It was the summer of 1984, the last time in my life when I took it as a compliment if someone called me a punk.

I was living in the northern New Jersey suburbs, taking a summer-school chemistry course so I could skip my junior year of high school. I was 15 going on 16.

After summer school one day in ultra-preppy Millburn, I stopped by The Record Mill there to blow my allowance on an LP. It was a choice between Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols and The Best of Freddie & The Dreamers.

Here I was, trying to skip junior year—little did I know that, had I chosen Freddie, I could have effectively skipped a year of my life. But it was not to be.

School ended in the early afternoon and my single mom didn't get home from work until 6 or later, so after class I'd often hop a train for the half-hour ride into Hoboken and, from there, do the nine-minute PATH-train jaunt to Greenwich Village. I was in love with the Village and determined to never leave there without having an adventure.

These adventures usually involved hanging out with hipsters—junkies, potsmokers, drunks and other interesting people who in their jaded way were amused at a fresh-faced suburban teen's asking them about their CBGB years. Even then, I was a historian, curious about all manner of bohemians and their history, be they beatniks, Yippies, or those adorable tatty punks who hung out on St. Marks Place.

Today, I walk by the St. Marks skanks in their ripped-up bondage pants as quickly as I can. But back then, I saw them as rebels who deserved sympathy.

The coolest skank was John Spacely, a gangly, tattooed junkie with platinum blonde hair and an eyepatch who would soon become the anti-hero of Lech Kowalski's harrowing druggie documentary "Gringo". Spacely was fascinating to me because he was the former publisher of the notorious Punk magazine, plus he knew Sid Vicious personally.

I also liked his spark—a sense of honor among thieves. I remember one afternoon—I haven't thought about this in 20 years—when he recognized me on St. Marks Place and immediately asked me if I could lend him whatever money I had so he could "pay his rent." He promised that if I lent it to him, he would return and panhandle it back for me. In my naivete (remember, I was only 15), I lent him whatever I had—probably around $10, which was a fortune to me—and waited for him.

The amazing thing to me even now is that he did come back. And he panhandled for a couple of hours, until he was able to get just over $5 for me. That was my "adventure" of the day—watching the legendary Spacely panhandle on my behalf.

One sunny summer afternoon, Spacely offered to tell me who really killed Sid Vicious's girlfriend—if I'd give him $2 for a beer.

So the two of us went to some grimy tavern, I gave him the $2, and he gave me the answer (available upon request—I like knowing who's read this far). And he told me about his own addictions, which he then claimed to have under control.

"So you pulled yourself up," I said, thinking of a line from some Talking Heads tune—my whole life was song lyrics back then.

"No," he said emphatically, surprising me with his sudden seriousness. "You can't pull yourself up. Someone has to pull you up."

When Spacely, who would die a few years later, said those words to me, I thought I was about as far as I could be from any harmful addiction, save from an inordinate love of chocolate. I didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't do drugs, and was determined to stay a virgin until marriage.

What I didn't know was that some weird feelings that had first come over me when I was 13 would intensify and gain a deadly foothold in my mind.

I remember how it first dawned upon me, coming home from middle school one day, that I had a knot in my chest, and that my throat was all choked up. That I seemed to be choked up all the time. I thought it was just because I had an unrequited crush on a boy.

But that choked-up sensation came and went through high school—it was familiar by the time I met Spacely—and, more and more, it was connected with a desire to harm myself. By the time I entered college, I was in the grip of cyclical depression, with a sickening walking-on-eggshells feeling. I might feel fine for a while, but I always knew that my mood would eventually dip and life would again become meaningless. And there was almost never a day when I didn't feel, deep down, that I would be better off dead.

It's not something I like to think about. But it's the reason I believe so strongly in the truth that is the basis for my faith. Because all the efforts that I made to pull myself out of my depression, which lasted over 15 years, failed. The only thing that healed me was God's reaching out to me and pulling me up. He did it in His own time, and there were many points along the way when I was convinced that, if He existed, He didn't care about me. But He did it, and made the darkness seem as though it had all been a bad dream.

"When the LORD brought back the captives to Zion, we were like men who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, 'The LORD has done great things for them.'"—Psalm 126:1-2

There is a beautiful passage in Luke that describes how Jesus healed a woman who had a "spirit of infirmity" and who Jesus said had been bound by Satan for 18 years. The language suggests that the woman's infirmity was not just physical, but spiritual; it stresses that she was so bent over that she could not even look up at Jesus.

I remember what that was like—to be so shut up in my prison of morbidity that I could not see a wider world, even though I wanted to. And despite being healed, I still often find myself in danger of viewing the world from a perspective of jealousy and lack.

As Isaiah says, it is important to look unto the rock whence we were hewn, as well as the pit whence we were digged. The rock is our heavenly Father, but the pit? That's where He pulled us up. He did it before, and He'll do it again, as often as we need Him to. But we have to hold on to Him when He reaches out to us.