God Spoke to Me

No, I mean really

Right before I wrote this, I was thinking of the reason why I have only talked about this twice in almost fifty years, and never written anything about it. It’s because of the setting in which it happened to me. I was involuntarily committed to a short stay at a state mental hospital in my early twenties. Surely a personal account of anything that anyone experienced while in the kind of mental and emotional state he would likely be in to be put into one of those places would be doubted or even ridiculed. How could he be sure that what is retelling was real, or the product of his putative mental illness? How could anyone reading this not dismiss it as just the crazy, mixed-up memories of a chaotic young-adulthood?

Well, I don’t know — and that’s why I have just kept it to myself all these years. But I’m at an age now that I feel like I have to tell whatever stories I have, to whoever will hear them. Maybe this is a story that could mean something to someone else, and maybe not. But it’s a story about an experience I had that made me believe in a God that cares about me.

My early adulthood — what I’m calling my life from the age of 18 to 29 — was troubled. My dad died at 17, and that marked the start of a spiral that began with me dropping out of college, and ending with me in and out of jails, mental hospitals, and various states of homelessness.

It was in one of the last short stays at a state mental hospital that this occurred. The sequence of events was simple and quick…