2. Third-Degree Burns and the God Who Held the Match

Childhood survival and the birth of a cosmic contract

We were out at the lake sitting inside a truck and at twelve years old I was about to smoke pot for the very first time. It was a choice that felt laced with hypocrisy because I had spent my entire childhood hating drugs. I had watched drugs dismantle the emotional health of my family, and I knew the wreckage they caused. But the unmediated chaos of my home environment had become a full-on destructive storm in my life. My father’s meth-induced rage fits during his comedowns and my mother’s crushing emotional issues and inability to protect us and herself had turned our house into a psychological war zone. My nervous system was completely overloaded.

I sought shelter in a peer group that encouraged me to drink and get high for the first time with them. It wasn’t about the substances. It was about the desperate need for a tribe. It was an entry into a horizontal hierarchy because the primary vertical hierarchy of my family had utterly collapsed.

I remember looking out the truck window at the lake. I was consumed by a profound burning anger at God. My life was a wreck and I felt I had been given no choice but to plunge directly into the very chaos I had detested for so long. This was my act of rebellion and frustration. After we smoked I remember explicitly telling God I didn’t believe in Him anymore and that I wasn’t going to waste time thinking about Him any longer.

Then shortly after, I stepped out of the truck to pee.

While I was outside, one of my friends decided he was hungry and tried to restart the campfire to cook some food. He poured gasoline into a pop can and attempted to pour it onto the hot coals so that the fire would start back up. The gasoline caught on fire instantly, travelling up the stream and turning the can into a fireball in his hand. In a panic, he threw the can into the air.

It came down and soaked my shirt on fire.

The burning gasoline soaked my shoulder and chest, lighting my clothes instantly. My friend screamed, “Stop, drop, and roll!” quite amazingly. I hit the ground and tried, but the fire was on my shoulder and it wasn’t going out. I scrambled back up and ripped the shirt off. It was a button-up nylon shirt and the synthetic fabric had melted to my skin. By the time the flames were out I ended up getting second- and third-degree burns all over my arm and shoulder.

I didn’t see a reckless accident with a gas can. My twelve-year-old brain saw the immediate wrathful strike from God. I had broken the rules, I had renounced His existence, and He had responded by sending a fire to show me what He could do. I internalized this as His warning against me and believed that He would kill me if I continued down this path, and even further, what would be waiting for me in Hell. Even though my parents weren’t religious and we didn’t go to church, I had heard enough about the ideas of Heaven and Hell from Hollywood and friends to know that bad people get what they deserve and good people go to heaven. I and my family were on the side of bad people getting what they deserve.

But the warning didn’t stop at the lake. The true terror of the contract was solidified in the doctor’s office during a procedure called surgical debridement.

When a second and third-degree burn heals, the damaged skin creates a stiff leathery layer of dead tissue. If left alone it can shrink and tighten severely as it heals and limit movement, while also trapping infection. To prevent this, the doctor uses a specialized surgical blade or an instrument called a dermatome to carefully scrape and shave away the burned, dead layers of skin.

Thankfully medicine has changed since I was twelve. But for me, this was done with absolutely no numbing medicine. This was the most painful experience of my life, even worse than the initial burn itself. It was a doctor systematically running a razor blade over exposed nerve endings. This pain would continue as phantom scrapes for hours after they had cut the dead skin away.

I really believed that the scraping was the continued punishment driving home the warning from God that said, “I will kill you and I can do it very painfully,” and I was terrified.

I had to do several rounds of the scraping. While my new skin began to grow back, a new, completely shattered internal architecture had grown in as well. I had signed a terrifying cosmic contract based on pure survival dread and the threat from God. I was a twelve-year-old boy experiencing hell in my childhood and believed that when I acted out from this chaos, I would be punished by a cosmic warden who used literal fire to keep me in line.

I kept this idea to myself, acknowledged the contract, and kept moving on with my life. I believed if I smoked pot again, the bill was going to come due, and God would finish what He started. So for the next three years, I wouldn’t touch pot. However, the chaos in my life with my family just got worse and I ended up not truly living with my parents full time shortly after that, bouncing around from house to house of friends constantly. The chaos of this emotional instability would catch back up to me, and I found myself testing just how seriously the terms of that threat would be enforced.

Continue the story below…