Since I last posted about this, I've been thinking about when was the next time I heard about God. Wow! As far as I can remember, it was years after those Sundays at Hap's and Heloise's church that I had any other exposure to spiritual stuff.

Unless you count the time I was 11 or 12 years old, living in Florissant, MO, when my friends and I played around with a Ouija board. Some girlfriends and I were having a slumber party at Lori's house and late that night we got out a Ouija board and set it up in the basement in the dark. We started asking questions and some were convinced that the answer-thingy was moving by itself. We were getting pretty creeped out, so we quit messing around with that and decided to just have a séance. (Yeah, like that was going to be less creepy than the Ouija board!) We lit a candle and put it in the middle of the table and someone – one of the girls who had been to a séance before – instructed us on proper protocol. We got started and, again, were getting a good case of the heebie-jeebies. One of the girls said, "Satan, if you are in this room with us, make the candle flame go taller." The flame shot up like a blow torch and we all freaked out, tipping over our chairs trying to get away from the table as fast as possible, frantically turning on the lights to dispel the "darkness". Lori really lost it – she tended to be pretty high strung anyway – and got hysterical and started crying and wouldn't stop and didn't want to stay in the basement anymore. It was all we could do to get her to chill out, and we did end up sleeping upstairs, all crammed together in her bedroom.

Somewhere in that same time frame, I also got exposed to yucky spiritual stuff by watching the movie, "The Exorcist". It was not by choice. My older sister and I went to the theater and were going to see, "All the President's Men". At least that's what I thought and that's what we had told our parents. But when we got to the theater, "The Exorcist" was playing on the other screen and my sister said we were going to see that instead. I didn't want to. I've never liked scary movies, but she did and she said I had to stay with her because she was older and was in charge. So in we went. It was usually cold inside the theater from the air conditioning and I had come prepared with my yellow windbreaker. I had it on for awhile, but as the movie got creepier, the jacket ended up over my head while I scrunched down in the seat, eyes shut tight and fingers in my ears, trying to block out by any means possible the sounds and images that were bombarding me from the screen. To this day I can still picture some of the things that I saw during that movie. Ick!

That was the extent of my spiritual journey up 'til then. By that time I definitely believed in the presence of true evil, and if asked, I probably would have said that I believed in God, too. But I didn't pursue Him in any way. Looking back, I find it sad that I would be willing to mess around with the "Dark Side" and yet never give "The Light" much thought. But God was already thinking of me, and pursuing me. I just didn't become aware of it til later.

More on that in my next blog…