Up on the Mountain

We were living up on Mt Hood in the little community of Zigzag.  Yes there really is such a place. The atmosphere up there was as weird as we were which was no surprise.

I never will forget the night that we found the house that we ended renting. It was in the early fall of 1987. Joani and I and had packed up our Suburban with an air mattress, cooler and a grill. We grabbed our Golden Retriever Riley, and headed out to tour Oregon. We had an incredible time. Since I made my living on the black market we chose time as if it was our own.

Somehow we wound up in Zigzag, a little berg about halfway up Mt Hood.  I remember pulling off of Highway 26.  There was a cleared piece of ground about 5 acres or so. We got out of the vehicle, the dog anxious to run and to relieve himself. It was then I looked up into the sky. I will never forget the sky that night! The stars were white and intense against a backdrop of deep purple. It more than amazed me it instantly moved my consciousness back in time 13 years.

I was a teenager in South Carolina; it was the summer of 1974. Those were wild times in the south and particularly wild in John Laney’s life. I was an absolute renegade. God was the farthest thing from mind. I started using pot when I was about thirteen and I had escalated into almost all the other drugs. That night I had taken two hits of LSD. A couple of my friends and I went out to a hayfield that was owned by a relative of mine. The hay was high, about three feet; I looked up into the sky. It felt like I could reach up and touch the stars. The night was alive, the stars white against the super dark sky. I looked across the hayfield as the wind began to blow. Suddenly the hay looked like the waves or the shifting tide of the sea. I lay down and looked up, suddenly everything opened up to me. I can’t explain it except to say that I had an epiphany. I looked up and imagined all the solar systems around the innumerable stars. I looked down at the dirt and I imagined the structure of the molecule, I was taken aback by the similarity. I thought “it looks the same, when you look at the solar system and you look at the molecule, they look the same”. I began to ponder time, space, and eternity. Suddenly I knew that God was real! I not only knew He was real, but at the time I felt that I had a real good handle on how the creation was brought into being. I was elated, on top of the world. My understanding would bring me incredible success.

When I woke up the next morning I could not remember most of the details. “I should have written it down” I told myself!

Now I am not advocating taking drugs to find God. I tried to duplicate the experience and after several attempts it became apparent what I had experienced was a onetime deal.   (I have gotten close in worship though) But that moment on I had a knowing, an awareness, that this system that we call the universe was created by an all powerful, all knowing God.  I don’t understand how something like that can happen. It is hard or impossible to reconcile religiously. I do understand that on that August night in 1974 I began to experience Grace, from that time on I was a believer in some sense of the word.