“Life was filled with guns and war
and everyone got trampled on the floor,
I wish we’d all been ready…”
Larry Norman, from the song “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”
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My spiritual roots deeply penetrate the richly turbulent religious soil of America in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s. All across the country young people were being drawn outside the conventional confines of traditional churches to something called “The Jesus Movement.” 
An outgrowth of the counter-cultural hippie phenomenon, the Jesus Movement gathered in coffeehouses and parks where guitars hammered out rock music and newly emerging artists gave birth to songs expressing the angst of the times all wrapped up in the hope of the gospel. The message was simple: the world is falling apart, but Jesus is coming.
I was going off to college during this time and the message resonated with me. I was deeply unsure of myself, my future – and the world. People my own age were being drafted into the armed forces and sent off to be killed in the jungles of Vietnam. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis igniting race riots in many cities. Drug use on campus was rampant, college administration buildings were being “taken over”, 4 students at Kent State University were shot and killed by National Guardsmen called in to quell a demonstration, and “the new morality” was blurring the traditional lines between right and wrong. It was a frightening and confusing time. And besides all that, I personally suffered with a profound inferiority complex that left me unsure of who I was and why I was even here.
To me the world did seem to be falling apart.
But Jesus was coming.
So I found myself drawn to this Movement of long-haired, guitar-playing, street-witnessing people.
The news media called them “Jesus People.”
Others called them “Jesus Freaks.”
I was one of them.
I’ll tell you more next time..
17 Jun 1972, Dallas, Texas, USA — The Explo 1972 was an evangelical conference and festival that took place in Dallas, Texas, from June 12 to June 17. The event was sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ and organized by Paul Eshleman. A crowd of 80,000 mostly young people from over 75 countries congregated to praise Jesus. An even larger crowd of 180,000 came to the nine hour rock festival that closed the festivities. A common sight throughout the event was the up-pointed fingers amid a sea of raised arms that symbolized Jesus as being “the one way”, and that the message was loud and clear. — Image by © JP Laffont/Sygma/Corbis
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Love and miss you, brother. Great stuff!