When God Arrested Me

One summer evening in the month of August, I was walking up my hallway, about to enter the living room, when suddenly something came over me. It was an uncontrollable urge to just start doing something, but I didn’t know what to do. I started to talk out openly and honestly to God. The best way to describe it might be that it was as if someone had suddenly come into my house, taken my hands, and lifted them up in the air for me. At the time, I was so addicted to cocaine and alcohol that I didn’t realize just how sad and pitiful my life had become. I was so messed up and out of touch with reality that I could determine neither the level of my sickness and my pain nor that I was in a deep state of depression. I even attempted suicide and failed. All I knew was that I was full of anger, mad as hell with myself because of the world I had created for myself. My world and my reality, yet not the truth. But on that day, something started happening to me from the inside. I started behaving like someone who had suddenly come under the control of a powerful yet wonderful force, a force that started to control my body, my mind, and my words. It was as if words were coming out of my mouth that I didn’t even have to think about to say them. I was so affected that I started to feel as if I was an alien from another planet or something. It was like nothing I’d experienced before. It was the manifest presence of God, and it was so strong right there in my living room that it felt like I was going to take wings and fly off somewhere. I was not afraid; in fact, I was amazed and overwhelmed with joy at the very thought that God Himself would show up in my living room. I had never imagined it was possible to experience Him in that way. I had never heard anyone say that God makes personal visits. I didn’t know He did anything like that, but it became obvious to me right then that I seriously needed and wanted Him there in my tired, lifeless life. I say “lifeless life” because while I was hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting with all five senses in operation, I was dead to the reality of life. I was no longer living but only existing from day to day. You see, even though I was still on this earth, I was so lost and blinded by the devil that I couldn’t and didn’t accept that truth about myself. I was in denial, which I found to be a zone of lies and self-deception. I call it “the Enemy zone” or “the gone zone.” It was a mindblowing thought that God had showed up in the same room where I’d spent countless times fussing and cussing with someone I’d been in a relationship with for fifteen years. So many ugly and sinful things had taken place in this very room: drunkenness, fornication, blackouts, and lots of my getting high by myself because I didn’t want to be around others when I was using it. I never imagined that He would come to such a dark place and that He would reach down so low to get someone like me out of a pit of hell. And yet He showed up. I know that if He did it for someone as nothing as I was, then it is easy for Him to do it for you or someone you know and care about. Now, let me tell you just how He showed up and showed Himself to be an able, mighty, and miracle-working God after coming to my house that day. Two weeks earlier, I walked into my bedroom to do what I had gone in there to do, when somehow my television was set to a religious channel. On the screen was a pastor from a church in Atlanta, Georgia. He was calling out a scripture, which was 1 Peter 5:7 from the King James Bible. He said, “God is speaking to you right now, and He is saying, cast all your care on Him for He cares for you.” I turned and looked over at the television, waved him off with my hand, and said, “Yeah, right, God ain’t thinking about me with my little ugly, drunken stinking behind.” Then I reached down to the nightstand and went on with what I had come to do in the first place, which was to take a couple of hits of cocaine, pour me a drink of cognac, and light a cigarette. I turned off the television and walked out of the room.