Ex-hippie becomes born-again believer after finding pamphlet about the Good News in men's bathroom
In the late '60s, a young man searching for peace, love and belonging traveled from the East Coast to San Francisco's Haight Ashbury district in search of fulfillment but only found darkness.
With the hippie movement in full swing in the late-'60 and '70s, Thomas Petrofsky said he was searching for "real friendship and fellowship," a place to fit in and thrive. However, he eventually became disillusioned with the movement and unexpectedly found solace in a pamphlet left in the men's room at his college that said: "How to Meet God," he revealed in a recent Delafé Testimonies account of his youth.
“[A]t the time, the hippie movement was just beginning. I saw in the hippie movement, this peace, this love, this desire for unity, this bond of fellowship and friendship, and I was all in. I wanted that.”
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"I just couldn't wait to be part of that scene. Driving into San Francisco was just like, was such a thrill,” he said. But while in San Francisco with his buddies, in what he described as the “mecca of the hippie movement," he was broken by what he saw.
“I went to these peace, love things. I found there was no peace. There was no love. It was every man for himself. ... I was there for a few weeks just experiencing the blackness and the deception of this movement. I was so disillusioned that I just packed up and went back to the East Coast,” Petrofsky said.
"And so, this whole hippie thing was a fraud. I was aimless. I didn't know what I stood for anymore because the thing that I pinned my hopes on wasn't alive.”
When he returned to the East Coast and his college, Petrofsky said he “walked into the men's room of the college I was going to in New Haven, Connecticut, and somebody had left a little pamphlet there, it said, 'How to meet God.' And I looked at that pamphlet and I said, ‘You can meet God?’”
“I put the little pamphlet in my pocket and I drove to where I was living, and it had a Bible verse in it. … I've never seen a Bible verse. I was raised in a religious school from childhood, but the Bible was not part of it. When I saw the Word of God written out, it grabbed my heart,” he declared.
“It grabbed me, and I couldn't believe that God had said these things, that ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever would believe in Him will not perish but have eternal life.’ When I read that, I was gripped that God would say such things.”
While reading the pamphlet, Petrofsky was captivated by the promises of God and how much God knows His children intimately and wants to have a relationship with them.
“If you're listening and you think that God is a million miles away, [that] He doesn't know your name, listen to this: God knows you intimately; He knows everything about you, and He knows everything that's happened to you and every wound that you've had. Every rejection you've had God knows about it, and He cares about it,” Petrofsky said.
“That's what I found in this little booklet that contained the Scriptures of God. God spoke to me through that. And I was just gripped. I said, ‘how do we get more of this?’"
He then became a born-again believer and witnessed to his friends who had driven with him on the road trip to San Francisco.
"I didn't want to do something that's cool without my best friend who had gone to San Francisco with me,” he said, explaining that he went to his friend's house and knocked on the door to share the Good News.
“He was a motorcycle dude at the time. … Nothing could have prepared him for that. ... We sat down together, we read through the Scriptures. ... I said, ‘Jeff, we should do this.’ He looked at me and said: ‘OK.’”
“We got on our knees. We asked the Lord to forgive our sins, come into our lives, to make us new creatures in Christ, and to accept us as His sons. We got up. We were new creatures in Christ. … And we were radically changed.”
Nicole VanDyke is a reporter for The Christian Post.
