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From Ken Raggio's Book
"Long Winding Road"


Long Winding Road
A Very Personal Story

By Ken Raggio

Chapter 12
Crash and Burn

We had not expected to return to Beaumont, but there seemed to be no choice. We rented a house and moved in, not knowing exactly what the next move would be.

We had to decide where we would attend Church while we waited on another open door for ministry. Since we had been so involved with the Charismatic movement, returning to Pastor Clendennen was out of the question. He never approved of any of that stuff. So we decided to visit the largest Assembly of God Church in Beaumont. For several years, they had been involved with many of the best-known Charismatic ministries, and I expected to find a Charismatic environment.

The auditorium was packed the first time we visited on a Sunday morning. In sharp contrast to what I expected, the service was actually very formal and dry. During the time of worship, someone stood to deliver a message in tongues, something which was not an uncommon occurrence in Spirit-filled Churches. I was astonished when, instead of waiting for an interpretation, the pastor nodded at one of the ushers, and the usher promptly walked down the aisle and escorted the person out of the building.

I looked at Dixie with a quizzical squint. What was that all about? The pastor had completely vetoed the operation of the gifts of the Spirit in a Pentecostal-Charismatic Church. Why? That really disturbed me.

Strike one.

We attended several more services. One of the members of the Church staff was an old friend. He invited Dixie and me to attend a banquet being held for all the Church leaders. I estimate that there were about forty or fifty leaders at that meal. It was at a fine restaurant. When the meal began, I was shocked to see that wine was being served all around the room! I could not believe my eyes.

I had never in my life been around people drinking alcoholic beverages, and the last place on earth I expected to see people drinking was at a Church leaders banquet. All the Bible verses I could think of were racing through my head. And there are plenty.

"Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise," Proverbs 20:1.

"Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright," Proverbs 23:31.

"And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit," Ephesians 5:18.

"Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also," Habakkuk 2:15.

"Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou, nor thy sons with thee, when ye go into the tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die: it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations," Leviticus 10:9.

"It is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink: Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted," Proverbs 31:4-5.

"Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink," Isaiah 5:22.

"They also have erred through wine, and through strong drink are out of the way; the priest and the prophet have erred through strong drink, they are swallowed up of wine, they are out of the way through strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in judgment," Isaiah 28:7.

That was strike two.

I didn't need three strikes. I was outta there. It was a very simple decision for us to make. Drinking alcohol is a primary sin. I saw no reason to go to a Church whose leaders drank, or who did not think that drinking was a sin. If the Church doesn't denounce sin, then who will?

We never went back after that.

A few of my old minister friends invited me to preach in their Churches, and I did. But we needed an open door for full-time, permanent ministry, and it was nowhere to be found. For the first time in thirteen years of ministry, I did not have a place to preach.

We needed a Church home. I was acquainted with just about every pastor and every kind of Full Gospel Church within a sixty-mile radius. We should have had plenty of choices, but having been in full-time ministry for my entire life, it was extremely difficult to imagine sitting on a pew in a small Church somewhere. It was a psychological barrier.

Disillusionment

I began to feel very disillusioned. I was twenty-seven years old, had been preaching for thirteen years, and had been in full-time ministry for ten years. In the few years since I had become a Charismatic minister, everything I was raised to believe had been severely challenged. Most of my old-fashioned convictions about right and wrong had been condemned as legalistic bondage. I had tried to play the game as best I could, but I knew the Bible too well.

The further I went with the Charismatic, Ecumenical thinking, the more skeptical I became. I had forced myself to believe that all these people were really saved, even though it did not appear to me that their lives were truly being changed.

I was constantly reminded that I had no right to judge anybody about the way they lived. The youth group could party all weekend at the lake in skimpy bathing suits, the couples could go to R-rated movies on Sunday afternoons after Church, and I could take communion at the Roman Catholic Church with the Catholic Charismatics. One of my (married) minister friends who was then pastoring a Church of several hundreds admitted confidentially to me that he kept a separate apartment in another city for his trysts with female friends. And this was still several years before the big scandals like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart would take place.

I watched all my new Christian acquaintances live just like everybody else who was in the world. In the old days, Christians didn't drink, smoke, chew tobacco, cuss or tell dirty jokes. In the old days, we didn't go to worldly amusements, engage in organized sports, go to the movies, ball games, mixed swimming or a lot of other questionable things. Women wore dresses, and men wore short hair. But now we could do anything we wanted to do, go anywhere we wanted to go, and dress any way we wanted to dress. For a while, I had even worn a full beard and long hair down below my ears.

In the new "anything goes" environment, I could no longer distinguish a Christian from a sinner. I felt like many of my own peers in the ministry were complete space aliens. I could see the laity taking over the Church, and I could see the ministry abandoning all responsibility for preaching Truth, Righteousness and Holiness. Chaos was pulverizing Christianity.

I finally overdosed on the "liberty" mantra. I told Dixie,

"If these are the people who are going to rule the world with Jesus Christ for a thousand years, it is going to be total ANARCHY!!"

And I really, really meant it.

I didn't want any more part of it. It was all just phony baloney. If preachers could smoke and drink and commit adultery, and if Christians could curse and swear and party and play around, then I didn't see any point in being a Christian.

Going Secular

Regardless of all these issues, I still had to support my family. Since nothing was developing in the ministry, I started looking for a secular job. Somebody told me I could make $14 an hour as a longshoreman at the Port of Beaumont. I didn't know anything about that kind of work, but I checked into it. They told me to show up at the Union Hall at 5:30 in the morning.

Every day, the union boss would pick a crew for the day's shipments coming into the port. Some days there was work. Most days there was no work. When I did get work, it was grueling. They dropped us down into the hole of a ship, 40-50 feet down, while a crane on the dock lowered pallets of flour sacks to be stacked ceiling-high in the hole. The sacks weighed 110 pounds each, and they were burlap - the flour dust filled the hole. After throwing those sacks for twelve hours a day, the sweat and the flour made a cake of white glue over me from head to toe. I worked that job as often as I could get work, until it plainly fizzled out.

I got a job in a refinery, doing a turn-around/shut-down as a boilermaker. I worked seven midnight shifts per week for about three months before the job ended. I made good money and caught up on the bills temporarily. When that job ran out, I had to look for more work.

Pursuing A Professional Career

I decided to try selling insurance. A new company had just come on the national scene, A.L. Williams. They were competing heavily with Prudential, Mutual of New York, and some of the real heavyweights in the insurance industry. Art Williams, a former football coach from Atlanta, was creating a sensation by replacing an entire generation of whole-life insurance policies with term-life insurance. The rates were vastly cheaper, and Williams was selling a high-yield annuity as a savings and investment side-product. The best part was that they were paying enormous advance commissions to their agents.

As soon as I went to work for A.L. Williams, things began to steam-roll. They trained me to be a Division Manager. Within four months, I hired and trained 75 new agents. We created a new-agent training program in Beaumont that was adopted at the national level. Locally, I produced a video training school that fast-tracked agents into the field. The Beaumont office was out-performing offices all over the country. We were in the top two percent of producers. Art Williams came to see us. He spent several days studying our operation, and we promoted several agents to managerial positions.

They asked me to go to San Antonio and start a new office. I took one partner and in one week, we hired and trained another 75 agents in San Antonio. We sent one of our top men from Beaumont to take over that office, and it soon became a top producing agency. The last time I saw that manager, he had become a millionaire.

Then our local manager was promoted to a Regional Vice Presidency. I became one of two Division Managers left to run the Beaumont office. We rented the entire second floor of a local shopping center, and were experiencing explosive growth. About 150 full and part-time agents were licensed through that office.

Then the unthinkable happened.

At the national level, the company was growing at the speed of light almost. Their mainframe computer systems were understaffed. The data processors were not able to keep up with the enormous influx of new business, and they began to be backlogged. New business was sitting in stacks for weeks at a time in Atlanta, and policies were not being issued on a timely basis.

In about the sixth month of our project, we started receiving shipments of large boxes from the national office. In those boxes were literally HUNDREDS of policy applications that had been returned to us because they had expired. Due to backlogs in Atlanta, these policies had never been issued. We were told that we would have to go back into the field and re-write all those policies. The clients were furious, and the save-rate was minuscule. Most people didn't want to give us a second chance.

The real killer in that scenario is that I had been paid tens of thousands of dollars in advanced commissions on all that business as soon as it was received in Atlanta. When they finally returned the applications to us, they CHARGED BACK all those commissions to me.

Suddenly, I found myself drowning in charge-backs. I was splitting all the overhead in the office with the other Division Manager - the rent, the utilities, secretaries, office equipment and supplies. Overnight, our cash-flow went into the red. I was in no position to survive the reversal. I had no reserves, no alternative game plan. I didn't feel like we could turn the situation around fast enough to survive. As a peace offering, they offered to promote me to a Regional Vice-Presidency if I would immediately move to Los Angeles and start a new office there. I said no.

I had just turned 28 years old. I was completely exhausted from the events of that year.

I bailed.

Those were most stressful times. It had been about eight or nine months since we had been to Church by now. Several of my new friends were people who were burn-outs from various local Churches and religions. One of my agents was a Baptist guy who was a Gospel music promoter. Several times a year, he put on Gospel concerts with well-known singing groups. As a side-line, he also sold drugs. Pot. Acid. You know.

In the heat of my stress, he came to me with a joint of marijuana. "Man, this stuff will help you take the edge off." I was resistant, but he was undaunted. "It's laced with some stuff that will really trip you out." I had never done any drugs. I had never even smoked. I had never drunk alcohol. But he prevailed on me to take the joint home with me. Little did I realize that the joint was laced with LSD - acid.

At home that night, I decided to try it. He had carefully instructed me to be sure to inhale it for the full effect. Unlike Bill Clinton, I inhaled. That was around 10:00 PM.

Timothy Leary would have been proud of me, as would the devil himself. For the next six hours, I embarked on the most mind-numbing, freaked-out, horrifying experience of my life.

I journeyed into worlds unknown.

I explored the mysteries of the universe. It was like writing a dual PhD dissertation on quantum physics and metaphysics while a fireworks factory was blowing up inside my brain. I theorized on the origins of the universe, and effectively explained away the existence of God to myself that night. I experienced episodes of heart palpitations, hyperventilation and anxiety attacks for about six hours. At four o'clock in the morning, I announced to Dixie that from now on, I was an atheist.

After that night, nothing was the same for me. I suppose that hell had a barn dance over my soul that night. Every kind of bitterness, rebellion, and evil intention filled my mind. I awoke the next day hell-bent on avenging all the failed dreams and religious disappointments I had ever had.

It was Sunday. I bought a carton of Marlboro cigarettes and went to the office. No one was there. I worked all day and smoked cigarettes until I literally puked.

In short order, I took up with one of the older agents who was an alcoholic. He ordered a round of martinis. Two of my agents were backslidden Pentecostals who had sour attitudes about God and religion. They became drinking buddies. One had married a Buddhist woman and was practicing the Buddhist religion. I attended some of their Buddhist encounters and smoked pot and chanted mantras with them.

Within days, I crossed all the thresholds.

I was initiated and confirmed into the society of the damned. Smoking, drinking and doing drugs. With my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, and a full-throttle, no-holds-barred attitude, it took me no time at all to plunge into a nightmare of self-destructive behaviors.

Still, I had to make a living. I followed one of my leads to an insurance company in Houston. Through a series of interviews, I ended up being hired by a hundred-million-dollar Savings and Loan company in downtown Houston as the Assistant Vice President of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations. They gave me a $250,000 annual marketing budget and a handsome office on Allan Parkway.

I moved my family to Baytown, where we lived for almost two years. Dixie and I had no religion and no God. We were so turned-off to religion that we both made a pact with each other that even if one of us decided to get religion again, the other would not return. We became God-haters. We were vicious around Christians and attacked them mercilessly. I collected everything in my house that had any connection to religion: my Bibles, religious books, tapes, records, sermon notes, and everything else connected to the ministry - and threw them into a dumpster.

We gave ourselves to partying. We smoked dope day and night, chain-smoked cigarettes, and became foul-mouthed, intolerable people for any but the most misbehaved. A party was a party, whether it was line-dancing at a cowboy dance-hall in Kemah or disco dancing on the top floor at the Westin-Galleria. We became almost completely estranged from all our families and old friends.

On the job, I tended to massive direct-mail campaigns that generated millions of dollars in revenue for the company. I produced radio and television advertising. I schmoozed with River Oaks executives and city officials and business leaders in towns where we had branch offices. I conducted Grand-Opening campaigns and threw country-club parties. Then, I learned that corporate parties go better with cocaine. That was the beginning of the end.

In all my socializing, I picked up several free-lance advertising projects for various clients. One was the owner of a chain of restaurants in East Houston. I created an advertising campaign for his restaurants that was successful. He offered to sell one of his troubled restaurants to me on a verbal agreement. I contemplated the offer, and decided to take it. I tendered my resignation to the Savings and Loan after about eighteen months there, and went into the restaurant business.

It was a troubled store that had seen a major decline in business since opening two years earlier. The owner had neglected it, and the manager he hired had embezzled heavily from him. I jumped in with both feet.

Dixie and I went to Richmond, Virginia to attend a week-long school in restaurant management. When I came home, I started working 12-14 hours days at the restaurant, seven days a week. No days off.

Despite the work-load, I maintained my addictions well.

I smoked three packages of cigarettes a day. I smoked pot day and night, 3-6 joints a day. My employees at the restaurant had access to a variety of drugs, and I quickly hooked up with a steady supply of amphetamines - speed. And just about every time I stepped out of the restaurant, I had a mixed drink - usually rum and coke.

In spite of my addictions, in short order, I had the restaurant back into profit, and was grossing several thousand dollars per week.

I did not have a contract on the business. I was leasing the building from the owner on a "gentlemen's agreement" with the intention of getting my own financing on the business as soon as I had established a profitable track record.

After a little over three months, the owner walked in one night at about 10 PM. His lawyer was with him. He came to notify me that he was entering his entire business into a Chapter 7 bankruptcy and he was going to close down this restaurant. The property I was leasing would be lost in the bankruptcy. I was instantly out of business. I didn't have a leg to stand on. I didn't figure I had any legal recourse. I cursed him madly and threw the keys in his face and walked out of the building.

I went to the home of some friends nearby who had lots of drugs. I sat down to ventilate all the events of the evening. I was enraged! Before long, I felt myself begin to black out. My heart was racing out of my chest, and I was having unbearable chest pains.

I knew that I was going to die.

I ordered somebody to take me home immediately. On the way home, drifting in and out of consciousness, I told someone to tell Dixie where my life insurance policies were filed. I knew that I was going to die that night. Going to the hospital was not an option because I was pumped full of illegal drugs and alcohol.

Miraculously, I survived the night. But when I awoke the next morning, a horrifying reality began to set in. I was out of business! Then a worse reality occurred. I had just mailed many thousands of dollars of checks in the mail on Friday, depending on the weekend receipts to cover them. In my rage, I had left the building without making the largest bank deposit of the week. I went to the restaurant, not expecting to find the money still in the drawer. Surely enough, the owner had raided the vault - approximately twelve thousand dollars were missing.

Not only was I out of work, out of business, out of income -- I had big, big trouble with those checks. They were not going to clear the bank, and I was not going to be able to cover them. It occurred to me that it was just a matter of time before I would be contacted by the District Attorney. I could already imagine myself locked up in the Harris County Jail.

I was thirty years old.

I was a chain-smoking, God-hating, drug-abusing shipwreck, and I had finally come to the end of my rope. I had played all my cards and had no moves left.

For seven days, I hyperventilated for hours at a time. Prolonged, breath-taking panic attacks. Desperate attempts to find logic and solutions to my dilemma. I couldn't find any. I didn't know what I would do. If I even happened to say something like, "Maybe I need to get right with God," Dixie would remind me that we had already discussed all that before, and this was no time to be adding another round of religious complications to an already complicated situation.

By the seventh night, I could no longer bear it. I paced the floors, lighting one cigarette off another, never closing my eyes the entire night. I was still pacing the floor when the sun came up.

I finally woke Dixie up at 5:30 AM. "I'm afraid that ALL this mess is because I have turned my back on God. I'm going to pray."

Dixie got up and got dressed. "What are you going to do?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said. But when she finished getting dressed, she took the keys and walked out of the house.

"Where are you going?" I asked again.

"I don't know."

"When are you coming back?"

"I don't know." And she was gone.

I fell on my face on the bedroom carpet.

It had been nearly three years since I had been to Church, read a Bible, or prayed.

I started to pray, but before I ever got the first word out of my mouth, a Bible verse pounded my head. “He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him." God was talking to me.

I listened to that verse in my head. I thought about it. If I come to God, I really have to believe that He is. He is not going to pay any attention to me if I don’t really admit that He exists.

I said, "God, I don't know who you are. I don't know what you are. I don't know where you are. I don't know what your name is. I just know that YOU ARE. And I know that I have offended you. I have sinned against you. I have been a very, very evil man, and I know now that I have been wrong. I don't know if you will forgive me. I have tried to blaspheme you, but I was a fool. I beg your forgiveness, in Jesus' name."

I don't know how long I prayed and wept and begged God's forgiveness. Hours passed before I got up off the floor.

At about 10:30 that morning, Dixie came into the house. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying. She never really told me where all she had been, but she had just come from a pay phone at a convenience store. She said, "I called my mother and told her what was going on with us."

"Mother asked me if I would let her pray for me. I said, 'yes,' so she did. Ken, I FELT AN ANGEL put his arms around me at that phone booth!"

That's all I needed to hear. God was going to help us.

I knew it in my soul. We laughed and cried and hugged and wondered what was next.

The phone began to ring - calls from family and friends. The little Assembly of God Church that Dixie's parents attended offered to provide us a place to stay if we decided to move back to the Beaumont area. They had an old parsonage that was empty, next door to the Church.

We drove from Houston to Beaumont that evening to see the house and talk to the people. We did a quick walk-through of the old empty house, and I told the pastor, "I want to go next door to that Church and have a prayer meeting." They agreed that was a good idea.

Shortly before 7:00 PM that night, Dixie, our two small boys, and I walked into that building with the Pastor and my in-laws to pray. As I walked into the back of the auditorium, I looked down the center aisle and saw the pulpit where I had preached several times many years before. I was stricken again with conviction for the mess I had made of my life.

Dixie and I went down the aisle and knelt in the altars and began to pray.

The others found a place to pray as well. It was an old-fashioned prayer meeting.

Within about thirty minutes, other people started showing up to pray with us. By 8:00 o'clock, there were about 35-40 people in that little Church praying with us, and we all prayed like an inferno until eleven o'clock that night. Relatives and old friends came from all over the county. The word had spread like wild-fire: Ken and Dixie were praying through!

I laid down under an altar bench near the platform and buried my face in the carpet. I wept and cried and repented of just about everything except breathing. I begged God to forgive all my foolish, foolish ways. Dixie was nearby in her own world of prayer. God's Spirit enveloped the place, and it seemed as if time stood still for those four hours.

In the midst of that prayer time, I found a Bible, and opened it randomly. It fell open to Isaiah 54. I read the entire chapter.

Verse 4 said, "Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more."

Verses 7 and 8 said, "For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the LORD thy Redeemer."

God promised a new beginning.

In the middle of the chapter, He said,

"And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children. In righteousness shalt thou be established: thou shalt be far from oppression; for thou shalt not fear: and from terror; for it shall not come near thee."

He promised that "great shall be the peace of thy children." That verse hammered me like a sledge hammer. I was so afraid that all the garbage my children had seen in me would have a long-term affect on them. They were still small - eight and four years old, but they had seen far too much, and I was ashamed. I needed that promise from God. I took it instantly into my heart and have claimed it in perpetuity.

That night, the darkness lifted. God poured His Spirit out on Dixie and me that night. He renewed our hearts, our minds and our hopes. Driving down Interstate 10 the next day, between Beaumont and Houston, I was amazed at how bright and beautiful the sky and the trees were. There was light!

I had actually been worried that I would never be able to cope with life without drugs. Instantly, for both of us, those days were over. Both of us completely abandoned all those habits immediately, and never resumed them. We were completely and instantly delivered. I carried out trash bags filled with cartons of cigarettes, booze, drugs and drug paraphernalia.




Continue to:
Long Winding Road - Chapter 13
"Separation Time"

Return to:
Long Winding Road - Chapter 11
"Holy Ghost or Nothing"