I’m skipping the Summer of 2017. While it was fun and gave me the chance to grow through Young Life Summer Staff at Sharptop Cove, I feel it holds little value to the following stories. However, my lack of testament to that summer staff indicates no feeling I have towards them, I loved them all dearly and still do to this day.
Towards the end of the previous semester, I had gotten close to four guys in the class above me and ended up living with them my Sophomore year. I met them through Young Life college and spent a lot of time at the apartment they lived in the year prior. So eventually we all just decided to live together. ‘The Retreat’ was the name of the place we chose, a college community near the football stadium. We called it the Jordan House since it was #23 and it quickly became ground zero for all our shenanigans. But before we get into that juicy stuff you first have to meet the roommates.
First up we’ve got Reynolds. Matt was his first name but we called him Reynolds because of Matt, otherwise known as Goose, who also lived with us. Reynolds was the only one out of the five of us who wasn’t involved in Young Life. He was a 35 year old man in a college boys body, he was the more tame one of the roommates but that’s not saying much considering the way the rest of us acted. Reynolds had spent a semester at Alabama before transferring to USC along with the second roommate, Josiah. Josiah was a country wild child whose lack of a filter made him the perfect addition to the shenanigans and made him the life of the party most anywhere we went. Josiah had also transferred with Reynolds from Bama after they were roommates during that first semester freshman year. Third we have Tad. His volume compensated for his lack of cleanliness and was nonetheless wild than Josiah. Tad, Josiah and Reynolds all went to high school together but Tad and Josiah had grown up best friends so their dynamic personalities seemed to flourish when they were together. Last but certainly not least we have Goose. Our fearless muscle of the house, a gentle heart but only a moments notice away from squaring up on anyone who tried to come at us. The obvious adult of the house but his personality, humor and curiosity completed a dynamic that seemed to blend perfectly. And though we had no idea the importance of all our differences, the five of us were in for a year that I will always cherish. I could write for hours about the random and hysterical things we did, our laughter filled nights and front porch Black & Mild talks. Some of my favorite memories were playing Guitar Hero at full volume in the middle of the day with all the doors and windows open, the winter Olympics where we got sucked into watching figure skating whenever it came on. Then there were impromptu moments where we’d all just act like fools, wether that was Reynolds cutting a hole in the window screens to get on the roof to play guitar and scream Wonder Wall or randomly putting on all the denim we owned and riding down the stairs in a laundry basket. Of course we had our more intimate moments, like I mentioned those front porch talks, sometimes they carried fun stories but more often than not we’d find ourselves openly talking about our problems and struggles, fears and uncertainties, doubts and anything that slipped in-between. Though we acted like fools, we still made sure to be there when the other needed us. My favorite memory though was the bible study that Goose and a few friends started in our living room. We intentionally made it a non-younglife bible study because we all felt we needed a place that wasn’t Young Life to grow spiritually in community with other guys who weren’t in Young Life. Connor, a former Young Life and College Life leader led the bible study. And it was by far the best and most genuine bible study I’ve ever had the chance to be a part of.
That same year was my first full year leading Young Life. It was a tough year as we were starting Young Life at a new school. Young Life was relatively uneventful for my sophomore year since we were still establishing.
Sophomore year was also the year I started a very low-key friends with benefits relationship with another leader in Columbia. I say “friends with benefits” but in reality it was just us hanging together, cuddling and making out when our roommates were gone. We used one another for physical comfort and ended up establishing a really weird friendship where a majority of our time was spent like that. Over that year, things slowly escalated between us physically. We never had sex but each night together became longer. Both of us knew we couldn’t tell people what we were doing and both of us did our best to keep it a secret, I don’t think anyone ever knew much, and if they did, there’s no way they would’ve known how consistently it went on. Our relationship continued on and off until this past semester and I’ll talk a little more about it along the way.
Overall, sophomore year was the funnest year of college. Wether that was from the lightsaber battles, stolen cars or front porch talks, it was by far the favorite.
Sadly, we only lived there for a year and all moved into new places after we all kinda failed to figure out living situations for the following year. But in the last few weeks of us all living there, we spent a lot more time together reminiscing on the past year and the friendships we’d grown. More intentional and open conversation became a more frequent occurrence and our front porch talks became a nightly event. Though there was one night in particular that stuck with me.
There had been a little bit of an ongoing joke that the house we had was haunted. At some point each of us had heard some weird noises and felt weird feelings. For instance, Goose talks about how he would feel like someone was in his bedroom at night and that he even felt like something was in his bed. He’d also had one point during the year where he had felt some of these things while he was going through a weird time spiritually and got super sick out of nowhere. Josiah also claimed to have felt things intermittently. He was always the one up late and talks about how one night he’d gone around to each of our rooms to pray over them, and when he reached Goose’s room, he said he felt some bad juju when he started to pray over it. They tell the stories much better than I do so if you know either of them, be sure to ask.
But one night towards the end of our time in the Retreat we brought up the topic of spiritual warfare. On the porch was Josiah, Tad, Goose and I. We were going thru talking about spiritual warfare and how we thought it effected our lives as believers. This is where Josiah and Goose brought up their little ghost stories for the first time but also where I had a big realization. At one point the conversation shifted to how we thought spiritual warfare could shift our minds to temptation. And like a baseball bat to the face, I was hit with a memory I’d suppressed more than 10 years before.
In the first chapter I talked about two reoccurring dreams I had as a kid. Dreams that happened for no particular reason yet subconsciously effected me throughout my childhood and subsequently, today. But in that chapter I mentioned there was another dream that I’d tell later, this is that story. The nightmare of the Shadow Man.
The dream would always start the same. It took place in the first house my family and I lived in South Carolina. I’d be standing at the top of the staircase at night. The way the staircase was laid out had a view straight to the front door. I’d be standing there in the dark looking at the door where you could see the glint from the streetlight outside shining on the decorative and oval shaped glass pane of the door. It’d be dead silent and I’d stand there staring for a few minutes before I’d be thrown to the bottom of the stairs. I was in a helpless state where I’d be unable to move but would be laying on my back looking up to the top of the steps. Where at the top, a shadowy figure stood. In the shape of a man, I could tell it was angry, breathing heavily. He would stand there staring for a few moments before he’d jump from the top step onto me where he’d beat me like a gorilla would pound the ground. I’d wake up almost immediately in my room where I had a clear view to the top of the steps where the Shadow Man had just been. I’d always look to see if he was coming, thinking I’d made it out of the nightmare. But while I’d peek from under the covers, I’d realize the Shadow Man was in my bed with me. And from then, he’d quietly and slowly grab my wrist to pull me into my closet where he would molest me. And from then, I’d wake up.
This dream happened back as far as I can remember all the way up to when we moved out of that house in 2007. It became normal to me as a kid and I never talked about it and would usually just forget it happened. And I really just suppressed the memory hoping it’d be forgotten. That was, until that night on the front porch in 2018.
Like I said, the memory of Shadow Man came out of nowhere and immediately had me in tears while the other guys were still deep in conversation. I sat there trying to process and couldn’t get over the notion that my child mind could’ve known that kind of violence, anger and let alone what sexual contact even was after the borderline sheltered childhood I had. It occurred to me that there was a chance that what I’d experienced was some type of spiritual warfare that could’ve planted seeds in my childhood mind of anger and sexual desire. An experience I wouldn’t come into contact with until a few months after moving out of that house in South Carolina in 2007, where a random thought and a little curiosity would fertilize the seed of a sexual addiction I’d carry and fight with to this day.
All these thoughts rushed in within a few moments and I had no clue how to process. So I stopped the guys in the middle of their conversation with a broken voice to tell them. They of course didn’t know how to react and neither did I. We all ended up sleeping in the same room that night, partially as a joke but also because we were all a little scared in our own right. We cracked jokes and talked shit to the ghosts but no amount of humor could’ve prepared me for the night after.
We sat out on the porch again the next night and were a little quieter. I spent a lot of that day thinking about the Shadow Man worrying that it’d come back somehow. I was also still trying to connect the dots of spiritual warfare to my own life in regards to the dream. I went to bed that night, now in my own bed, with these thoughts still racing through. In the middle of the night though, I woke up to a little girl standing next to my bed. She said softly, “get up” — So I pulled the covers off, put my feet on the floor and stood up as the little girl grabbed my hand. The girl had the same look of the Shadow Man, as in me only being able to see the dark silhouette, but I could tell somehow that she was kind. The feeling of peace and kindness didn’t come from the fact it was a little girl or her voice, but it was just this weird feeling in my heart. When I stood up I felt the girl gently grab my hand. When she did, my dark room turned into the most beautiful landscape I’d ever seen. There were hills of soft grass that felt like long flowing hair, a breeze blew straight through my skin like a breath of peace itself. The sky and the clouds were a soft pink and purple mixture. I stood there beginning to cry. Then the little girl spoke up and said, “It’s over, you’re safe now.” — And after standing there a few moments longer, I woke up.