Alone, Empty, and Screaming: A Lifetime between Salvation and Surrender

By Dirk Larson

What a fifty-three years it has been. I am the living proof that we have a relentless God whose grace has no end. My heart pours out to those who are growing up or have grown up in the church; those who were saved, like me, at an early age. My father has always said, “Never forget what you were saved from.” For most of us that grew up in the church, that “from” is nothing more than church pews and swing sets. My story is for you and for those that love you. Though God was always a part of my life, He was never the Lord of my life. I was saved, but it was without effect. Through the decades of utter darkness, I have found my way through. Forty-seven years between salvation and surrender. The reason for telling my story is to give hope to the hopeless. No matter where you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter how long you’ve run or where you’re running to now, you are not alone. We are not alone. The journey to whole is not an easy one, but it is the only way that life will ever make sense. There is a God that will carry you through if you’re ready to let him. My journey is far from over, but if you’d like, we can do it together. Are you ready?

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781098018511

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Alone, Empty, and Screaming

A Lifetime between Salvation and Surrender

Dirk Larson

Copyright © 2019 by Dirk Larson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The U-Haul Years

The Desert Years

Finally Home

In the Eye

Landfall

On My Own, I Don’t Have a Chance

The Decision

The Darkness

Out of the Dark without the Light

Close but No Surrender

Trying to Steal Second with the Bases Loaded

Getting to Unbroken

This book is dedicated to my father who has always been the wind beneath my wings, my one true north. If I hadn’t seen what it is to live Christ by watching you I may have never seen the light that I’ve been so desperately seeking. And to my three boys Justin, Mathias, and CJ, through the darkest of times when I had NONE left, you have always been my reasons.

Acknowledgment

Special thanks to Jeff, Kevin, Pastor Jerry, Jeri, Urmas and Olga, Scott, Ilona, Inna, and many, many others who have kept my head above water and gave me support with no expectation of return. To my wife, who has walked with me through every minute of the pain, without you I can’t imagine where I’d be today, no thanks could ever be enough. This book does not happen without every single one of you. To Roger, Shannon and Pastor Chad (sorry, I just had to P), you guys were the cultivators of this life lost. I will look back on our mornings at Starbucks for eternity and be thankful for what you built in me. And last, but certainly not least, I thank the Lord for his hard truth and ridiculous grace. Thank you for never stopping the knocking.

The U-Haul Years

We’ve all heard the story, I was born in a small town… too many times to count. But in order to put my early years in to perspective, I think it’s important for you to have a picture of just how tiny this little world of mine really was. My home town was so small that it isn’t even listed on my birth certificate. How could it be? We didn’t have a hospital; shoot, we didn’t even have a real grocery store. The nearest town to mine, that was big enough to have a hospital, was seventeen miles down the road. It was still small enough that my older brother and I were born in the same room, with the same doctor and the same nurse (singular), four years apart. You know you’re in a small town when there are only nine cars in the church parking lot on Sunday morning, but the place is still packed. Our post office, fire station (if you can really call a two-room shed a station), the corner store, the park, and the school were all only a block away…in the same direction. We were road warriors to say the least. We packed up the car for the day just to go grocery shopping. Anyway, I think you get the idea.

Most kids who grow up in a minister’s home (yep, I’m a PK) fit the profile and stereotypes perfectly. They start innocent as doves then break loose like they grew up in Alcatraz, then some find their way home and some never do. I, on the other hand, didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea, so I rebelled straight from the womb. Folklore has it that one glorious Sunday morning, barely a month old, as I was laying buck naked on the couch while my mom was changing me, Dad leaned in for a kiss before heading to church. With a smile only a mother could love, I let fly, and in an instant, Pastor Jerry was dripping with my love from his glasses, to his three-piece suit, to his ONLY shiny black belt. He looked like he’d just lost a four-round fight with a garden hose. Oh, the joy he must have been feeling. No matter how she acted, you can’t tell me Mom wasn’t smiling from ear to ear in there somewhere. Heck, I didn’t want to wait to disappoint my parents. I started right out of the womb.

So where do I begin this story of mine. It is the question that has tormented me for two decades now. Whether it be from the head injury I suffered during the accident that should have killed me, or the many years of drugs and alcohol (we’ll get in to all that later), or my inescapable genes passed down by a father who can’t find the keys that are in his other hand, I don’t have many memories of my early years. Then again, when your entire world consists of a small three-bedroom parsonage (a house owned by a church that the minister and his family were allowed to live in), a parking lot, a German shepherd, and the neighbor’s fence, what’s really to remember? There were only two rules in that small world of mine, just two. Don’t cross the parking lot to bug your father while he’s working. Imagine being a young boy and having your hero just two hundred yards away, all day, every day. That parking lot might as well have been molten lava, a big black sea of torture for me. The second rule, stay off the neighbor’s new fence. Doesn’t take a boy long to figure out what rule to break where the punishment was worth the crime. As I played all day on my half-rusted fifteen-dollar swing set that was planted in the corner of my twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot piece of green prison cell, I would peak through the slats of that beautiful new barn red no-no in great anticipation of the neighbors arriving home from work, at which time I would announce, as loud as a boy could, Hello, neighbor, I’m going to climb on your fence. With each small but beautiful step, I would say, Neighbor, I’m climbing your fence. And as I reached the summit, perched atop the pinnacle of my world, I would so proudly smile, the rebel inside me thinking, no one is gonna tell me what to do, wave in at them and say, Neighbor, I’m sitting on your fence. By the time I reached the top, Mom could finally see me through that small kitchen window and head out with threats in tow. You get off that fence, or I won’t let you come out here and play anymore!, which would last for about two hours the next day before she wanted to throw me through that same kitchen window. I was the champion of my tiny four-person world! On the nights during those years, we would wrestle with Dad after dinner then bug him half to death while he watched sports on TV until it was our bedtime. Before climbing in, my older brother would force me to my knees in our bedroom every night to pray. That pretty much sums up those first few years, trouble-pray-sleep, trouble-pray-sleep, repeat. The only thing I may have hated more than rules in those day were pictures, and I did everything I could to ruin most of them. I would swing back and forth between pouting and/or fake crying, as if the Burgermeister Meisterburger really had outlawed all toys, and cheesy, ridiculous grins. It was my payback for Mom dressing my brother and I in the most ridiculous matching outfits that made even most adults go, really? But oh, to have those Grandma-crocheted wool sweater itching, high water polyester pant-wearing, painful, pain-free days back again.

It wasn’t long before we packed up our little world and headed north, to another, not quite as small town, in Western Washington. Shoot, we actually had a lumber yard and a grocery store now. But that is a year and a half black hole in my memory. I can’t reach deep enough to even find a picture in my mind (and very few to actually hold either), no sounds, no smells, no streets, no houses, no church, nothing from that time, just a black hole that my world fell in to. It was simply another twenty-foot-by-twenty-foot patch of green prison for me. The one event that defines those years was the accident. We were driving home from spending the Fourth of July with old friends back in our old hometown. It was always worth the trip and for a four-year-old to be trapped inside an ugly old gold Plymouth for three hours that’s saying something. Shoot, what kid wouldn’t get excited about the marble collection my folk’s friend’s son had amassed. It had reached into the thousands by the time we’d stop making that trip. Couple that with the endless gooey cinnamon rolls that dripped of endless brown sugar and butter, and I’d probably walked there if the car had broken down. This trip would be so very different than the rest. We had run and played nonstop the entire day, so even me, the Tasmanian devil, was tired.

My brother and I were just big enough to not be able to both sleep on the back seat and the fights quickly became more about the punishment than the prize, so I took my customary spot on the floor between the seats. The joy of silence must have been a triumph for Mom and Dad. Usually when I was that tired, I was out, stone cold ’til we hit the driveway at home, but for some reason, this evening, I had woken up. I was sitting on the edge of the backseat, just tall enough to rest my chin on the middle of the front seat. As we passed the Kalama exit one mile sign on Interstate Five, I asked the only question a boy asks while on a trip, Are we there yet? And then it happened. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, nothing to react to. We had gone from sixty-five miles an hour to a complete stop in mere seconds. We had become the world’s first live full-speed crash test dummies.

The initial sound was like lying beneath a freight train. Then came dead silence, spinning, and my short but painful flight. My perfect little world had turned into a human snow globe, but the snow happened to be shattered glass. You see, a lady traveling south on I5 had lost her steering wheel, and by lost, I mean it had come off. Back in the sixties and early seventies, there were no meridians on the freeways, no sunken patches of grass, no cables between vehicles passing each other at warp speed, so when her car veered into the northbound lanes there was nothing to stop her, nothing but an ugly old gold Plymouth that is. She hit us like a wrecking ball. I am convinced that the only reason my family and I are still alive today is that she had glanced off the car in front of us just enough that we didn’t hit quite head on. Oh, and more likely the fact that God said it’s not time yet. In those days, seatbelts were rarely worn, so it was no big deal that Mom was the only one with one on. When we were hit, I immediately flew over the front seat on my way to the floor on top of my father’s feet. In between, I struck either the dashboard or the steering wheel which had left a gash so wide that my scalp had flapped over and was dying to meet my forehead. It took some sixty stitches to put that little scrape back together. When I saw the pictures of the accident some years later, I was awed by the size of the hole in our car right where I’d been lying just minutes before the impact. All in all, there were nine cars scattered all over the freeway. It resembled an earthquake scene from an old B movie. With that picture in mind, try to imagine that my father came through all of it almost unscathed. I have forgotten what it looked like and what it felt like, both during and the weeks after the crash, but the story my father tells is as fresh as yesterday. As he sat on a gurney in the back of one of the ambulances, he heard two firemen talking while they were staring at our car. One said to the other, There’s no way anyone that was in that car is still alive. The lady who had hit us spent the next fourteen months in the hospital learning to eat and stand and walk again. To say, we were blessed is a monumental understatement. She came out of the accident a millionaire via the car company, but her life, as well as ours, would never be the same. If you’re reading this and you are at a point where you think you have no purpose, no reason for tomorrow, know this, you are alive because God wants you and needs you. If you don’t believe me, then put the book down. If you’re unsure,