I got in without a second glance and drove straight home to my family. I never uttered a word of the incident for years.

I couldn’t dare incriminate myself.

But a couple of years ago, as I started processing my past, I began discussing it all. I found that memories held less tormenting power the more I talked about them. When I moved back home, I went on an informal Accountability and Apology tour. Making amends for those I’d wronged and demanding answers from those who’d wronged me, very few escaped my wrath or remorse. I was trying desperately to make peace with my past and I had a checklist of people to visit.

He was at the top of my list but it had been almost 40 years and I never even knew his last name. Using the detective skills my dad taught me as a child, the journalistic research I’d been learning at the time, and the benefits of small-time life, I found not only his full name but his address within three days. I was ready to confront him. The only question was whether or not I was going to do it live on TikTok.

I was still in my Vicious Era.

I drove over late one night and sat outside his house. I was trying to get things right with God while still keeping the door open to the devil so I was torn. Forgive or annihilate? This memory had tormented me for a long time. He deserved to suffer. Maybe I’d spare his wife the grief and make sure I confronted him while she was gone. I drove home.

A couple of days later I went back, ready for battle. This man was finally going to answer for what he’d done. But something happened.

Somehow in all my fury, I’d never allowed this man to age in my mind. He’d been in his 40’s then but the man I saw walk outside was now in his 80’s and he was pushing his wife in a wheelchair.

Did I really need to blow up this man’s life? Surely it had been difficult for a while if he’d remained on drugs. Maybe he’d found Jesus in the four decades since. Maybe he was the same man he always was.

It didn’t matter. If my anger was a balloon, the knot had been untied and the air seeped out that day until all that was left was a piece of limp latex. It was the day I learned to let sleeping dogs lie.

I didn’t need to see anyone else. I didn’t need any more answers. It was time to put the rest of my past at the foot of the cross. It was time to close the door to the devil myself and let it all go. Anger gives Satan a foothold and he’d had a hold on me for long enough.

I’d always rested on Exodus 14:14: The Lord shall fight for you and you shall hold your peace.

But I learned something that day. You aren’t supposed to be the hype man for the fight. Peace never comes when violence and anger are on the stage even if you tag God in.

Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. We can only move forward with our eyes on Christ and our hearts and minds unburdened with the past.

Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. Isaiah 43:18-19