From Death Unto Life

By Lee Jackson

From Death Unto Life is how I, Lee Jackson, went around through life (if you want to call that life), getting high for most of it without a care in the world, being ashamed of who I was, and holding my head down because I lied to people who trusted and loved me and have lost all respect for myself. That's no life for anyone. So I cried out to the Lord, and He gave me a new life. After going to and joining a good church and reading the Bible, I found out who I am in Christ Jesus. He made me new. "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644920831

Lee Jackson

Lee Jackson is an Award-winning Motivational Speaker, Author of 13 books and a leading Presentation Skills Coach. He is also the a past President of the Professional Speaking Association in the UK & Ireland. For more information visit http://www.leejackson.org or on twitter @leejackson

Book preview

Why We Moved and Where

Hello, everyone. These are short stories of a part in my life when I started doing drugs and how the devil kept me blind for so many years.

This story starts in a little town called Haskell, Oklahoma, which only had about eight hundred residents at the time. My dad moved us there because he loved horses, and for him, the place was horse central. Dad was very good at raising really fast race horses. When we moved there in 1976, I think I was about twelve or thirteen years old. The house we moved into was small, with ceilings that were only about six feet high, so Dad was always breaking the light bulbs with his head when he would walk through the kitchen. We had a small living room, two bedrooms, and a little bathroom with no running water, so we had to haul water from town in barrels, which cost a nickel a barrel. We drank, bathed, and washed clothes with the water from the barrels and even used it for the horses until we were able to dig a pond for them. We lived in that wasp-infested, mouse-overrun house for ten years. The foundation was set on stumps and bricks, but we only paid thirty dollars a month for rent and there were forty acres of land where we could play and the horses could graze.

The landlord was named Doc. He was about ninety years old and liked to eat turtles. He was very kind in his own way and was also very honest. If he didn’t like you, he would tell you. One day, I was looking out my window and saw him get run over by his own truck. He had been standing behind it after stopping by his mailbox. He got out and started reading his mail, and that was when the truck must have popped out of gear and started rolling backward, running him over. The truck ended up in a ditch. I started screaming for my dad to go help, but by the time my dad got to where Doc was, he had already gotten back into his truck and then drove off like nothing ever happened. He was kind of fascinating to us as he liked to eat turtles. We also knew he went to church every Sunday.

Even though the house was small, there were lots of things for kids to do. We had lots of fishing ponds full of fish and a lot of fruit trees, such as peach, apple, pear, and pecan. The hunting was also good, with lots of rabbits, raccoons, snakes, and bullfrogs, which actually tastes very good. We also caught armadillos. There were only three houses on our road and a bar called the Road Duster along with a few oil rigs and a set of train tracks. At night, the coyotes would howl.

Getting High for the First Time

Drugs became a part of my life at a young age, and it didn’t start because I was a bad person or because I grew up in a bad environment. I did it because I wanted to. However, it took me further than I thought I would ever go, even to using other drugs.

The first time I ever got high was from weed. I was with my brothers and some friends from school on our way to a roller-skating party that would last all night long. I was driving my very first car, and they said they were going to get me high. I said, No, no, no. I don’t want my car smelling like that stuff because it stinks! Needless to say, I gave in, and that was how I got started. We went skating every Sunday from seven in the evening to midnight if we could get away from working with the horses or hauling hay.

My first car was a 1978 Ford LTD with air shocks. The owner only wanted eighty dollars for it. It was sitting in a hog pen with no tires on it. It had a sheet of plywood for a hood and was covered in chicken mess. I was with my dad when he went to visit one of his horse buddies, and I spotted the car. The owner had lots of hogs, chickens, and horses.

Living in Oklahoma

Living in Oklahoma was kind of laid-back as there was not a lot to do. After finishing high school and working at Oral Robert’s University, I decided to join my friend at a Job Corps center. That’s when the drugs and drinking kicked in. I did start to have fun when I got there, trying so hard to fit in and find a girlfriend. I wasn’t paying attention to the drugs and how much drinking I was doing, but I didn’t think it was anything to be concerned about. I started hanging out with anybody who got high or drunk, trying to be cool, and we always drank a lot right before curfew.

Yeah, we had a curfew, which was eleven o’clock at night. We had to be inside or we were put in isolation for one night. However, we brothers could handle ourselves when it came to drinking and acting cool, so we didn’t get caught by the RAs (Registered Assistants) of the school. But the Indians would go crazy. They acted like they had lost their minds, and there was no reaching them once they got drunk. As a result, they would almost always get put in isolation. They would run and scream, shouting in their native language all night. They acted as if they were from another world, but by the next day, they wouldn’t remember a thing or even what had happened the whole day.

Job Corps

One day, I decided to go to the movies, and while standing in line, I just happened to look down and saw what looked like a bag of weed—a quarter ounce maybe. There had to be at least a hundred people there in line with me, yet I was the only one who saw it? That seemed funny to me. But I grabbed it and went over to a friend’s house down the street to tell him what had just happened.

You see, life for me was all about getting high, and seeking Jesus was not on my mind. People would sometimes come up to me and invite me to their church, but I always said no. I can see now how God was trying to get my attention, but I decided to follow the drugs instead. So the drugs became a god to me because anything you put first in your life like drugs and alcohol and it becomes a god to you. Then it’s what leads you around and what you do all day, which means getting stoned or wasted. Life would have been better for me education-wise if I had listened to that still, small voice, but I didn’t.

Being in Tahlequah sometimes made me feel like I was in the right place at the wrong time. One night, I was on my way to my room when, out of nowhere, a red convertible Camaro zoomed right past me, getting kind of close. I was high and probably a little drunk. The Camaro was full of young guys who started calling me names and then started throwing empty beer bottles at me. After I saw them do a donut in the parking lot, I started to run and found some bushes to hide behind. I picked up one of the beer bottles they threw at me and threw it back at them, hitting and shattering their windshield. Now they were really mad and tried hard to catch me, but I was able to make it safely to my building and inside before they could do anything to me except ride around the school cursing and saying bad words.

There was