My Living Testimony - Part 3

Tongue Talkers

My body rejected every push of the needle that I drove hard into my veins, each time tearing them a little further apart with blood escaping into tissue, all whilst chasing that illusive rush trying to better the last. Vomiting, cramped and very vague I pursued the climactic hit, the one as good as my first. Every muscle was weak, my flesh pale, my frame thin and drawn from a lack of vitamins and malnourished I continued to down more vodka, snort more coke, smoke more dope and shoot thousands of dollars up my arm. Dying slowly a death the same as thousands that had gone before me, I was in the company of the rich, of movie stars, rock stars and endless nobodies. All victims of the same synonymous choir of addicts, crying out the same chorus, knocking on Heavens door, I can feel it, cold and clammy, death was approaching, empty and unfulfilled, nevertheless I'll just keep going till the weakened muscle in my frail chest gives up.

It was around this time I finally realized that nothing was going to stop this morbid cycle except that if by some miracle there was a God that could rescue me, so I cried out for HELP! I mustered every bit of raw survival scream I had left in me and yelled in desperation and fear of my impending demise. If there really was a God that could save me, I needed Him NOW. I screamed with all that I had in that small apartment, I reflected back to my childhood in the Baptist children's home and thought that from so many people who attended church, surely they couldn't all be so deluded, and that there must have been some truth in all of this. The silence that followed was deafening, I wept bitterly at what had become of me. I needed rescuing or I was dead. I kept a calendar of the drugs bought and money spent and with a large black maker I wrote across it HELP! I still have it to this day as a reminder and souvenir of my past life.

Several months before this final binge I was awarded $40,000 dollars for a payout from an insurance company after I had a work accident and broke one of my elbows. This was the second time in my life that I had broken an elbow. The first was whilst loaded up on barbiturates in North Queensland, Townsville to be exact and a car had sharply turned in front of me coming from the opposite direction whilst I was riding down the main drag on my motorcycle. It was a heavy noisy beast, but I loved to ride it. It seemed to be captured in slow motion as I sailed over the top of the car and landed on my back in a four ways intersection coming down heavily on my left arm. Traffic just watched on, not moving, still and idling. My motorcycle landed on the kerb next to the traffic lights and I bounced back on to the road with my head hitting the bitumen several times just from the motion. No concussion, no bruises just a broken elbow. Needless to say, unlicensed, unregistered and out of it, I needed to get out of there ASAP! I got to my feet and tried to lift the beast but my arm gave way, car doors flew open and a couple of decent people helped me off the road whilst others looked on in disbelief. Later the police arrived and sought out the vehicle that had hit me as it had left the scene. No one was ever charged! Surgery, a week in hospital, a few pins and wire in my elbow, a few drinks, some smoko and I was on the mend. I made a few mates from that stay in hospital and often went drinking with them including some of the nurses. These also drifted out of my life as I moved on.

The case for my injury claim from the work accident seemed to take forever but it came around and in a lump sum payout which was settled out of court. I shot the whole lot up my arm in three months which then brought me to the end of myself! I placed an add in the newspaper for a roommate and in came a tongue talking' babbler from Bribe Island, Queensland. This guy was a Christian, backslidden, but God had mapped out this course of events to bring me to Him. Since the day I cried out to God things started to change around me. All of a sudden the cab I hailed down would have a Christian at the wheel, preaching the gospel to me. Flyer's for Christianity would now end up in my mailbox. I was being pursued in a positive way by Christians and the truth. It started to all make sense. I remembered little things from my childhood that I had forgotten like who was the oldest man in the Bible? Methuselah and The sun shines on the righteous, all sorts of things that seemed to be trivia from my Sunday school days. I even heard scripture quoted on the television which I went and looked up, yes... I had a bible. I still remember it was on marriage and divorce in Matthew, I didn't comprehend at the time what the Lord was saying to me but later I understood He was saying by the Holy Spirit that I was married to the world and divorcing it was what I had to do.
My roommate and I still got high everyday but the funny thing was we would talk of God and of the bible. He would start praying in a language that I had never heard and to me it was beautiful. I wanted him to keep doing it. So here we were two guys drug addicts, on the floor, off our faces, needles,bong's,cones and alcohol laying around, smoking and praying to God! and my roomy, praying in tongues, WOW! what an experience this was. This was all so new and powerful to me, something was happening and I had no idea what. I came to know a presence of peace in my apartment. I put it down to a spirit of a child that had been hit by a car and killed on our street just a month or so earlier hanging around us. How lame was that! Later I knew it was the peaceful presence of the Holy Spirit. I would often speak to the spirit whilst on my own and share what I was doing or laughing with it, it was so normal to me really like I had known this spirit for many years. It was quite natural yet unnatural. Drugs can bend and shape your reality but this was real, nothing that drugs could conjure up or manufacture. This was not in my mind but alive!