I was 25 yrs. Old. I had been arrested…again. It was my “problem”…again.
Was I never to be able to overcome the desolation of my childhood caused by the nurse who molested me?
I went from being the all american kid to become a troubled exhibitionist. I hated myself. Yet I wanted answers to my confusion that expressed itself by my exposing of myself.
Why did I do this? Why couldn’t I stop? Prison, County Jail, state hospital…I’ve run the gauntlet of degradation.
Yet, somehow I always trusted in Jesus. I didn’t understand the Bible; churches taught me to believe by faith. Faith being, the result of believing without seeing; without being given a supernatural sign. But I’ve had signs, miracles even.
Still the questions and self-doubt remained. I was the walking wounded. My “problem” as I called it, was the source of self-hate and confusion. So when I went to jail for exhibitionism, called Indecent Exposure, I begged for help. And I got sent to Patton State Hospital.
There I got busy asking myself the questions I thought I needed to ask: Why?
And so it was that one day as I attended group, I found myself getting mad at the guy speaking. Knowing that I might not be able to keep myself from punching the guy, I turned my chair away from the group.
“What are you mad at Mr. Truett?” The counselor asked. I should have known I would be asked, but at the time I was just too mad to see straight!
Yet the question being asked of me got me to thinking, what was I mad at? I didn’t know.
Even if it’s true as stated in the Bible: “Man’s anger defeats God’s Righteous purpose.” at that time in my life, I wasn’t aware of it, nor of what I was to do with it.
How do you get rid of anger like that? I didn’t know because I didn’t know why I was angry in the first place.
When I started asking myself, why was I angry, I had to face the biblical truth that I couldn’t hold his sins against him or God would hold my sins against me. Yet I was still angry.
This is really unusual with me. Normally I am hard to get mad…I accept life with a laugh, as I am often told, when it hit me! This guy was telling of his sins and smiling! Much like I use to laugh a bit nervously when I would talk of my own sins.
I saw myself in him!!! Instantly I blacked out. In the black out I saw a picture frame of clouds with a ladder running top to bottom; and at the bottom were two hands grasping the last two rungs of the ladder.
When I could see again, everyone in the group looked like family, and when I left the group I left in a cloud of awe and wonder as everything I saw glowed with Love.
That day was the day of my conversion into the family of God.
In Him,
J.J.