It does me good to pause from time to time to read an account of a person coming to faith. It never ceases to fascinate me how many different paths we take to that one door and it never ceases to encourage me to read about another person’s experience of coming to the end of themselves before finally entrusting themselves to the Lord. God is endlessly creative in the ways in which he draws his people to himself.
Ashley Lande spent much of her life looking for The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever. That search led her down many different paths, but the one that most compelled and attracted her was psychedelics. She revered them and related to them almost as if they were a god, the means through which she would come to complete self-understanding, complete wholeness—the means through which she would achieve transcendence.
From the first time Lande tasted a psilocybin mushroom she was hooked and eventually graduated to LSD and other psychedelic substances. She was never a junkie as she might have been had she pursued hard drugs, but she was addicted nonetheless—addicted to the experience, to the effects, and perhaps most of all, to the conviction that these drugs would eventually bring her a kind of salvation.
There was no single thunderclap moment that broke her commitment to drugs and made her loyal to Jesus. Rather, it was a succession of small moments—faithful Christians living godly lives, faithful churches speaking gentle truths, and a faithful husband who was on a similar journey but a few steps ahead. In the end, she began to understand that she had made herself her own god and realized this was an utterly futile pursuit. “Suddenly my grande pursuit of enlightenment through psychedelics seemed to position me no better than a junkie. I wasn’t a seeker, or a sojourner, or a pilgrim courageously plunging into unmapped worlds. I liked getting high. I loved drugs.” As soon as she was willing to admit the futility of her own attempts to be enlightened and instead trust in Jesus, she was saved—wonderfully, miraculously, and radically saved.
Though I have read many conversion memoirs over the years, I had never read one quite like Lande’s. The writing is top-tier and so is her self-understanding. She probes deep into her actions and gazes deep into her soul to explain what drew her to psychedelics, what she thought they would do for her, and why they eventually and inevitably let her down. She offers insights into the intersection between the New Age movement and the use of drugs. And she explains why the Christian faith offers hope and assurance that are reliable and compelling.
The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever is a thoroughly enjoyable read and, like any great memoir, turns the reader’s attention far beyond its author and to the One who is ultimately the Author of her story and all of ours as well.
