FORMER BIKER GOES FULL THROTTLE FOR JESUS

OCEANSIDE, CALIFORNIA (ANS) -- Drugs and excessive speed nearly cost him his life, but now he uses his motorcycle to reach outlaw bikers like the Hell's Angels, Pagans, and Sons of Silence with a message of new life in Christ. (Pictured: Bikers for Christ patch on jacket). 

"I rebelled against everything," says Fred "Z" Zariczny, founder of Bikers for Christ, an international motorcycle ministry with members in over 40 states in the U.S. and several other countries.

Although raised in a Roman Catholic family in Massachusetts, by age 12 he turned his back on God and entered the drug culture of the Sixties. "Tune in, turn on, and drop out was pretty much me," he says, recalling his excessive use of marijuana and alcohol, as well as sniffing glue and gasoline. "I lost count of the LSD trips after 50 or 100."

At 16 he developed a fascination with motorcycles after witnessing a bikers parade in his hometown. Two motorcycle gangs were drinking heavily and smoking marijuana in open defiance of the police. Their open rebellion was like a magnet to Zariczny. He watched as a brawl break out between the rival gangs. "One guy took a beer pull tab and started cutting this guy's ear off," he recalls. "I felt like a Roman watching the gladiators-it was pretty intense."

" He literally "bombed out" of high school after planting three explosive M-80s in the school restroom. Later, he hitchhiked to several anti-war demonstrations protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam. "The radicals wanted to take over Washington D.C. for one day, and we nearly succeeded," Zariczny says. "I took way too much LSD and I thought I saw the Washington monument melting," he says. They carried Zariczny to a medical tent screaming, as the rock group Jefferson Starship played onstage. (Pictured: Fred Zariczny and his wife, Esther).

Throughout this period, Zariczny supported his lifestyle by selling drugs. One day he made a serious error by selling to an undercover police informant. "He got enough evidence on me to put me away for quite a while," he says. But because of his father's friendship with the police chief a deal was struck: Enter the military and the police would forget his transgression. It was a difficult to choose between Vietnam and jail, but Zariczny chose military service.

"I had orders to go to Vietnam aboard the John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier, but somebody in personnel lost my orders," he says. "Instead, I got shore duty in Florida." After inexplicably dodging service in Vietnam, Zariczny started to feel invincible because he always seemed to get away with his misdeeds. "It drove me deeper into sin," he admits.

While his parents and the authorities hoped military life would bring some discipline to a troubled 18-year-old-in his case-it didn't seem to work. "They probably thought it would straighten my life out, but I got worse in the military," he recalls. "I had a new group of customers and started dealing drugs in the military."

Zariczny earned enough in the military to buy his first serious motorcycle: an 850 Norton Commander, considered one of the fastest street bikes available. "I ended up racing people on the weekends in Jacksonville, Florida, where I was stationed, for bags of dope and cases of beer."

"I used to win all the races," Zariczny says. "There's a saying in the biker community: 'Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,'" he says. "That's the way I lived my life."

His thirst for speed landed him in trouble again, however. Clocked by the police racing at 115 miles per hour in downtown Jacksonville, Zariczny lost his driver's license in Florida and was thrown in jail for one night. Right after this incident, the military transferred him from Florida to Arizona. Amazingly, he was able to quickly obtain an Arizona license, and went back to his fast-living ways.

The military trained Zariczny to work in ground support, towing multimillion-dollar fighter jets in and out of aircraft hangars. One night Zariczny and a friend were towing an A-7 Corsair toward the fuel pits after they both smoked a large quantity of marijuana. "We were both really stoned and it was real dark," Zariczny recalls. "We got too close to the guard rail at the fuel pits and tore the tail section off the jet."

"It was a major accident and they wanted answers," he says. He and his friend were brought before a 'captain's mast,' one step below a court martial. "I said it was really dark at the fuel pits and there was poor lighting," he recalls. "They believed it and we got off again."

But Zariczny's unusual ability to evade the consequences of his behavior was running out. While on leave back in Massachusetts, he and a friend went for a ride about 10 miles from his home. "We were blasting down an old country road doing 80 miles per hour." Zariczny was leaning back, gripping the high handlebars as he drove the chopper, and his friend was on the back.

He suddenly spotted a sharp, hairpin turn on the dirt lane. "I came up so fast on the corner I knew there was no way to make it," he says. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted a driveway partly obscured by foliage and decided to take a chance.

Zariczny and his friend barreled down the driveway. "I looked in front of me and there was a stone wall that went all around someone's property," he recalls. "There was no way out of this situation." The stone wall was three to four feet high.

Scared to death, Zariczny hit the aluminum brake lever with so much adrenalin it broke, instantly removing 70 percent of his stopping power. He downshifted frantically, but to no avail as the chopper hit the wall at 50 miles per hour.

"My friend's body weight broke my back," Zariczny says. "I slammed into the gas tank face first." The motorcycle folded up like an accordion as Zariczny's friend sailed over him. Miraculously, the friend was relatively unscathed.

But Zariczny was like "an animal in shock," bleeding from the spine, with three broken vertebrae and a huge hole ripped in his left leg by the gas tank.

"I woke up in the hospital a couple of days later and didn't get out until the next year," Zariczny says. "They told my parents I had a 75 percent chance of paralysis," he says. "I laid flat on my back for almost a year."

In retrospect, Zariczny can see God allowed the accident for a reason. "God was trying to get my attention," he says. "I began thinking about God and what life was all about. I wondered why I was still here and why I didn't die."

"There's a story in the Jewish tradition about the shepherd and the sheep," Zariczny notes. "If a sheep keeps wandering from the flock, the shepherd, out of love, will take the sheep and break its leg so it will stay close to him," he says. "That's what I felt like."

"If he didn't do it I would have been eaten by the wolves," he adds.

In 1975 Zariczny was released from the hospital, after relearning how to walk. He was discharged from the military "under honorable conditions." While God seemed to be knocking at his door, he turned his back again and went back to his party lifestyle.

"D.L. Moody says 'a man can stumble across the truth, pick himself up and brush himself off and go on his way as if nothing happened.'" Zariczny moved up to Alaska, where he joined "a hardcore outlaw motorcycle gang." Most of his friends in the gang later became Hell's Angels.

But Zariczny happened to meet a young woman who invited him to church. "The only reason I went to church was because she was cute," Zariczny says. "I had no intention of getting my life right. I didn't like Christians," he says. "I thought most Christians were hypocrites and geeks who had short hair and wore polyester suits."

He smoked marijuana before he entered the Christian center filled with about 1,000 people. "As I listened to this guy share about Christ, everything he said seemed to be for me." Zariczny recalls feeling angered at first, thinking his friend tipped off the preacher about his lifestyle. "The more he preached, God kept tugging my heart."

"When he gave the altar call I went forward to give my life to Christ," he says. "Jesus put a 50,000 watt light bulb in my heart. I went home and threw away thousands of dollars worth of dope."

Zariczny gave up his drug dealing, but still had people calling him at all hours of the night asking if he had anything to sell. He would invite them to come over and began sharing Christ with them. Most were repulsed by his change and left angrily, but a few friends were saved after witnessing his transformation.

"God gave me a gift of evangelism right out of the gate," Zariczny says. "I had an old hippie van and I'd drive downtown and start sharing Christ with prostitutes and drug dealers and heavy metal guys," he recalls. "People were getting saved right and left and then I'd take them in my van and bring them to church."

After several years he interned with another pastor, then eventually planted his own church in northern California. In 1990, he started Bikers for Christ with 20 other friends who shared his passion for motorcycles and the Lord.

"It totally took off," Zariczny says. "We've seen hundreds come to Christ, including some real hardcore people," he says. Bikers for Christ members reach out to outlaw and independent bikers, drug addicts, alcoholics, rebellious teens, punkers, cultists and satanists. "We use our motorcycles as tools for evangelism."

"Jesus has freed me from the bondage of drug addiction, and other types of sin," he says. "It is a daily battle, but I've found that living for Jesus and serving Him is the only way to have real peace and purpose in life."