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The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, and Jesus Christ
For years, psychedelics were my religion.
All I ever wanted was The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, the panacea, the cure for what plagued me. From those first moments when I tasted the earthy pulp of a psilocybin mushroom, it was love. Psychedelics were my sacrament. They shot me into cathedral vaults. The promise of eternal life through chemicals glittered seductively, but hid a yawning abyss.
The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever tells my story of psychedelic devastation and spiritual rescue. It chronicles my trajectory from acid enthusiast to soul-weary druggie to psychedelic refugee. I finally found The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever—in the last place I thought to look.
All I ever wanted was The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, the panacea, the cure for what plagued me. From those first moments when I tasted the earthy pulp of a psilocybin mushroom, it was love. Psychedelics were my sacrament. They shot me into cathedral vaults. The promise of eternal life through chemicals glittered seductively, but hid a yawning abyss.
The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever tells my story of psychedelic devastation and spiritual rescue. It chronicles my trajectory from acid enthusiast to soul-weary druggie to psychedelic refugee. I finally found The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever—in the last place I thought to look.
264 pages, Paperback
Published October 9, 2024
28 people are currently reading
353 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
June 26, 2025
This book was impactful to me. The Lande family are friends, so I was excited to see this book published and hear the story of specifically Ashley's journey. Using a rich vocabulary, Ashley paints a vivid and often horrifying picture of years of psychedelic use that was at its core a search for Something. There is a profound tipping point in the story where the drugs begin to betray her relentlessly, and Jesus continually pursues her. I was particularly struck by her comparisons of Buddhism/the escapism of drugs, which try and detach you from reality, with the incarnation of God, which is all about God gripping reality by the horns, suffering and all. I already have a copy ready to gift a friend in the clutches of the New Age who I think will benefit from Ashley's testimony.
December 16, 2024
Really good story of grace
December 17, 2024
There’s a risk when getting into someone else’s life story. To actually commit yourself to listening as they recount the paths they’ve taken, the dark corners in their lives where lurk wild things, the odd reasonings in their heads, and more. The risk happens at different levels. One risk is that if a person really tunes in to the tales of another’s life, as weird or dark or grief-filled as it may be, there’s a lot of commonality. ‘This person is very much like me, and I find myself thinking the same way they did.’ If you really listen, it can be eye-opening. Ashley Lande, author and writer in rural Kansas, takes a bold step by inviting you into her life story in her award-winning autobiographical narrative, “The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics, & Jesus Christ”. It’s in both paperback and Logos Digital formats. And it is a page-turning journey through a life looking for the thing that would make everything okay forever. Simply because of who I am, I found myself praying for the author, chapter after chapter.
Lande takes readers on a trek through her kaleidoscopic existence where, as she admits, “I had ruined myself, almost on purpose, because I believed I could find something far better than God, whom I had never really known or bothered to seek” (22). The voyage includes sailing through many of her years on the chemical seas of mushrooms (psilocybin), acid, and LSD. It includes her youthful renunciation of God, diving into atheism, then moving over to an Americanized form of Buddhism and Hinduism all wrapped up in yoga, dietary rules and more. Along the way she introduces us to rocky relationships, marriage, motherhood, and death, to name a few. Inside every episode comes forth the author’s internal dialog and rationale, all of which seemed rock solid and sound at the moment, but later exposed itself as the self-delusion it was all along.
And there is a raw honesty that fuels her life story. Such as, when she turned to her “pugilistic atheism” it was to prove to herself and everyone that there was no God, and then she observes that this is “a far easier absolution to make in youth, when life has been fairly charmed and everyone you love is still alive and your hubris can fill in the nicks and concavities where you’ve been humbled” (35). Or later in her young life, confronted by grace, she came to realize “I’d lived by rules. Rules were my god, Dietary rules, in particular, had held me captive during my pregnancy…I had found grace unacceptable…I clung to the ideas that all my efforts still conferred upon me at least some degree of superiority to the pedestrian folks…who’d never gone spelunking in the deepest caverns of the cosmos, who’d never luxuriated in obliterative light, like a flotsam on a sea of oceanic bliss…My hubris knew no bounds…” (184-185). And then, before a new day dawned in her life, she saw clearly that “Psychedelics (mushrooms, acid, LSD) made me believe I could have it all. Glory without submission. Transcendence without descent. Knowledge without trauma. Freedom without discipline. New life without death. It was all a lie” (263). As I mentioned earlier, I found myself praying for the author with each chapter.
Lande’s life takes an unexpected turn; a slow, long-arched turn that finally brought her to find “The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever,” but I’ll leave it for the readers to find out what, when, how, and who. Here is a work where one gets to sit and listen and walk with Lande down the paths she’s taken, around into the dark corners in her life where lurk wild things, and get drawn up into the odd reasonings and self-made mirages of the author’s fancies. If you are on a similar journey yourself, I recommend this book to you. Love it or not, if you’re honest, it will speak to you and grab your attention. But I also highly recommend this work to pastors and Christians of every stripe. It will be enlightening, frightening, encouraging, and enfolding.
Thanks to Lexham Press for sending me the copy I requested and used in this evaluation. No demands were made. Thus, my review is freely made and freely given.
Lande takes readers on a trek through her kaleidoscopic existence where, as she admits, “I had ruined myself, almost on purpose, because I believed I could find something far better than God, whom I had never really known or bothered to seek” (22). The voyage includes sailing through many of her years on the chemical seas of mushrooms (psilocybin), acid, and LSD. It includes her youthful renunciation of God, diving into atheism, then moving over to an Americanized form of Buddhism and Hinduism all wrapped up in yoga, dietary rules and more. Along the way she introduces us to rocky relationships, marriage, motherhood, and death, to name a few. Inside every episode comes forth the author’s internal dialog and rationale, all of which seemed rock solid and sound at the moment, but later exposed itself as the self-delusion it was all along.
And there is a raw honesty that fuels her life story. Such as, when she turned to her “pugilistic atheism” it was to prove to herself and everyone that there was no God, and then she observes that this is “a far easier absolution to make in youth, when life has been fairly charmed and everyone you love is still alive and your hubris can fill in the nicks and concavities where you’ve been humbled” (35). Or later in her young life, confronted by grace, she came to realize “I’d lived by rules. Rules were my god, Dietary rules, in particular, had held me captive during my pregnancy…I had found grace unacceptable…I clung to the ideas that all my efforts still conferred upon me at least some degree of superiority to the pedestrian folks…who’d never gone spelunking in the deepest caverns of the cosmos, who’d never luxuriated in obliterative light, like a flotsam on a sea of oceanic bliss…My hubris knew no bounds…” (184-185). And then, before a new day dawned in her life, she saw clearly that “Psychedelics (mushrooms, acid, LSD) made me believe I could have it all. Glory without submission. Transcendence without descent. Knowledge without trauma. Freedom without discipline. New life without death. It was all a lie” (263). As I mentioned earlier, I found myself praying for the author with each chapter.
Lande’s life takes an unexpected turn; a slow, long-arched turn that finally brought her to find “The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever,” but I’ll leave it for the readers to find out what, when, how, and who. Here is a work where one gets to sit and listen and walk with Lande down the paths she’s taken, around into the dark corners in her life where lurk wild things, and get drawn up into the odd reasonings and self-made mirages of the author’s fancies. If you are on a similar journey yourself, I recommend this book to you. Love it or not, if you’re honest, it will speak to you and grab your attention. But I also highly recommend this work to pastors and Christians of every stripe. It will be enlightening, frightening, encouraging, and enfolding.
Thanks to Lexham Press for sending me the copy I requested and used in this evaluation. No demands were made. Thus, my review is freely made and freely given.
October 19, 2024
I gobbled this book up! Lande writes so well, pulling her reader through her story to the pinnacle of the person of Jesus Christ. As someone living in New Orleans surrounded by 'tormented' people, I feel like this book has equipped me a little better to understand what desires are pulled on by drugs and psychedelics that are actually met and fulfilled in Christ.
July 14, 2025
I liked reading this memoir for book club. Definitely not something I would normally read. And I liked the Kansas City connection. I liked how Lande’s language shifted from flowery and complex in a youthful overconfidence to a more honest but still powerful tone as she grew. However, I wanted more of the author’s insight about why she left behind psychedelics and speed and found faith in Jesus so compelling. I felt like she spent 200 pages with deep insight into her formerly tripping self so I expected similar depth of reflection on what compelled her to change her mind.
March 20, 2025
Disclaimer: This is my book. I wrote it.
A friend asked me recently how it felt to have so much of my life "out there" in print. I honestly did that know how to answer because I honestly haven't been thinking about it. After the initial publication high of "Hey, I really wrote this thing and it isn't half-bad! In fact, it's pretty darn good!" which then swung wildly within a matter of days to "This is terrible! I can't believe they published my self-indulgent, navel-gazing tripe! I'm finished before I've even began!" until I finally heard my dad's gravelly, menthol-kippered voice in my head saying what he always said in relation to my drawings: "Just walk away and stop looking at it, Ash. Just let it be finished."
And I must. There's simply too much else to attend to right now: the squealing toddler who draws on the walls and throws the marker down and runs upon discovery, his gleeful giggles of evasion trailing, like a seasoned little criminal. The two teenagers with thoughts and dreams and jokes and struggles: the girl with a face that flashes between hints of the beautiful young woman to come, the one who moves with grace except when she trips over limbs grown gangly, and the tender child who has been, who still is, and who needs me still despite regularly reminding me how much I need *her* to save the hell-on-wheels toddler from disaster (true). The man-child like a beanstalk, electric with energy, always crackling with so many thoughts, many of which require irreconcilable philopsophical conundrums, such as "Is the Kool-Aid Man the pitcher, or the Kool-Aid? And if he's the pitcher, is the kool-aid itself his... blood? And is it interchangeable, like you could put any kind of kool-aid in there and he'd still be himself?" Not to mention sweet baby girl still in the womb, 35 weeks on, kicking and tickling and rolling about and making walking 30 feet feel like a bow-legged hobble to the finish of an ultramarathon.
So the book is out here, just floating around, on Goodreads, freely available for purchase from your favorite retailer (I hear it's only $13.99 on Amazon 😉). I am letting it be finished, letting it be what it is, letting God do what He will. I wrote what I knew and I wrote what was true, and if the "at times overwritten" accusations are legitimate and I do not, with apologies to Kurt Vonnegut's thinking on the matter, always sound like a gal raised in suburban Missouri and currently abiding in rural Kansas, well, you have to understand I was not popular in high school and I read a LOT of books. So it goes, with more apologies to Vonnegut, whose entire oeuvre I read the summer I turned 15.
I wrote this book for others, of course, but I also wrote it for myself, for the working out of my own salvation. I needed to remember what happened, needed to limn out the dimensions of what God did for me. I needed to remember the darkness that appeared as light, the madness that appeared as ecstasy, the chaos that appeared - for a time - as purposed and directional. I had to dig into soil even I hadn't wanted to touch in years, and there were those were not happy about it, but I had to let that be finished, too.
Why do we crazy people do this? Why write a memoir? Is it a dysfunctional compulsion? A colorful variation on a Tourette's-esque tic, custom-designed by Satan himself with no purpose besides antagonizing my discreet mother? Why share to the point of at least moderate self-humiliation? I'm not sure except that I think it IS something resembling a compulsion, but maybe - I hope - a holy one.
Because the story is mine... but is it? Until I dig deep into the unseemly dregs of my past, grace is nothing but an abstract concept to me, a beautiful word evoking litheness and light, but little more. Until I can point and see and say "Oh yes, there it was," and "Oh yes, there again," and "Yes, there. Right there. I would've died had the Lord not been saturating me with GRACE right then." In the dark mire of my sin, of my confusion, of my wanton traipsing toward the abyss of oblivion, God's grace shockingly, staggeringly and sometimes downright inconveniently struck me down or lifted me up or simply held me and carried me, as a Father carries His son, as those musty old mass-produced cheaply framed images of footprints sunken into sand at thrift stores avow: *it was then that He carried me.*
And now the big kids are home from track practice and they're telling me things and asking me to do things and my brief moment of deep thoughts is past.
But just know this: no one ever cared for me like Jesus. I write, and spill my guts while doing so, *almost* involuntarily, as though carried along by the Holy Spirit. I write about all the things I did and failed to do and all the dumb graceless thoughts I had while doing so, so I can *remember*, and so God's grace and mercy stand in majestic contrast. Not that they need the contrast for their glory, but sometimes I do - I need it, just to see a little more clearly, though still in a mirror dimly.
I hope it helps you remember, too. (Like I said - Amazon, $13.99 That's significantly less than the Kool-Aid Ultimate Party Pack on Amazon, which does sound fun and does contain 36 packets of 18 different flavors but is also full of food dyes and sugar. My book has no such liabilities, but hopefully inspires as deep theological / ontological questions as does the Kool-Aid Man!)
A friend asked me recently how it felt to have so much of my life "out there" in print. I honestly did that know how to answer because I honestly haven't been thinking about it. After the initial publication high of "Hey, I really wrote this thing and it isn't half-bad! In fact, it's pretty darn good!" which then swung wildly within a matter of days to "This is terrible! I can't believe they published my self-indulgent, navel-gazing tripe! I'm finished before I've even began!" until I finally heard my dad's gravelly, menthol-kippered voice in my head saying what he always said in relation to my drawings: "Just walk away and stop looking at it, Ash. Just let it be finished."
And I must. There's simply too much else to attend to right now: the squealing toddler who draws on the walls and throws the marker down and runs upon discovery, his gleeful giggles of evasion trailing, like a seasoned little criminal. The two teenagers with thoughts and dreams and jokes and struggles: the girl with a face that flashes between hints of the beautiful young woman to come, the one who moves with grace except when she trips over limbs grown gangly, and the tender child who has been, who still is, and who needs me still despite regularly reminding me how much I need *her* to save the hell-on-wheels toddler from disaster (true). The man-child like a beanstalk, electric with energy, always crackling with so many thoughts, many of which require irreconcilable philopsophical conundrums, such as "Is the Kool-Aid Man the pitcher, or the Kool-Aid? And if he's the pitcher, is the kool-aid itself his... blood? And is it interchangeable, like you could put any kind of kool-aid in there and he'd still be himself?" Not to mention sweet baby girl still in the womb, 35 weeks on, kicking and tickling and rolling about and making walking 30 feet feel like a bow-legged hobble to the finish of an ultramarathon.
So the book is out here, just floating around, on Goodreads, freely available for purchase from your favorite retailer (I hear it's only $13.99 on Amazon 😉). I am letting it be finished, letting it be what it is, letting God do what He will. I wrote what I knew and I wrote what was true, and if the "at times overwritten" accusations are legitimate and I do not, with apologies to Kurt Vonnegut's thinking on the matter, always sound like a gal raised in suburban Missouri and currently abiding in rural Kansas, well, you have to understand I was not popular in high school and I read a LOT of books. So it goes, with more apologies to Vonnegut, whose entire oeuvre I read the summer I turned 15.
I wrote this book for others, of course, but I also wrote it for myself, for the working out of my own salvation. I needed to remember what happened, needed to limn out the dimensions of what God did for me. I needed to remember the darkness that appeared as light, the madness that appeared as ecstasy, the chaos that appeared - for a time - as purposed and directional. I had to dig into soil even I hadn't wanted to touch in years, and there were those were not happy about it, but I had to let that be finished, too.
Why do we crazy people do this? Why write a memoir? Is it a dysfunctional compulsion? A colorful variation on a Tourette's-esque tic, custom-designed by Satan himself with no purpose besides antagonizing my discreet mother? Why share to the point of at least moderate self-humiliation? I'm not sure except that I think it IS something resembling a compulsion, but maybe - I hope - a holy one.
Because the story is mine... but is it? Until I dig deep into the unseemly dregs of my past, grace is nothing but an abstract concept to me, a beautiful word evoking litheness and light, but little more. Until I can point and see and say "Oh yes, there it was," and "Oh yes, there again," and "Yes, there. Right there. I would've died had the Lord not been saturating me with GRACE right then." In the dark mire of my sin, of my confusion, of my wanton traipsing toward the abyss of oblivion, God's grace shockingly, staggeringly and sometimes downright inconveniently struck me down or lifted me up or simply held me and carried me, as a Father carries His son, as those musty old mass-produced cheaply framed images of footprints sunken into sand at thrift stores avow: *it was then that He carried me.*
And now the big kids are home from track practice and they're telling me things and asking me to do things and my brief moment of deep thoughts is past.
But just know this: no one ever cared for me like Jesus. I write, and spill my guts while doing so, *almost* involuntarily, as though carried along by the Holy Spirit. I write about all the things I did and failed to do and all the dumb graceless thoughts I had while doing so, so I can *remember*, and so God's grace and mercy stand in majestic contrast. Not that they need the contrast for their glory, but sometimes I do - I need it, just to see a little more clearly, though still in a mirror dimly.
I hope it helps you remember, too. (Like I said - Amazon, $13.99 That's significantly less than the Kool-Aid Ultimate Party Pack on Amazon, which does sound fun and does contain 36 packets of 18 different flavors but is also full of food dyes and sugar. My book has no such liabilities, but hopefully inspires as deep theological / ontological questions as does the Kool-Aid Man!)
December 26, 2024
In a way, this book was captivating, but perhaps that was because I was already excited to read it. Lande’s writing style was mesmerizing. Her language was descriptive, imaginative, and colorful (but not in the cursing sort of way). If you are looking for arguments to use against New Age philosophy, you probably won’t find any direct ones here, aside from Lande’s story. If you are looking for a book that is heavy in technical theology, you will not find it here. What you will find, however, is Lande’s personal story, vividly chronicling her life in spiritual darkness and pride until she finally succumbs to the saving grace and truth of Jesus Christ.
December 12, 2024
It's fun to read, more like a 250-page blog than a book. It qualifies as testimony. I'm not sure it qualifies as a memoir? I can't quite pin why.
December 5, 2024
This book is remarkable. I have never read anything like it. Lande’s voice is completely unique and gripping. In this memoir of a young life, she tells the story of her quest for meaning, understanding, and transcendence through psychedelic drugs. And in the chasing after this “enlightenment” Lande details how, time and again, her friend LSD betrays her. “A slave does not know what his master is doing.”
Lande’s use of language is stunning. I loved her employment of sacred images and words to convey the not-so-hidden idolatry of psychedelic culture. Drugs as sacraments, Bob Dylan leading you into “hymnic reverence”, incantations and yogic poses as paltry substitutes for liturgies and humble prayer. And the VOCABULARY in this book! My lexical palate expanded considerably!
Lande builds a slow, steady crescendo to the summit of her story: surrendering to the person of Jesus. In reading it, I felt like I had the wind knocked out of me, so shattering were her descriptions of finding the Meaning and Truth she’d always been looking for.
*chapter 3 includes an extensive recounting of a very strange book by RA Lafferty that was impactful to Lande at the time. I mostly skimmed this part as I was rapidly losing interest in hearing about someone else’s book. Once I got through that section, I was again engrossed in the story.
Lande’s use of language is stunning. I loved her employment of sacred images and words to convey the not-so-hidden idolatry of psychedelic culture. Drugs as sacraments, Bob Dylan leading you into “hymnic reverence”, incantations and yogic poses as paltry substitutes for liturgies and humble prayer. And the VOCABULARY in this book! My lexical palate expanded considerably!
Lande builds a slow, steady crescendo to the summit of her story: surrendering to the person of Jesus. In reading it, I felt like I had the wind knocked out of me, so shattering were her descriptions of finding the Meaning and Truth she’d always been looking for.
*chapter 3 includes an extensive recounting of a very strange book by RA Lafferty that was impactful to Lande at the time. I mostly skimmed this part as I was rapidly losing interest in hearing about someone else’s book. Once I got through that section, I was again engrossed in the story.
October 14, 2024
Ashley Lande’s search for The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever took her everywhere— New Atheism, Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age Mysticism, though her longest stop along the way was in the land of psychedelics. Her search and her journey are gripping. She relays her story with a mastery of language that feels like a true anointing (not ashamed to say I googled more than a few words in this one).
I love this one. I think you should read it. Maybe you’re on your own journey of finding The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, most of us are, and you should listen to this one who is going before us.
I love this one. I think you should read it. Maybe you’re on your own journey of finding The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, most of us are, and you should listen to this one who is going before us.
August 15, 2025
I love reading about how God draws people to saving faith in Jesus. Some of my favorites include Carolyn Weber's "Surprised by Oxford", Sheldon Van Auken's "A Severe Mercy", and Jonathan Aitken's "John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace". Ashley Lande's book joins a list of favorites in this genre. Lande's descriptive writing provides a fitting color and pace to this story about how Jesus drew her out of a lifestyle of LSD, Magic Mushrooms, and the vacuity of New Age Spirituality.
"The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever" reminds us of the amazing character of God's grace and that the Hound of Heaven will retrieve his own, no matter how far they've run or how seemingly well-fortified their hearts are against him.
"And I saw it clearly, at last: it wasn't about my search for him, wasn't about my clutching and grasping scrabble up my tower of Babel, piling on litter to create another foothold by which I might finally lurch my body onto the peak and into the heavens. It wasn't about how I could get to him, how I could storm heaven and lay claim to holy ground. It didn't work that way at all. It was about what he--broken, bleeding, bereft--had done for me. I'd found the secret, the Promise That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, that did make everything okay forever, in the end. And it turned out that the only God who could truly offer me anything at all offered me everything."
"The Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever" reminds us of the amazing character of God's grace and that the Hound of Heaven will retrieve his own, no matter how far they've run or how seemingly well-fortified their hearts are against him.
"And I saw it clearly, at last: it wasn't about my search for him, wasn't about my clutching and grasping scrabble up my tower of Babel, piling on litter to create another foothold by which I might finally lurch my body onto the peak and into the heavens. It wasn't about how I could get to him, how I could storm heaven and lay claim to holy ground. It didn't work that way at all. It was about what he--broken, bleeding, bereft--had done for me. I'd found the secret, the Promise That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, that did make everything okay forever, in the end. And it turned out that the only God who could truly offer me anything at all offered me everything."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 2, 2025
This was fantastic.
September 19, 2024
As I read this book, I was concerned that it not glorify the druggie life by making it so interesting. She did, however, show her journey as she tried and tried to find that “thing” that makes a person whole. I thought her description of salvation as definitely coming from outside of her was very instructive and, I hope, a cautionary tale to those who try the same things she did. The arrogance of her unbelief and the absolute emptiness of Eastern religion are especially strong points of her story. It was so encouraging to read how God rescued her and her family from a life of vanity.
November 5, 2025
Ashley has such a beautiful testimony of the relentless and unending love of God. She writes beautifully of her journey in coming to know Christ. Highly recommend.
December 5, 2025
**SPOILERS**
This is why words are so important. This author, using words, took what I knew about Jesus Christ and elevated it—wait, that's not the right word. Because of her unique path to Christ and her mastery of the English language, she made Jesus shine for me. She couldn't have done it without the words. I'm so grateful that she studied her English and read good books and chose to tell us about how Christ found her and rescued her.
Here are some of the radiant bits about Jesus that I want to read again and again, so worshipful are they for me.
This is why words are so important. This author, using words, took what I knew about Jesus Christ and elevated it—wait, that's not the right word. Because of her unique path to Christ and her mastery of the English language, she made Jesus shine for me. She couldn't have done it without the words. I'm so grateful that she studied her English and read good books and chose to tell us about how Christ found her and rescued her.
Here are some of the radiant bits about Jesus that I want to read again and again, so worshipful are they for me.
... spoke this secret language of blood and death and new life, of Jesus as God, a deeply personal reality rather than an amorphous life force. God became flesh and bones. It was unfathomable, and maybe even unconscionable—It narrowed God to a terrifyingly specific point. And with terrible specificity came accountability, came inescapability, came a piercing intimacy.
Nothing in the Bible acquiesced to my attempts at syncretism. Jesus descended to ascend, Philippians read, yes, but there was nothing about him embracing the darkness or his "shadow" or having complicity with the dark in any way. In him there is light, and there is no darkness at all. How could that be? It sounded too good to be true. I'd been told and told myself for years that I had to embrace the darkness as part and parcel of the cosmic dance... The idea of someone, dear God, anyone in the universe being composed only of light "with no shadow of turning with thee," as the hymn went, filled my heart with a hope that the rest of my being looked at askance. It was a naive hope, an unsophisticated hope, I thought. It was the hope of a child, and that kind of hope was what I needed more than anything else.
Because of Jesus Christ, the man silent before Pilate and sniveling Herod, the man whose bones were riven by nails on the cross, the man who hung there with his skin graffitied with blood and glistening with the sweat of unimaginable pain and exertion and flecked with the sour contemptuous spit of his accusers. His body trashed. His blood spilled. The Holy One. The only Holy One in the whole pantheon of would-be gods. He was my Redeemer. He was my Savior, there could be no other, I now saw, no other solution, no other salve, no other story big enough to cool the flaming hell of this roiling world and my own rotten heart and seed both with new life.
Only Jesus—baffling, confounding, radical, indefinable Jesus.
June 3, 2025
I'm so grateful for this book. The author's story is worth the telling simply as a fascinating narrative, but the real gift of the book is how beautifully she contrasts New Age spirituality and the truth of the Christian gospel.
"For so long, I'd lived by rules...I found the idea of grace unacceptable."
On the surface, New Age culture seems to be about freedom from convention, self expression, and pleasure seeking. But at its core, New Age spirituality is just another kind of legalism - do these practices, take these drugs, achieve maximum health, read these books, believe these things, and maybe if you try hard enough, you can save yourself. An ever-increasing list of demands, promising everything, but never delivering.
In the end, we have two choices: Law or gospel. Legalism or grace. Desperately trying to save ourselves, or accepting the salvation Jesus has offered to us. Ashley Lande was on the hamster wheel of self-salvation. And this book is a heart-wrenching memoir of how the Lord reached her heart -and her husband's! - with the Good News.
"It wasn't about my search for him...It was about what he had done for me."
"For so long, I'd lived by rules...I found the idea of grace unacceptable."
On the surface, New Age culture seems to be about freedom from convention, self expression, and pleasure seeking. But at its core, New Age spirituality is just another kind of legalism - do these practices, take these drugs, achieve maximum health, read these books, believe these things, and maybe if you try hard enough, you can save yourself. An ever-increasing list of demands, promising everything, but never delivering.
In the end, we have two choices: Law or gospel. Legalism or grace. Desperately trying to save ourselves, or accepting the salvation Jesus has offered to us. Ashley Lande was on the hamster wheel of self-salvation. And this book is a heart-wrenching memoir of how the Lord reached her heart -and her husband's! - with the Good News.
"It wasn't about my search for him...It was about what he had done for me."
August 20, 2025
A beautiful memoir of God’s relentless pursuit of those He calls. Lande’s search for meaning in psychedelics, speed, yoga and other transcendental means never “made everything ok forever,” and she recounts those pursuits in detail. I was particularly taken by how child birth and raising her children led her to ask different questions and be willing to open her life to God.
I’d think of this as an edgier or R rated Surprised By Oxford. There are so many ways that the “Hound of Heaven” saves His own.
I’d think of this as an edgier or R rated Surprised By Oxford. There are so many ways that the “Hound of Heaven” saves His own.
March 14, 2025
What a beautiful story of God’s patient goodness. Grateful.
January 5, 2026
I kept thinking as I read this book: "how wonderful that Ashley's drug use didn't wreck her brain, or fry her vocabulary." Ashley's testimony intrigued me, but it was her writing that made this book enjoyable.
How interesting that her epiphanies worked through her slowly and painfully, unfolding concurrently with the slow pain of giving birth. And how beautiful that she worked so hard to ascend to God, only to finally give herself over to the God who descended to her.
I found many of her insights astute. The one that moved me most was her awareness of the "narrowed God" of incarnation, who came with "piercing intimacy," down to a "terrifyingly specific point." What a surprising God we find in Jesus Christ.
Overall, a well written book full of heart and wisdom.
How interesting that her epiphanies worked through her slowly and painfully, unfolding concurrently with the slow pain of giving birth. And how beautiful that she worked so hard to ascend to God, only to finally give herself over to the God who descended to her.
I found many of her insights astute. The one that moved me most was her awareness of the "narrowed God" of incarnation, who came with "piercing intimacy," down to a "terrifyingly specific point." What a surprising God we find in Jesus Christ.
Overall, a well written book full of heart and wisdom.
December 7, 2024
A great debut by Ashley! A crazy journey that seems so impossible for so nice a person.
December 26, 2025
Having read several underwhelming books about psychedelics X Christianity, I highly recommend this wonderful book for several reasons; Right out of the gate, the author's unique voice is strong and clear as she brings the reader into her life and psychedelic experiences, holding nothing back. The authenticity was inspiring and kept me turning the pages. The story progresses in an interesting way building up to some beautifully written scenes that are very powerful. By the end of this book, you will feel like you've made a new friend.
November 17, 2024
This book is a testimony of one woman's journey from dependence on psychedelics to salvation in Jesus Christ. It is a dramatic story, but one of the things that stood out to me so much about it are the seemingly small details in her life that added up to providentially guide her down this path. I suppose that is the most encouraging part of this book for me, beyond the obvious that God can reach anyone, anytime, anywhere. Even the destructive desire that led her in the wrong direction was the first step that God used to cause the author to want something better. R. A. Lafferty was a science fiction writer, not an evangelist, but his short stories provided another step. This is a very good book that helped me learn more about some things that simply I don't have very much experience with.
March 13, 2025
brilliant
So well written - had to finish. A vivid story of seeking meaning in LSD and unexpectedly finding it in Jesus. Thank you for telling your story.
So well written - had to finish. A vivid story of seeking meaning in LSD and unexpectedly finding it in Jesus. Thank you for telling your story.
September 5, 2024
I just finished reading ‘The Thing That Would Make Everything OK Forever’ by Ashley Lande, published by Lexham Press in 2024. It’s an autobiographical journey through Ashley’s psychedelic search for transcendence.
The author takes you through a labyrinthian maze of her magic mushroom memories. The book consists of a prologue and 11 chapters, weighing in at 273 pages (including the end-notes). The prologue begins: “The last time I ever tripped, I ate mushrooms I’d grown myself.”
She describes stumbling down the rabbit hole of psychedelic drugs as a teenager, looking at the “glittering doorway of decadent effulgence… I was a feckless moth, drawn toward the flame of anything even remotely countercultural.” (p.15) “I was in that sweet spot, poised on that glimmering threshold where the Turkish Delights proffered by the White Witch still tasted good. Rumors of darkness from beyond — bad trips, psychosis — glanced off me.” (p.29)
Although it’s her first book, her obvious love of art, music, and literature reveal a mature vocabulary. She had me looking up a few words in the dictionary, like someone studying the menu at a nice restaurant — to savor the flavors.
This author was a contributor to another volume published in 2023, “Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity“
In this memoir, she interacts with a variety of authors, like atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great). Along the journey she mentions William J. Craddock (Be Not Content); R. A. Lafferty, Ram Dass, and Alan Watts (On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are).
My review continues here -- https://dougvos.com/thing-that-would-...
The author takes you through a labyrinthian maze of her magic mushroom memories. The book consists of a prologue and 11 chapters, weighing in at 273 pages (including the end-notes). The prologue begins: “The last time I ever tripped, I ate mushrooms I’d grown myself.”
She describes stumbling down the rabbit hole of psychedelic drugs as a teenager, looking at the “glittering doorway of decadent effulgence… I was a feckless moth, drawn toward the flame of anything even remotely countercultural.” (p.15) “I was in that sweet spot, poised on that glimmering threshold where the Turkish Delights proffered by the White Witch still tasted good. Rumors of darkness from beyond — bad trips, psychosis — glanced off me.” (p.29)
Although it’s her first book, her obvious love of art, music, and literature reveal a mature vocabulary. She had me looking up a few words in the dictionary, like someone studying the menu at a nice restaurant — to savor the flavors.
This author was a contributor to another volume published in 2023, “Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 12 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity“
In this memoir, she interacts with a variety of authors, like atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great). Along the journey she mentions William J. Craddock (Be Not Content); R. A. Lafferty, Ram Dass, and Alan Watts (On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are).
My review continues here -- https://dougvos.com/thing-that-would-...
March 19, 2025
A beautiful testimony of God’s grace and patience in calling the lost to himself. The goodness of Jesus is evidenced.
As to the writing, Lande has as expansive a vocabulary as I’ve encountered this side of Webster’s. There are more words I’ve never read before in this volume than the last 50 books I’ve read combined. Keep your dictionary close.
As to the writing, Lande has as expansive a vocabulary as I’ve encountered this side of Webster’s. There are more words I’ve never read before in this volume than the last 50 books I’ve read combined. Keep your dictionary close.
September 9, 2024
Ashley shares her life with us — her hunger for meaning, for something bigger, for enlightenment, for something more. Her beginning steps into psychedelics, and the illusion that she was benefitting from it. Her desperation as the trips get worse and the mantras about erasing yourself and being just part of the One start to seem meaningless — but if this isn’t the answer, what is? What really is the thing that would make everything okay forever?
Finally, she finds it — finds Him. Reading the moment that Ashley suddenly sees the love and grace of God surrounding her — tears and goosebumps. I stayed up late to finish this excellent book.
I was happy to receive this for free as an advance reader so I could get my hands on it sooner!
Finally, she finds it — finds Him. Reading the moment that Ashley suddenly sees the love and grace of God surrounding her — tears and goosebumps. I stayed up late to finish this excellent book.
I was happy to receive this for free as an advance reader so I could get my hands on it sooner!
December 14, 2024
Captivating and encouraging. Very thankful for this author’s vulnerability in sharing her testimony. I also love the speculative fiction she cites since I, too, find that genre fascinating and surprisingly edifying.
My one critique would be the excessive adjectives and complex words which sometimes obscured the point of her sentences and felt a bit like Joey finding a thesaurus. But at the same time, I love a good vocabulary lesson and appreciate that this is her particular style. It conveyed her swirling, poetic, evolving perspective, so overall it proved okay even if I would have cut some descriptors here and there.
Definitely recommend and can see why TGC honored it among its books of the year!
My one critique would be the excessive adjectives and complex words which sometimes obscured the point of her sentences and felt a bit like Joey finding a thesaurus. But at the same time, I love a good vocabulary lesson and appreciate that this is her particular style. It conveyed her swirling, poetic, evolving perspective, so overall it proved okay even if I would have cut some descriptors here and there.
Definitely recommend and can see why TGC honored it among its books of the year!
January 22, 2025
I loved this book! Ashley, thanks for sharing your experience with us and showing once again the power of Christ.
March 24, 2025
Wow! That ending...
Ashley searched for her salvation through drugs, yoga, home birth, and diet, but nothing satisfied. I loved seeing how God gently wooed her to Himself.
Some quotes:
"I knew I had no recourse, no refuge, no shelter from the storm if my own child should develop a cancerous disease. No recourse if he died suddenly, if everything I held dear was snatched away by the capricious Universe. And I was terrified."
"I thought my ego and all its trappings-all the things I was loath to label 'sin'...-should have surely been adequately destroyed by the power of psychedelics. But it wasn't. It was still there, ever resurgent, ever taunting. And now here was a Christian pastor claiming all my deep plunges into oblivion, all my practice, all my meditation, all my rules hadn't made so much as a dent in it. It was unfathomable."
"I'd pinned my hopes on having a home birth as the singular event that could redeem me...it would make me worthy at last."
"With gods like this, I thought - scrutinizing her crazed, blood-drunk eyes, her decapitated foes, her arachnid libs - who needs demons?"
"Something yearned to cry out, to confess, to see at last if this cleansing the Christians spoke of could be for me, too, however impossible it seemed. But the forces of darkness pressed fear of exposure a tremulous hairsbreadth beyond the promise of relief."
"Jesus was working in the heart of enemy territory within me, too, sifting, pruning, lovingly breaking me. I was almost ready, almost ready to come, though still skeptical, doubting, hesitant. But almost ready."
"Jesus Christ was an enigma clothed in impenetrable poetry about blood and suffering. But he was naked on the cross, and that was the point at which I couldn't look away, couldn't relativize him and consign him to the pantheon of great teachers or enlightened beings. He was something and Someone else entirely."
"I wasn't getting any closer (to God). And with this dark revelation came utter sinking despair. It was the most profound sorrow I'd ever felt: between God and me a great chasm was fixed. I would never catch him. I would never know him. I was stuck for all eternity in this clanging, dizzying, stroboscopic arcade world, without rest, without refuge. Without even the blessed oblivion of silent death."
"More than anything, though, I didn't want to be god anymore. I wanted God to be God, wherever he might be found."
"It was mad. It couldn't be real. But sitting on my porch on an ordinary spring day...with tears streaming down my face, I believed it all at last-not by intellect, not by certainty, but by some fantastic and mysterious movement of the Holy Spirit. I also knew at last and for good that nothing and no one else would do. Only Jesus-baffling, confounding, radical, indefinable Jesus."
"It wasn't about my search for him, wasn't about my clutching and grasping scrabble up my tower of Babel, piling on litter to create another foothold by which I might finally lurch my body onto the peak and into the heavens. It wasn't about how I could get to him, how I could storm heaven and lay claim to holy ground. It didn't work that way at all. It was about what he-broken, bleeding, bereft- had done for me. I'd found the secret, the Promise That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, that did make everything okay forever, in the end. And it turned out that the only God who could truly offer me anything at all offered me everything."
"No, the mountain of Jesus is joy, and peace, and light, and love-ironically the same words I would have thrown about so glibly back then. But they mean nothing outside of Christ. And at the peak of this mountain and in its very essence and at the core of the words of Jesus and in his very person is The Thing That Will Make Everything Okay Forever.
And in him there is light, and there is no darkness at all."
2025 A memoir or autobiography
Ashley searched for her salvation through drugs, yoga, home birth, and diet, but nothing satisfied. I loved seeing how God gently wooed her to Himself.
Some quotes:
"I knew I had no recourse, no refuge, no shelter from the storm if my own child should develop a cancerous disease. No recourse if he died suddenly, if everything I held dear was snatched away by the capricious Universe. And I was terrified."
"I thought my ego and all its trappings-all the things I was loath to label 'sin'...-should have surely been adequately destroyed by the power of psychedelics. But it wasn't. It was still there, ever resurgent, ever taunting. And now here was a Christian pastor claiming all my deep plunges into oblivion, all my practice, all my meditation, all my rules hadn't made so much as a dent in it. It was unfathomable."
"I'd pinned my hopes on having a home birth as the singular event that could redeem me...it would make me worthy at last."
"With gods like this, I thought - scrutinizing her crazed, blood-drunk eyes, her decapitated foes, her arachnid libs - who needs demons?"
"Something yearned to cry out, to confess, to see at last if this cleansing the Christians spoke of could be for me, too, however impossible it seemed. But the forces of darkness pressed fear of exposure a tremulous hairsbreadth beyond the promise of relief."
"Jesus was working in the heart of enemy territory within me, too, sifting, pruning, lovingly breaking me. I was almost ready, almost ready to come, though still skeptical, doubting, hesitant. But almost ready."
"Jesus Christ was an enigma clothed in impenetrable poetry about blood and suffering. But he was naked on the cross, and that was the point at which I couldn't look away, couldn't relativize him and consign him to the pantheon of great teachers or enlightened beings. He was something and Someone else entirely."
"I wasn't getting any closer (to God). And with this dark revelation came utter sinking despair. It was the most profound sorrow I'd ever felt: between God and me a great chasm was fixed. I would never catch him. I would never know him. I was stuck for all eternity in this clanging, dizzying, stroboscopic arcade world, without rest, without refuge. Without even the blessed oblivion of silent death."
"More than anything, though, I didn't want to be god anymore. I wanted God to be God, wherever he might be found."
"It was mad. It couldn't be real. But sitting on my porch on an ordinary spring day...with tears streaming down my face, I believed it all at last-not by intellect, not by certainty, but by some fantastic and mysterious movement of the Holy Spirit. I also knew at last and for good that nothing and no one else would do. Only Jesus-baffling, confounding, radical, indefinable Jesus."
"It wasn't about my search for him, wasn't about my clutching and grasping scrabble up my tower of Babel, piling on litter to create another foothold by which I might finally lurch my body onto the peak and into the heavens. It wasn't about how I could get to him, how I could storm heaven and lay claim to holy ground. It didn't work that way at all. It was about what he-broken, bleeding, bereft- had done for me. I'd found the secret, the Promise That Would Make Everything Okay Forever, that did make everything okay forever, in the end. And it turned out that the only God who could truly offer me anything at all offered me everything."
"No, the mountain of Jesus is joy, and peace, and light, and love-ironically the same words I would have thrown about so glibly back then. But they mean nothing outside of Christ. And at the peak of this mountain and in its very essence and at the core of the words of Jesus and in his very person is The Thing That Will Make Everything Okay Forever.
And in him there is light, and there is no darkness at all."
2025 A memoir or autobiography
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 19, 2024
Here is a book that tells a beautiful story in a beautiful way. And yet, there is a lot of darkness to get through before the dawn breaks. The raw honesty of Lande's story, the power of her effervescent prose, and the drastic nature of her conversion are just some of the elements that make this book difficult to put down and impossible to forget.
For anyone interested in psychedelics, especially those drawn to spiritual illumination via that route, this book is for you. Lande speaks the language, has been down that road, done that, got the t-shirt. And she found something far, far better, in the very last place she thought to look. If I have any complaints about the book, it's that the conversion comes late in the narrative and then the book ends a bit too abruptly, even if those last two chapters among the most moving things I've ever read. Before reaching the back cover, I wanted to learn a bit more about how Christ had transformed different aspects of her life and relationships that had been explored in previous chapters.
There is some debate both inside and outside the church regarding the use of psychedelics. One of the common complaints from psychedelic enthusiasts is that Christians forbid psychedelics out of some blind dogma. But rather than seeing it as a silly religious bias to avoid psychedelics, perhaps it would be better to see two different sources of very ancient spiritual wisdom. One, the Judeo-Christian heritage, teaches us that there is danger in such things, and that practices such as the ingesting of psychoactive substances put us in contact with a world of spirits that is not our assigned place. And yet Christianity fully validates that longing for a connection to the spiritual. The Scriptures make clear that this God-given hunger for the transcendent is meant to be satisfied by God himself, through Christ his Son, as mediated by the Holy Spirit.
The other ancient source of spiritual wisdom comes from those traditions who have for millennia partaken of psychoactive substances to connect with the spirit world and transcend one's embodied consciousness. To some degree they can deliver on that promise. People can and do make contact with personal spiritual forces, and aside from the thrill of that experience, there is the added buzz that comes from knowing something that so much of society seems oblivious to. These practices make no personal moral demands. There are no ten commandments, no golden rule, no ultimate moral Judge. This makes it particularly compatible with the moral relativism of our age. Lastly, there is no creed or structure of authority like in a church, which resonates with our current cultural suspicion of authority and institutions.
We in the West are now firmly post-Christian. As we cast about for a solution to the spiritual malaise afflicting us, the last place we will tend to look is the place we think we have just been: Christianity. Haven’t we just decided we’re done with those old superstitions? So a journey to the island paradise of paganism, earth religion, eastern philosophy, or psychedelics seems to be just the thing we need for our starved souls in our disenchanted world. But we perhaps forget (or have never learned) that the best of paganism was fulfilled and transcended by Christianity, as G.K. Chesterton chronicled in his book 'The Everlasting Man'.
For Ashley Lande, and perhaps for many others now journeying through the twists and turns of psychedelia and new age spirituality, the way home spiritually seems to include going round the whole world before arriving back and finding in Christ the Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever.
For anyone interested in psychedelics, especially those drawn to spiritual illumination via that route, this book is for you. Lande speaks the language, has been down that road, done that, got the t-shirt. And she found something far, far better, in the very last place she thought to look. If I have any complaints about the book, it's that the conversion comes late in the narrative and then the book ends a bit too abruptly, even if those last two chapters among the most moving things I've ever read. Before reaching the back cover, I wanted to learn a bit more about how Christ had transformed different aspects of her life and relationships that had been explored in previous chapters.
There is some debate both inside and outside the church regarding the use of psychedelics. One of the common complaints from psychedelic enthusiasts is that Christians forbid psychedelics out of some blind dogma. But rather than seeing it as a silly religious bias to avoid psychedelics, perhaps it would be better to see two different sources of very ancient spiritual wisdom. One, the Judeo-Christian heritage, teaches us that there is danger in such things, and that practices such as the ingesting of psychoactive substances put us in contact with a world of spirits that is not our assigned place. And yet Christianity fully validates that longing for a connection to the spiritual. The Scriptures make clear that this God-given hunger for the transcendent is meant to be satisfied by God himself, through Christ his Son, as mediated by the Holy Spirit.
The other ancient source of spiritual wisdom comes from those traditions who have for millennia partaken of psychoactive substances to connect with the spirit world and transcend one's embodied consciousness. To some degree they can deliver on that promise. People can and do make contact with personal spiritual forces, and aside from the thrill of that experience, there is the added buzz that comes from knowing something that so much of society seems oblivious to. These practices make no personal moral demands. There are no ten commandments, no golden rule, no ultimate moral Judge. This makes it particularly compatible with the moral relativism of our age. Lastly, there is no creed or structure of authority like in a church, which resonates with our current cultural suspicion of authority and institutions.
We in the West are now firmly post-Christian. As we cast about for a solution to the spiritual malaise afflicting us, the last place we will tend to look is the place we think we have just been: Christianity. Haven’t we just decided we’re done with those old superstitions? So a journey to the island paradise of paganism, earth religion, eastern philosophy, or psychedelics seems to be just the thing we need for our starved souls in our disenchanted world. But we perhaps forget (or have never learned) that the best of paganism was fulfilled and transcended by Christianity, as G.K. Chesterton chronicled in his book 'The Everlasting Man'.
For Ashley Lande, and perhaps for many others now journeying through the twists and turns of psychedelia and new age spirituality, the way home spiritually seems to include going round the whole world before arriving back and finding in Christ the Thing That Would Make Everything Okay Forever.
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