Chasing the Dragon Read Online Free Page A

about?
It seemed to me that I was trapped. I could not live just how I pleased, because it was possible that God was there after all and that one day I would have to explain everything I had done to Him. This was not a happy thought.
    Then there was the problem of sin. I had seen the school register and the mark the students got against their name every day. Lying on the tennis lawn, I looked up at the sky and imagined God was up there with a big book. It had all our names in it, and every time you did something wrong, you got a mark.I had a look at my column, and it was terribly long. I think it went on for pages. Well, there was nothing to be done, because there was a song in Sunday School about being stuck with your sins:
    God has blotted them out
    I’m happy and glad and free!
    God has blotted them out
    let’s turn to Isaiah and see. 1
    I did not understand “blotting out,” so it wasn’t until years later that I knew what we were singing. I thought of that big book with all my sins stretching for lines and lines and God with a piece of blotting paper carefully blotting them in. At last a solution occurred to me. Because youth was in my favor, I decided,
If I never do anything wrong again, ever, ever, perhaps one day I will catch up to Winston Churchill! He is the goodest person on the earth, but he is very old, so if I stop sinning now maybe we will end up about equal!
    I made another mistake during my first term at boarding school. My twin and I were sitting at the end of the table, eating the compulsory piece of brown bread for tea. The head of our table was a tall girl named Mirissa; she told me off for not cutting my bread in half before eating it. I thought I would try to atone for the brown bread by making polite conversation, but, unfortunately, I chose the wrong topic. Having heard the first Billy Graham broadcast a short time previously, I mentioned how impressed I had been with the evangelist. “Mass emotion!” she drawled disdainfully and dismissed the subject. (I was in such awe of the seniors that ever after when such matters cropped up in school, I would sneer, “Mass emotion!”)
    Confirmation came around, and it was our grade’s turn to be “done.” I was rather serious about all this, feeling that I was one of the few who really believed in God. The others were only doing it for the dresses and the Confirmation Tea, to which we could invite relatives and godparents. My real fear was that the vicar would ask us individually what we believed before wecould get through, but I need not have worried—he never did. So that was all right. But I had to ask him a question first: “What should I think about when the bishop puts his hands upon my head?”
    The vicar thought for a moment. “Ah—I should er … er—pray!” he concluded triumphantly. Gilly and I walked forward in our school-issue white dresses and knelt down. The bishop laid hands on us—I can only remember walking back to my seat filled with joy. Actually, I felt like laughing—like splitting my sides.
How improper—this was a confirmation service, and this was the solemn bit. Laughing was for the tea afterward
. I found my service sheet and covered up my face so that no one should see me smiling in the pew, and then quickly put my head down in an attitude of prayer. I had hoped to carry off the ceremony looking both reverent and graceful—there did not seem to be any connection between the service and this unseemly gladness. I was giving my life to God; I had expected nothing back.
    My next move was to find the classified phone directory, look up missionary societies, take the address of the first one and write them a letter. “I’m thinking of becoming a missionary,” I wrote, “and I think I should start preparing now. What subjects should I take?” They responded by joining me to their postal youth fellowship. It was lovely getting extra mail at boarding school breakfast, but I had to make sure I leaned across the label