The Night I'll Never Forget

There is one night from my teenage years that I will always remember. And to be honest there are many parts about the evening that my mind must have blocked out. I do remember the outcome but much of it is still hearsay to me because I don't remember witnessing it and I have never met the victims. I didn't remember the events the day after it happened and I don't remember them to this day. Maybe it's Gods way of sparing me the unnecessary replays that would occur in my memory. Maybe your brain takes over to protect your heart or maybe it's just denial. Maybe it was just all of the drugs and alcohol that were in my system that night . Either way they proved it all in a court of law so here you go.
I don't remember what night of the week it was, I do know it was cold out and it was sometime in February I believe. My father was back in the hospital again from complications from drinking too much his entire life and I do know it was just a few months after I had quit school. I had been spending a lot of time with a certain friend of mine and we had been reading a lot from this Satanic Bible that I had found at a bookstore in the mall.
I remember going over to his house that night around 6:00 and there was another kid there who was only 14. I was 17 and this other guy had just turned 18. We had picked up some more grain alcohol for the night and that stuff would put you right over the top. It was 190 proof and would just warp your brain. On top of that my buddy had some pills that we took and I couldn't tell you what they were. This guy had a steady supply of this stuff and about all you could ever get out of him was, just take them, you'll like it. We were also smoking pot all night and we were reading from this book.
Our dream was to have power over people, power to get what we wanted without having to work for it or pay for it. We believed that if we did the things the book said to do that we could have whatever we wanted. I don't remember what we read that night or what we actually set out to do.
What I do remember is going to my parents house and taking two hunting rifles and a shotgun out of the gun cabinet and hitting the road with my friends in my 1969 GTO. My mom woke up that night and she tried to stop me, she tried to talk some sense into me but I just pushed her aside and told her not to worry about what I was doing.
I only remember bits and pieces from that night. They pieced most of it together for me in a series of trials that found me guilty on two counts each of reckless endangerment, aggravated assault and accomplice to attempted homicide.Attorneys didn't want to represent me because they all thought I was lying about not remembering the events of the night. Finally my parents were able to find someone to take the case and I think my grandparents paid the attorney fee's because it was so much money.
The main elements I remember from that night were my friends telling me to go, I remember being chased by the police for hours and losing them several times. I remember telling my buddy to blast the car in front of us, which he did because they had pulled out if front of my prized GTO. I remember being face down in the middle of the road with lots of police cruisers surrounding me and seeing my buddy laying on his back in a police car trying to kick the rear windows out.
I remember the police telling me later that I was a good driver and I also remember the police taking my mom to the hospital with heart problems because of what I had done that night.
I don't remember the man getting shot that was sitting in his van trying to defrost the ice off his windshield so he could begin his delivery route. I remember leaving the parking lot and the police chase beginning just a short time later. I remember dropping off one of the kids to stash the guns in the woods and I do remember picking him back up with the guns because we thought the coast was clear. I also remember taking the shots at the girl in the car ahead of us, but she didn't get hit.
I do remember spending over a year locked up for my crimes, I do remember the fact that the 18 year old spent eight years locked up because of what we did. You see he was an adult and I wasn't and that made the differences in our sentences.
I do believe God was with us that night no matter how terrible that sounds. You see God kept the bullets far enough away from the mans heart so he didn't die and God kept the lady leaning just a bit to the left so two bullets didn't enter the back of her head. I do know that the events we set in motion that night came from doing and believing the wrong things and I also believe that God intervened to keep us all around to do better things.
Believe what you want, but just for a moment imagine that there is something bigger out there than us all. Imagine that good can come from bad and imagine that God uses us all in different ways at different times for different reasons. I meet so many people that say if there was a God he wouldn't let things like that happen. I can bet that some of the people we hurt that night could maybe feel that way or maybe their family members while they were laying in the hospital trying to recover. I know it drives me crazy sometimes too because I don't understand why things happen or what the reasons may be. I can say just keep the faith and life can and will be good because trust me, the spree wasn't over yet.