I didn’t go to a church until I got converted at the age of twenty-one. My parents weren’t drug dealers or sex traffickers, they just didn’t claim to be Christians, so they didn’t pretend to be by going to church. And you know what? I appreciate that.

Yep, we didn’t go to church at all. Not on Easter or Christmas. I’m talking about no immediate church experience for me. Not even weddings or funerals. Indeed, there were zero kumbaya gatherings for this Cretin.

What I knew about Christians was primarily via the guys and gals I bumped up against in high school.

What I gained from my interactions with the Christian males I ran into was this: They’re self-righteous softies who wanted me to go to hell. Suffice it to say, we didn’t get along at all and becoming a Christian was not on my ‘To Do List’.

But God had other plans ...

From the age of thirteen to twenty-one I was hell on two skinny legs. I started drinking pretty heavily and regularly at thirteen and around sixteen I saw Fast Times At Ridgemont High and started taking notes. By the end of that year I was dealing weed, LSD, and speed.

I was an evil little monster. I was not a good person. Not at all.

All I wanted was sex, a solid buzz, a fast car and that was it. I kept it simple, because I was stupid.

Please note: I was not on a spiritual quest. I did not want to be a Christian and I heartily expected that if I died my elevator would not be going up. I was going straight to hell. I was under no delusions about ‘being a good boy, who meant well, but was troubled.’ I knew I was damned and honestly, I was okay with that ... for a while.

I won’t bore you with the details, but God had my number and I started feeling ‘weird’ when I would do bad crap beginning around the age of eighteen and, heretofore, I had never felt bad. It was all a big joke to me.

Around 1981 that callousness began to erode.

At that stage of the game, I was way down the funnel of evil and it wasn’t funny anymore, people were being hurt, and I was getting arrested.

The stakes were high and so was I.

I knew I needed a change but I did not want to start going to church because most of the Christian males I met in high school were wussies and I didn’t not want to be a wussy.

So, instead of becoming a choir boy, I started dialing back on my partying and started working out. ‘Exercise versus excess’, I thought. That was my solution to my current level of pollution which wasn’t totally bad, mind you.

It was, however, short-lived. My conscience was still kicking my butt. Working out wasn’t drowning out the guilt I had for what I had done and who I knew I was at my core, namely, a sinner. Ergo, I did what any good sinner would do and cranked back up the drinking, sex, and drug machine to silence ‘the voices.’

My next three years were really bad. I don’t even remember most of them. Just lots of booze, weed, acid, and cocaine.

I’ll never forget one night me and my buddy Joe were cooking on some blotter, hanging out at a closed public pool, just tripping away and talking about ... God?

Yep, we were talking about God. Wondering if he existed and if there was a right and wrong and how, if there was the aforementioned, and we had to meet him, then man oh, man; were we on the wrong side of that equation. But still, nothing of substance changed in me.

It was at that juncture, when I was finally entertaining God, righteousness, death, and judgment that I started getting bombarded with thoughts from my evil angels saying, ‘You don’t want to be a Christian. Christians are wussies. People will mock you. Who wants to be that?’ And like an idiot, I believed that low-level devil and I carried on in my self-destructive course, blowing off God and indulging deeply in what Saint James called, ‘the superfluity of naughtiness’. That was until December 7th, 1983. On that fateful night, God poleaxed me.

Here’s how it went down.

My dad and I were watching NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and Tom was talking about a fourteen-year-old kid who’d just graduated college. I was twenty-one-years old and had just been kicked out of college and Brokaw’s little vignette on this over-achiever made me feel like Beavis & Butthead on steroids. I felt like I should’ve felt: like a loser. My dad didn’t say a word but I knew what he was thinking, namely, ‘when is he going to get his act together?’

Following my normal course of action after getting convicted of my sin, I went and got my girlfriend at Texas Tech, my weed stash, and a 12-pack of Silver Bullets, and off we went to get high and bump uglies.

While we were partying in my car, out of nowhere, I told my main squeeze that I wanted to go home. She’s like, ‘We just got here. What’s wrong?’ I said nothing and that I just wanted to go home. She said ok and off we went, back home in the middle of our ‘date.’

When I got back to my house my girlfriend and I got into an argument that got pretty heated out in front of my house. It was so loud that my dad and brother came outside to see what the heck was going on. When my dad stepped off the porch and started heading towards me in the driveway I ran towards him, embraced him, and asked him to forgive me for all the horrible crap I’d done to him and mom. I collapsed. I wept. Everyone was like, ‘Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot!’ Where did this come from? I was broken. I was shattered. The game was over.

After I’d calmed down a bit, my girlfriend and I loaded back up in my pickup and off we went to drop her off at her dorm. However, we didn’t get very far. It started hitting me again. Namely, a massive sense of guilt and conviction. It was so bad that I had to pull my vehicle over in an apartment parking lot. My girl’s really freaking now. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happening to you?’ she asked. All I could do was weep. And I mean capital W-E-E-P, weep. Finally, out from under the massive flow of tears and phlegm, I said to God, not to her, ‘God if you’re real and if Jesus is who people say he is then please change me.’ And boom. It happened.

On December 7th, 1983, I got converted and it was radical and ugly. Immediately I stopped the drugs and the booze abuse. I no longer wanted it. I wanted God instead. My former vices no longer appealed to me. All I wanted to do was pursue the God who pursued me, the clod.

Now, in case you missed it, let me reiterate what was a major sticking point to my aversion to becoming a Christian. It was something that the powers of darkness really used against me, the rebel without a clue. It was this; if I became a Christian, based on what I saw and heard from Christians in high school, that means that I would have to become a wussy and becoming a wussy appeared nowhere on my Christmas wish list.

For example: I experienced major, and I mean major conviction, and yet I didn’t want to become a Christian because of the effeminized Christian males I’d met. I was almost bargaining with God. It went something like this, ‘Please forgive me, let me go to heaven, but don’t make me sing sappy songs, wear nerdy ‘Christian’ clothes and act like Jim Bakker on the PTL Club, or like that lame dork named Todd, the Youth Group director.

I kid you not.

I wanted to be forgiven but I did not want to become a ‘Christian’.

Again, from what I’d gathered from interacting with male, high school Christians, was that Jesus and church attendance gelds a guy and gelded I did not want to get.

These were real problems to me as a young turk who’d grown up watching the likes of Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Steve McQueen, the Dallas Cowboys, and being around WWII adults.

Yes, my lofty aspirations, when I actually had some, were to kill dragons, save nations, and throttle some enemy with a Raquel Welch clone at my side. Wearing a cardigan, singing I’ll Fly Away, while holding hands with other men, as we talk about our feelings and how wrong it is to masturbate was nightmarish to me.

It was not cool.

It was not inspiring.

It was not masculine.

And I wanted, more than anything, as a lost man, to be masculine. As all boys do. Aside from Bruce Jenner, of course. But my sins had become too much for me to bear and I caved. God won. I got converted and a couple of months later I finally went to church. And you know what? All my suspicions were spot on. It was very effeminate.

Mind you, and pardon my redundancy, I had no knowledge base about what went down in church having never, ever, been before. I just knew what I knew about believers from high school and seeing the scary peeps on the PTL Club at my aunt’s house when we would visit. I came in raw and I’ll never forget my first blush with the brethren. Never. All my fears were spot on. The Church, by and large, had been severely effeminized.

Thank God I met some bros who loved God and didn’t like to knit but liked to hunt and fish instead. I also met some epic dudes who loved God wholeheartedly and liked to debate and do jail, street, bar, and rock concert ministry and radical missions way down deep in Mexican jungles.

Look folks, God hardwired men, in his image, to be providers, protectors, hunters, and heroes under his governance. For pastors or anyone else to try to effeminize the Imago Dei and foist that lie upon men’s psyche, is to bastardize the scripture, deceive men into denying their God-given masculine traits and to me, that ranks up there with the Unpardonable Sin.

Finally, if you have screwed up your life royally please know that God’ll forgive you when you repent and do a 180. If that’s you, pray this prayer that King David prayed after he committed adultery and had Bathsheba’s husband murdered.

Clash Ministries is here to do two things, namely, put brains and cojones on Christians. Yep, our holy job is renewing minds (Rom.12:1-2) and emboldening hearts (Prov.28:1). Your generosity helps us throttle the enemy by equipping God's people to live bold, wild and free in Him. You are a vital part of this ministry and we could not do this without you. Thank you for your faithful gifts and partnership and remember to always ... stay rowdy!

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Doug Giles is Pastor of Liberty Fellowship in Wimberley, TX, and is the founder of ClashDaily.com​

Follow Doug on Instagram and Twitter @TheArtOfDoug.

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