Youth Aflame — Winkie Pratney

A Young Person of Flame and the Fire of God

And I want to talk about what it means to be a young person of flame. I've always been fascinated with fire, I really have. When I was younger and much less wise, I decided to do something very freaky.

Now we don't have 4th of July in New Zealand. We have 5th of November, which is a little different. 5th of November came about when a guy by the name of Guy Fawkes, which is why we call it Guy Fawkes.

They have this in Britain too I understand, but they have that in Scotland, Alastair is he here? Yeah, they have Guy Fawkes there too. Apparently Guy Fawkes was a guy who tried to blow up Parliament. And so we celebrate this because he nearly made it.

And what we do actually is we, in New Zealand we form a big bonfire and then we dress up a dummy made of straw to look like what's called a guy, like this, see? And we just stick this dummy on top of this big old straw pile, and it's all covered with, you know, everybody brings old rubber tires and wood and things they need to burn.

And we put this dummy up on top of the thing, he just sits up there, and then when the night time comes, kids set fire to the bonfire and then we dance around like banshees with fireworks and stuff and watch the guy burn up, and that's where we get our kicks in New Zealand.

Now I, for the first time, our school decided to have a bonfire at school. They also had a guy competition where the kids were allowed to make guys and put them up on the bonfire during the week, time for Saturday night when the guys would all be burned, which was Guy Fawkes night.

Well I decided I'd give our school a bonfire night they'd never forget. And so what I did is I dressed up as a guy. I put straw out the back of this mask that I bought, these old floppy clothes and old boots, stuffed them up with straw, and then I had my sister drag me to school on this little soapbox cart, and then when she, she dragged me all the way across the field until we got to the place, and when I got safely behind, and it was quite early in the afternoon and nobody had even been near the school by that time, and I climbed up on top of the pile and found myself a rubber tire up there and made myself a nice seat among all the other guys that had been put up there, facing the crowd.

And I had about two or three hours to wait before everybody began to arrive, and that was pretty uncomfortable sitting up there, I was sitting up waiting. Finally it began to get dark and people began to arrive, and then they ran around with some cans or something throwing it all over the bottom, I don't know what that was, but, well I said this big wet grass there and if I caught fire I'd just roll over and put myself out, I had it all worked out.

I'll never forget, forgotten the time when they began to light it, and they lit it behind me back here somewhere, and I was just sitting up there with all the other guys. And I remember this lady looking up at the guys, and I might have moved or something because I remember going, I remember her looking at like this, see, and I, she really started, look, I think the light was glimpsing in behind my mask into my eyes, and she's looking like this, see, and my sister, my silly sister, she's a year younger than me at that time, still is, she got a bit freaked out because these flames started coming up from behind, she was dead sure I was going to catch fire, see, she didn't know I had all this worked out with the wet grass and everything.

So she sort of started going, ooh, ooh, and everybody was sort of wondering what she was doing there, but I remember this lady, I figured my stupid sister's going to give me away anyway in a second, so I've never forgotten this lady's face, she's looking like this, and then I remember I lifted up my hands like this and went, aah, that lady went wide as a sheep, top to bottom, and nearly passed out, then I stood up, aah, and I fell over and rolled around in the grass, and that was the last time our school ever had a bonfire at school.

I've always been fascinated with fire. I remember in Disneyland, sometimes we used to live in Anaheim for a while, I'd see every Saturday night there'd fire rockets up and a shell of patriotic stars and sparks would hit the night sky.

The Fire of Spiritual Awakening in a Violent Age

But this afternoon I'm thinking of another star, the red star, and this afternoon millions of young people are marching under its banner. I'm thinking of that banner unfurled around the world, I'm thinking of a movement which is in fifteen years going to be the single largest youth movement, training over twenty million people, twenty million young people.

I'm thinking of Nikita Khrushchev, who stood in a vast parade in Red Square one day, and those thousands and thousands of disciplined young Russian Communist young people gathered around there. Nikita Khrushchev stepped up to the microphone to address the young Communist lead, and he looked out and he said, you are all dead men, now go out into the world and prove it.

I believe that we're living in an era of imminent violence, a chain of explosive tensions, the world is a chain of explosions, apparently without any way to stop them, exploding passions, populations leading to famine, exploding diseases, exploding prejudices, and the world seems to be sitting on a powder keg so awesome that tomorrow could witness the destruction of the world, which is why Barry McGuire wrote that song, Eve of Destruction.

We see the shadow of atomic clouds and hydrogen bomb clouds and all this, and it seems like, remember the Atomic Energy Commission published their little paper, and over the years they've put the clock five minutes to midnight, and every time a significant nuclear advance has been made, they move that little hand closer in towards the final hour.

And I believe that most of us here will probably see the end of the world in our lifetime. And I ask us this afternoon, are we ready? Are we ready to see that kind of fire? I would like to see God's fire flame across this nation.

I would like to see not the fires of tension, of riot or revolution, but I'd like to see God's flame burn, and for that end I've dedicated my life, to see spiritual awakening take place in nations just like this before revolution takes place.

Now, we've had some pretty rotten days before. Every time it's dark around a nation, it seems people want to light fires in it, and I think we've got a choice. We can light God's fire, or we'll see the flame of hatred and the devil and of revolution lit.

George Whitfield, John Wesley, and Revival Preaching

In England, in the 1700s, it was a very dark day. During that time, 1700s, for two cents, you could get dead drunk, absolutely smashed right out of your mind, and they'd even give you some straw to sleep on, to sleep it off the night.

With a nation filled with unconverted ministers, men stood behind the pulpits and preached garbage, said absolutely nothing. They quoted from Time magazine and Life magazine, but they never said the Bible.

And England was sitting at that time for a bloodbath, just like the French Revolution, and God's eyes searched the nation without light, searched up and down. There on a college campus, he found two men.

One was a lying, stealing, Sabbath-breaking, foul-mouthed phony, and another young man was the young man who'd been kind of an ascetic during his day. He was a spooky kind of kid, because he'd only been the youngest member of his family, and his house had nearly burned down.

And somebody just remembered in time that he was up there, rushed in, dragged him out just before the roof fell in, and he called himself a bran plucked from the burning. And God's eyes searched that nation, and there on the same campus, he found two men.

One young man's name was George Whitfield, and the other young man's name was John Wesley. And this young man, George Whitfield, began to study the Word of God on his knees. He received in his own words a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost.

He stood up and preached in an Anglican church his very first message. Fifteen people went stark raving mad under his first message. George Whitfield was twenty-one years of age. And the Scriptures tell us you shall receive power after the Holy Ghost has come upon you.

This time we had some young people who not only believe in the gifts of the Spirit, but who demonstrate power in their ministry. Bristol, an entire city, stirred and riveted to the spot by the fire of the anointed Word of God.

And Kensington, fifty thousand people came out in the snow to listen at six o 'clock in the morning to that young man preach. And they asked George Whitfield near the end of a fruitful life, Do you have any hope of getting to heaven when you die, Mr. Whitfield?

He said, I've been there for twenty years already. It was a dark day for the city of Nineveh. God had already pronounced sentence against Nineveh. God had his eyes on that man called Jonah we began this week out with.

A man he had called who was running away from the call of God. And I believe it's possible that there are Jonah sitting here this afternoon. If you've got a call of God on your life, you'll never shake it off.

You may go to the grave shaking it, but you'll never get rid of it. It'll always be there in your life. God will always be haunting you with his call. You'll never be able to sleep properly, knowing that God has put something in your heart that you've turned your back on.

And God found Jonah out in the surging green waters of the Mediterranean. Jonah found out he couldn't fight God. Fish came back, threw up. Jonah came out. And that weird prophet with his face white, permanently scarred by the stomach juices of that fish, must have walked through that city looking like a man from, from out of the grave or from outer space.

He walked through 40 days and Nineveh will be destroyed. 39, 38, 37, 36. Must have taken him a full 40 days to go through the city. He scared the people so much, they believed the word of the Lord. They began to repent.

They even told the cows to repent. They said, put sackcloth and asses on the cows too. Maybe God will spare us. And Nineveh was shaken with conviction. And you know the story. From president to prostitute, from the top to the bottom.

Shaken by the greatest mass awakening ever recorded in the scriptures. 120 ,000 people gave their lives to God. The greatest mass move in the Bible. And God reversed his judgment. Now we've had dark days before.

The Light of the World and the Call to Leadership

But God has always found a way to find a man. And I believe God's answer to darkness is light. People who can shine. The Lord Jesus said, as long as I am in the world, you are the light of the world. But in Matthew 5 .14, God issues a challenge to those who are called to world conquest.

He said, you are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works. And glorify your Father which is in heaven. And the call of God this afternoon will only rest on men who are willing to be exposed to the flame of God.

You can be used to change your world. I'm convinced of that. Everywhere I go, I believe God is looking for a man, for a woman. As part of the great mass move he's going to do. Whenever God gets set to shake a nation, he always looks for men.

He always looks for women. He looks for people, for individuals that he can call into places of responsibility, of leadership, of challenge and of inspiration. And everywhere I go, I look for that man.

I look for that woman. I could be here this afternoon sitting here, a little unknown Christian that nobody ever heard of before. And you're sitting down there and you're taking notes and you're reading your Bible that God is preparing you.

You may be a David and all you've done is take a few lions on here and there. God is getting ready to shape you up to take on Goliath. You may be a Ruth. Maybe all you've found in your life so far is emptiness.

You followed back somebody and God is about to open up a brand new door for you. You may be Esther. She was a beauty queen, Miss International Israel and Babylon and everything of her time. God had her all set up to save an entire kingdom.

I don't know who you are. I do know that God uses some very freaky people. The teen challenge of its generation was the Salvation Army. And God's man for that era was William Booth. He was worn and he was haggard.

His eyes were baggy and his clothes were baggy and everything about him looked like he'd just been dragged right over the garbage can. But he stood behind that pulpit, that ragged, haggard, baggy man, and his eyes lit up like blow lamps.

And as his eyes swept, the audience, it's like, raked them with coals of fire. And people fell under such tremendous conviction that they felt literally lifted out of their seats and dumped at the altar by the presence of the Spirit of God.

William Booth and the Salvation Army's Costly Mission

And that man who one day walked through Thames, nicknamed the Big Stink because of the filth that had been pouring into it, walked through the city. He saw little nine-year-old kids walking up specially designed stairs up to the counters of the gym houses.

He saw seven-year-old kids getting their stomachs pumped out. He saw nine-year-old kids dying of cirrhosis of the liver from alcoholism. And he saw these little girls being sold into prostitution at nine, ten and eleven years of age.

And William Booth came back and he said to his wife, I have found my destiny. And he put together a little ragtag army that he got out of the gutters of the streets. He got different people of different races.

He got people that were twisted and broken that everybody laughed at. And he put them together into a little ragtag army. And that little ragtag army, he put uniforms on them and they marched proud and straight and they played tunes that were too radical for any church people to listen to in those days.

And they went into the cities and they marched and they went to the very center and people as they walked past would throw dead animals at them and they'd have to catch them and hold them in their hands so they wouldn't pick them up and throw them again.

And they threw egg shells filled with paint at them. They threw rotten fruit at them. Somebody came up and spat at William Booth when he walked past and a solicitor said he was going to try and brush it aside and Booth said, leave it alone, it's a medal.

And they marched into cities. And I don't know if you know, you may think the Salvation Army was just and suds and a little bit of salvation, but in those days there were teenage girls in there and they got armies together to turn the Salvation Army out of cities as high as 5 ,000 people.

They roped them with ropes and poured burning sulfur on them to turn them back. They took those teenage girls and fired ship's rockets at them to turn them back. But the Salvation Army marched into the center of the city, knelt there in the middle of the city and the leader would say, Lord Jesus in your name we take this city for God and take it.

Billy Graham and David Wilkerson: Surrendering Personal Ambition

I think of a young man walking a lonely night in a golf course near his Bible school. In his hands is a corsage, his steady girlfriend has just curtly refused for the last time. And in this young man's ears ring these words, it's better we don't see each other again, you're just not spiritual enough for me.

And alone in the silence he fell on his knees and he said, it's no good, I may as well give up the ministry, God has failed me. And finally after a great struggle of life, he says, what a fool I've been, I've told God, I've promised him I'd do anything, I'd go anywhere.

And he said, here I am just because some girl that I've liked a great deal drops me, I'm ready to quit, I'm ready to give it all in, I'm ready to pack it all in. And then on his knees in that golf course he prayed this prayer, God, take all of me there is, and I've determined that I'll never have a girl, a career, anything will come between you and your call for my life.

And his friends went out to look for him in the morning, and he was still there in the golf course lying down there, his face glued to his Bible with tears and with the view of heaven. And they shook him and woke him up, they said, get up, get up.

A young man got up off his knees, and his name was Billy Graham. And I think of a skinny country preacher who just went to Bible school, and was keen, and spent a lot of time in the prayer room, but was never particularly the boy voted most likely to succeed, and never was student body president or anything.

A young man who just was faithful in his classes, and didn't seem to have much going for him. I'm thinking of that skinny country preacher who one day did give up his television set to make himself available for God.

And he hears a voice in his heart as he stands with an unknown burden swirling over him from the face of a young killer in Life magazine. And Tim Challenge was born from the answer of the heart of David Wilkerson.

Are you here this afternoon? Has God put something in your heart? Because if you're here, you're going to need to learn the lessons of what it costs to be a man of flame. And I'll tell you some things I've learned about light and about fire.

Failure, Success, and the Example of Elijah

You may be a failure. God can do a lot with failures. You see, in this world where men are judged by their ability to do and to be superstars, A. W. Tozer in his book Born After Midnight says, they are rated according to the distance they've come up the ladder of achievement.

When we come to Christ, we enter a different world. The first are the last and the last are the first. The greatest man is the one that best serve others. The one who loses everything is the one who will have everything at last.

Our Lord died in apparent failure, discredited by the leaders of established religion, rejected by society and forsaken by his friends. The man who ordered him to the cross was a successful statesman whose hand the ambitious hack politicians kissed.

It took the resurrection to demonstrate how gloriously Jesus had triumphed and how tragically the governor had failed. The true Christian, especially the minister of the gospel, should search their own hearts, look deep into their inner motives.

No man is worthy to succeed until he is willing to fail. No man is morally worthy of success in religious activities until he is willing that the honor of succeeding should go to another if God so directs.

God may allow a servant to succeed who has disciplined him to a point where he does not need to succeed to be happy. Are you a failure? I think of a man who was a failure. He came onto the scene when Israel was losing its faith.

Israel needed more than a few meetings for deeper life conventions. They were backslidden and not only backslidden, sold out to the powers of darkness. Feet of hell stalked through the land. They had all their platform personalities and their programs and their little church games.

But there was no flame in the land. There was no fire. And gloom had gone up. Fear and trembling filled the whole nation. And idolatry stalked through the land. And into the horror of all this hell stalked God's fire bullet, lonely desert commando by the name of Elijah.

He comes out of nowhere. He's got no pedigree. Ask Elijah what his qualifications for preaching are. He had no pedigree. He had no background. All you know is suddenly he appears. God's prophet of fire.

And he puts that challenge up before the whole of Israel. And you know the story of the finger of light that dissolved the sacrifice, burned up the water that was in the trench, licked everything up. The people fell on their knees and said, The Lord, he is God.

And we look at this man, Elijah, and we think, What a tremendous man you are. The Bible tells us he wasn't a tremendous man. He was a man of like passion. A man of like passion. And he prayed. And he prayed.

And he prayed. And this same man, see him just a few chapters on from there. And this woman who invented Revlon makeup, Jezebel, she got mad because he had killed the prophets. She said, I'm going to cut his head off, just like he cut off the heads of my prophets.

And here's Elijah, this man who'd seen the flame of God look down out of the sky. And what's he doing? He's sitting in a cave. And he's sitting there muttering to himself, Well, yes, it's all over for the ministry.

Somebody went and picked on me. Jezebel's going to get me if I go out. Sitting there. I told you I'm going to write a book called my hateful hymn book. Hymns I hate most. So I got a few for that. One of them is called hold the fort for I'm coming.

I don't know what you think of when you think of hold the fort for I'm coming, but I know what I think of. Think of a bunch of chicken disciples, all scared, hiding from Rome, all up there waving flags saying, Jesus, please hurry up and come home.

The nasty wicked world is killing us all. Hold the fort my eyeball. That's about as bad as prone to one the Lord I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. How I tried singing that to my wife. Prone to wonder, the way I feel it.

Prone to leave the wife I love. And Elijah had fallen to the spirit of self-pitying. Sitting there. I'm the only one left. He's in a cave full of fear. And the voice of God comes to Elijah. What do you want?

He said, what are you doing here, Elijah? And then he saw a wind and he saw an earthquake and he saw a fire and the wind and the fire and the earthquake. The Lord was not in any of them. Now for me, my testimony, my story begins way back there.

The Speaker's Divided Life and Empty Religious Routine

I guess I had sat for a long time, seen my mother's life change, seen my dad's life begin to change, and I said, well, that's very nice. They can be Christians because they're 40 years old. And when I get to be 40, I might even think about becoming Christian, even a missionary.

But I never saw anybody my age do it. And for me, the wind and the fire. Yes, I had those things. For me, the earthquake was the rocking sound of bass and treble guitar. Thunder was a set of sticks on skins that my best friend, Dougie, name was John Douglas, used to sit there surrounded by a string of Ludwigs and he'd drum until the sweat rolled off his face.

He'd fling his sticks up and drum his head up. The fire was the flame of a Bunsen under a bubbling reetort filled with organic chemicals. And the Lord was not in the fire or the earthquake. And I remember, I had thought to myself, well, everybody else in their family is religious.

I might as well go too. So, I found out a slot I could put in for God. Whole Sunday. Now, Monday through Saturday was my part of the week. That's the week that I knew that I could take out my halo, polish it up, put it away on the shelf and save it for Sunday.

Come Sunday, I'd have that halo all ready. Could fix it on, brush my teeth with religiously sex-appealed toothpaste, go out and smile. And I went to church sometimes five times a day. Taught a Sunday school class, led the congregational singing, sung some of the special music, especially just to close the walk with thee.

Just to walk as close to hell as I possibly could. But since our church was about 15 miles away from my school and my home, and I never let my parents know what my friends were like, and I never let any of my friends ever know that I was going to church, especially there in town, never the twain did meet.

And so for many years, I just lived two separate lives. And it was very simple. Monday I'd go back to school, I'd put my halo away, horns would start to go and my tail would come out, start waggling. For a whole week, I'd do this.

Saturday we had our rock band and we'd do our thing. And then Saturday night, the convention would start to set in, so that I'd repent early in the morning, get up in time to have a little penance, and then put my halo out, clip my horns for the week, stuff my tail into my suit, and then off I went to church again.

I'll tell you something about that. Miserable. Miserable. And I, I had a rotten life. For six years, from the time I'd first made some kind of decision to be vaguely Christian when I was 12 years old to the time I was 18, I held back from giving everything I had to God.

I said, that's all right, I've given him enough. He's got a whole hour, church, and five hours, different hours a day, that's enough for anybody. There was only two things I didn't want to give to God.

He could have had anything else. I'd even give him some of that. I probably borrowed it back following camp, but he couldn't have two things. He couldn't have my career. And he couldn't have my band. Anything but that.

I didn't mind what else he took, but he couldn't have those. He said, that's mine, I could, I've been good at these things. Let him take all the lousy things, it would wreck my life. Not these, these are the good things.

The Speaker's Career, Chemistry, and Rock Band

Now, I don't know, but, but I, you may have wanted to be a policeman, and now you're a garbage collector or something, or you may have wanted to be a garbage collector, and now you're a policeman. I don't know what you wanted to be when you were a little kid, but I always wanted to be a scientist.

I never remember a time when I wanted to be anything else except a scientist. When I was seven years old, I got my first laboratory. I, when I was six years old, I remember getting some bottles of colored water.

I couldn't find any real chemicals, so I found some crepe paper, and I, the running crepe paper, you know, the stuff that, you know, that all the dye runs out when you put it in water. And then I filled up these, all these jam jars with crepe paper water, and I mixed them all in a different color, put it alongside a wall, and that was my first laboratory.

That was when I was six. When I was seven, I found my first real chemical. My dad had a bicycle job, not a motorbike, but the other kind, and he used a bottle of hydrochloric acid to clean up the iron and stuff like this.

And I found this bottle, pulled the top off it, smelled it. It was concentrated hydrochloric acid, and it smelled all, you know, weird and fizzy, and I poured it out on the concrete, and the concrete started fizzing and going yellow, and I figured, wow, this is a cool chemical.

It dissolves concrete. So I ripped it off my dad's shop, stuck it on my lab, and then I had my first chemical. When I was seven years old, my birthday, my parents gave me a first chemistry set, because they realized it was kind of interesting.

From then on, I made friends with all the local chemists and chemical warehouse supply places. I remember walking in when I was nine years old and asking for a chemical a dude had never even heard of.

And it blew his mind so much, he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm going to be a chemist. So he took me out the back of his vast warehouse, and he gave me all their broken beakers and flasks, and I took on the whole car full of stuff, and I was in business.

By the time I was going to high school, I had a better lab than the high school did, and my first year in university, I had a better lab than the university did. And I told some of you, seven years old, I got a microscope, and I was looking for a cure for cancer.

I got this cheese, this old furry cheese, blue furry cheese. Have you seen that blue cheese with fur through it, you know, that kind of stuff? And I figured if Alexander Fleming found a cure for, you know, penicillin, if he found that in cheese, if you look hard enough, you start early enough, I could find a cure for cancer in cheese.

So I was looking at this cheese under the microscope, and that cheese walked right off the slide when I was looking, and I've never eaten cheese since, raw, unless it's been irradiated. This interest only changed in degree.

When we were in primary school, we made plans to launch rockets on our unsuspecting city, devised this chemical to color our swimming pool, a bright iridescent crimson. And when we had our gang wars, I told you we didn't do the usual trip with the brass knuckles and that.

I was always skinny, I couldn't use the brass knuckle thing. So we devised this thing looked like a little contact pill. And you just drop it in the back of a dude's pocket you didn't like, and he sat down and broke it, and five minutes later, when he walked away, the back of his trousers burned out on him.

I love chemistry. And in all this search, I'd worked about 18 hours a day in this lab, and I was, I was in love with chemistry, it was my whole life. My parents knew, they'd want to get me something for my birthday, they'd buy me a chemist's dictionary or something like that, and that's what I lived in.

And then there was this weird emptiness though. And I thought, well, your problem is you're working 18 hours a day in a lab, you don't see anybody, you need to go out and meet some people, you want to go and it's people that you're missing.

I thought, so I thought, well, what's the best way to meet people? So we started putting together a band. Now I'm not a musician, I used to play drums once and my teacher told me to beat it. Finished me off.

We got together a band of kids that absolutely love music. Most of them are friends of mine, I got to learn to know them. And we put together a band, there was Kerry, who could make electric music, play with all his fingers, this way, this way.

There was Squash, I don't know why we called him Squash, but he was our rhythm guitarist. The only redeeming feature about Squash was that he was an electronics genius. He could rig an amp to do things that nobody had ever heard before.

And there was Buggy, my friend, who'd lived on these drums. And then there was Rod, Rod was our bass guitarist. He never smiled, he just played bass. And that's the band. And from the start, there was a success.

It got off well, and we didn't have television very much, just starting to find out what it was in New Zealand at that time. We were very backward over there. And radio and that was a big thing there.

And it started to go well, and there were a lot of kids, and they came, and I thought, well, this is really it. A lot of kids, they're looking up there and everything else. And the thing that bothered me was this, that when the lights were switched off, and everybody went home, and you turned the amps off, and you packed everything up in the truck, and we headed out, that same all-emptiness came back again.

That same inner, aching loneliness. And I'd had, I'd done everything that I knew, we were well-known, I had a career, I had everything fixed, I had all the money I wanted. And when I didn't have it, I could steal it, and I knew everything I wanted was there, and yet there was still nothing.

And it just bothered me, I didn't know what. And I remember the day that God began to speak to me. All the time, my mother had been praying for me. She didn't come and say, oh, that nasty, horrible rock music, well, let's take this stuff out of our house.

She'd just come in there and look at her music, and go like this, and walk out again, and she prayed for me. All those years, she prayed for me. I remember the day that God really spoke to me. We're having a rock practice, and we're practicing in our garage.

We'd set our recorders up in the garage, because there's a wall of sound effect that could happen. And we'd set up the thing, we're practicing, and creating this wall of sound thing, and suddenly, right in the middle of practice, I heard this, which ruined the recording, and practice, and everything else.

I go out to the front of the lawn, and there's my idiot friend, underneath this tree with a brand new motorbike. That's a Triumph, big black and shiny chrome thing, so big he sat on it like this, you know.

And he'd just bought this thing, brand new. You know, he loved motorbikes, and this was a big bike, and do 100 miles an hour without even trying, and he usually made him try. He pulled up, he pulled up on the lawn, slammed on his brake, and carved a big groove right through the lawn for my dad to see when he came home.

I went out to talk to my idiot friend. Spent about half an hour, we talked about things. He showed me his bike, he was proud of it. I got excited because our band had its first real big appearance. We'd just broken into what was us, big time.

And I talked for about half an hour about the band, and what we're doing, and what we're going to do, and where we're going to go from there. And he talked about his bike. As a matter of fact, we talked about our God.

Then, he said, listen, he said, I'm just going to go and visit my grandparents. He said, would you like a ride out to the country? And I looked at the bike, I knew he wanted to give me a ride, but pulling on the back, and I said, well, yeah, and then I thought, no, we've got to finish the practice off.

And I said, look, I'll tell you what, you go out now, I'll take a ride later on. Come back some other time, we'll do it. He said, you sure you don't want to ride? I'm going to be out about 15 minutes out there, 15 minutes back.

I just want to show my grandparents, it's only three miles out, and then we'll come back here, and you can finish it off. I said, oh, no, I'd better not, I'd better get it finished. I turned around and went back inside, and he backed his bike up to the dirt, you know, dropped it, and his back went up.