I met my childhood best friend (let’s call him Kevin) when I was seven years old. For the decade that followed, our destructive influence on each other spiraled into an ever-increasing helix of hell-raising.

In short, Kevin and I were bad, and not in a cool way. In a despicable, sad, desperately hopeless kind of way.

Last week, I baptized him.

I showed up to Mrs. Virginia’s 2nd grade class at Springville Elementary in the Spring of 2002. By then, I was perfectly primed to meet Kevin; to illustrate this period of priming, I’ve provided a breakdown of relevant numbers:

● 18 — approximate number of months my parents were married before they split
● 7 — number of schools I attended between kindergarten and second grade
● 4 — number of states I lived in before the age of seven
● 12 — approximate number of apartments/trailers/motorcycle dealership backrooms lived in before the age of seven
● 4 — number of children my mom had by the time she was 22 years old
● 3 — number of fathers to said children
● 6 — the number of years I’d been alive before I dove headlong into R-Rated movies (and other adult content)

It didn’t take long to realize that Kevin, like me, slithered around the classroom in the same impish ways: crafting pranks out of thin air, grasping hungrily for attention, and harboring a deep-seeded annoyance with rules and rule makers. With the help of my family name, I quickly established a reputation in my small town as the kid you didn’t want your kid hanging out with. But Kevin had earned an equal reputation.

One day, we cemented our friendship with a secret ritual in a graveyard.

The “best friend handshake” was invented in the Maplewood Cemetery during a school field trip. The motions were based on vague notions we had of hiphop culture that had slowly crept from American cities of influence to our humble village of mostly dairy farmers. It involves a hand slap, with a couple of fist bumps and culminates in a masculine hug (brief in duration with hearty backslaps). We invented the secret handshake as innocent kids. We couldn’t have known then that the handshake would serve as a signing of a social contract, a binding agreement to spur each other on toward deeds that lead unto death. That the contract was first signed in a graveyard was fitting.

By 6th grade, we were stealing beer from his dad’s loosely guarded basement bar. If we couldn’t find beer, we’d pilfer indiscernible splashes from different bottles of liquor. Kevin watched the clock to be sure we’d choke down shots of the noxious potions at regular intervals of five minutes until we couldn’t see straight. We’d stumble outside in the dark and chain-smoke an entire pack of menthol cigarettes we got from God knows where.

In retrospect, these hobbies seemed relatively tame compared to what followed.

In 8th grade, while snowboarding at the dinky slopes outside town, Kevin convinced a stranger (Canadian fellow in his 20s) to sell us $20 worth of marijuana. We received the flattened emerald disc with jubilance. That icy December night was a confirmation of sorts; we packed the weed into a clumsily engineered apple in the woods outside Kevin’s house. He held the lighter for me, looked dead in my eyes, and said, “Do it.”

The green flower stuffed inside the red apple was a firstfruits, a gateway to new realms. The laugh attacks, munchies, and general psychological jambalaya that came with being high became my crutch, the refuge I fled to when Dad got drunk and scary, when my stepmom committed suicide, when mom got sick from withdrawal, when we got evicted from yet another apartment, when my big brother went to prison, when the stuff I don’t feel like writing about happened in the dark.

Weed was our savior. Though deep down I think we knew, even then, it was a lousy, fleeting savior.

Nevertheless, Kevin and I rarely attended a social event (read scuzzy teen party in a basement, or adjacent wooded area) without each other in the following years. Three obsessions magnetized us: alcohol, drugs, and girls. Victory in any one of these areas was always punctuated by the deadly “best friend handshake.”

Somewhere in the blur of those hazy years, a guy called Tim Toy shared the gospel with me and about a 1,000 other teens in Saranac, NY at YoungLife camp. When Tim explained the problem of sin and the holiness of God, and why Jesus went to the cross, I was primed for his reading of Luke 23:34: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” My heart just about exploded. I felt what the Apostle John felt when he erupted in praise in the middle of a letter: “… what great love has the Father lavished on us that we should be called children of God” (1 John 3:1). I’d never encountered anybody — or any substance — that saved so fully, selflessly, and unconditionally.

Nestled in the mighty stillness of the Adirondack Mountains, I asked Jesus to be my savior. I signed a new contract that required nothing from me. And everything. An unforgettable impression was laid over me in a simple refrain: “Everything is going to be ok now.”

I wish I could say I never smoked weed or used drugs or sinned sexually or got blackout drunk again after that night. But I did. The difference was, I felt remorse, and, very slowly, freedom and victory and new desires for a Savior that isn’t lousy but glorious, not fleeting, but steadfast.

This new relationship felt like the death of an old one. I couldn’t hang out with Kevin anymore. I knew Jesus was a friend of sinners, but in my Christian infancy, I was not prepared to flee from temptation if I remained close to Kevin.

So we drifted apart, lost touch the way childhood friends often lose each other in the swift current of passing years.

After a decade, we unexpectedly reconnected. I agreed to go camping with some friends I grew up playing football with, Kevin included. I’d only heard through the grapevine of Kevin’s whereabouts in life since high school; there were whispers of run-ins with the law, terribly messy breakups, financial struggle, and drug abuse. During that same time, I’d worked in full-time ministry, become a high school teacher, married, preached and served at my local church. I usually only said the ‘f word’ if I stubbed my toe really hard, and even then I felt bad. I was unrecognizable, and certain that Kevin would reject this new Ned-Flanders-esque guy, wondering what had happened to his best friend.

Imagine my shock when we met at the campsite, did our secret handshake and I saw “Romans 5:3-4” tattooed on his forearm.

How could this be? It was miraculous enough that God redeemed me! How could He save and transform a wretch like me? I was a liar, cheat, drunkard, manipulator, gossip, abuser, and arrogant jerk from a family of generational sin. I lived in the space that seemed further from God than anyone (save maybe Kevin). I was flabbergasted by the audacity of the Holy, Holy, Holy God to save not one, but both of the baddest kids from Springville’s class of 2012.

That weekend Kevin and I floated on the Allegheny River on cheap inflatable tubes made for kids. We talked for hours about Jesus. We talked like awestruck boys talk about the heroics of their favorite athlete or the epic feats of a superhero swinging across the silver screen. We talked about the glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the scandal of grace, about how satisfying the beauty of the Lord is compared to anything the world tries selling–including drugs, booze, and sex with strangers. Kevin had learned of Jesus in the past year or two, and was new to the faith. Beneath the surface of the tattoo, I saw a genuine love for Christ in his heart.

I asked him if he’d been baptized and he said no. I explained it to him, and he said he wanted me to baptize him right then and there in the Allegheny River, right in front of our non-believing high school football buddies. I asked him if he was sure, and said I didn’t want to pressure him. He slipped out of the pink innertube, looked me in the eyes and said, “Do it.”

When he came out of the water we hugged, but not before we did our secret handshake, a handshake that was simultaneously old and new, a handshake born from a grave of death, and washed clean by the “water springing up to eternal life” (paraphrase of John 4:14).

Sometimes God the Author gets a bit extravagant with the literary richness, irony, and symbolism in His grand story. What am I to say? He’s too on the nose with this one? No. I’ll simply marvel at the One who continues to astound my soul, stagger my imagination, and ask, “What great love have I lavished on you, Cody and Kevin, that you should be called sons of God.”

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Originally from Buffalo, NY, Cody Adams is an expatriate teaching literature in Toronto, Ontario. His poetry and fiction has appeared in Ekstasis Magazine, Three Line Poetry, Cacti Fur, Defenestration, among others. He also serves as a Board Member for Forefront Festival.

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