It is God to whom and with whom we travel,
and while He is the end of our journey,
He is also at every stopping place.
Elisabeth Elliot
Greg Laurie’s personal Jesus Revolution may well have started with the prayers of Kay Smith.
Kay and Chuck Smith’s neat, one-story bungalow was in a modest neighborhood just a few blocks from Newport Beach’s Harbor High School.
Sometimes, in the afternoons, Kay would look out her sparkling, Windexed living room window and see kids ambling home from school. She’d see high school boys with their long hair and the rolling walk of people who’ve been smoking dope. Sometimes she could hear scraps of inane conversation. Kay’s heart went out to them with the same compassion she’d felt when she’d first seen the hippies in Huntington Beach. So she’d stop whatever she was doing, right there in her living room, and pray for the kids on the street. She didn’t know, of course, that the one with the long, blond hair and the art papers stuck under his arm was a lost, high seventeen-year-old named Greg Laurie.
Greg didn’t feel like he was seventeen. To put it in the words of the Beatles’ song, he felt like he’d already been down a very long and winding road—and, sadly, it hadn’t led to anyone’s door. He’d been beaten, mocked, or ignored by his mother’s not-so-significant others when he was little. His mom had sent him off to military school. Because of her serial husbands, he’d gone to way too many schools and moved way too many times. He’d refined his artistic skills sitting in bars at night, drawing cartoons while he waited for his mom to nightcap off her evening. He had heroes—cartoonists like Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, for example. But his everyday experience was that the adults he actually knew were just the people who let you down, broke their word, or sent you to the principal’s office. He dreamed of great things, of one day being in a place where everybody knew his name. But he had no idea how to get there.
Greg had thought that drugs might be the ticket for that journey. But all he’d found was that they were not exactly a path to cosmic creativity and celestial self-discovery. LSD promised psychedelic colors and a rainbow of higher consciousness, but all it did for Greg was take him to dark, bleak places where he saw his face melting and all that was left was a skull. Acid had permanently cracked some kids he knew; they downed it like candy, and now they’d never be the same. Pot was not much better; it dulled him out and leached his creativity. He’d think he’d drawn something extraordinary, only to look at it the next day and realize that all he’d sketched was a million mushrooms and marijuana leaves, like wallpaper for a hippie bathroom.
He’d seen Jesus freaks on the street; they’d hand him tracts when he’d go down to the pier to score some pot. The tracts didn’t make any sense, really, but he’d kept them stuffed in a “God drawer” in his room, like a raccoon saving treasures he didn’t quite understand.
He’d read a book called Sun Signs, the first astrology book to ever get a spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Among other things, it told him that as a Sagittarius, he was full of “idealistic enthusiasm and curiosity.” Because of his “sunny optimism,” there would almost always be a crowd around him. He was so optimistic, in fact, that “if his enemies mailed him a huge carton of manure, he wouldn’t be offended. He’d just figure they forgot to include the horse.”1
Bottom line, the book itself sounded a bit like a carton of manure.
Greg wasn’t a huge Rolling Stones fan, but the fact was, he couldn’t get no satisfaction. Drugs, sex, music, alcohol, school, and the adult world all had been tried and found wanting. Life looked like a long spool, most of it as yet unwound, but there sure didn’t seem to be any promise that the future would be any different from the past.
It was a sunny, mid-March day in 1970. He was on his way to go off campus to buy some drugs.
A week or so earlier, a total eclipse of the sun had turned the day into darkness across much of the United States.
In New York, members of the Weather Underground—a radical leftist group opposed to the Vietnam War—died when the bomb they were assembling to blow up a US Army base exploded prematurely in their Greenwich Village townhouse.
The United States lowered the national voting age from twenty-one to eighteen.
An Eastern Air Lines flight from Newark to Boston was hijacked by a guy armed with a .38-caliber revolver. After a gun battle in the cockpit, the pilot was somehow able to land the plane safely.
Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was the number one song in America. The Beatles released a new album, Let It Be.
The US military announced its five hundredth nuclear test explosion since 1945.
At Harbor High School, however, Greg Laurie wasn’t thinking much about the national news of the day. Nor was he pondering the rise and fall of great civilizations, or the hippie movement, or much of anything. He was pondering how to sneak off campus to smoke pot and checking out what cute girls were doing.
There was one girl in particular. Her magnetism didn’t have to do with being attractive, however. Greg was drawn to her because she seemed so happy and free.
There was one big problem, though. At school, she carried around a Bible the size of an atlas, and she was clearly a Jesus freak.
During lunch hour on that fine March day in 1970, this girl was sitting in the grass with about thirty other students, singing folk songs to one kid’s guitar, and smiling way too much. Greg inched just close enough to see what they were doing, but not close enough to seem like he was part of the group. As always, he was an observer.
The singing was pretty plain, but it also seemed pure. As a cynic, Greg could sniff out insincerity, and these kids were actually, really into Jesus. There’s Bill up there singing, he thought. And I used to get stoned with him. Now, it’s like he really is different.
Then, as the music faded, a guy got up. And he looked just like . . . Jesus. He wasn’t quite the pale Jesus portrait on Greg’s grandparents’ living room wall, but pretty close. He had long, dark hair parted in the middle, with a mustache and beard. He had peaceful brown eyes. He was wearing sandals and a flowing shirt that looked like a first-century tunic.
Greg didn’t know the guy’s name then, but it was Lonnie Frisbee. As he continued to evangelize throughout the Costa Mesa area, Lonnie had come to Greg’s public high school to teach a Bible study during lunchtime.
Lonnie read out loud from the Bible and talked about how Jesus wasn’t some faraway, dry historical figure. He was real, and human beings at Harbor High School in 1970 could actually have a relationship with Him.
Greg thought Jesus was great; he’d seen all His movies, like Ben Hur and King of Kings. He knew that Jesus was a good teacher who probably would have fit right in with all the peace-loving hippies of the day.
Lonnie talked about how Jesus was the Son of God, that He had died for everyone’s sins, and that He had risen from the dead. For the first time in his life, Greg made a personal connection. He realized that Jesus had died for his sins, and that Jesus was alive and speaking to Greg through this hippie evangelist.
Then Lonnie said something that forced the point: “Jesus said that ‘You’re either for Me, or you’re against Me.’
“There’s no middle ground with Jesus,” Lonnie went on. “You’re either for Him or against Him. So which side are you on?”
Whoa, Greg thought. Jesus wasn’t just part of the nice hippie blur of peace and love and harmony, take some of what He said if you like it, skip the other parts you don’t like so much, make Him part of your own little world. He was actually more radical than that. More revolutionary: you were either for Him or against Him.
Greg looked at the Jesus-freak kids sitting there with their Bibles on their laps. They’d clearly made a decision. It was actually cool that they didn’t seem to care what other people thought. They were for Jesus.
I’m not part of them, Greg thought. So does that mean I’m against Jesus?
Lonnie Frisbee went on. Anyone who wanted to decide to be for Jesus could come forward and he would pray with them.
It was scary. Greg thought, What if it’s not real? What if I can’t do it right? What if it works for everybody else but me?
But in the end, all he knew was he wanted to be for Jesus, not against Him. His body somehow made its way up to the front toward Lonnie, the Jesus lookalike, along with other students who’d decided the same thing. They all stood there. Quiet.
Then, after some earnest words of simple instruction from Lonnie, Greg prayed to tell Jesus that he was for Him, that he wanted to follow Him, and that he wanted Jesus to forgive his sins.
All the other kids erupted into tears and hugs. Greg just stood there. He felt nothing except the sneaking suspicion that he just hadn’t done it right. But then he felt something else. It was the sense that a weight had been lifted, a burden he hadn’t even consciously known he had carried all his life. His long and winding road had, in fact, led to the Door.