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PART II

Setting the Stage

“Forgetting Those Things Which Are Behind…And Pressing Toward the Mark”

“...But God said, ‘No!’

You did not choose Me,

but I chose you

and appointed you

that you should go and bear fruit,

and that your fruit should remain,

(John 15:16 NKJV)

Sixty-one years ago, God set in motion a plan He is still carrying out today. I, Donnie Foster was born a bawling, squalling, walloping baby boy. God’s creation; the Father’s design; formed by the very hand of God in my mother’s womb. Sounds like the perfect prelude to a beautiful life but I wonder, “Did God anoint my conception with a heavy heart?” My life was not beautiful. It was tragic “But God,” God has not lost one minute in the last sixty-two years in my life.

“…your care has preserved my spirit.

(Job 10: 10-12 NKJV)

I believe God anointed my life to be “special”…very, very special.

“But the anointing which you have received from Him

abides in you,…as the same anointing

teaches you concerning all things,

and is true, and is not a lie,…

you will abide in Him.”

(I John 2:27 NKJV)

Yes, my life was special, all right. I would describe it as “special” in the sense that it was insignificant to anyone. But…for God Himself, my life became very significant for decades. I started out as “the least of these.” My survival was found in the trenches of the evil influences of this world. As a child, most were the result of the evil that surrounded me but, as I grew, the trenches were deeper burrows of my own making.

I had instinctive needs that were never met. I was born to endure the absence of nurturing. As a result, scales of torment and anger became my garment because of things I needed but didn’t have; needs I didn’t even know I needed. Life was life and life was empty!

From the absence of very essential and unidentified hungering, I developed deep-rooted wounds that would haunt me for years but also, from them, I learned how to survive from age to age without the things I needed most. Their absence entrenched a deep emptiness in the core of my being. Survival was the only need I recognized. I survived because the Giver of life was preparing me as His witness. It was the shadow of God that covered me and followed me and led me into life everlasting for HIS glory!

“…Unaware”

I needed love but love was ever absent…“But God”… God’s love sustained me unaware.

I needed acceptance but I was always the misfit… “But God”… God’s anointing on me fit me uniquely into His plan of which for fifty years I was unaware.

I needed peace and security as a child but it was constant fear I stumbled over day after day…“But God”… God’s invisible, yet ever protective hand was over me of which I was unaware.

I needed a father who would care for me, love me, teach me, and protect me, and not hurt me… “But God”… I had the love of my Heavenly Father who was ever-present yet, I was unaware.

“…..Unaware…But God…was there.”

From my memories as a toddler through the years of adolescence, the Psalmist’s words sustained Me:

“For he shall give his angels charge over you,

to keep you in all your ways.”

(Psalms 91:11 NKJV)

My “special needs” were all met when I came to the end of myself. I was done. I began to look for a way out. I was so low I could only look up and realize the deepest need of all, a deep, deep hopeless void that I tried to fill with all the wrong things. But those first forty-plus years of my life were not for naught. They were the grounds of my learning…decades of “learning.” I would liken them to an exceptional walk through minefields of evil and the curses that escort it. Destruction could have blown up in my face at every turn. Figuratively speaking, my life was a living hell on earth. I was learning the pain of what it was like to be empty and angry in the pit of abuse and addictions, forsaken by all that was good.

Where was God for those fifty years? Believe it or not, He was there! Oh yes! I know that now. He was always there! I believe God wept bitterly over the pain and suffering I experienced, not just as a child, but as a grown man caught in the snarled and twisted chains of a dark and hopeless life fueled by lies of Satan and his demons.

Let’s look around us. Outside our comfort zones, there are throngs of people just like I was: without hope, empty, looking for something, anything, to fill that void in their lives that will bring them peace or satisfaction if even for a brief moment.

All around us are the evils of abuse, addiction, deception, hatred, anger, moral decay. Child abuse is rampant. Addiction is the only way many know how to live…for that single hit to bring them a few brief moments of satisfaction. And for every moment of what I thought was satisfaction, I always had to come back to reality: The reality that living life the only way I knew how was held in a downward spiral toward hell and destruction.

Sixty-two years ago, God opened the pages of my life, knowing it would be anything but pleasant. But today…today it’s because of that life, that I can clinch the reality and penetrating truth that accompanies the misery of those whose lives are in a spiral dive into that same emptiness. I lived it; I know it; I understand it; I know how it feels; I comprehend every major hurdle they face. I know every lie the hopeless believe.

You don’t have to live in a big city to find people living in that black abyss of self-annihilation and evil. They are all around us and even in our own families. I lived it and, by the grace of our God, survived it. Why can I rejoice in that? Because God had a plan. God was preparing me for ministry to His honor and glory. He was sculpting me in my misery to one day become His vessel for hope.

As God held my life together and moved me from a young life of fear, my fear began to turn into anger and self-preservation and finally rage took over my character. My chain of addiction grew as I faced life and the ramifications of the choices I made.

I had absolutely no conscience. I didn’t care who I hurt or who I stepped on or kicked to the curb. I had no filter for what was right or what was truth. I did what I thought I had to do to survive.

I should have died on more than one occasion. Death to my body could have come by the actions and choices of my own hand; or, sometimes, it could easily have come by the hand of another. That’s the way it is in the world of addiction. Every day is a crapshoot. But God…those beautiful words…But God spared my life. Why? Because God said in His Word: “I will rescue you from your own people…I am sending you to them to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God.” (Acts 26:17, 18 NIV)

The whole purpose of my life is right there in that one verse! Thank you, Jesus! Yes, my life was special; but listen, God was honing and firing a cold hard piece of worthless steel into a tool for a specific and divine purpose. Forging and firing are painful but, when the instrument becomes ready, it is sharpened, strengthened, and shaped for its intended use by the master craftsman. When done by the hand of God, the tool can only be broken by its Creator.

Moving Forward from Face Down

Remember early in the book, that night, at the tender age of four, when I was literally shoved out of the pickup of my angry and drunken stepfather? I’ll forever remember being left on a dark country road alone. I can still feel the darkness, hear the rattling of his old truck, and see the dust kicked up on that dirt road as it disappeared behind the taillights. Fear and darkness were so thick all around me and pressed in on me so tightly it was hard to breathe.

Earlier in the day, I had been beaten because I tried to run away and then, later that night, before my mom came home, my stepfather told me to get in the truck. I had no idea where we were going or why. We drove into the dark and then he stopped the old truck. He reached across the seat of the old pickup and opened the passenger door and then he said to me as he pushed me out onto the gravel road, “You wanna’ run…get out and run!”…I didn’t know why. I was terrified! Looking back, that one incident set the scene for my life for the years to come. Fleeing, keeping my head down, scared and ever fighting for self-preservation in an evil darkness, suffocating to my spirit.

For over forty years, I walked one very dark walk in a suffocating dense, deceptive, and destructive jungle. All through my years of growing up, I was at the mercy of the abusive hands of vile stepfathers. Looking for an escape from life as it was, I turned to drugs and alcohol at a very early age. It was a way of survival for me. It was a way of coping…of setting my fears free for a while. As the years passed, my wrong choices escalated and eventually led me to serving drug lords, running, and hiding. Eventually, I spent many of my young adult years in and out of prisons.

When Satan has control of the paths our feet run to follow, searching for those missing pieces, we find ourselves seduced by his lies. The confusing thing about his lies is they seem and sound so logical as we look for that satisfying formula: Like the deadly black widow spider, he sucks them to their doom in the sticky silk. Once we are sucked into the web of deceit, he entraps us into thinking we’ll find fleshly pleasures. There he ultimately destroys the soul and spirit by destroying truth with his lies. God’s Word describes that life perfectly when it says, “…men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For everyone practicing evil hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.” (John 3:19-20 NKJV)

I have been clean and dry for the last fifteen years and God has allowed me to share my story as a testimony that there is hope in God’s saving grace and it’s real. Through him, we are offered the light of Jesus to replace the darkness we’ve been living in.

“Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying,

‘I am the Light of the world;

he who follows Me

will not walk in the darkness,

but will have the Light of life.’”

(John 8:12 NKJV)

If you read my story in the book Face Down, please understand this one thing: As difficult as it might have been to read, be assured that I know God’s hand was on me every miserable day of my life. You might ask, “How can you say that? I thought God was a God of love and mercy.” Oh yes! He is, but he is also sovereign. What does that mean? A sovereign being is one who possesses supreme or ultimate power. Through the darkest storms, God never loses control of the ship.

As terrifying as my life was as a child and as despicable as it was as I grew to manhood, why would I have any reason to think God cared for, loved me, or had any regard for my life? I can say that by one very significant event He walked me through. If his hand had not been extended to me to protect and prepare me, the truth would never have been revealed to me what I was becoming. Here is the account:

God opened my blinded eyes one day when I was washing my Harley. It was a Saturday and I was so very angry. Abby, my wife at the time, had begun to attend revival services in our small town in Oregon. She had gone to the Saturday evening service and I was stewing in my anger that she could be so irrational as to attend church! What kind of a weak woman was she becoming! Over the last few days, I observed in her behavior, that she was actually listening and considering everything she was hearing from that preacher and I wasn’t about to have a wife that “foolish.” I seethed with anger when she backed her car out on the street that day to attend the service, “But God”…God stepped up and intervened.

Up until that day, I was Satan’s right-hand man and Satan had me right where he wanted me. There’s no way Satan would have revealed a very powerful truth to me of what I was becoming.

With the water hose in my hand, rinsing the breather on my bike, God stepped in and said, “Okay, Donnie, enough! Take a good look, Donnie. What do you see in the reflection in front of you?” My eyes caught my reflection in the breather of my bike! God’s sovereignty chose that day to radically jolt the bars of my self-made prison. Every chain that held me captive was of my own making in the execution of the evil path I followed. God stepped in and opened the path that was to set me free. This short excerpt is taken from the book, Face Down:

“I soaped my bike down and was squatted on my haunches,

rinsing it with the hose when something in the breather caught

my eye. I turned the stream of water away from the bike and took

a better look. There, in the reflection on the breather, I saw a very

distinct set of horns. They were sitting atop a head that didn’t

look like me, but something in the eyes looked like my eyes. I was

stunned at what I was seeing. I dropped the hose, and my hands

started to shake. I knew the vision was representing me as Satan.”

(From Face Down, pp. 189 -190)

Oh, dear friends! Know this! Satan would never have revealed that to me…“But God”…God did! God opened my blinded eyes and made it very clear to me…and just in time!

For all those years, Satan didn’t want me to know the truth. As long as he kept me in my ignorance, I was right where he wanted me. Not only was I his servant, but I was also no threat to him or his cause because evil ran rampant in the circles I frequented and I was one of his best promoters!

“But God…This particular Saturday, God revealed the truth to me. I was angry but more than that, I was scared out of my wits. I had to get Abby out of that church before any more of this craziness rose up! I straddled my Harley and rode to the church in a rage! I was going to drag my wife out of that service in front of the pastor and everybody. I bullied my bike up to the front doors and busted in…but…it didn’t happen quite the way I had it planned. I was at the height of my anger when I stomped into God’s house and opened those huge oak doors leading into the sanctuary.

“But God”…God took over with His plan. I stormed into the church sanctuary and found my wife. Before I could exit the building with her, God moved and God’s people prayed over me, You can read the account in Face Down. I was stunned! I took a leap and trusted something I was totally ignorant of, but it gave peace and new life to my dying soul better than any drug hit I ever experienced.

You see, this whole thing gets a little crazy. God didn’t start preparing me that night of experiencing God’s love when God’s people prayed over me and I felt delivered from addiction. God did not start preparing me after allowing me to see my reflection as Satan in the breather of my Harley. I reflected in Face Down:

“To tell you the truth, I don’t remember too much of what took

place at that moment, but I do remember someone talking with

me and explaining the love of Jesus and his gift of love and mercy

to forgive me for all the sinful things I’d ever done. It was more

than my doped-up mind could conceive, but I took a leap of faith

into something that made no sense. I believed what they told me,

and I stepped out in trust and let the congregation pray over me,

and I dedicated my life to do the will of God.”

(From Face Down, p. 192)

As evil and hellish as my life had been up to his point, I believe this one thing: That was NOT the hour in that little church that God started to prepare me. That was the moment I allowed God to begin preparing and creating a new man in me. “But God”…God had been preparing me from the day I drew my first breath of life. His preparation began in my childhood through all of my adult bondage. I know now God held me in the shadow of his almighty wings, preparing and preserving a life and a heart that would understand the very people he’s called me to minister to today. God saw the big picture long before I ever realized I was in a picture.

I didn’t really understand any of what just happened that night in the church, but I experienced something that no drug hit ever offered me. Feeling the power of God’s love was freeing and cleansing. Abby and I were the last to leave the church that night and, in the days and weeks that followed, I tried desperately to maintain a new life but I failed. I failed again and again and again. I relapsed more than a few times, fighting the fight. But I had tasted the sweetness of God’s mercy.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good;

blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.”

(Psalms 34:8 NIV)

Several years later of failure after failure, I had reached the end of my endurance of pain and hopelessness. I had returned to being a full-blown druggie and gangster. I was losing over and over. On several different occasions, I made solid decisions to take myself out and end it all.

But, God’s eye was on me every horrible day of my life. I’m sure God wept at the abuse. He embraced me when, as an adolescent, I lived on the streets of Los Angeles, eating out of McDonald’s dumpsters, because He loved me. God held His hand of protection over me with compassion at every attempt I made to set myself free from the yoke encumbering me in my life and my will of self-destruction.

One time, while incarcerated, I planned to overdose on drugs after the lights went out but a servant of the Lord showed up and rekindled one very weak and shallow hope I had left in me. When he left, I flushed the drugs down the toilet in my cell.

Once I tried shooting air directly into my veins with an empty syringe. I was so good with a syringe I could shoot up while driving but this time…I failed!

Once, while driving, I put a gun barrel in my mouth and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired so I pointed it downward and fired again. The gun exploded and blew a hole in the floor of my pickup. The shot also ripped through the firewall. It scared me so bad I threw that blasted gun out the window.

Another time, I foolishly challenged a highway patrol officer to shoot me. He pulled me over for speeding. Before he had a chance to do anything I jumped out of my truck and we faced off in the middle of the highway. In my rage, I circled him shouting, “Shoot me! Go ahead, shoot me!” and then I tried to accost him but quickly learned I wasn’t the bad boy I thought I was. Before I knew it, his baton club came to life and he had me in handcuffs and in his car.

Still another time, I decided to drive my pickup off a California cliff. It was an uphill curve and I was just several yards from the edge when my truck died. I jumped out and lifted the hood. There was the battery lying over on its side, with cables disconnected. What happened? Only God can rightfully answer that. All I know is, as I was speeding around a mountainous curve, the battery just literally fell over. Isn’t our God amazing? And looking back, I’m sure it was just a flick of his little finger that flipped it over.

Well, if I couldn’t drive off the cliff, I’d jump off but, when I took a leap to what I thought was my death, I hit a limb that knocked me to the ground and again…I failed.

Well, my Lord and Master is always one up on evil. I’m sure God was shaking his head by now while his sovereignty embarrassed the enemy and the demons of hell… God’s plan for me was not to die just because I wanted it so!!! I can truly sing this verse with the Psalmist in 118 (MSG)

“Í was right on the cliff edge, ready to fail,

when God grabbed and held me.

God’s my strength, he’s also my song

and now he’s my salvation…I didn’t die. I lived!

And now I’m telling the world

What God did. He tested me,

He pushed me hard

But he didn’t hand me over to death.”

I just knew my life was worthless, I had to survive from one day to the next and I had no expectations of ever becoming anything more than what I already was and that was one rung below nothing! It was survival the best way I knew how: and that was by the “…way that seemeth right unto man but the way thereof is the way of death.” (Proverbs 14:12 KJV)

If it weren’t for God’s unfailing love, surely it would have been easier for God to have just turned His head, thrown up His hands at any one of those suicidal attempts, called His angels back to His courts, and said, “Okay. Forget it! Go ahead, Foster! Take yourself out. You’d be better off dead than living the way you insist on living.”

Oh no! That is not my God. My Holy and Loving God had set a plan in motion for me and just as with Moses and Joseph, he walked every step of the way with me.

“But as for you,

you meant evil against me;

‘But God’

meant it for good,

in order to bring it about as it is this day,

to save many people alive.”

(Genesis 50:20 NKJV)

Listen, friends, God never created anyone for such a life. God’s intention for every person that has ever drawn a breath is that there is something special for you. If you are tempted by the act of suicide, know this: GOD NEVER INTENDED THAT OPTION FOR YOU. HE HAS SOMETHING SO MUCH BETTER.

Someone may be reading this and thinking, “God could never love or forgive me for what I’ve done.” Friend, listen…He’s the only one who can. I can love you with all my heart. Your family can love you with the deepest love they have. There are those who love you so much they would carry this cross for you, but they can’t. Why? Because man cannot take away the things you’ve done. They can forgive you for doing them but they can’t remove them. Man’s love cannot wipe those things from the confines of your heart…your innermost being. The love of mortal man cannot create a new heart in you. Only God’s love is deep enough and pure enough to wipe away your past and give you a new heart which leads to a new and victorious life. It is His will that all should come to repentance and He’s made provision for everyone.

“The Lord is not slack concerning his promise…,

but is longsuffering to us-ward,

not willing that any should perish,

but that all should come to repentance.”

(II Peter 3:9 KJV)

God is perfect in love. It’s what God is. He died for that place in your soul that is searching for peace. That empty spot you are trying to fill with all the wrong things. You can’t eliminate your addiction with your own strength. Your addiction will always follow you but the blood of Jesus can remove it because the old you will be gone and your new heart will seek something better.

“A good man

out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good;

and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart

bringeth forth that which is evil…”

(Luke 6:45 KJV)

IT IS ONLY GOD’S LOVE that can release your past…wipe it off your spiritual record and give you peace. And He gives all his children the privilege to show His love to others. That is what we attempt to do in our ministry. We’re not perfect but we are redeemed.

If you are struggling with an addiction and you find yourself in a state of hopelessness, remember this: You only have two choices. You give up your life to your addiction or you can give your addiction to the One who will never leave you and give you your intended life.

God has a divine plan for every life out there…yes, even for you.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD,

“plans to prosper you

and not to harm you,

plans to give you hope

and a future.”

(Jeremiah 29:11 NIV)

(*Addiction doesn’t necessarily mean drugs or alcohol. An addiction is anything that controls our life. Addiction is a psychological and/or physical inability to stop consuming or depending on anything that governs our actions, goals, or our life’s pleasures that can be damaging to ourselves or others. It can be drugs, alcohol, sex, power, pride, money, food, work, gambling, pornography…anything that dictates what we live for from day to day. It drives our ambition for whatever we think will make us happy no matter how brief the moment of pleasure or satisfaction.)

Heb. 11:25 tells us the “pleasures of sin last only for a season.”

…that’s all. Just for a season. And then like smoke it dissipates and you can’t get it back until you fall for another hit…again and again and again and again and again and………