the church—but in this dream I was shown the inside of the Long Beach Arena, a place I had never been. I was standing in a long line on what appeared to be the north side of the arena, just to the right of center stage where Kenneth Hagan was laying hands on attendees before him. I was in the line which was heading to the stage, and in the dream it seemed it was being made clear to me where I was to stand and which way I was to go. I could see very clearly the paint color and the scratches on the wall; it was as if God wanted me to see where I would be or where he was going to put me and I knew it the moment I woke up. I knew what it meant and what God was showing me. Without a doubt, I knew where the dream came from, but I had other ideas. I wanted to go to the convention, but I was not going to get in line and go up on stage.
I called Laura and told her that I wasn’t going to the convention and she got upset. A week later, I reluctantly gave in to Laura’s constant phone calls about the convention and went when the time came. Once inside the arena, I made sure that we went to the south side of the arena. I was going to do everything in my power to prove that dream wrong. The ushers gave out some kind of raffle ticket, or at least that’s what I thought they were, and I took one for the both of us. We climbed the bleacher seats to about midway to the top and sat down. I said in my mind I guess that dream’s not coming true after all, and I settled back and waited for Kenneth Hagan to come out on stage.
As the crowd settled into their seats, one of the ushers made an announcement from the stage and asked that all those attendees who got a raffle ticket in their hands please come down from their seats. I looked at Laura and smiled and said, “Okay, I’ll be right back. Maybe I won a prize.”
As I got down to the bottom, I quickly turned to the opposite side of the arena that was to my right, but the usher grabbed my arm and told me to go the other way, towards the north side. An usher placed me in a line at the exact same spot as in my dream, and I saw the paint color and scratches. At that moment one of the assistants onstage announced that Kenneth Hagan was tired from the earlier convention that day and needed to rest, and that Pastor Frederick K. Price would be filling in for him tonight.
As the line moved up to the stage the ushers revealed what was happening. They said that all of those who had gotten tickets when they came in would be prayed for and have hands laid on them and they could receive the Holy Spirit and be saved. My jaw dropped as I looked upward towards where Laura was seated. For the first time in my life I had consistently tried to go against God’s plan and I had lost. I went onstage and received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, but old Ray still had one more act of resistance up his sleeve. I could see that everyone else who had gone up on stage before me had fallen down once the pastor laid hands on him or her. I said to myself out loud that I wasn’t going to fall down, no matter what, so when I got up onstage and Pastor Price got ready to lay his hands on me, I planted my feet strongly on the floor, absolutely determined not to go down. But the next thing I knew the ushers were helping me get up off the floor.
In the car on the way to dropping Laura off, I revealed the dream to her and what I had tried to do to keep it from becoming a reality, and she just smiled and said, “God is wonderful.” I kissed Laura in her driveway and watched her go in, and then drove off.
During my drive home my thoughts were only about the dream and the events that followed it. A couple of weeks later Laura and I went to a Bible study at a pastor’s house and I brought David along with me. Once at the Bible study the pastor began to give divine messages concerning our lives in the future, and she looked at Laura and said something to the effect that she would be someone of influence, and then she looked at me and said that I would be likened unto Moses. Everyone almost stopped breathing for a moment and looked at me; Laura nudged me in my side with her elbow and said, “Wow.”
The pastor told David he would be an evangelist, and David said there was no way that would happen because he had other plans for his life, and being an evangelist one not one of them.
A few weeks later Laura got an invitation to try out for the Women’s Olympic basketball team. She began to practice hard at the gym, and she and I would play some pickup games a couple times a week. When the tryouts came, Laura flew to Colorado very excited. Her heart was set on making that team and we were all behind her, but she fell short and returned home to Los Angeles very sad.
A few months later Laura and I had a minor disagreement inside the USC basketball gym, after which I walked away and told her the relationship was over. She never called me and I never called her. To my surprise, it really was over. I then made plans to move out of Reverend Jones’ place, I really needed privacy and found a little place over in East LA above a church. I still couldn’t shake the dream and the Long Beach Arena event; all I knew was that there was a change inside of me and it felt good. My major goal was to immerse myself fully into my acting and hopefully get a break. It was time to move on, time to knock down the doors of Hollywood. After all, this was the reason I came west and I had to focus. Now I had to become a star.
The little room above the church was infested with roaches. The pastor of the church made it a point with me that it was important that I attend church downstairs because after all, this was one of the reasons she let me have the room. It seemed to me back then that she was running some kind of cult church because the people who stayed there in the rooms above the church were almost worshiping her in a way. I knew how we were supposed look up to pastors and all that, but sometimes I would go downstairs with my friend Larry who also lived in one of the rooms and when we visited her in her little house, some of her church members would be washing her feet, combing her hair, dressing her, cooking for her, and so on.
I just found it kind of strange that all of this was going on. There were a lot of broken families living in some of those rooms. It was right about the same time that Jim Jones killed all those people from his church in Guyana. Some of the people in this church had lost family members, and I would see these people sitting around at the pastor’s feet in her house, never smiling, never really looking anyone in the face. Most of the time they kept their heads down to the floor as they sat around the pastor. I asked my friend Larry one night when we were downstairs visiting the pastor what was wrong with these people who always sit at the pastor’s feet and never smile. I figured in my mind that if they were Christians and they knew the Lord then they should smile a little sometimes. Larry finally pulled me to the side one evening and told me that these were relatives of some of the people who got killed with Jim Jones down in Guyana. It became very clear to me then; these people were in mourning for their loved ones. At that point, I did feel a little guilty for questioning the church, the pastor, and the people who hung out around there. This was the first time in my life that I was finding God and the church on my own without my mother, so all the things that were going on around me, as far as the church was concerned, were new territory. But I had just had my own in counter with God, and I needed to be sure this place really had God in it. Although I was a young Christian, I still knew the stories of how people in the church took their eyes off of God and began to focus on the pastor and got lost. It can happen before you know it.
A few days later Larry and I got into a big fight over his ex-girlfriend Rachel; they had broken up at the church and she asked me to give her and her kids a ride home. This didn’t sit well with Larry, and Rachel asked me to stay over for a while and have some dinner. It had already gotten dark outside, and as we were sitting at the table talking, she heard a noise outside of the window near the dining room.
She jumped up and said, “Oh my God, it’s Larry spying on me!” She was afraid of him and felt he would do something to hurt her. I started to get concerned myself because I knew he was really in love with her and I didn’t want him to think I was trying to make a move on her. I really liked her kids, and I thought we were all friends, but after hearing him outside the window and seeing the fear on her face, I started to feel a little out of place.
The next thing we heard was a knock on the door. Rachel was afraid to open it, so I went to the door and slowly looked out, and sure enough it was Larry looking me dead cold in the eyes like
