What it took to believe

Adam Stacks used to throw Bible tracts in the garbage when he worked at Wal-Mart. Back then, Adam was an atheist, and not a very nice one. “A man would come in and put Christian tracts in the bathroom. I called him Propaganda Man. I didn’t like the fact that he was spreading his Christian propaganda, so I would wait until he left and I’d throw those tracts in the trash,” he says. “I didn’t like that the church tried to run people’s lives. I also thought that the church encouraged people to believe, in order to fatten their wallets.”Adam wasn’t raised in church, and as a high schooler he hadn’t given Christianity much of a thought. “I went to church only once or twice a year with my grandfather. I didn’t really have much of an opinion about it,” says Adam.What Adam was interested in was football. He played offensive tackle for his high school team in Cordova, Alabama. Adam and his fellow teammates formed a sort of fraternal bond, and one boy in particular Adam admired. His name was Thomas.“Thomas was 6’6” and over 300 pounds. He went up to summer camp at Vanderbilt University and got MVP of the camp. Out of all of our teammates, we knew he was going to be the one to make it,” says Adam. But the team didn’t perform particularly well that year, and Thomas didn’t get the looks from college scouts to garner a scholarship.The boys graduated and Adam went to work at Wal-Mart as a cart push. He met a girl named Kristin who was a Christian, and they started dating. Kristin encouraged Adam to attend a revival, and during the revival, Adam felt led to go to the front. When he got there, the pastor asked him if he wanted to receive salvation or to rededicate his life to Christ. “I didn’t know what either of those things meant, so I said that I wanted to rededicate my life,” Adam laughs. So Adam rededicated his life to Christ before he ever got saved.No matter, because Adam believed he was a Christian. “I was walking around thinking ‘I’m a Christian’ but I didn’t really have a clue what that meant.”One day while working at Wal-Mart, Adam ran into Thomas. The pair talked, and Adam discovered that Thomas’s life hadn’t panned out how he expected. Two weeks later, Thomas committed suicide.Thomas’s death had a profound impact on Adam. “I was still walking in this idea that there was a heaven and a hell. Right after I heard the news of Thomas’s suicide, I made my decision. I thought, ‘Why would an all-loving God allow something like this to happen?’”Death breathed spiritual death, as Adam turned angry and began to avow that God did not exist. One of his co-workers, a more seasoned atheist, encouraged him to read atheist literature and held Adam’s hand down into a Godless abyss. “We used to have these discussions, and I remember us talking about writing atheist literature. I really wanted to mess with Christians. We wanted to write a comic book where the devil was the savior and Jesus came and messed everything up,” Adam says.Stacks also says that he had very little patience with people who would greet him with “God Bless You” or “Merry Christmas.”“I would respond with ‘There is no God’, ‘There is no Christmas’,” he says.But it seemed as the angrier Adam got, the more people he encountered proclaiming the Good News. “God kept sending people my way,” he says.Still nothing changed. “I didn’t like myself. I was angry and bitter and yes, I had thoughts of suicide,” he says ashamedly.Adam left Wal-Mart on January 1, 2000 and got a job as a surveyor.Even though Adam grew more and more vehement in his unbelief as the years went by, Kristin continued to stay with Adam and the couple got engaged. Kristin sang solos at her church, and she soon discovered that the only way to get Adam to church was to sing. So she devised a plan: the more she would sing, the more Adam would have to come hear her sing. She hoped that through this, Adam would turn back to God.She began to sing every service.But Adam caught on to her plan. “I said, ‘I’m done.’ I told her I wasn’t coming no more. And I decided I was going to break up with her.”One particular Sunday stands out as the turning point for the couple, and for Adam. “Kristin invited me to church that Sunday morning and that Sunday night, and I didn’t go to either service. Her dad dropped her off at my house after the Sunday night service. We started to argue. When I was taking her back home, we continued to argue in the car. When we got back to her house, we argued on her porch. I told her that there was nothing in this world would make me believe that God exists. I was going to break up with her that night, but I chickened out. I told her I had to go and she said, ‘Well, are you not going to kiss me goodbye?’ So I gave her like the worst kiss ever.”When Adam walked back to the truck and opened the door, he noticed that the inside of the truck was very cold. “It was September but the truck was ice cold,” Adam says.What he saw next would change Adam’s life forever. “As soon as I got in, the hair on the back of my neck began to stand up. I looked into the passenger seat and sitting next to me was a demon.”Adam was right; nothing in this world would make him believe that God exists. It took something else.The demon, Adam said, was “scrawny, small, naked, dark, and hairy. It had cheeks that stuck way out. It looked at me with pure hate. It just looked like it wanted to kill you.” (Describing it further, Adam says that the only thing in this world that resembles it is a Chinese mask worn in festivals).Adam, understandably, was terrified. He immediately began praying. “I got saved right then. I remember saying, ‘God forgive me for being stupid.’ I also kept repeating, ‘I accept Jesus! I accept Jesus!’”He sat in the truck for five minutes and prayed to the God he didn’t believe in.On the way home, Adam was afraid to turn his head and look in the passenger seat, for fear of seeing the face of evil once again. “I just looked straight and to my left,” he says, chopping his hands respectively. “I didn’t look in the passenger seat again until I got home and was safely in my house.”Adam says he called Kristin immediately and asked her to set a date for their wedding. “I also asked her what time the church service was on Wednesday.”In the midst of this, Adam learned that a special prayer had been lifted for him that morning by the deacons of Kristin’s church. “Kristin told her church that she couldn’t marry me if I was an unbeliever and asked them to pray that God would show me something that would reveal himself to me,” says Adam. “The Bible says that Jesus stands at the door and knocks. They prayed for a way for Jesus to enter my life.”Adam believes that God allowed him to see that demon because there was nothing in the world that was going to cause him to believe in God.A year later, Adam and Kristin got married. Since that time, Adam’s life has been dedicated to Christ. He serves as Associate Pastor at Crossroads Assembly of God. One may question whether or not Adam actually saw a demon, but what no one can question is how Adam’s life has since changed for the better.Through his ministry, Adam wants to offer something he believes is lacking in today’s church. “I want to be a big brother to younger men. The hard thing is to maintain discipleship in a believer’s early walk and to keep them from wandering like I did,” he says.Adam still tears up when he thinks about Thomas’s suicide. “I realized then that I had feelings for God. His death caused me to pick a side. I chose the wrong side, but God found a way to reveal himself to me.”As for the demon, Adam says “I can’t run away from what I saw.” He says that when he speaks to unbelievers, he asks them “Are you willing for me to pray for you to see the same thing that I saw?”The answer is always “no.” Perhaps that in itself is reason enough to believe.Today, Adam regrets throwing those Bible tracts in the garbage. He fears judgment from the Lord.“I wish I could find that guy who used to put out those tracts. I’d like to tell him I’m sorry.” 78