Lee Harbaugh

Introduction

This post is part of my series, Who Is God?, an exploration of my personal journey with the mystical and spiritual realities.

In my last post in this series, I talked through my high school years and the deepening of my faith. I mentioned that this was the age in which I began to regularly pray and study the Bible on my own. It's also the age when I began to learn to meditate, even though I didn't know to call it that back then.

In this post, I will talk about two very significant events that happened just after I went away to college and how both deepened my quest to experience God in even more profound ways. It was here that I first experienced the miraculous...at least what many would call the miraculous.

Off to College

After much internal debate and soul-searching, I decided late in my senior year of high school to go to college at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. Nacogdoches was about three hours away from my home in Grand Prairie, so it was a get-away-from-home-but-not-too-far experience for me. Music was going to be my major, and my goal was to become a professional trombone player in a major symphony orchestra. I left home in August of 1989, and just as many of you have experienced, my life changed.

I was paired with another trombone player in a tiny dorm room that year. Fortunately, we got along. In fact, Chad Hogan and I are still friends to this day. Our room could not have been bigger than 10x10. And if we allow a little fluff—maybe 12x12. And we had to share a bathroom with the guys next door. I'll spare you the gory details of our living conditions that year, but suffice it to say that neither of us wanted to spend much time in that dorm room. And that meant we spent quite a bit of time elsewhere on campus.

The Life of a Music Major

For me, my dorm situation meant I spent enormous amounts of time in the music building. I believed with all my heart that God had told me to be a trombone major. As a result, I had this notion early in my freshman year that I needed to practice all the time. I was enrolled in enough music ensembles that I would generally spend three to four hours a day in rehearsals. Then, I'd usually practice on my own for another two to three hours. It was not unusual for me to be playing my instrument 8 or even 10—12 hours a day.

At first, I loved this! This was my dream come true. I could go into a practice room any time I wanted and play to my heart's content. And I was also getting the opportunity to play every day with other very good musicians. What more could I ask for?

Musical Disillusionment

After doing this for two or three months, something became clear to me. I realized that I was spending a lot of time playing my trombone, but I didn't feel like I was getting any better. In fact, I actually felt I was somehow regressing. How could this be? Wasn't there a rule that said the more one practices the better one gets? I just couldn't make sense of it.

Meanwhile, I was still praying and reading the Bible and meditating regularly, but not nearly as much as I had done the last few years of high school. To me, God had given me my mission, and now I was off working that mission by playing my horn all the time. I didn't think I should be praying or meditating for hours each day.

Spiritual Exploration

Because I did still keep up a spiritual practice, I continued to have a spiritual curiosity. And although I wasn't spending enormous amounts of time exploring this side of me, I did still explore it some. One of the questions that I brought with me from high school was the question of miracles and what the New Testament writers call spiritual gifts (abilities such as healing, speaking in tongues—speaking a non-native language spontaneously—prophecy, leadership, etc.). To reiterate briefly, in high school, I had been taught at my church that miracles stopped occurring after about the 1st century CE. Yet, I had friends at school who belonged to other denominational churches that taught miracles and all spiritual gifts occurred today.

Late in the fall semester of my freshman year, I was participating in a weekly bible study in my dorm. The group was mainly comprised of other musicians living there. One day, one of our guys said he had been to the doctor, and they told him he had Hodgkin's Disease. They said he had a tumor the size of a grapefruit in his abdomen or chest area and that they needed to operate quickly in order to remove it. He would then undergo some regimen of chemo and radiation treatments. We were stunned. He then asked us to pray for him. One of the other guys in the group led the way and suggested we all lay a hand on our friend as we prayed for him. This was very strange for me. I had never been a part of anything like this. It felt odd to lay a hand on someone and pray for them. But the whole group was doing it, so I joined in as well.

I don't recall exactly what was said during that prayer, but the overarching words being spoken were primarily seeking God to heal our friend. Guys were invoking the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus and saying other things that I'd never heard in church. I remember thinking it was a weird experience, but it was also somehow edifying. Though I didn't understand the theology of what was taking place, I did recognize a bond that had formed among these guys, including me.

A week or two went by, and our friend came back to the group. He had just been to the doctor where they had done some kind of imaging test to take another look at the tumor. What he told us next floored me. He said that the doctors were stunned. Where there once had been a tumor, they could see one no more.

This rocked my world. Miracles and healings like this just weren't supposed to happen today. And yet, here I was seemingly experiencing one in front of my own eyes.

I never questioned this experience. I never asked for proof of the healing. I never sought to interrogate my friend to find out if there was some natural explanation for this—or for that matter to find out if he just made the whole thing up. Years later, when I would come to identify as agnostic, I found myself revisiting this healing often. Sure, it's possible the guy just made it up to get attention. Or, as I've since learned, there are actually a small number of cancers that do spontaneously go away for no known medical reason. One of these scenarios might have explained what I experienced that day in that dorm bible study. But one thing I do know beyond any shadow of a doubt: The truth behind that event is almost irrelevant. This "healing" permanently changed how I viewed both my own church upbringing and also how deeply I would trust authorities—especially those in the church—ever again.

The Calling

A few months later, as my second semester in college got under way, I found myself extraordinarily frustrated. I was quickly arriving at a point where I simply did not enjoy music at all. I was playing all the time, but I did not perceive myself improving. What I now know to be embouchure fatigue (the embouchure is the muscle group surrounding the lips that enables a wind player to effectively play a wind instrument) was setting in in a huge way. Because playing my trombone was such a large part of my life, my agitation level kept growing.

Then one day early that semester (early 1990), I found myself sitting in a laundromat waiting on my laundry to finish. I was listening to a cassette tape of Michael W. Smith on my Walkman player. In a moment of ultimate clarity, I heard, "You have allowed that horn to become your god. I am your God." It wasn't an audible voice, but it might as well have been. It was unequivocal, and it was clear.

I knew in that instant that my life had changed. I knew I had a calling—not to a specific task or occupation or anything like that—but to a life. A life of complete spiritual presence. And 36 years later, I can say that (even through the many years of calling myself an agnostic) that has never changed.

Learning To Be One With God

For the remainder of 1990, I felt a deep awakening of what I called the presence of God in me. It was a season of my life that became marked by multiple hours each day of prayer and meditation. By that fall, I was starting to experience regular occurrences of what I would now call the truly mystical. It was not unusual for me to have dreams that would literally come true (there were also plenty of dreams that did not), or for me to sense something about someone else and be right on. Synchronicities seemed to abound. Often, I would be thinking about a person, and they would call—or vice versa. Or I might pray for someone and a shooting star might appear to us. Countless experiences like these happened that year.

But as my perceived spiritual growth accelerated, something else started to creep in. Ego.

I was already disillusioned with my Southern Baptist upbringing by this point, and the more I considered it, the more cynical I became. Consequently, it was hard for me to find a church that I felt comfortable with. Though I went to church regularly, I was bouncing around from Bible Church to Charismatic to Assemblies of God to Non-denominational to countless others. None seemed to fit my lived experience with God. Either they were so conservative that they outright dismissed the possibility of God doing certain things in today's world, or they were so embracing of the miraculous and gifts of the Spirit that they seemed to me to have lost their grounding.

The Next Chapter

And so, as 1990 drew to a close and 1991 got under way, more change was happening in me. But this time, the change was painful and difficult. Whereas 1990 felt like bliss, 1991 would turn out to be a "dark night of the soul" year for me. In my next post, I will talk about this difficulty and the rise of my ego. I will share attitudes and mindsets that I developed that were not healthy for me or others around me. And I will talk about how I came out of that season.