It was the kind of rock-and-roll scene sure to trouble every thirtysomething, churchgoing father (like me). Up on stage, Tom Petty belted out a string of his most popular songs, many of which contain clever double-entendres which relate to drug use. Out on the lawn, I sat among a teen-age wasteland of stoned young kids--many of whom were so fried they couldn't be roused to hear "Mary Jane's Last Dance" or "You Don't Know How It Feels."

While I tried not to ruin the concert for my twentysomething friend (who had asked me to attend after his girlfriend dumped him), I had a hard time dealing with the sight of so many glassy-eyed young people stoned out of their minds. Indeed, these kids reminded me of a glassyeyed, pot-smoking teenager I used to see all the time.

In the mirror.

That's right, in my youth I not only experimented with marijuana, I inhaled. Frequently. In fact, I sometimes tell people that one of the many differences between me and Ralph Reed (who was the College Republican president at the University of Georgia when I was president of the Young Democrats) is that Ralph and his GOP buddies got drunk after their meetings, whereas I and my Democratic friends got stoned after ours.

Of course, this was before Ralph and I each "got religion" (as our fellow UGA student Michael Stipe of R.E.M. might say). Which, as it happens, is rather significant to this story.

You see, the National Institute for Healthcare Research reports that illegal drug use is far less common among young people who attend church religiously than among other youth. And while some might be tempted to consider this a ho-hum finding which merely shows that churchgoers are less likely to break the law, at least one prominent ex-toker thinks there is more to this research than meets the eye.

In a fascinating--but little-noticed--speech earlier this year, Vice President Al Gore called youth drug use a "spiritual problem" that plagues many young people who are seeking not just to escape the pains andpressures of everyday life, but to rise above their profound feelings of emptiness, alienation, and worthlessness.

Now, in my youth, I would have scoffed at the notion that my drug use was a sign of spiritual unrest. And I would have snickered at the suggestion that I was smoking weed to try to fill a hole in my soul

But it is rather curious that those who "get high" often speak of the experence in mystical or transcendent terms. Indeed, Tom Petty's song, "(We've Got to Get to) A Higher Place" sounds like the kind of title one might find in a church hymnal.

And it is even more curious that Christian writer Francis Schaeffer sympathized with youthful drug users growing up in our relativistic age because they "are smart enough to know that they have been given no answers" to life's ultimate questions. In essence, Schaeffer perceived that Karl Marx got it backwards when he said that "religion is the opium of the people." Because many of the opium users who visited Schaeffer's Swiss retreat center before his death were actually looking for the transcendent meaning, purpose, and significance that true religion offers.

Now, lest there be any doubt, I hope that my own kids will see the ultimate futility of using mind-altering drugs--without repeating my foolish mistakes. And, no, I do not feel like a hypocrite for asking them to do as I say and not as I did. Indeed, I want them to heed the wisdom of that ancient Chinese proverb, "A fool makes his own mistakes, but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others."

Most of all, though, I want my kids (and the kids I saw at the Tom Petty concert) to understand that the pains and pressures and sorrows of life do not point to a meaningless existence. But to a higher reality. For as C.S. Lewis once wrote, "If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world."