Sons & Daughters of Thunder Ministries

I am sitting in a crack house in the deepest darkest pit of addicted hell fully convinced that I have fallen so far and so deep that I can never return to the life I once had. I have deserted and run away from what most people would consider a “good life”. I have been missing for several weeks and nobody knows where I am. I have been smoking crack everyday non-stop without eating or much sleep. The enemy has me convinced that I am hated and despised by everyone I know and love because I have done something so terrible and despicable that now this drug house is my new home and smoking crack is my forever tragic life to live. I have completely cut myself off from all reality and the constant flow of crack cocaine into my system is my only desire. I have abandoned my three children, my loved ones, my close friends, all of my responsibilities and from all the awesome kids that I coach in football and track. One weekday evening I went out for a few drinks at the bar and was supposed to go home afterward but instead found myself snared in an angry trap of a crack house that refuses to let me go. Now the crack cocaine mixed with paralyzing fear, overwhelming shame and smothering guilt have me held captive in a drug den of insurmountable darkness, wickedness and deception. I left my own comfortable house where my children slept with the full intention of going home after a few drinks and I never made it back. The alcohol that night was not strong enough to numb the emptiness, loneliness and the emotional pain that I have always kept buried deep within myself for reasons I do not understand. The steady flow of drinks cannot untangle the confusion in my mind of why I cannot find joy in a life filled with so many great attributes. It is not at all alleviating the suffocating stress that has a strangle hold on my soul, so I went in search of something stronger. I drove the streets for a while and finally found what I was looking for and once again I disappeared into the dark recesses of the violently wicked and insanely unpredictable world of crack cocaine addiction and smoking drugs.

I am sitting in a dark room in a crack house where people come off the streets to buy and smoke crack. I am hiding out in terror from the reality of what I have done realizing my life will never ever be the same again. Paralyzing fear overcomes me while I anguish over my situation looking into a darkness until now, I had never known before.  The confusion is biting at me driving me deeper and deeper into the abyss. I am falling so fast with no chance at stopping into this nasty, stinking, selfish, pitiful hole that I have pride-fully dug for myself once again. This time however, I can’t remember ever having gone this far into the wickedness, falling this deep into the dark pit of addiction, this fast, with absolutely no capacity to figure a way out. I am slowly losing myself to the evil devouring insanity that is stealing anything good that is left inside of me. I am fighting hard to hold on to the memories of my old life but they are just floating further and further away into the distance of my slowly fracturing mind. Like sand falling through my clinched fists, the memories fall from me sadly and all I am left with is this crack house that has become my home and my insatiable desire for more drugs to escape my living worst nightmare. With the pressure of my haunting reality pressing down on me and the inability to shake myself free from the clawing stress, a heavy blanket of cold bitter darkness moves over me as something unseen in the room begins to change. Then there is a knock at the door!

The door opens as I am struggling trying to adjust to the strangeness of my confusingly changed surroundings and the darkness that is taking hold of my entire being. Entering the room is a scraggly, disheveled, old unkempt man with hauntingly piercing blue eyes peeking out through the strands of his filthy matted hair. This man looks like he crawled out from a dirty hole from under an abandoned bridge and sits in the chair to my right and begins to smoke crack. He lights up and takes in a hit of crack as I look at him in my peripheral and then he begins to speak. He starts talking and immediately I feel this tormenting presence begin to gnaw at me. Quickly I am unsettled and become agitated as a vicious wickedness grips me and I begin to gnash my teeth uncontrollably and I am unable to understand what he is saying. I am frozen now in absolute fear and the torment is increasing as it becomes clear to me that this man is unnatural. He is talking very fast and forming complete sentences but once I receive the sentences and hear what he is saying and I understand all the words but they are out of sequence and it sounds like complete gibberish. It is as if something was taking his words after they left his mouth and rearranging the words in the air before they reach my ear. As he continues to speak and unable to decipher this foreign tongue and some sort of devilish code streaming now into my realm, I fall into a drowning torment and I am unable to control the grinding and gnashing of my teeth. My body begins to feel like it is on fire as I suddenly say to myself in absolute horror,” Oh my God, how did I die?  Oh my God, I have died and I am in hell!  Oh my God, how did I die?”  Still gnashing my teeth and my body hot with fire, I frantically look around the room and now I am convinced that I have died and this crack house is my never-ending hell.  “Oh my God, how did I die?’

My mind and my body feel as if they are both sizzling with burning fire and in a panic still gnashing my teeth violently, my eyes darting around the room I struggle to catch a glimpse of anything that will make sense to me and tell me that this isn’t true.  All I recognize is what I perceive to be as my everlasting hell. “Oh my God, how did I die?”  The more I say to myself, “This can’t be!”, the more I realize that it is and that I am now dead and in some kind of bizarre strange hell lost forever in its tormenting midst. This is now my reality as I absolutely without any doubt whatsoever believe that I have somehow died in this crack house and now my soul is trapped here for eternity. I try to remember the event that caused my death thinking that maybe I had overdosed or someone had shot me and I began checking my body for bullet holes.  “Where was I shot? “I am panic stricken and cannot remember my death so I begin to say to myself like a broken record in utter grieving defeat, “How did I die?  How did I die? How did I die?”  I then begin bargaining with myself in desperation saying, “I know I was alive, but somehow I must have died when the room changed and I fell into this purgatory.  Please Lord; do not let this be my drug addicted hell forever!  Please Lord do not let this be!”  I want to remember my death so I can come to terms with my new reality and I try with all of might to recall the events, but every stream of questioning thought always runs into a wall, a dead end which leaves me stranded saying to myself once again, “How did I die?” In final demoralizing agonizing utter defeat, with all the life knocked out of me and the realization that I have lost my salvation and now have to spend eternity in this crack house hell, I say to myself, “My poor children!”

Looking back now into that nightmare, I cannot describe accurately in words the sheer terror, absolute horror or agonizing defeat that encapsulated this totally devastating moment. The moment in my life when all the fight I ever had was sucked out of me as I realized I was defeated in this wicked game that I had played for so long and now had finally come to an end and I had lost and the final price to pay was the eternal resting or in the case eternal un-resting place for my soul in this crack house hell. I was absolutely without a shadow of a doubt certain that I was in hell and would be separated from God for all eternity.  I thought to myself, “How stupid I could have been for allowing this to happen to me when all along I knew better and new that crack cocaine kills and destroys!” I just always thought in my arrogance and pride that there is no way that this would ever happen to me. Another thought that haunted me was that I thought I had pushed the envelope and played this game with crack cocaine too many times that finally this time the crack got me and death had come knocking on my door and I had answered and let the grim reaper walk on in through the wicked smoke that I was bringing into my lungs. I believed that because I had forsaken my children and abandoned my life to be in this crack house that it would be my twisted hell forever.  I was convinced! I was completely overcome with grief to a point where my soul cracked and shattered into a million pieces and my spirit was poured out like dirty bath water. I thought that this scene in this crack house was my hell and that the scene would play over and over again for eternity.

This was my reality at this moment in time! Now I know, based upon this experience, on a mental and an emotional level, what it must feel like for your soul to fall through the windowpane of hell with no chance of return. When that room changed, I actually felt myself go somewhere different, some other alternate reality from where I had been.  Even though I did not die and hell was not my eternal destination, in that moment in time hell became my reality and I was terrified! At one point the torment became so unbearable, I finally cried out in anguish a gut-wrenching primal scream and yelled as loud as I possibly could,” Stooooooooooooooppppppp!” The scream that I let out in that moment was a terror filled excruciating cry for help. That yell, as you can imagine, cleared the room of fellow crackheads and I was left alone with myself to try and unravel the situation. All alone and still feeling like I was somewhere different from where I had been before when the room changed, I began to pray!  I kept asking God to forgive me and make this not be real and get me out of this place that I believed was hell. I begged him to show me that this was not real. I cried out to him to save me from hell.

Slowly I began to feel a calmness come over me and the room began to change again and I was able to finally breathe. I came back to my senses and the true harsh reality that I was sitting in a crack house and had abandoned my children and my life, and continuing on this path was seriously leaving my soul and my life in doubt.  I was under spiritual attack and once again the enemy was trying to destroy me through my addiction. Along with the enemy, the world, my own addicted flesh and carnal mind, I had become an enemy unto myself by continuing to pour an endless stream of wickedly dangerous drugs into my body with reckless abandon and I was going down fast. This event was the beginning of the end for me living in defeat of my addiction and set me on a crash course encounter with the devil himself and a soul and life changing deliverance by my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ! My addiction now had come to a pinnacle in the battle for my eternal spirit and soul between the prince of darkness and the Lord of Light as I was riding this death horse of addiction straight into the darkness and hell of absolute destruction.

PSALM 18:4-6 (KJV)

The sorrows of death compassed me, and the floods of ungodly men made me afraid. The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death prevented me. In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even into his ears.