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CBN.com – I sat on the sofa in our apartment on Eighty-fifth Street, trying to figure it out. Now that I was a Christian was I supposed to cut my hair, take off my boots, say good-bye to the world I knew best?
That morning I had walked to work feeling great. I wanted to run up to everyone I saw in the street and tell him, "Listen man, let me tell you about Jesus." But — you know. You can’t do that.
When I got to Bookmasters, I put on my clerk’s face and began selling. After a while, a group of young people came into the store. They kept looking at me and whispering. Finally this boy came over.
"Aren’t you Scott Ross?"
"Yeah."
"What are you doing here?"
"Selling books."
"Haven’t you got your show anymore? That’s too bad. We used to think you knew where it was at."
"Not then, man. But now I’m into something heavy."
"Yeah? What?"
And suddenly I was in a trap. What could I possibly say? It would all come out Christianese, the thing I hated. I had "gone forward"? I had "found the Lord"? I was "saved"? In the end I told the kids it was sort of private and after a while they left.
But soon as I had a chance, I went back to the stockroom and prayed: "Lord, this isn’t any good. I want to talk to people like these. Jesus, You’ve got to train me. Please."
When I got back a book was lying on the counter. I started to put it back on the shelf when something prompted me to flip it open. Next minute I was really staring. There, in a footnote, was a reference to Hagerstown.
What a crazy coincidence that this writer should mention the little Maryland town where Nedra and I had first felt Jesus tugging at us. Was this His answer? He’d gotten through to us once in Hagerstown. Were we to go back there, back to Pastor Miles’ church, for the rest of the message?
I sat there at the coffee table in the apartment, trying to get it right. We’d have to move out of this apartment next week in any case; my year’s lease was up, and it was a cinch I couldn’t renew on a clerk’s salary. What if I were to quit my job at Bookmasters and go down and offer my services to Pastor Miles, just whatever menial jobs he had, while we tried to get to know God better . . .
Which is how, a few days later Nedra and I pulled up in front of Mum’s apartment and began to unpack the Chrysler.
"Hi’ya, Scott."
I turned around and there stood Bill Something-or-other, a boy I’d gone to high school with.
"You paying a visit?" Bill asked.
Man, I said to myself: two minutes in town and already the hot-shot who made it in New York is having to eat humble pie.
"No, we’re staying a while. Bill, I’d like you to meet my wife."
"How d’ya do," Bill said. "Too bad things didn’t work out up north."
"They worked out."
"Sure."
Mum and Anne gave us a warm welcome. Too warm in a way. Mum couldn’t do enough for us, and over the next few days I saw Nedra wondering where she fitted in. It was always "Char-rles," with a burr. "Char-rles your bath is ready." "Don’t bother with supper, Nedra. I know what Char-rles likes." The Little Scottish Mother Bit, Nedra called it. And then there was Anne. Seventeen now, she was quite literally sitting at my feet to hear tales about the big city. It didn’t bode well for our marriage, all the attention I was getting from two women whom I also loved.
Then there was the question of what I should do with my time. I read the Bible a lot and I worked down at the church, sweeping the basement, arranging chairs, helping little old ladies lift things. Which was okay — little old ladies need help. But we never seemed to find much to talk about.
So it all came down to finding a part-time job so we could have our own apartment. One night when Mum and Anne had gone to bed Nedra and I decided to go about house — and job-hunting in a way we’d never tried before.
We’d pray about it.
It was the first time the two of us had ever prayed together and we were so self-conscious we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes. "Jesus," I said, staring hard at the carpet, "we’re having hassles. We can’t hack living in this apartment with no privacy. I need work and we need a place of our own. Amen."
It was a pretty weird prayer, but within ten days both parts of it had been answered. I got a part-time job writing commercials and dong news for a nearby radio station. The job paid the grand sum of $22 a week — even Bookmasters had paid almost five times that much — but with the $22 we were able to rent a tiny apartment a few blocks from Mum’s. The bathroom was down the hall, the furniture almost non-existent, but it had a new kitchen and above all it was our own.
Nedra and I were getting ready for bed, the first night in our new home, when I remembered something I’d read in the Bible just that morning.
"Nedra, do you know what we are?"
"Besides a couple of crazy kids?"
"Yeah. Besides that, we’re like those lepers who never came back to say thank you to Jesus." So, standing there in the bare little bedroom, feeling, this time, not quite so embarrassed, we thanked God for our apartment and for the job. When we switched out the light it was with a sense of being close to something huge.
Perhaps it was just as well that we did not know what lay ahead.
Maybe the problem was that I expected things to be different now that I was a Christian. And they were different, in a way. Jesus, the Bible, prayer — every day I was finding out about a whole new world. It was me where I didn’t see any changes. I remained the same messed-up, self-centered individual I’d been all along. I was still having fear trips — and they could scarcely be drug flashbacks at this late date. I still had the same big-mouth temper that had driven me and Epstein apart.
Only now the person on the receiving end of that temper was Nedra. Moving into the apartment solved things for a few days, then we were scrapping again.
"For one thing, Mr. Scott Ross," Nedra said, "It’s like being in a prison around here. I’m not used to being alone. You go down to that church or off to your job and I stare at the walls. I want to go somewhere today. Let’s go to a movie. Let’s drive to Washington."
And instead of understanding how many adjustments she ways trying to make all at once, I’d blew up at her. If I started taking off, how could I keep a job? And if I didn’t have a job, that meant moving back with Mum. Nedra didn’t need logic, of course, she needed company — but I was too dense to see it.
We had a little respite with a piece of tremendous news. Nedra broke it to me one night as we were walking over to Mum’s. It was a lovely evening, the trees pale with new yellow buds. She must have been waiting for just such a setting.
"Scott . . . we’re going to have a baby."
Right there on the sidewalk we hugged and danced around like crazy. When we told Mum and Anne they broke out the tin of real Scottish shortcake they’d been saving for Anne’s high school graduation party. Things would be all right now. The baby would draw us together and solve all our problems.
But within a week we were shouting again. The strain of getting along on $22 a week, trying to get used to each other, adjusting to the low key life after New York, trying to figure out who Jesus was, getting used to the idea that we would be parents: everything seemed to work together to move our tensions into a new pitch. Becoming Christians hadn’t changed anything, it seemed to me — except to make things worse. We’d lost touch with most of our friends, we were quarreling with each other, we were broke — and then as if things weren’t bad enough, along came the news of the death of a friend.
I was having tea with Mum in her kitchen. On the table sat her radio, one I had sent her from New York. I flipped it on for the news.
"This late word just in," the announcer was saying. "Beatles manager Brian Epstein died this morning in his London apartment. According to police, the cause of death was an overdose of drugs."
I must have gone white or something, because Mum put down her cup. "Are you all right, Char-rles?"
"I knew him, Mum. We fought, but we were friends just the same."
Mum reached over and patted my hand. "I’ll heat up some nice hot broth. It’s good and strong and full of comfort."
I didn’t want the stupid stuff. How many of our friends were going to die of drugs? I thought of Brian Jones. Jimi Hendrix. Peter Yarrow’s brother. Talk was that all of them were in trouble. And what about a thousand young people whose names I didn’t know but whose faces I’d seen, staring up at the stage in a darkened theater, milling around a stage door after a concert, standing in the street outside some hotel entrance. People that I, along with the rest, had helped convince that drugs were a great scene. Suddenly and without warning, I burst into tears.
"It’s no good, Mum. Here’s Eppie gone. He gets in the news, but how many are there no one ever hears about? I know these people, Mum. They’re my people. I’ve got to find some way to help them."
Mum picked up the untouched bowl of broth. "I hope you and Nedra patch things up soon, Char-rles. If you can’t manage your own life, how can you hope to straighten out somebody else’s?"
I knew Mum was right. The week before, after a particularly noisy argument, Nedra had packed a suitcase and flown up to visit her cousin Estelle in New York. After work Monday I drove up to see her.
Estelle’s apartment on Riverside Drive was all antique mirrors, sectional couches and distant hallways. Nedra and I started out lovey-dovey enough, but within an hour I was yelling again. This time the issue was where the baby would be born. Her obstetrician was urging her to decide. Nedra wanted to be in New York, near her mother. I asked what was the matter with the hospital in Hagerstown. That was where she belonged. I had a job, I could support her: her place was with me.
And then all at once I didn’t have a job. The day I got back from visiting Nedra, the station manager came into my office. "Ross, we like your work."
"Thank you."
"We need a full-time air man and you’re it."
"Well, ah- can I think about it?"
The manager looked at me quizzically. "You mean you might not want the job?"
So I had to tell him about the church and how the whole point of coming to Maryland was to spend part of every day over there.
"Well, take it or leave it, fellow. We don’t need a part-timer anymore. Either full time or not at all."
He left, and so did I, to draw my severance pay.
When I called Nedra that night I was in great confusion. She’d have to stay in New York now: her breadwinner wasn’t even pulling down $22 a week. "Lord Jesus," I prayed as I put down the receiver, "was it just my own idea, coming to Hagerstown? I thought down here You could show me Your plan for my life. Maybe, Jesus, You don’t have any plan for me?"
That really scared me — thinking that maybe Jesus Himself couldn’t make anything good out of me. Maybe I’d gone too far the other direction. Maybe when you played around with evil — on purpose, over a period of time — the evil got inside you, and you wouldn’t ever be free of it. With me it had been drugs and booze and illicit sex. With someone else it might be greed, or hate, or stealing, or witchcraft. Whatever it was, maybe I you really gave into it, then even when you stopped doing it, the evil thing went on controlling you.
What scared me was that this other thing, this evil thing, was following me now even into church. I’d be sitting there, trying to pray, trying to find God, when a black suffocating something — like a plastic bag — would close over me, cutting off the air, stifling me. It was getting so I hated to enter the church. But I didn’t know where else to look for Jesus, so I kept going. And it was there, the Sunday after I lost my job, that the thing happened which at first I thought was going to be the answer.
All my life of course I’d known about the baptism in the Holy Spirit. My dad taught that it was a natural part of Christian experience, and that speaking in tongues was a normal sign that it had occurred.
Maybe — only it sure had never happened to me. I still remembered an awful experience when I was fourteen. My folks had sent me to a summer camp in New Jersey run by Pentecostals. It was okay, except every night you had to attend a service in a wooden building literally with sawdust all over the floor. Well, one night a group of grown-ups surrounded me and pushed me down on me knees and began screaming and yelling at me to "receive the Baptism." My nose was full of sawdust and I was sweating and embarrassed, and at last to get away from them I went "Bugla, bugla bugla" and some other nonsense sounds. And the guy who had his hands on my head sang out, "He’s got it! He’s got it!" and every one began crying and praising God, and I split out of there as fast as I could.
Since that night I’d never once prayed for the Baptism, and I certainly wasn’t praying for it now. It was Vernon Miles’ regular Sunday evening service, only this one turned out to be unusual. Every now and then someone would move forward to the kneeling rail where he would begin weeping for his sins. Soon the whole congregation was down front, crying out to God.
Well, I thought, okay, that’s how I feel too at times- certainly I’ve got as much to cry about as anyone. So I went forward and knelt down, only I couldn’t produce any tears. I tried thinking about everything that was going wrong: Nedra up in New York, and me with no job, and not seeing deep changes in myself, and stuff out of my past still pushing me around. Only, with every thought would come a different one, like: I’m sure happy Nedra married me. And I’m glad we’re going to have a baby. And I’m grateful for Pastor Miles and this church until before I knew it instead of weeping I was praising God for everything I could think of . The cushion beneath me so my knees didn’t hurt. The old lady wailing away next to me. This warm summer night. Just being alive.
And all at once to my horror, up from my throat came a deep, loud laugh. I clapped my hands over my mouth. Laughing in church — when I was a child to laugh in the Lord’s house was even worse than smoking or listening to the radio. But the laughter kept bubbling up in me, swelling my chest till I thought I would burst. I tried to force it down, but it kept rising until I wanted to shout for joy. I took my hands away from my mouth to say, "Praise You, Jesus" but the sounds that came out were like no language I’d ever heard. Joyful fluent phrases rushed up, expressing a love and wonder too deep for words.
How long I praised God in my new language I don’t know, but gradually I became aware of their voices praying all around me. The congregation had again gathered to stand behind me. "Thank You, Jesus," one man said, "For giving our brother the Baptism in Your Spirit."
So that’s what it was! I thought back to that hot night in New Jersey, the grunting and sweating, the forced effort. The real gift- how freely and graciously it had come . . .
For a while, as I say, I thought this would be the end of my struggles. With God’s Spirit coming into my life, things would be different at last.
But they weren’t. Differences, sure. A lot of them, and they kept getting bigger. Praising God was a whole other thing, now that I had a prayer language to do it in. I started understanding the Bible like I never could before — and remembering verses when I needed them.
One night after I’d talked to Nedra on the phone I was sitting up in bed praising God. Nedra was staying at her mother’s now, and with the baby coming I guess her mother had decided the marriage was here to stay. Anyhow her mom had talked to me on the phone too and been real friendly, and I was thanking God for that and a lot of other things, and pretty soon I began to thank Him in tongues and even to sing in tongues which was a really fantastic experience.
And suddenly right at the foot of the bed was this glorious shining light. This time the light was in the shape of a man and it spoke to me. Incredible as the whole experience was, I sensed somehow that it was "real". I’d had hallucinations when I was on drugs, but this was different. My head was straight, all my senses normal. What the voice said was, "I am your Lord."
Well I was amazed and wondering why God would appear to me, of all people, when this little thread of doubt crept into my mind.
"You are my Lord?" I said.
"I am you Lord and your God and you are to worship me."
But still something about it wasn’t right. And then I knew. The joy and love I’d been feeling minutes earlier was deserting me, and in its place was fear. That cold, paralyzing fear I’d known in the apartment in New York, hidden this time, but lurking somewhere within that dazzling light.
And all at once into my mind came a passage of scripture I had read days before in Second Timothy: For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power , and of love, and of a sound mind.
"Are you my Lord Jesus Christ?"
For an answer the glorious figure grew brighter still, showering the room with light like a Fourth of July sparkler. And at that thought I almost laughed aloud. Why, it’s like a vaudeville trick, I thought. The lord of the universe doesn’t need to resort to cheap theatrics!
And now into my mind crowded scripture after scripture, complete with chapter and verse:
First John 4:18: There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear; because fear hath torment.
James 4:7: Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
Staring down the thing at the foot of my bed I hurled the verses at it like I was trying to drive off a wild animal with stones. It glowed and swelled a few more times, then grew fainter, and finally vanished altogether.
Man, then I really did praise God! I got up and marched around that bare little apartment like I was at the head of an army. I saw what the Spirit was doing — He was giving me tools to fight with. Tools of discernment. Tools of knowledge. Tools of faith.
Only . . . I would have to use the tools He gave. He wasn’t going to do it for me. And He wasn’t going to change me overnight into some kind of spiritual prodigy. I was still walking around in a body that remembered, and felt, and reacted. To that degree although I was different I was also the same person I’d always been. I could block His activity, miss His message.
Certainly I did not recognize a quite casual invitation at church one day as coming from Him. One of the men asked me if I’d like to drive to Baltimore with him that afternoon to attend a meeting of the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship, a group of charismatic laymen.
I said yes, and then spent the trip wondering why. What could a group of middle-aged businessmen have to do with my situation? It was young people I tuned in with. Whenever I drove up to New York to see Nedra, I’d stop to pick up the fellows who stood at the entrance to the turnpike. I’d have the car radio set at a rock station and right away, we were talking music. When finally the guys asked me something like, "So, what are you into?" and I answered, "Jesus," there’d never be an embarrassed silence. Instead, there’d be real interest like, "Wow, man, that’s heavy. Jesus. How’d you get into that?"
It all came so naturally — coupling music with talking about Him . . . So what was I doing in this drafty cafeteria in Baltimore? I had plenty of time to wonder about it because the main speaker — a guy named Pat Robertson — was delayed by a storm. When he did get there and began to speak, everyone in the audience seemed to already know what he was talking about. He kept referring, in his deep Virginia drawl, to "our Christian TV station," and "our Christian radio station."
Christian radio station? Christian TV station? I could just picture it. Any station run by this Hollywood-handsome square in his neatly pressed suit, was certainly not going to be my kind of outfit. The guy, I was sure, would be an ultra-conservative southern super-dude. I could just see his chalked face if some long-haired people from the rock culture showed up at his sanctified station.
So why did I go up and talk with Pat Robertson after the meeting? Why did he seem so interested when I told him I had been in radio myself?
"What’ve you done?"
I told him. And then for some reason I also found myself telling him about the music-centered people I knew, how hungry they were, how lonesome, how suicidal, even, some of them.
"Listen," Pat Robertson said, "would you come down to Portsmouth to do a talk show with me? I’d like to hear more about these friends of yours."
Which is how it happened that a few days later I was driving through Portsmouth looking for the headquarters of the Christian Broadcasting Network. I pulled up in front of a garage-like building which housed the offices of WXRI radio, and a few moments later was sitting with Pat Robertson in the studio. We talked on the air about the generation of young men and women like Nedra and me who were trying to say something about themselves and their world through their culture and their music.
We were still on the air when Pat’s secretary stepped into the studio and handed him a letter. Pat read it to himself, then said into the mike: "This is a real coincidence. Here we are talking about drugs and alternate life styles and in the morning mail comes this letter from a college girl who asks why we never speak about these things."
Pat read the letter aloud, all but names and places. The girl had been involved in drugs and sex and wanted to know if religion had anything better to offer.
When the program was over, Pat and I talked again about the timing of that letter. Was it a nudge from God? Maybe we were to start a music-and-talk show designed to reach people just like this girl. But, you know, ideas are easy to come by. We shook hands in the hallway and said the usual things like, "We’ll be in touch."
And then, out in the parking lot, a sensation of fear swept over me. I got in the car and leaned my head back. The sides of the car began to melt, turning soft, turning to rubber. I didn’t see how it could be a chemical phenomenon: by now I’d been off drugs over five months.
I ran back into the studio. The floor, the walls were spongy and sagging. The receptionist in the hallway looked at me. "You all right?" she said. She jumped up from the desk. "No, you’re not all right!"
The girl ran down the hall calling, "Pat! Pat!"
Pat and two other guys showed up. Without asking questions they, the receptionist and a couple of secretaries formed a circle around me. "Satan, you foul enemy," said Pat in a voice which rang with authority, "we stand together in the power of Jesus against this attack. This man is no longer yours! In the name of Jesus, we command you to leave him alone!"
Even as he spoke I felt the dizziness lift, the numbness in my hands and legs disappear, the fear pass.
I was stunned by the speed of it. I knew these fear attacks, knew how long it took to recover from one of them. With Bible verses, with prayer, even with prayer in tongues, I’d never fought free in under four of five hours. But this release had been almost instantaneous. What was the difference? "We stand together," Pat had said . . . I wanted to ask him about it, but he was talking eagerly on about the new show idea.
"You know, Scott," he said, "Satan only fights what threatens him. I think this attack is a sign that our conversation a minute ago was important. Think some more about a music-and-talk show for CBN, would you? Pray about it. Talk to your wife about it."
It was obvious that Pat regarded that circle of believers in the hallway and the instant answer to prayer as normal procedure. All the way back to Hagerstown I puzzled over those words. We stand together . . .
I did call Nedra in New York that night. I tried to present a flat and neutral picture of the radio show idea, but I wasn’t fooling anyone. Nedra laughed.
"You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you, Scott?"
"Yeah, I guess I have."
That weekend I drove up to see her. Martin was back from England and Saturday night we went down to his apartment on Central Park South. It was the same old scene. Acid smoke so heavy you could get high just breathing, bottles of booze on every table top. Besides Martin and the perpetually present, vague-faced girls, all the members of The Lost Souls were there. We got a terrific welcome.
"Nedra! Scott! We thought you were dead."
"Someone said you were in a monastery."
They were delighted to see that Nedra was pregnant, and proposed that we celebrate by getting stoned. There was great confusion when we refused.
"You mean you’ve stayed clean?"
"We’ve got all the high we need, man," I said.
They asked a lot of questions, but I didn’t feel like they were listening to the answers. They wanted to talk about the troubles The Souls were facing after Eppie’s death.
Nedra’s doctor said no late nights, so after a while I took her back to her mother’s. I felt restless so I set out walking nowhere particular, just roaming lies and miles through the city. All at once I noticed a street sign. Sixty-eighth Street. I was just around the corner from Rock Church! My heart raced. I’d go there. I’d go visit Pastor Vick!
I started to run. There, tucked away among the elegant townhouses was the little church that had meant so much to Nedra and me. I smiled, remembering again the wild group of friends who had showed up for our wedding. I raced up to the door and put my hand on the doorknob.
It wouldn’t turn.
I tried again. I knocked. I pounded. Then as a lone passerby stared at me strangely, I kicked the door. No one came.
Even Rock Church, the best church I had ever known, was locked tight.
Why should this have been so hard on me? Rationally, of course, no church was going to be open at three in the morning. If you didn’t lock up a church in New York, winos turned it into a latrine.
But understanding didn’t help. What I was experiencing had nothing to do with reason. I found myself lumping Rock Church together with the jolly group of hypocrites who tried to kick my father out of his church, or the people who told me I could come to their service when I was in "appropriate attire."
They made me sick. All of them. None was any different.
I started back uptown, and all the way I was fighting tears.
While I was in New York I wanted to get some material for the new talk show. Nedra and I thought Times Square would be a good place to do a series of interview s with kids. What did they say their problems were? Were they as turned off by the churches as I was?
We strolled through Times Square with our tape recorder, stopping college students and high school dropouts, long-hair types and guys uniform. Every one of the people we interviewed was searching for something and said so; not one even considered looking for it in a church. They were hungry, open, eager to talk. With the hum and honk of traffic as a background, they spoke about drugs, sex, the war in Vietnam, the establishment.
We recorded a dozen conversations, then boarded the Eighth Avenue bus to go back to Nedra’s mom’s. And it was there, on the city bus inching its way uptown, that the strange thing happened.
I was just staring past Nedra out the window, thinking about the talks we’d just had, when the side of the bus just seemed to dissolve. At first I was scared, thinking I was having another Satanic attack. But this was nothing like that: I felt no fear, in fact I felt strangely at peace. Only, a movie was unrolling before my eyes.
I blinked but the scene remained. What was happening! The set for the "movie" was a large, barny kind of room that was never closed — somehow that was the first thing I knew about it. And this huge room was packed with people like the ones we had just interviewed, young men and women from the lonesome generation, sitting and standing in a great circle. On a raised platform and group was playing. It was a good, new sound. I could even hear lyrics and to my astonishment, though the sound was contemporary, the words were all about Jesus.
Just as suddenly as it had come, the picture vanished.
I sat quietly for a while wondering what that was all about. For lingering, as a part of the memory, was a feeling that I had seen, not an imaginary scene, but a place which actually existed — even if only in the mind of God.
As we lurched uptown I told Nedra about the vision. She took it very seriously.
"Where was it all happening?"
"I don’t know."
"Down in Virginia?"
"I don’t know."
"Maryland?"
"For gosh sakes, Nedra, stop bugging me! I told you twice I don’t know. It was just a big old room, like a loft."
Nedra sat back, smarting under the lousy temper I still could not control.
But as the bus ground along, I couldn’t forget my vision.
"It is ‘my’ vision, isn’t it, Lord?" I asked silently. "You gave me that picture, didn’t You, so I’ll know it when I see it?"
But the only answer was the gasping of the air brakes.
This excerpt from Scott Free is reprinted with permission from the author. Any use of this material without written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.
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