Teena Myers

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My path to writing began the year my father retired from the Army to open an appliance repair business. We moved into a trailer. My mother enrolled my siblings and I in a public school. I was accustomed to the modern, clean schools maintained by the military. In my new school, I attended one class in a building with a condemned sign hanging on the door. I wasn’t happy, and being an awkward, socially handicapped child in a dysfunctional family compounded my misery.

I sought refuge from the harsh reality of my life in the school library. My only friends were my books. I spent hours in the barnyard with Wilbur the talking pig and marveled at the stamina of a great racehorse named Man of War. A book about the beauty and grace of Irish Setters birthed a desire to own one, and I did for six miserable months. My beautiful Irish Setter turned my backyard into the Grand Canyon. That experience taught me reality is not as appealing as fantasy.

After I exhausted the supply of animal books, I decided to read every book in the library. One day, I came to a row of paperback books nestled under a window framed with a dingy, yellow curtain. I pulled out a book titled The Cross and the Switchblade by David Wilkerson. It wasn’t the kind of book I normally read, but I had a goal to fulfill and it was next in line. Of all the books that I read Wilkerson’s book made me pause and wonder what is different. I read his book a second time and then reluctantly returned it to the library, thinking I had read fiction.

The Cross and the Switchblade is a factual account of Rev. Wilkerson’s ministry to gangs and drug addicts in New York City. After he won one of the most notorious gang members in the city to the Lord, Rev. Wilkerson established Teen Challenge, which eventually spread throughout the world, offering multitudes of young men and women a new way of life. The cure rate for drug addicts that went through the Teen Challenge program was documented at 80%, most other drug programs had a 10 to 15% cure rate. The success of the Teen Challenge program was attributed to the Jesus factor.

About a year after I read The Cross and the Switchblade, my father’s business failed. He accepted a job in New Orleans, and we moved to a trailer park on the west bank of the Mississippi River. My mother enrolled me in the 9th grade at the local high school. On the way to my school locker, I saw a poster on the wall announcing David Wilkerson would be speaking at the New Orleans Rivergate. I couldn’t get home fast enough to ask my mother if she would bring me.

“Why do you want to go?” she said.

I didn’t know why I wanted to go. 

”Who is David Wilkerson?”

“He is an author, and I want to hear him speak.”

“Teena, you will just be bored, I am not bringing you.”

My mother would have saved herself a lot of heartache if she had heeded my plea. Not long after that incident, my life became entangled in the local drug culture. I quickly grew weary of the drug addicts’ way of life but didn’t know how to stop. It’s not as easy as “just say no.”

I became desperate as smoking joints gave way to dropping acid, and my friend tried to talk me into shooting up heroin. She introduced me to a drug dealer, who assured me he would do everything. All I had to do was hold out my arm. A loud banging at the door distracted us.

Someone peeked out the window. “Police!”

Drugs were stuffed in bras and underwear as the banging continued. The dealer opened the door a crack. The police pushed the door open and walked in. They police were looking for my friend. She had neglected to tell us that she had run away from home. Her mother told the police where she might be.

My friend and I were 15. Too young to be in a known drug house with adult men. The police delivered both of us to our parents. My exasperated parents sent me to live with my aunt and uncle thinking a change of place would change me. It didn’t.

When I returned home, I experimented with new pills to fit in with my friends and dreaded the day they would ask me to shoot up with them. I became the poster child for Paul’s “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” (Romans 7:15 NIV). 

I started hanging out at a warehouse where local bands played rock music while the attendees filled the air with a fog of marijuana. One night, a friend approached me with a hand full of pills. “Take one,” he said. My thoughts screamed NO as I popped one into my mouth.

Disgusted by my weakness, I wandered away from my friends waiting for the high that, thankfully, never came. I stopped in front of a huge speaker booming the Doobie Brothers song, “Jesus Is Just Alright” and prayed, “God, help me stop taking drugs.”

Several months after that prayer, a friend invited me to a Jesus Rally. She enticed me to attend with the assurance a lot of good-looking guys would be at the meeting.

Her mother dropped us off in front of a building. The sign above the door said House of Living Water. We entered a room that was a cross between an abandoned business and someone’s home. A few rows of empty metal chairs greeted us. To my left there was a bathroom and stairs. I could see a kitchen through an open door. But I didn’t see a lot of good-looking guys. My friend had conned me into coming with a false promise.

Two elementary age girls walked in and sat across the aisle from us. One had a skinned up knee, the other an uncooperative eye, its pupil irreversibly stuck left of center. About that time a young man stood behind a music stand declaring Jesus is returning and we need to be ready.

At the end of his message, a young woman and another man entered the room. The preacher invited us to follow them upstairs if we wanted prayer or to receive Jesus as savior. My friend immediately whispered in my ear that she had received Jesus and that I should receive him, too.

I followed my friend upstairs to the prayer room. The prayer warrior prayed for the girls skinned up knee. Nothing happened. He turned his attention to the wayward eye, but it mockingly stayed exactly left of center.

Then, my turn came. Unlike my predecessors, I wasn’t expecting anything to happen. He led me in a prayer of repentance. Before I finished the prayer joy exploded within me. The experience shocked me into an emotionless silence. I also witnessed my first faith healing, where no one was instantly healed, and it was not the last. It would be a long time before I honestly pondered why those two girls and many others who believed they would be healed were not, yet the one expecting nothing, me, receive a revelation of God’s love. I left the Jesus Rally with the knowledge that I had been “born again” but ignorant of what that meant.

The following week, the woman from the House of Living Water picked me up to attend the rally again. This time, the young man preached a message about Stephen, one of the church’s first deacons who possessed wisdom that could not be resisted. Jealous Jews accused him of blasphemy and spread lies about him. Then they brought him before the high council and stoned him for telling the truth. The woman brought me home, and I never returned to the House of Living Water.

I did not associate what happened that night with church. My mother raised me Catholic when we lived in Germany, but when we returned to America, she abandoned the church. The place where God revealed himself to me did not look like a church. My friend and her mother didn’t attend church and never told me I should. God never told me to go to church either. For reasons that remain a mystery, no one did.

For months after that experience the comforting presence of God’s Spirit filled me with peace and turned the weeping of a troubled childhood into laughter. At times, his presence was so strong I could not contain it. Those months were the most precious time of my life. If God had not laid in me a strong foundation of his existence, I doubt I would have survived the things that followed.

TO BE CONTINUED...