I woke up at dawn, next to a small rural road in northeast Texas. It was my birthday; I was 21 years old now. I’d slept well overnight, just laying on a grassy patch I found. No snakes or scorpions or other varmints had bothered me.

The day before I’d tried to hitchhike from near the Oklahoma border, back down to Austin to start university again for the fall. The rides were few on the meandering back road I took and so I had to sleep under the stars. There had been big thunderstorms not far off so I stayed up late, watching the lightning show as the storms slowly moved further south from me, into the night.

But the thing I remember most to this day is the incredible peace and joy I had that early morning. I’ve written in articles like  “Lucifer and the white moths” and “Going to Hell”, about  the soul-shattering “near death experience” I’d had in Austin 5 weeks before this morning along the side of the road. My near death experience remains the pinnacle experience of my life because, through that decent into hell, I experienced the reality of both God and His enemy, Lucifer

Through it all, I’d come away with such a “change” (that’s a weak word for it) that I was just recreated in my innermost being. So there at dawn, the Beatles’ song “You’re having a birthday” roared through my mind. And an emotion that was so utterly foreign to me until just the last few weeks seized my heart. It was astounding joy.

So on the side of the road I got up and just started dancing there by myself, filled with a happiness and elation that I recognized very much right then was just so unlike anything I’d ever thought or felt in the years before my near death experience a few weeks before.

Afterwards I ate a sandwich I’d brought in my backpack, got back out on the road and was able to hitch-hike back across another 200 miles, back to Austin. But the whole experience came to me this morning of how almost other-worldly that was and what a transformation I’d gone through.

Was I a Christian? That’s the funny thing. I had not been raised in a Christian family and at that time, I was still searching to try to find out who Jesus was. I could tell He was really important. I’d gotten my grandmother’s Bible that my parents had kept and I was daily reading through it, although I didn’t get a lot out of it.

This was the period in my life when I was wondering if I should start sacrificing chickens. Well, you laugh but it looked to me like it was right there in the Scriptures I was reading. So I was really coming out of a kind of ignorance and darkness concerning the things of the Lord. But now I’d come to vehemently believed in the God of Abraham; I also now knew only too well the enemy of God who’d tried to come and claim my soul. But I just didn’t know who Jesus was. It was still a few months more before I meet some dear teenage “Jesus People” who showed me plainly who Jesus was and is. And they led me to receive the Lord.

This morning these memories came back to me and I remembered dancing at dawn on the side of a road, just so very happy to be alive and to know the power of God’s deliverance and love. It reminds me of the verses, “God has delivered us from the power of darkness, and has translated us into the kingdom of His dear Son.” (Colossians 1:13) “Because the creature itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21)