What a terrible savior am I
Yesterday I posted an encounter I had with Jesus when I was a teen. This second of three posts describes my attempt at cleaning myself up and taking charge of my destiny. Like so many others, I decided that if I could get good enough, I probably wouldn’t need to upend my life by receiving Christ. The thing I didn’t reckon with was this: I sucked at being my own savior. Therefore, I have entitled this part “What a terrible savior am I”.
My testimony Part 2:
After Jesus appeared to me while I was in an opium-induced hallucination back in January, 1972, I decided that I needed to stop all my drugging and drinking. After all, I would be a Christian some day. This began a very frustrating, legalistic season in my life. I stopped drinking; I stopped doing drugs; I was working my way to Heaven.
This lasted a good year and a half…but then I went to college. There was no way I could attend Party School, USA, and not join in on the fun! Therefore, I compromised with my savior (who was, frankly, me, myself, and I at the time): I could drink all I wanted to, but no dope.
Quite honestly, I learned something profound through that decision. Improving myself was not the same thing as being a new creature. I had tried to be good for God; however, I was terribly bored with that lifestyle, and deep down, I knew I still wanted to party.
I jumped into freshman year with gusto. Five of us—three gals and two guys—became a close-knit band, gallivanting from party to party, kegger to kegger, and bar to bar. I taught them camp songs that we sang at the top of our lungs through the streets of the campus following our nights of drinking; after that we would return to the dorm and buy chocolate milk as a chaser, always throwing the empty cartons on the roof of the dorm lobby. After the five of us parted ways for the evening, it was my practice to sit on the landing of the seventh floor stairwell and talk to God about the evening’s adventure.
Life was good; I was a good person—I wasn’t doing drugs and I was keeping the lines of communication open with God. I was pretty much in charge of life and doing a darn good job of it. And then came the summer.
I had been assigned the role of primitive camp director at my summer camp. I loved that camp, I loved the woods, I loved primitive camp, I loved the magic of it all. However, there was one problem. I made a lousy primitive camp director. I could build fires and shelters with the best of them; I could spit a watermelon seed further than most; however, I had no clue how to build a diving tower, the premier project every summer at primitive camp. You’d think I’d just tell the camp director that neither I nor the young man hired to assist me had any idea how to manage that job, but as a daughter of the seventies, “I was woman, hear me roar,” and I couldn’t swallow my pride enough to admit “WE NEED HELP OVER HERE!” Two sessions later—and no tower—sent up a big red flag back at main camp: Get a skilled male counselor over to primitive camp and do it now!
Although I felt relieved, the whole thing mortified me. No one else thought anything about it (except probably the male counselor who lost his job); however it left me feeling like a total failure. My fantasy of being a super woods-woman was crushed; frankly, by the end of that summer, I was spiraling into disillusionment and near self-loathing.
Sophomore year couldn’t come too quickly. My two female friends had joined sororities, but I still had my trusty partners-in-crime, John and Charlie. We partied our way through first semester, and on Halloween, I decided to take a little alcoholic trip down memory lane. I purchased a bottle of Boone’s Farm apple wine and a six-pack of beer—the first smorgasbord of liquor I got pass-out drunk on back in high school. Dressed as Mary Poppins, I downed all of it as I wandered the campus with Charlie, John, and a few others. And I discovered something that utterly shook my already-fragile frame of mind—I wasn’t getting drunk; I wasn’t even tipsy. I needed far more alcohol to achieve far less! And then it dawned on me—I had become an alcoholic, just like my dad.
The next morning, November first, I woke up early, fighting a growing, gnawing sense of panic—I’m out of control! I’m not in charge of my life; I’m a mess! My fantasy about my personal invincibility had been eroding rapidly ever since the diving tower fiasco; and now here I was—an alcoholic at nineteen years old. And I knew I could do nothing about it.
I grabbed a Good News for Modern Man: New Testament and Psalms which I had acquired earlier in my quest for truth and headed out to the only place of refuge I could think of—the woods toward the edge of campus.
I made my way to a creek, and with tears streaming down my face, I trudged down the dried up creek bed, ashamed to speak to the God I once thought I had all but figured out. The sense of guilt and unworthiness overwhelmed me as I carefully held the Bible, frightened of the contrast between its purity and my sin.
It fell open. Fearing to read it, but needing to with every fiber of my being, I saw the heading: Psalm 51.
1Be merciful to me, O God,
because of your constant love.
Because of your great mercy
wipe away my sins!
2 Wash away all my evil
and make me clean from my sin!
3 I recognize my faults;
I am always conscious of my sins.
4 I have sinned against you—only against you—
and done what you consider evil.
So you are right in judging me;
you are justified in condemning me.
I remembered the jury in that hallucination so long ago. I continued reading.
7Remove my sin, and I will be clean;
wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.
I wanted nothing more than to feel clean again.
10Create a pure heart in me, O God,
and put a new and loyal spirit in me.
11 Do not banish me from your presence;
do not take your holy spirit away from me.
12 Give me again the joy that comes from your salvation,
and make me willing to obey you.
13 Then I will teach sinners your commands,
and they will turn back to you.
With all my heart I desired that.
17 My sacrifice is a humble spirit, O God;
you will not reject a humble and repentant heart. (Good News Translation)
Feeling lifted but still heavy-hearted, I picked my way back out of the creek bed, through the woods, and back to the dorm.
© 2015, Dorothy Frick, and updated 2017.
Next: December 29, 1974—Jesus to the rescue
Read MoreJesus quieted the jury
My testimony Part 1:
One of the last stanzas in the carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem” asks this of the Lord:
“O holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born in us today.” (Phillips Brookes, 1868)
This birth is exactly what happened within me in 1974, four days after Christmas. I want to take a few days to share with you my personal journey to both the manger and the cross. Perhaps my story is somewhat non-traditional; however, as this same carol declares:
“No ear may hear His coming,
But in this world of sin,
Where meek souls will receive Him still,
The dear Christ enters in.”
I was raised in a “Christian” family; we were Presbyterian, but the church we attended in the sixties focused more on issues of social relevance than it did the state of our souls. As far as I could tell, everyone went to Heaven if they were good; Hell was likely a really bad state of mind; and the devil was either an allegorical representation of evil or a red-pajama’d fairy tale, believed in only by the weak-minded.
My mom had been raised by a staunch southern Baptist. She and her sisters married intellectual men and shunned the more “primitive” demonstration of Christianity. Whereas Mom and Dad held to the ritual of denominational Protestantism, my aunts and their spouses ran as far away from religion as they could. Grandma was the “black sheep” of the family; we visited her only because we had to; we put up with her praying over the meals only because we had to; we tolerated her “are you saved?” inquiries only because that was part of the whole package of who she was—and the rules said we had to go see her.
I didn’t mind Grandma, though; I secretly admired her persistence in the face of eye-rolling, dismissive behavior, and condescending comments.
At home, however, with Mom and Dad, religion—especially talk of relationship with God (and even worse, with Jesus)—was taboo. If you wanted to see over-the-top discomfort, just drop the J-bomb. Talk of Jesus was fine at church—where it was safe—but you didn’t bring Him into the conversation at home unless you wanted to be branded a religious fanatic like Grandma.
One snowy night late in January of 1972 after a high school basketball game, my date and I planned to go to a party. He took a detour to a park where he showed me two joints that he wanted to share with me. I was game, but told him that they would likely have no effect on me—I’d smoked pot eleven times before without any noticeable results. (Have I ever mentioned that one of my quirks is an OCD tendency to count things?) He assured me that these were different—they were laced with opium.
When we got back to his car after puffing them down to nothing, I said to him, “I told you these would have no effect…” And then my words echoed back at me, again and again.
As he drove to the party, I was in a virtual echo-chamber. I could see nothing but flashes and sparkles. He commented to me as he was driving, “That tree just turned into a pine cone.”
Unconcerned about having a hallucinating chauffeur driving me around the streets of our town, I replied, “Give my regards to its mother.” I was too busy in my echo-chamber to give much thought to safety.
And then a series of hallucinations happened that resulted in a type of “line in the sand” between the Lord and me. First, as I looked out of the big windshield on that dark January night, I saw my mom’s loving face filling a brilliant blue sky. I became terribly convicted, realizing that I was breaking massive rules, potentially hurting her very deeply. Then her face was gone, and I saw the dark expanse of the starry heavens and thought, “God can see me!” so I ducked below the dashboard in an attempt to hide from the Almighty.
What happened next forever changed the way I viewed Jesus. Immediately I was at my trial on Judgment Day (not a popular topic in the particular mainline denominational church I attended). I was about to be sentenced to Hell by a raging jury; they shouted at me with faces filled with fury, pounding their fists. I stood with my head hung down knowing I deserved no mercy. And then Jesus approached. He was robed in white with a gold cord around His waist and radiated a golden liquid love. He first turned to the jury, raised both hands and then lowered them in a gesture of silence. Begrudgingly, the jury quieted as the Lord turned to me.
I will never forget the love I saw in His face as He gazed into my eyes while speaking to the jury. “This is My own dear daughter whom I love very much. She wants to be with Me. I think she will.”
With that, the hallucination/vision faded. I was back in the car, in a vehicle driven by someone who had just smoked the same stuff I had—and I was very aware of the dangerous position I was in. But a deep sense of peace and God’s protection came over me as I said to myself, “I’ll be a Christian someday.”
© 2015, Dorothy Frick, and updated 2017.
Read MoreApril Fools
Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish, so that he may become wise. 1 Corinthians 3:18
I never would have planned it this way, but I was water baptized on April Fools’ Day. The last thing I would have ever dreamed of doing was to make such a serious act of commitment to Jesus on a day associated with pranks and practical jokes. But God sees things differently.
I had been saved barely three months; yet every time I turned on my newly-discovered Christian radio station, all I heard them talking about was water baptism. I soaked it up, but was utterly perplexed. How do I get someone to baptize me? I pondered. I didn’t go to a traditional church; my church was the Tuesday/Thursday night dorm Bible study. My pride was kicking in—I didn’t want to be laughed at for my ignorance about baptism—but nevertheless, I sought out a seasoned saint in the dorm. She was the ripe old age of 21 and about as learned as Moses. Sheepishly, I asked her to explain it to me.
Instead of teasing me for my limited knowledge, her face lit up. She got on the phone with Rick, the leader of our Bible study, and said, “We’re having baptism tonight. Get everything ready!”
The only problem: I was mortified that it was April Fools’ Day! Wouldn’t I dishonor God and open Him up to ridicule if—of all days—I was baptized on April Fools? I almost backed out.
When my wise counselor perceived my dilemma, she assured me that God would not be offended if I got baptized on April first. In fact, she shared, I was obeying Scripture—I was allowing myself to be foolish so that I could become truly wise (see 1 Corinthians 3:18). It was settled. I was getting baptized—that very night.
This was the first of many baptisms I attended while in college; every one of them was an event full of love, joy, camaraderie, and the first blush of commitment to Jesus Christ as new believers obeyed the command to be baptized in the name of Jesus.
Before I was saved I had watched this motley crew of Christians trek back to the dorm more than once after water baptisms late at night—that’s how I knew who the believers in the dorm were when I needed them later on—and here I was—on April Fools’ Day, 1975, doing the same thing. Who would have thought?
The group of fifteen or so of us hiked down to the rock quarry across campus. Some of the guys had gone ahead of us to build a huge bonfire on the bank. Several of the ladies were carrying towels and blankets. I invited three very special friends who didn’t attend our Bible study to witness my “burial and resurrection”—Linda, who was unsaved; Miriam, who was from a prominent family in her mainline Protestant church; and Carla, who was backslidden.
Rick shared on water baptism from the Bible: “Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). By the light of the fire, I saw joy and expectation on everyone’s faces—except for Linda’s, Miriam’s, and Carla’s. Their heads hung low; none of them gave eye contact either to Rick or to me.
It was time. Around 8:30, with stars twinkling in the sky, I followed Rick (another Moses-type to me—he was nearly 22 and had been saved most of his life) into the quarry. The water took my breath away, it was so cold, but the joy I was experiencing warmed me to the core.
“Dorothy, have you received Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” Rick asked.
“Yes,” I responded.
“Then in front of these witnesses, I baptize you in the name of Jesus!” And with that, he dunked me under the nearly-freezing water and pulled me back up.
On the bank, I heard whooping and hollering, followed by guitar and the sound of loud, jubilant singing:
“Break forth into joy, oh my soul! Break forth into, oh my soul!
For in the presence of the Lord, there is joy forevermore;
Break forth, break forth into joy, oh my soul!”
As Rick and I emerged from the water, both of us were greeted with blankets wrapped around our shoulders; and as I stood by the fire, I received joyful hugs all around. Everyone was beaming ear to ear, worshiping around the crackling bonfire—everyone, that is, except Linda, Miriam, and Carla. All three of them—the unsaved, the religious, and the backslider—were weeping uncontrollably.
God was touching each one of them, very deeply, that April Fools night.
Linda got saved less than a year later, getting baptized in the quarry herself in the dead of winter when we had to break the ice covering it—and now she is a prominent businesswoman in my area; Miriam wrote me a beautiful letter describing how the Scriptures came alive to her that night and how “newness of life” meant something new to her now, as well; and Carla went on to return to her first love, Jesus—and she has been winning souls to Him ever since.
As for me, I was through with trying to appear wise. I realized that the wisdom of the world was absolute foolishness to God; if I truly wanted to be wise, I must become foolish first—with the foolishness of God. And then—and only then—would I become wise.
And that’s no April Fools.
Dorothy
Read MoreI am going to McDonald’s
A little over a year ago, a godly Bible teacher, Charles Capps, passed into Heaven. He was well-known for his teachings on the power of the tongue and the importance of believing and speaking the Word of God.
The Lord used Brother Capps in a very unusual way at a critical moment in my life, in a very tense situation long ago—and he wasn’t even there!
When I was born again, I jumped in with both feet. In my twenties, I frequently went out to the streets, along with other young Christians, to witness—sharing the Gospel and praying with the lost. The joy and freedom of expressing the good news with someone who was hungry for Jesus motivated my friends and me to continue going back, weekend after weekend.
As the church I attended grew to mega-church proportions, we were blessed to sit under the teaching of some of the finest Bible teachers in the country. One of those teachers was Charles Capps. At the same time that we were hosting a growing number of national speakers, just about everything else we did in that church was becoming more and more structured and organized. This included the weekend street-preaching jaunts.
Interest in this personal evangelism had spread in the church I was attending, and leadership was put in charge of this radical group of teens, twenties, and thirties for the sake of safety, oversight, and training for those who were new to one-on-one evangelism.
One weekend evening in my late twenties, we were ready to “hit the streets”. Small teams were assigned for the evening’s adventure, and two newer believers, a young man and woman, were assigned to accompany me.
When we arrived downtown, we met under the Gateway Arch and prayed together as a large group. We then made arrangements to meet back at McDonald’s—housed on a riverboat and anchored opposite the south leg of the Arch on the Mississippi River.
My little group took off together and each of us shared with various individuals as we walked along the cobblestone road that ran parallel to the river. Toward the end of the evening, we climbed up the wide set of steps that arced toward the south leg of the Arch and began sharing the gospel with a young woman we met near the top.
She was receptive to the message, and as I was about to ask her if she would like to pray with us, I noticed that my two companions had ditched me in favor of McDonald’s—an obvious Big Mac attack. Let ‘em go, I thought; this lady wants to receive Jesus.
But just as I was about to pray with her, her eyes nearly bugged out of her head, and backing away quickly, she just took off. Huh? I was wondering, perplexed. And as I turned around, I understood why that young woman had skedaddled so abruptly.
I found myself surrounded by six to eight young men, circling closely in on me. But before I had time to get frightened, something very unusual happened.
Suddenly, I was at my church. Oh, yeah, my body was still standing on the steps going up to the south leg of the Arch and I was still surrounded by six to eight strange young men, but in my spirit I was at church. I was at a meeting in which Charles Capps was speaking, and I could see and hear everything with crystal clarity. There he was, standing behind the pulpit preaching, and I could see the scalp on his head through his familiar crew cut—that’s just how vivid this “vision” was. And he was preaching a message about Jesus in a boat in the middle of a storm.
With my body still standing on the steps leading to the south leg of the Arch, Brother Capps was preaching in his Arkansas twang, “Jesus said, ‘Let us go to the other side of the lake’ and my brother, sister, if Jesus said, ‘Let us go to the other side of the lake,’ then nothing—no devil, no storm, no wind, no waves—nothing could stop Him from goin’ to the other side of the lake.”
And with that, there I was, back at the Arch, surrounded by this group of men. I noticed Riverboat McDonald’s, and I said out loud and with great authority, “I am going to McDonald’s.”
I don’t have a clue what those guys thought when I said this, but I passed through the midst of them without so much as a finger touching my body. As I stepped out of the circle and down the steps, the Holy Ghost spoke very clearly to my heart, “Walk, don’t run. Hold your head high, and don’t look back.”
I did as I was instructed, and walked, step by step, down that wide, curving stairway. Boom, boom, boom, my steps pounded decisively as I marched to the street below.
“Oooh, baby! You got fries with that shake?” they called out after me, along with other unmentionable “compliments”.
I never looked back. When I got to the street, I crossed it with my head held high. Boom, boom, boom, my marching feet blasted as I stomped across the gangplank bridge to McDonald’s. Walking tall and in the authority of Christ, I reached the threshold. Never before had the Golden Arches looked so good.
I opened the door and stepped into the wonderfully lit, French fry-soaked atmosphere. There, seated inside, were my two young team members and everyone else. “Hi, Dorothy! What took you so long? We’ve got a seat for you!”
And as the reality of what just happened dawned on me, my knees turned to Jello and buckled beneath me—and then I got up and ordered some fries.
Brother Capps returned to that church years later and I had the opportunity to share my story with him. He didn’t say a word; he just smiled, nodded his head, and then walked away.
May the help you need be made abundantly plain by the Holy Spirit in your time of trouble. The Lord is faithful.
Dorothy
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Psalm 46:1b
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My own personal Pentecost
And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance. Acts 2:4
I plan to continue discussing the shift in prayer direction God gave me in April, but May 10th is a very important anniversary for me in my walk with God. Therefore, I would like to share about it with you before I pick back up on last week’s topic.
It was Saturday night on the 10th of May, 1975. I had just finished finals and was back in my hometown to prepare for my camp counseling assignment starting in June.
I was visiting a church in town that night with a friend from the college Bible study and her mother. This church had been experiencing power of the “Jesus Move”, and I had heard a tale (confirmed since then by many unrelated witnesses) about a strange phenomenon that had happened there sometime before the evening I attended.
According to what I heard, it happened something like this. At some point in one of the worship services, while the congregation was praising God in song, flames of fires were seen—not inside the building by the congregants, but outside, shooting up from the roof—by individuals in the neighborhood and folks passing by on the highway. Those inside worshipping God were oblivious to the sign from God until their service was invaded by the local fire department after several calls had come in to the station, alerting them to the church fire. I’m imagining that the leadership of that church could have paraphrased Peter in Acts 2:15-19, “This building is not on fire as you suppose, but this is what was spoken of through the prophet Joel…I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind…and I will grant wonders in the sky above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke” (emphasis added).
The night I visited was relatively tame in comparison, but first, let me backtrack before I describe what took place that evening.
I had gotten saved at the end of December, ’74, and was water baptized in April. I was sold out to Jesus who had visited me, saved me, and landed me in a fervent, intimate body of young believers. But I lacked something that I desired with all my heart—the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues.
I knew about it because when my Bible study friends worshipped God and communed with Him, I sometimes observed their mouths moving quickly but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Just about all of them did it; it intrigued me, so I asked one of them about it.
“Oh! We’re just praying in the Holy Spirit!” she explained. “We’re speaking in tongues. You can read about it in Acts 2.” That’s all she said, and I went away all the more hungry, on a mission from God to learn about this mysterious baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in other tongues.
I read Acts 2 and everything else in the Bible I could find about the subject and kept straining in the meetings to hear what it sounded like. But these young people were “stealth” tongues-talkers; they did it regularly, but no one could hear their heavenly language! To this day, I enjoy praying that way at times when I’m in a crowd—a stealth tongues-talker in the midst of the world!
I lived on the seventh floor of my dorm and often sat on the heating register that was by the window as I looked out on the campus. More times than I can count that semester, I sat in that spot, mirror in hand, and said to the Lord, “Fill me with the Holy Ghost now!” And I would look in the mirror to see if He was moving my mouth at all. Nothing. That only resulted in this: I became even hungrier for the baptism in the Holy Spirit.
And there I was, on May 10, 1975, sitting in this vibrant church next to my friend and her mom, worshipping God, when a very strange thing happened. My tongue started “jumping around” in my mouth and I began to make quiet clicking noises. It didn’t scare me at all; it was soothing, but I thought it was odd.
I leaned over to my friend and whispered, “My tongue is clicking around in my mouth.”
She began punch-slapping me in the arm and whispered enthusiastically, “Oooo! Ooooo! Ooooo! You’ve got the Holy Ghost!”
So this is what it’s all about, I thought and kept on clicking quietly, still rather puzzled by the clicks.
After the meeting, I told my friend’s mom what I had experienced with the clicking, and she repeated her daughter, verbatim, “Oooo! Ooooo! Ooooo! You’ve got the Holy Ghost!” But she added a bit of wisdom to that and said, “Keep practicing. You can speak in tongues whenever you want now as you pray, and as you practice, it’ll sound more like a real language; you’ll grow in it.”
So my personal Pentecost launched me into a new avenue of prayer and communion with God. I practiced whenever I was alone, my language started sounding more real to me—not just clicks—and I grew in it, just like Mrs. Belt said would happen.
But then, five or six years later, as a young teacher, I went to the movies and watched a quirky comedy. It was about an empty Coke bottle falling out of a plane over Botswana, Africa, and landing on the head of a sweet bushman who lived a primitive life there with his tribe. The chaos and comedy and national crisis that unfolded were memorable enough (I love good comedies), but what gripped my gut with holy awe was this: the bushman’s language—clicks made inside his mouth by his tongue “jumping around” in there—was the very language I spoke on May 10th, 1975, when I was first baptized in the Holy Spirit!
Thirty-nine years later I’m still praying in the Holy Ghost, and I am still deeply grateful for this wonderful gift!
Dorothy
For these men are not drunk, as you suppose… Acts 2:15a
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