God cared about my piercings.

I listened to a lot of Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. I watched movies like The Craft that made witchcraft look cool. So, I was like; I’m going to look into it. I had the internet and I was just a seeker. I wanted to find truth, whatever it was. I started looking into black magic and witchcraft and stuff. I seen people saying that they could levitate and cast spells and do voodoo and all this stuff. A friend of mine gave me a Ouija board and so I started messing around with it. Just trying to see, but I never really saw results with that stuff either. I’d read about it and I’d see that there was something real supposedly but I never really saw anything that impressed me. I just honestly thought that there was nothing real to any of it. So I just lived my life the way I wanted to and didn’t think about the consequences. I just thought this is life until death and it was really a depressing lifestyle. Drinking, partying and having fun, what I thought was fun was really just escaping reality. At this point, my cousin, who I looked up to, who was older than me and cool, I hadn’t seen in eight and a half years is driving five hours to help us move and I know he’s a Christian. I wind up in this pick up truck with him. It’s just me and him for a five hour drive. It’s just me and him in a small cab. He started showing me and telling me stuff about the bible. Not about church. Not about a place or a building. But he showed me the bible and he said; “Dude, there are secrets in this Bible. This isn’t about dressing in a button up shirt and sitting in a stiff pew and listening to a guy or following a bunch of rules. This isn’t a rule book. There are secrets in here to life. There are things in here that you never heard in church.” He said; “I read it and I have seen the secrets and I pray and I see miracles happen. It’s almost like that magic stuff that you like. The stuff that you think is cool and the witchcraft and stuff. It’s just like that but it’s the good side.” I thought; well, I have no reason to believe that my cousin is lying to me about this stuff. My Mother, and everybody around the world who’s putting their face to the ground. Like, something is out there. What is it? I just want to know. I believe what he’s saying. He got it from this Bible, so I started reading the Bible. I started putting God to the test. I started praying for things that I needed. I prayed about a job. I wanted to work at Hot Topic. That was my thing. I turned in like ten applications, literally, no exaggeration. I Xeroxed them every other day and would keep giving them to them to show them that I was serious. Like give me a chance. But you don’t get that job unless you know somebody. Because so many people want to work there and there is a bunch of weirdo’s and they don’t know who to trust. So you have to know somebody and I didn’t. I was new to town, I had just moved back. I go down this road and I hit up every restaurant, every gas station, anything. I put out applications all day. The very last thing I went to was Smokey Bones. That’s a barbecue restaurant. There was a lady that took my application and she was talking to me a little bit. She noticed the holes in my face. She was like; “Oh, you’ve got a lip ring?” I said; “Yeah, I had to take them out to get a job, you know, working for the man.” She goes; “Oh yeah, I understand.” She flipped out a septum piercing and she put it back in. She was the manager. So we kind of connected, there was a connection there. She said; “Come back tomorrow to speak to the General Manager and I will try to get you a job.” I come back and I get the job. Well, it’s a job and it’s helping me get established and on my feet. I had to take my piercing out every single day and put them back in and they were getting infected. That’s what I hate about it. I’m like; “I’m working for the man. They’re forcing me to take my piercing out and all of this.” But it just so happened that I started talking to this girl manager and I told her that I wanted a job at Hot Topic. She was like; “Oh my best friend’s a manager over there.” Oh, wow, big coincidence right? She’s like; “I’ll tell her that you’re a good worker and if they get an opening I’ll have her let me know. Well, three months later, I get the job. How could I have planned that out? God was orchestrating the entire universe to answer a prayer that I hadn’t even prayed yet. I gave him the credit for that prayer. That’s the thing, I recognize where it came from. I wrote it on a piece of paper that “God gave me the job that I wanted at Hot Topic, Thank you Jesus” and I stuck it on my mirror. But I just don’t feel like I’m ready to become a Christian yet. Like it seems like something I am going to have to change my lifestyle. I’m twenty one, twenty two whatever. I’m going to the clubs every night. So I’m by myself in my living room and I just roll up a blunt and I put on the Simpsons. That’s what I do. I just try to relax and forget things, you know. I’m just smoking this blunt, watching the Simpsons and I feel like God’s just saying; “Why don’t you pray?” I’m like; I just don’t feel like it. I want to relax. I had a long day. I just want to sit back and just chill and not do anything. At that moment, it was like a revelation. Like an eye opening moment. Like, you just put the Simpsons before God. You feel something. You’re looking for God and you’re seeking for truth. And you feel, you have a feeling that God wants you to pray, and you said; “No, I want to watch the Simpsons.” So at that moment I just hit mute and I just bowed my head and I said; “Alright, I don’t know what I’m praying about but Lord just help me through this situation, that situation, help this friend, that friend you know just thinking of anything I could pray about. Just to do what I felt led to do. All of a sudden it felt like God was saying; “This is your moment.” At that moment I realized that I was feeling a feeling that everybody says when they say they felt God all over. Like I felt like I was being smothered in this love feeling. I felt like I was floating. I just stayed on this level with God as long as I could. I just prayed. To this day I have never felt that again. But I have felt some things. And it’s just like, that’s the new drug. The new drug is trying to get to that level. What ever it takes, fasting, prayer, like. He even used this video game that I used to play called PaRappa The Rapper. When you beat a level, he spins around and says; “I just got to believe!’ God was so cool and personal that He used little things like that, that should mean nothing to Him. But he knows that they mean something to you. He used it as a bridge to Him. Like, “I’m cool. I’m the reason that you think things are cool.” Everything made sense. I had an experience that wasn’t a high. I had smoked weed a million times. It’s never done that. That was 2005. It’s 2014 and the relationship is growing stronger. I don’t do drugs anymore. I don’t smoke weed. I don’t drink. I’m not affected by outside influences. It’s only God and it’s getting stronger and stronger.