Ted and Elizabeth Wise were part of the vanguard of Beat-sympathetic free spirits that predated the 1967 Summer of Love in the Bay area. Ted Wise was a native of Lakeport, California, a small community on the shores of Clear Lake, about seventy miles north of San Francisco. When he was a child, his family had moved to Auburn, where he nourished an interest in art and literature until joining the Navy in the mid-1950s. While serving aboard a Navy tender in the Pacific Fleet, he learned how to work with canvas and began learning the sail-making trade; on shore leave in Japan, he experimented with marijuana and heroin.

Even as a child, Wise had been fascinated by the idea of drug use; he cherished a magazine photo of a Mexican peasant with an array of mind-bending mushrooms. As a teenager, he was captivated by the 1955 Frank Sinatra film The Man with the Golden Arm, which he remembered made heroin addiction look attractive: "All you had to do was roll around in agony a bit . . . the worst thing that could happen to me would be to meet Kim Novak."

Upon returning home to Auburn, Wise enrolled at Sierra College. While he continued to nurse his interest in the "jazz musician's smoking preference," he met Elizabeth, a young woman who, like Ted, was interested in art and poetry. At Sierra, they were devotees of an English professor with connections to the Beat scene in San Francisco. The allure of the exciting artistic and literary scene there prompted Elizabeth to move to San Francisco in the summer of 1959 in hopes of starting a career in modeling; Ted followed her shortly thereafter and enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Once in town, they quickly moved into a Beat commune on O'Farrell Street in the city's North Beach bohemian enclave.

"Our basic identity," Wise recalled, "was as beatniks." Life in the commune proved a constant source of new ideas and fascinating discussions, as artists, academics, and literary figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti turned up regularly at dinnertime.

In 1961, the couple married, and a daughter was born. To make ends meet for his new family, Ted found work in the boatyards, eventually landing at Sutter Sail in the "boho-friendly" village of Sausalito, and the Wises relocated across the bay.

Throughout this period, drug use loomed large in the Wises' lives. Marijuana was the foundational drug of choice, but mushrooms of all sorts, mescaline/peyote ("it was amazing"), and amphetamines were all on the menu. But the imagination of many of the people in Wise's circle was fired by what they were hearing about the wonders of LSD, and Wise was no exception. After a failed attempt to secure some of the new mystery drug from "Chemical Buddha" (British philosopher turned Bay Area Zen Buddhist maven, Alan Watts), in late 1964, Wise and friends finally scored a batch of prime black-market LSD that came straight from the labs of Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer Sandoz. His first trip was an epiphany.

"We tried it, and it was a phenomenal experience," Wise recalled. LSD use became routine; often he would go to work high on acid. "Small doses were very interesting," he remembered, noting that after the initial score, supply was not a problem: "We had a lot of it."

By 1965, Ted Wise's life seemed to be shaping up just to his liking. From his job, he made connections with the owners of racing boats and yachts and spent much of his time on weekends as a crew member for his bosses' customers. Plying a craft he loved, hanging out with interesting people, and using drugs—everything in life seemed to be coming up roses. All in all, he lived what he later claimed "on the outside looked like the coolest life one could have," with a mix of friends that included "beats to yachtsman [sic], jazz musicians, artists and poets . . . America's Cup captains . . . Yogis, Buddhists, Anarchists, [and] Communists."

The Rat in the Basement

The internal reality, however, was apparently less than cool. Wise was regularly working long hours, going out carousing with friends, and sleeping with a succession of girlfriends, while Liz stayed at home with a family that soon included two children. Knowledge of Ted's philandering caused increasingly rancorous relations within the marriage—later, Wise even admitted to plotting to murder Liz. Mercifully, on one of his frequent LSD trips, he began to be troubled by insights into his own character or, more precisely, his lack thereof. He became increasingly convinced that, at bottom, Ted Wise was a self-centered liar, cheat, and thief; as he put it: "I went into the palace looking for the prince on the throne but discovered only the rat in the basement."

Ted, whose exposure to Christianity thus far had been a couple of visits to church with his grandmother and a few mandatory chapel services in the Navy, was antagonistic when his wife began to attend services at First Baptist in Mill Valley, but he noted, "She came back from church just glowing." Eventually, he decided to read the New Testament: "I didn't want to be hypocritical about it; I was always putting it down but [had] never actually read it."

What he found, however, surpassed his mild expectations of finding a new role model in Jesus Christ. "I just got fascinated by Jesus," Wise recalled. As he read, he was particularly impressed by Christ's claims to divinity and Paul's assertions that all people had a need to respond individually to his invitation to be born again. Convinced that Jesus was God, Wise later described his experiences as a Paul-like conversion: "While on my way to my own Damascus . . . I found it necessary to cry out to God to save my life in every sense of the word. Jesus knocked me off my metaphysical ass. I could choose Him or literally suffer a fate worse than death."

Having embraced Christianity, Wise felt his next step was something of a heavenly legal requirement—making a public acknowledgement of his belief in Jesus. One Saturday night in early 1965, he and Liz took a healthy hit of LSD and traveled to Berkeley to visit an old friend, Danny Sands. At the party, they found a house full of pot-smoking people plundering a major score Sands had just brought north from Mexico. Isolated in the midst of the mellow, marijuana-imbibing crowd, Wise began announcing that "Jesus is my Lord," much to his fellow partiers' discomfort and befuddlement.

Leaving the party, Wise, who had driven before while on LSD, experienced a nightmare of a ride back across the Bay Bridge. "It seemed like the bridge was going straight up," Wise remembered years later. Even more disconcerting, he claimed, "it seemed like I was out of the car, somewhere else, [but] conscious of myself still driving the car."

Hearing demonic voices urging him to "Flee!" he prayed and was rationalizing his past behavior when he claimed he heard an audible angelic voice telling him that excuse making was inappropriate when speaking to God: his best option would be to "Shut up!" Eventually, the Wises returned home, and Ted believed that God had rescued him—and had audibly ordered him to attend church the next morning. …

"I Felt Such Happiness"

Jim and Judy Doop (pronounced "Dopp") had first run into Ted and Liz at a neighborhood party and had been intrigued at the way the hip Wise made his newfound Christian "trip" sound relevant and exciting. A native of Des Moines, Iowa, Jim Doop had served a stint in the Marines (primarily as a trombonist in the Marine Corps Band) and was attending Grandview College in Des Moines when he met Judy Marshall, a girl from an upper-class Presbyterian family who once had harbored a desire to become a missionary. Married after a three-month whirlwind courtship in 1959, they headed out to California in 1961 and ended up in Berkeley, where Jim worked for Mills Women's College.

Hoping to pursue his dream of becoming a stand-up comedian in the mold of Lenny Bruce, Jim began working in clubs and strip joints on the weekend as "Jimmy Sand" and picked up a fairly solid weekday job as a full-time factory sales rep for the Philip Morris Tobacco Company.

On the personal side, the Doops' life was a bizarre mix of middle-American respectability and California bohemian hip. Regular attendees at a local Lutheran church—despite the fact that Jim was fairly doubtful about there even being a God—and social hosts for the North Carolina delegation during the 1964 Republican convention (Jim Doop was an admirer of Barry Goldwater), they indulged their wild side with a steady stream of cocktails and were early members of Berkeley's Sexual Freedom League.

This bifurcated lifestyle began to grate on their marriage. "[We were] torn in two directions, free but not free," remembered Judy Doop Marshall. As a result, they found themselves more than open to both the allure of the Bay Area drug scene and a desire for spiritual truth. Both of those paths intersected in their new friends, the Wises.

Jim Doop looked to Ted Wise as something of a father figure, respecting both his biblically infused wisdom and his knowledge of drugs—the latter admiration won by dint of Wise's tales of his own numerous excursions on acid. After experimenting with LSD a couple of times, Doop dropped by Wise's house one evening in October 1966 to visit and smoke some joints.

During their conversation, he reported mixed results with his first encounters with acid—his first trip had been exhilarating, but his second had been depressing. Doop remembered years later that Wise then leaned close to him and shared his own revelatory insight about "the Rat that lives in the cellar of our soul."

Oddly affected by the marijuana, Doop lay down on the floor and began to contemplate Wise's words with Bob Dylan's recently released album Blonde on Blonde playing in the background. While he lay there, he began to meditate on his spiritual condition and came to a profound realization:

I finally got it. I was the rat. And it was my soul that was repenting. I thought to myself, Maybe there is a God. I hadn't considered that possibility in a number of years, when suddenly a peace came over me, my breathing became easier. My chest became lighter. And I said, letting out a long sigh, "Oh Father, forgive me." Immediately the entire weight that was on my chest was gone, and the rush of relief from my heart was one of exultation. . . . My eyes were closed and there was a bright light in front of me. I felt such happiness. I had never known anything like this before. . . .

I understood in an instant that God is my Father and I am His child. . . . The joy, the peace and love that I had on my heart for God and others was just incredible. Never had I realized anything comparable before. . . .

In the days and weeks that followed, Doop's appetite for the Bible was insatiable. "My mind was being blown away by the Bible's brilliance, by its simplicity," he recalled; "the words of Jesus just enlarged my love for God and for mankind. . . . I felt so cool that I [started telling] my friends I was dropping [using] LSD, smoking marijuana and that Jesus Christ was my Lord. . . . I had turned on, tuned in, and Christ was leading me out."

The new spiritual Jim Doop proved very popular in his own household. When he finally sat down with Judy and explained the changes that had come over him, she was ecstatic. Happily, she told him that she, too, had been moving back toward God and that this was an answer to her prayers.

This condensed excerpt is reprinted with permission by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.

"I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies." -John 11:25

Among the wonders of creation are the frogs and insects that suddenly re-appear each spring, even in the coldest of climates. How do they survive the icy tomb of winter? Extreme cold is a tremendous challenge for every living thing. Unprotected, the fragile cells that make up the substance of plants and animals burst like water pipes in freezing temperatures—and this leads to irreversible tissue damage.

God gave humankind the intelligence to protect ourselves in harsh weather, because we are more sensitive to cold than most other creatures. In this sense, we are also more dependent upon our Creator. If our core body temperature drops just 3 or 4 degrees—below 95°F (35°C) —we will die. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), hypothermia causes approximately 1,000–1,500 deaths each year in the United States alone.

With this in mind, the survival of the common wood frog of North America (Rana sylvatica) is astounding. It is the only amphibian found living above the Arctic Circle. Unlike most frogs, which hibernate by burrowing into the soft mud of lakes or ponds, the wood frog seeks shelter in the late-autumn ground litter of its forest habitat. This leaves it exposed to much harsher temperatures than pond-dwelling amphibian species, which are insulated by water.

In winter the wood frog freezes solid for two or three months without harm. In the bitter cold its internal organs become encased in ice, and the frog's eyes turn ghostly white as the lenses inside freeze. Not a pretty sight.

Yet in spring it comes back to life. How? Simply put, God has made the wood frog extra sweet. As autumn temperatures plummet in the far north, the liver of the wood frog churns out huge amounts of glucose (a sugar common to the body). Glucose accumulates in the frog's tissues and acts as a type of antifreeze—not unlike the ethylene glycol used in a car's radiator. This enormous amount of sugar allows the fluids inside the frog's tissues to become as thick as maple syrup, and this prevents intracellular ice crystals from forming. The frog is safe as long as ice doesn't crystallize within its cells, which would make them to rupture. Fluid outside the cells, however, can freeze completely without damaging the frog's internal organs.

This incredibly high concentration of sugar—pumped out by the liver—would quickly cause you and me to enter into an irreversible diabetic coma. And it flies in the face of the way an amphibian's body usually works. Normally, the pancreas (a special organ in its belly) releases a protein called insulin when blood sugar rises. Insulin drives the blood glucose level back down by helping the frog's tissues utilize sugar. All this changes in late fall. During winter months, glucose remains extremely elevated. For the wood frog, it effectively prevents cells from exploding in the cold.

As the frog freezes solid like a Popsicle, its heart stops, blood flow and breathing cease, and brain activity disappears. It is clinically dead, and it remains this way for weeks at a time. In spring the frog thaws and miraculously comes back to life, leaping and jumping around only hours after being as stiff as a brick.

God's Antifreeze

Over the past 50 years researchers have discovered many of the organisms God fashioned possess a type of antifreeze in winter. What's fascinating is that the method of cold protection often varies from animal to animal and plant to plant. Our incredibly creative God uses a host of sugars, alcohols, and proteins to shield his creation from the bitter cold.

Several of the insects and spiders found in Alaska, for instance, are laced with antifreeze proteins (AFPs) that allow them to survive temperatures down to −94°F (−70°C).

The beetle Upis ceramboides is unique among Alaskan insects because it is protected by a complex sugar known as xylomannan. But another species, the red flat bark beetle, must be the world champion cryonic insect. In the laboratory these beetles have been exposed to temperatures approaching 238 degrees below zero (–150°C), and they did not freeze!

Fish—including northern cod, herring, and flounder—survive the frigid Arctic Ocean because God created them in such a way that their bodies create special antifreeze proteins that possess an unusual molecular structure with a repeating pattern, not unlike the proteins found in cold-tolerant insects. These cryoprotective proteins bind to tiny ice crystals, thus preventing larger ice crystals from forming and damaging the fish's tissues and organs.

Plants, fungi, and bacteria have also been designed to withstand the ravages of winter through similar methods.

(Incidentally, how would you feel about eating a strawberry laced with beetle protein? You may be interested to know that food scientists are presently attempting to create frost-tolerant fruits and vegetables by inserting into plants the gene for the antifreeze proteins found in certain insects. They are also trying to come up with a smoother ice cream texture using the same insect molecules. The presence of antifreeze proteins prevents ice crystals from forming, which cause grittiness. Just imagine the advertisement— "Our ice cream is made with real bug protein for that smooth taste you've come to love!")

All this is more testimony to our Creator's genius (Romans 1:20). The common wood frog in particular symbolizes our future resurrection in Christ. To be sure, Christ's body didn't just seem dead. He truly died, and thus he truly rose again from the dead. Likewise we will truly die before being raised to new life. But the life cycle of the common wood frog is nonetheless a fascinating natural picture of our future hope.

[Click this link to see a You Tube video of this "natural picture of our future hope."]

Rick Destree is Director of His Creation.

Saint Paul said, "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8, ESV). This is the main thing to know, and the main thing everyone needs to hear, at least before she dies. But we also read that the Lord put forth Behemoth who is "the chief of the ways of God" (Job 40:19, KJV). Behemoth was created to stun an answerer-back with the sheer shattering force of what God can do. Only God's imagination could make Behemoth. You could say that Behemoth was created to give massive corroboration to the Everyman of life that he or she is not God.

I've spent a lot of time over the years in the company of Behemoths, which is to say, in the company of visions and dreams that corroborate God. It's not that you set out to find things that corroborate God. But things come to you. Data find you. Phenomena leap right into your lap.

You see a movie or hear a song, and it's the power of God. You're overcome by God's grace through a symbol. Or you're dazzled by God's control, and not yours, through a parable of grace.

Here is a recent example, or at least, recent for me. It's a Behemoth that is able to bring the message of God into the here and now. Let's talk about The Guess Who.

The Guess Who was a rock band from Canada that had a string of top ten records in the late 1960s and early 1970s: "These Eyes," "Laughing," "American Woman," "No Time," "Hand Me Down World," "No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature," "Clap for the Wolfman"—and there were several others. They were the soundtrack of our lives back then, and they live on through their use in television and movies.

But The Guess Who was not just a successful rock band; The Guess Who was a Behemoth. Their work revealed something. It put its finger on something. It pointed to something beyond itself.

There is no better example of what they saw and heard than their song "Pain Train," the opening track of their celebrated performance album, Live at the Paramount (1972). "Pain Train" is for me their signature song. It's about irreparable loss and the oncoming pain of life. It's a scorcher and a rock anthem.

Train comin' too fast Pain, is it really gonna last?

And you still refuse to see You still refuse to see And you still refuse to see

Can you hear it like a Train, comin' too fast Pain, is it really gonna last?

There are dozens of such songs in the track list of The Guess Who that are x-rays of suffering and urgent pleas for aid—even, for God's aid.

Did rock fans of those long-gone days see a Behemoth in their music? I, for one, didn't, though I did pick up the plaintive note in the vocals of the lead singer. Somehow I connected with the pain in his voice. So I bought the records.

The band members were all in their early 20s. They were led by a singer/songwriter Burton Cummings, guitarist/songwriter Randy Bachman, and later guitarist/songwriter Kurt Winter. They spent their whole lives—prior to becoming famous—in Winnipeg, Manitoba (O Canada, I salute thee!). And they rolled out these completely realistic descriptions of life: an oncoming and fast-moving train of pain. Where, at the age of 25, did they get such wisdom? They were a Behemoth.

And there's more. Listen to their biggest hits: "These Eyes," "Laughing," "Broken," "Hang on to Your Life," and "Sour Suite." These songs exist within the country of loss. They were written in suits of mourning and became anguished cries for deliverance. Some of them were addressed directly to God. Here are some Bible-sounding lines from "Three More Days:"

… Looking out the window down the road And I see the same damn thing.

Three days to get it on Three days to get it off And three more days to die.

And I'm six feet down And I'm asking the good Lord up in heaven

Why?

I compare the urgency of these songs to William Cowper's poem The Castaway (1799), wherein the Evangelical poet lays out the desperate case of a drowning man, which concludes:

No voice divine the storm allay'd, No light propitious shone; When, snatch'd from all effectual aid, We perish'd, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he.

A friend recently told me about an illness that took a heavy toll on him. In response to a sermon I preached, he said, "I am well aware that Christ came for me, died for my sin, left this world asking us to love and forgive one another, and promised eternal life. Without any disrespect to the former, which is the message of Christianity, I want to be forced to think about all of these things in a deeper context. I want to hear a sermon that makes me think about Christianity in today's world, and how it affects my everyday life."

I thought, Well, a Behemoth is what's called for—a way to get in, and also a way to salve that "affects my everyday life."

That is what I think The Guess Who were on to. It fascinates me that their great lead singer, Burton Cummings, hits a pure gospel note in his striking recent number, "Invisible." It comes from the 2008 album Above the Ground:

You read it in the Bible You saw it in a storybook Remember from the kindergarten You had it in your first crush You had it with your lost love

You had it when your heart broke You saw it in a baby's smile You saw it in your mother cryin' silver teardrops. Hey, I thought that stuff was invisible And I said hey, I thought that stuff was invisible

You felt it in a heartbeat You heard it in a sermon You felt it at the race track Saw it in the church goin' people. You heard it on the radio.

You got it from behind the iron curtain You felt it in a royal flush Even had the damnedest dreams about it. Hey, I thought that stuff was invisible And I said hey, I thought that stuff was invisible

And I don't know if it's really true How I know, how I know what I'm feeling I've got nothing to compare it to But this I know, this I know, I need healing Yes, I need healing.

This is a word, maybe even the Word. This is me they're talking about. It's what I mean by a Behemoth. God didn't have to make him, but he did. To give a little corroboration.

Paul F. M. Zahl is a retired Episcopal minister. He is dean-emeritus of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry (Ambridge PA), and the author of Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life (Eerdmans).

Healthy Habits of Awesome People

You don't have to be a genius to see divine wonders all around us. But it doesn't hurt. This review in the Harvard Business Review looks at Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Author Mason Curry examines the schedules of 161 painters, writers, composers, philosophers, scientists, and other exceptional thinkers. The most surprising idea came from Ernest Hemingway: stop when you're on a roll.

Another habit of many geniuses is a daily walk. It apparently has some science behind it, as reported in "Walking Helps Get the Creative Juices Flowing," on the Stanford Graduate School Website.

Graces Small and Large

One thing that fills us at The Behemoth with awe is how God manages to rescue all manner of people from all manner of trouble. Like a bank robber suffering from addiction and depression. Among the lines that made us smile: "Prison is not a place for personal growth. But there were small graces."

Survival of the Beautiful-est

One problem with non-theistic evolutionary theory it provides no place for the beauty of the natural world. We read about how living things adapt to their environments and how the fittest survive. But why is the world so beautiful? "Our Generous God" suggests the world is fashioned not just to meet our physical needs, but to enhance our "desires and pleasures."

The Practical Parrotfish

On the other hand, some beautiful creatures of God can do useful and practical things—like balancing delicate ecosystems. The authors of "Meet the Sand-Pooping, Reef-Saving, Hermaphroditic Parrotfish" would not see God's providential hand in Hawaii's reefs, but we do.

Tattoo Trendsetter

Just when Christians think they are on the cutting edge by getting tattoos, along comes the news "Been there, done that." When? About 1,300 years ago. A tattoo of Michael the archangel was recently found on the inner thigh of a Sudanese female mummy. The Telegraph article notes, "The letters on her inner thigh spell out M-I-X-A-H-A, which is "Michael" in ancient Greek. Researchers say that she probably died around A.D. 700 and lived in a Christian community on the banks of the Nile River."