It was my birthday weekend; my buddies were passed out from smoking weed laced with something that had caused all of us to hallucinate. I was the only one awake. The feeling of being entirely alone swept through me in horrifying waves of fear. While everyone slept, odd memories started to come forth and I remember thinking about God and Heaven and hell. This voice in my head began contradicting and disproving the Word of God to me, whispering it through my brain. I remember running to the bathroom and vomiting blood. That was when I really knew I hadn’t just been smoking weed. I still do not know what it was that had been slipped to us, I just remember sitting on my stairs feeling as if I had been sucked into another world. Was I crazy? No. Was I high? Yes. That is what drugs do, but I was aware enough to know that this was not just a simple case of hallucination.

In this other world, it was just me and a demon in outer space. I remember telling the demon what I had learned about God. Step by step he was trying to disprove it. It was like everything I thought I knew was shattered. He said to me, “Do want to know what eternity looks like?” Out of nowhere I saw this tiny, white, shiny ball. It kind of looked like a star. The demon said, “That’s eternity.” It kept coming closer and closer until I could see it was magnified 10 billion times over. This ball was made up of millions and millions of other little balls. As this “eternity” got closer I saw that each of the little balls was a world.

“You are just in one of those bubbles right now, that you call earth, and in this bubble you have something called a God, and the God that you worship in your world, is called Jesus. But that is just in THIS world; your Mom and Dad aren’t even real,” he whispered. “The God that you worship, people in other worlds have never even heard of Him. Whenever you die, you just go to the next world and then on to the next world and then you finally reach this place that is kind of like a heaven and kind of like a hell.” I was becoming more and more confused and anxious.
“Don’t worry.” He informed me. “It has already been determined that you will be going to hell.”

All hope in everything was lost. Nothing was real any more. Everything I knew about everything was shattered. My Mom and Dad weren’t real, the earth wasn’t real, and the God I served wasn’t real! All hope was gone within me. That was when the devil started putting more lies into my mind. “Well you’ve already figured it out, there’s no going back now. You might as well just kill yourself and start new in the next world.”

I remember my Dad was asleep upstairs. I wanted to do nothing more than shake him awake and have him calm me down, do something, give me a hug, and show me love. But it was meaningless and had no purpose because I realized that every bit of love and affection from the very beginning of life wasn’t real. There was nothing that could possibly comfort me.

I slowly made it to my room upstairs and I remember shutting the door. Now this is how the devil works, as soon as I shut the door, I saw it. What did I have behind my door? It was my 12 gauge pump shotgun. I stood there staring at the gun. The shotgun shells were on the dresser just next to me. I remember looking at the gun and looking at the shells, mesmerized, thinking, ‘I’m going to kill myself tonight.’

Well obviously I’m here. It’s an interesting thought that if I would have given in that night; can you imagine? You wouldn’t know me, you wouldn’t know anything about me because I would have been just another one of those kids in statistics that lost the battle on drugs and killed themselves after hallucinating demonic thoughts.

As I stood there contemplating my death, I literally said this and I am not even sure who I was talking to at that time, “I have no idea what’s real and what’s not but I am going to sleep one last night here in this world and if I feel like I do right now in the morning, I’ll kill myself.’ I went to bed, I woke up in the morning, my high naturally lower, and so I thought, ‘well, I guess I can actually make it.’ All of the fear was still there, but I wasn’t high anymore. This was very confusing for me. If the high was gone, why didn’t that horrible fear go away? It was so thick inside of me I could taste it! I asked my friends and they said that sometimes you stay a little high for a couple of days after partying so hard, so I blamed the drugs for my fear. That morning I kept saying over and over again…’I’m done…I’m done… I won’t smoke weed anymore!’ I gave away all of my smoking devices, and any extra weed I had. I was DONE! I literally walked around for an entire week like a zombie, saying again and again, “I’m done, I’m done, I’m done.” And I was done. I was forever done, until the next weekend.

The first battle had been waged and I was still alive, but the darkness was not done with me.

(to be continued in part 3)