By Eric Epps –
For 14 days straight, Jerry Fussell took LSD—six microdots in total—experiencing hallucinations and sleeplessness.
“It was just destroying me,” Fussell recounts on the Door Church LA YouTube channel. “In a moment of desperation, I asked God, ‘If you’re really out there… if you’re real, show me.’”
Eventually, Jerry escaped drugs and turned to God, going through a cycle of seeking divine connection and falling back into sin.
Jerry’s mom divorced twice during his childhood. She moved to Tucson, Arizona, to start over, which is where Jerry began using drugs.
“At first, I was nervous about taking drugs,” he says. “I observed my friends. They were having fun. They weren’t winding up in the hospital or jumping out of windows. So I thought I’d give it a try.”
Soon, he was deeply involved. “In my sophomore year of school, I was dealing lightweight stuff. I was involved with some dangerous people. That was my connection to get the dope.”
He was burning out. The 14-day psychedelic binge left him so hollow that he first cried out to God, whom he vaguely knew only because the marvels of the human body, which he had studied in biology, didn’t make sense as a result of happenstance. “There had to be a higher power,” he says.
One morning, while walking home on the outskirts of town, he saw a man shouting from atop a nearby mountain. Thinking the man was stranded and needed help, Jerry hiked up to assist.
As he hiked up, the man hiked down. The man told Jerry about Jesus and invited him to church. He had been preaching on the hilltop.
Jerry attended the outreach concert. It was a Christian rock concert, which confused Jerry, as in 1982, rock was not associated with Christianity.
“I was very powerfully touched, but I was also freaked out by it,” he says. “I’d never been to a church like this.”
At the next party, he and his buddies “picked up some girls” and arrived at an apartment at 2:00 a.m. Then the Holy Spirit fell on Jerry.
“God just visits me, I get out of the car and start to weep,” he recalls. “I say to my friends, ‘I can’t do this.’”
His friends didn’t understand, but Jerry called a taxi and went home.
He tried praying and going to church. “I would go to church and then get high,” he says.
On January 30, 1982, God “took the scales off his eyes” while he was in his friend’s car.
“All of a sudden, I saw life and the world and understood God,” he says. “It came on like a switch. I absolutely knew without a shadow of a doubt that Jesus was real.”
He gave his life to God and went back to church. He was filled with the Holy Spirit there.
Incredibly, he went back to the club and consumed some psilocybin mushrooms. He felt convicted by the Spirit and responded defiantly.
“If you want, you can take back the Holy Ghost,” he said.
“I was acting like a total idiot,” he now realizes. “I was having an encounter with God but still acting like a fool.”
Suddenly at the club, he got scared and left. “I never took mushrooms again,” he says. “I gave the mushrooms to my friends.”
Finally, he squared up with God. He attended church regularly, quit partying, and lived a straight life.
Incomprehensibly, his mom got mad. She went to church and threatened to sue the pastor because Jerry was still slightly underage. She ranted about influencing a minor. (Thirty-three years later, she accepted Jesus.)
Jerry invited his friends and girlfriend to follow God, but when they said no, he cut them out. He didn’t want to fall back into sin under their influence.
After five years at the Door Church, he felt he should get married. On the first date with his now-wife, he explained clearly: he was going to be an evangelist. “If you’re not into that, enjoy your spaghetti and we’ll call it a day.”
Jerry and Glenda are still married. He is an evangelist with the Christian Fellowship Ministries.
“If you don’t have Jesus, it is a tragedy at the end,” Jerry says.
If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here
About the writer of this article: Eric Epps lives in the the San Fernando Valley and studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy.
