Ep24 In The Shadow Of The Mountain C.L.Knox stories

The speaker discusses their experience of being exposed to inappropriate sexual behavior as a child and their discomfort with discussing it. They then recount an encounter with someone named Chuck, who made them feel uncomfortable by caressing them. They mention a friend named Tom who intervened and comforted them. The speaker reflects on whether Tom was an angel and discusses their interest in spirituality and reading religious texts. They also mention their fascination with the book of Revelation and how it connects to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The speaker reflects on the choices humans make and their belief in God's purpose for humanity. episode 24. I'm gonna carry on with some of that Chuck stuff. This will be the last one for Chuck and it's not it's not an easy one for me to share. I guess I can explain that now. When, like, throughout my life as a child, throughout my childhood, after my mom and dad divorced, we were exposed, I was exposed, can't speak for my siblings, I can, but I was exposed to all kinds of what would be considered inappropriate sexual behavior by adults. It was just that was part of the hippie thing. I mean, it was part of humanity. It's part of the human thing, a perversion of sex. I don't like talking about it. I mean, I don't mind shedding light on it. I don't like like to illuminate it in our culture because sex is such a big deal. And yet, it's trivialized. So we have that kind of dichotomy there. But anyway, that's just a precursor. I'm gonna tell the story. So after Chuck and Tom and I returned to the co-op house or the commune house in Vancouver, we stayed there for a while. Chuck was not in a good frame of mind. You know, some would say Chuck never was in a good frame of mind. I think that's probably appropriate. He was hurt. I think there was anger, Fiona not coming back with us. I don't know what else happened. Might have been something with his drugs suppliers or I don't know, but he was not in a... Well, I mean, I said last week, I wasn't in a good frame of mind either. You know, severe depression. Somehow, Tom seemed to ride that one out, you know, or he had acquired the personal tools needed to traverse the path of depression. I don't know. Anyway, so we were back in the house doing the parties, partying and well, you know, partying, doing drugs and lots of transient people coming through and leaving again. And Chuck was making plans for himself. He didn't want to stick around in BC anymore. So anyhow, I mean, we got all really stoned one night. I think my memory is that we had an acid trip and it was a pretty wild, like, revealing, personally revealing acid trip. Afterwards, I was lying on the couch and we were watching, Tom was watching one of the TVs that was in the house. This wasn't a big room, but it had a couch and a couple of chairs and a television. Chuck came in and lay down beside me and put his arms around me and started to caress me. And it put me in an extremely awkward position. I was 12 again, right? So that, in my mind, that, the intent behind the caressing me, that's wrong. What he was doing was wrong. Now, in the world we live in again today, those lines are being blurred more readily. So I didn't know how to react to this unwanted attention. I just sort of curled up in a ball, got tense, got tight. And Tom was sitting there watching the whole thing go down, the whole episode go down. The television was on. I don't remember anybody else in the room. And then Tom says to Chuck, and I think this is actually what he said, I mean, who knows, memory over 50 plus years. He said, I don't think Chris is particularly enjoying that, Chuck. And Chuck stopped and sort of backed up. And he looked at me. And he went, Oh, my God, I'm sorry. And he left the room. This is one of many sexual encounters that were unwanted. And you may say that one didn't advance very far. It advanced too far. It should never have happened. Anyway, so after that, Tom and I were left in the room and we were just quiet for quite a while. And then Tom began to query me about how I felt. I don't know, Tom never showed any sexual intent towards me. And you know what, I don't think that's a rarity. I don't think most men are animals. I don't think they are that way. I think we are all, according to Romans, again, we all have a natural understanding. We all know right from wrong. We all know good and bad. And we all have a conscience. Right. So anyway, I, I, we talked again, there's nothing ever, I don't remember anything religious ever coming. Or, you know, I would say spiritual maybe, but he didn't, he didn't use the I Ching, he didn't talk tarot cards. It's just like this guy was, was there to protect and to comfort and to add wisdom to my life. Right. So just so interesting. Sometimes I wonder if Tom was real. If there ever was a Tom. I think, I don't know, sometimes I wonder like, was this just an angel guy walking around beside me trying to take care of me? He never told me about God. He never mentioned God, as far as I can remember. I don't know. It was an interesting thing that happened. So anyway, after that, I went home. Chuck took me home. Tom, I don't remember him coming over there, but he may have dropped me off. Chuck might have stayed a day or two. I can't remember. Then he left. He said he was gonna go back to the States. I don't remember him being American, but that's how I remember him going back to the States. A lot of Americans up here at that time. Young men avoiding the draft, avoiding the Vietnam War. It was a lot. He may have been one. Wouldn't surprise me. So, you know, these things all get, get me thinking about, again, back to philosophy. And like I said, I go like, I wonder if he was an angel. So I'm always going back into this spiritual realm that I consider actually to be the real realm. So I can, like, this is real. My flesh is real and everything that I feel is real. But the real realm that this realm is not a reflection of. So we have impurity and in propriety and sin in this realm that we have to deal with. So every single one of us in a personal way and in a corporate way, like this is humanity. I've been reading, like again, I've been reading in Revelations. I've been reading in Mark. I've been reading in Peter. I've been reading in Psalms. And I've been reading Jeremiah. Like I jump around, like if you saw my Bible, this is one of them. You can see there's like probably seven bookmarks in there, right? So that's kind of, that's how I read. I read old books and I try to read it all the way through. I don't always read the same book every day. I'll jump around between these books. It's just my way, the way that I've developed to read the Bible. Partly is I like the complete overview of the character of God, which is throughout the Bible. It's all through it. But sometimes it's not easy to recognize it. As I was reading Revelations 18, 19, 20, the last parts, right to 22, I finished it. It caused me to go back and look at the first part of Revelation. Just the very first letter, the very first, the introduction of it, because in the beginning, the end in the beginning, one of the things that Jesus said about himself that was that he was the Alpha and the Omega. I wear sometimes I wear a hat with an Alpha and Omega sign on it. The Alpha is the very first letter of the Greek alphabet and the Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet. So at the beginning of the book of Revelation, where the prophetic end times prophecies are coming through, right up in the front, I can't remember, between five and 10 in the number sequence. So one five or one 10 or somewhere in there. Jesus is spoken of as the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the end in the beginning. And that's what that means, that Alpha means the first Alpha. And at the end, that same phrase comes through a couple of times. And then right at the almost the very end of the book, it's that again, Jesus says, I am the Alpha and the Omega. I am the first and the last. I'm the end and the beginning. Take me back to the beginning. And then looking at the end and recognizing that he's identifying himself as the beginning and the end. And then thinking like I'm reading in Genesis two, I've been reading, rereading Genesis one to seven or eight, over and over. It's one, two, three, four, the ones that really are grabbing me. And that's been going on for months, just months of me reading that. You know, every month, at least once I'll read from one to four, and I'll read it. And it's intense that Genesis, it shows so much about our personalities and God's personality and why we're here. It answers so many of those philosophical questions of like, why is there something rather than nothing? Why am I here? Who am I? Is there life after death? Who's God? Is there a God? You know, so it answers all those questions. And I just love it. I just love reading over it and remembering and examining. And then Revelation, I love too, but in a different way, although the very end of Revelation, I gotta say, I'm realizing now, at the beginning in the Garden of Eden, there's this paradise, this paradise, the Garden of Eden. And man comes in and basically he's the cause of the destruction, although it's never destroyed. Humanity's just forbidden access to the Garden of Eden. And then just recently reading, like reading them both at the same time, the beginning and the end, and reading Revelation and seeing the New Jerusalem that comes down is described like, you know, specific or very clearly is described as the Garden of Eden. It's not called the Garden of Eden. It's called New Jerusalem. So, stuff like that, it just grabs me. And again, I've said it before, maybe it's because of my past psychedelic trips. Maybe it's just because the Holy Spirit has touched me, or is touching me, when I'm reading those things. And it comes together and it makes complete sense. And it's just very clear that from the beginning it was not God's intent, evil for men, for men to choose evil. But it was a given choice. And I'm coming to realize more and more that understanding this timeline with God, I mentioned it before, he's outside of time. And he's all through time. He created time. So his understanding is completely different of reality. We're in the three-dimension plus time existence. So really it's a fourth dimension. We're in this three-dimension plus time existence. And since the Garden of Eden, we choose to choose ourselves over God, the Creator, our Father. There is this purpose that God has, purpose of us, humanity, learning who he is, establishing a relationship with him. And through the experience of the Garden of Eden, we learn a lot about who God is, a lot about humanity, what the nature of man is, since what we call the Fall, since the Fall of man. That is, the disobeying the one mandate that God had to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So we learn about the nature of man in that first four chapters of Genesis. I think it's all there, just in those four chapters. And then as you go on and read through it, it's, you know, you learn what it takes to to walk or live according to the plan of God, because he had a plan, has a plan. That is fulfilled in Christ. That's the Christian faith, that the plan was for Christ to live as a sinless man, die on a cross, and be raised again. And that is the Lamb that's represented throughout Scripture, the sacrificial Lamb. And there's also like scapegoat, like there's all these things that you read, like all these terms that we use that you realize are established in Scripture, and they're just permeated in our culture, and we don't even realize that the origin of them is Christian faith. I've talked about that before as well, and I will again, no doubt. Anyway, and the purpose for us to become friends with God, for us to become sons and daughters of God. And that was the purpose from the beginning. Those are all just, what would you call them, allegory or whatever. They're painting the picture of our relationship, or our potential relationship with God. All through, you see the jealousy of God, like I talked about last time. You just see God's character recreated in His image, and if you look at His character, and you look at yourself, you'll see your capacity. But not just your capacity, you'll see how perverted the capacity has become, how distorted, how arrogant, how we've taken so many other gods, so many other idols, so many other things, and made them idols, lifted them up. And always we're at the center, like this is back to the Garden of Eden. We're always at the center, not God. What is it when you think about this grace that God has given us, when you think about Jesus, and what He said, this grace, and He comes to set the captive free. There's this understanding about repentance, and this word, we hate it. We just despise that word, that word, sin and repentance. But again, repentance is like the way I describe jealousy. Repentance is an act of love. It's recognizing God's love for me, undying love, and loving Him back, and choosing to turn away from the Chris on the throne model, and move towards the Lord God Jesus on the throne. The Holy Spirit does that work, it pulls you, it's pulling on everybody. I honestly believe it's pulling on everybody. But we have varying degrees of spite, pain, anger, and a lot of that gets directed at God. How could you let this happen to me? And then I come really, in my life, the things that I've learned from the hardships I've gone through, and every single person I know can say that. The things that I've learned from the hardships I've gone through, and how many times it was something about me that precipitated it. Was there something about me that precipitated it with Chuck? I want to say this one more thing about Chuck, the wrap up. I became a Christian, I went home, I went back to school. So it would have been probably at least a year after I saw Chuck and that whole incident happened. At least a year, maybe slightly older, maybe 13, 14 months instead of 12 months. I was asleep one night, it was probably four in the morning, and I heard the phone ring. I was still at this time. We were sharing the room, the four of us were sharing, me and Joe and Vicki and Jonathan were sharing the room with two bucks on either side. Bryce answered the phone, and I could hear him say, no, I don't accept the charges. Then he said, it's four o'clock in the morning, he's sleeping and he has school tomorrow. Then he hung up. The next morning, Bryce told me that Chuck had called Collect at four in the morning. He was in Miami, I guess, because it was, do you accept the Collect charges for Miami, Florida, USA? Bryce was like, no, I don't. It's four o'clock in the morning. I'm not getting him up. The gist of the story is, some few weeks after, I don't remember who it was, and this still kind of breaks me up a little bit, but somebody came to the farm that knew Chuck and was still in touch with him, and told us that he had committed suicide. So, they had the date, you know, they say it was in the morning. So there's a three or four hour time difference. So if he called from four o'clock our time, roughly, then it would have been like anywhere between seven and eight, his time in the morning. Anyway, apparently he stepped off the sidewalk in front of a bus on a busy thoroughfare and got hit by the bus and died. This is another thing I got to carry. Why did he phone? Was he looking for something for me? Was he looking for redemption? And then again, was it something about me? Was there a reason? I don't know. Anyway, that screwed with my brain. I mean, it still does. It still boggles the mind. That being what it is, I just, I have a lot of love and care and that produces a lot of patience. Like I read today in, must have been Peter, love covers a multitude of sins. I have a sense of loss, love lost. And the one thing about Chuck is that he never heard me say, it's alright, I forgive you. Maybe without that, he couldn't forgive himself. And this again goes back to the plan and purpose of God, that we all know the wrong, bad that we do. We all know it's there. And sometimes we can't forgive ourselves. And we're never going to get the forgiveness we need from other people. But back to Psalm 51, which I've mentioned a few times throughout these podcasts, that's the psalm where David had an affair with Bathsheba, a married woman. And then he sent her husband out to the front line of battle and had the rest of the forces pull back and he was killed. So basically he had him murdered, just to cover up his own sin. And then when that whole thing unfolds, that's in 2 Samuel, that story, it's a pretty cool story. But in Psalm 51, it's David's writing that poet's heart, saying that he realizes that the sin that he's committed is against God. It's not so much man as it is against God. And seeking God's forgiveness. We sin against each other, there's no doubt. But the sin, the ultimate sin, what makes it sin, is God's holiness and our inability to live up to that holiness, that example, our God. Anyway, that's this episode. And the next one is 25. See you there. That meaning is anything to me. Our country's bowed by the wind and the sunlight's far below the sea. I ran aground at a harder time, lost the days while I played. Thank God He sent some gold chasers to carry me to sea. Do a thousand years and have the world away. Be still, O reader, when you pray. Silver scales lash bright and clear, and the reeds on your shoulder glow. Like a crib, the world's small, and the sky above comes and hits you. Don't die, O reader, when this world is not seen. Do a thousand years and have the world away. Be still, O reader, when you pray. Silver scales lash bright and clear, and the reeds on your shoulder glow. Like a bird in a sea, O reader, when you pray, your sin comes to shine. Like a crib, the world's small, and the sky above comes and hits you. Comes to shine.