Virgil and I dated for several months before we decided to get married. The proposal? Well, Virgil didn’t exactly propose to me, mainly because I didn’t give him the chance. Once we knew we were going to be together, I vowed to do it right this time – no more living with someone and hoping it might work out. So when Virgil’s stint in the Army was up and he got ready to become a civilian, I laid down the law.
‘Either you need to get your own apartment, or we need to get married,’ I said.
‘Well,’ Virgil said with a wink, ‘I guess it’s cheaper to marry you.’
As much as I loved him, the idea of marrying Virgil scared the heck out of me. My history with men was something I couldn’t put behind me, and it was like I was always waiting for something to go wrong – only now it wouldn’t just affect me. It would mess up my kids. When Virgil and I went to get our marriage license, I had a fullblown panic attack. I couldn’t even sign the license; my hand was shaking so badly. Then I found I couldn’t say the word ‘husband’. The first time I heard someone refer to Virgil as my husband, I had another panic attack. Nine years later, we still laugh about that.
I guess this was just my mind playing tricks on me. In my heart, I knew I wanted to be with Virgil forever. When I told the kids we were getting married, they were beyond excited – they were already nuts about Virgil and had been for a while. So were my friends, and my mother and everyone who knew him.
During my early twenties my life was so chaotic I only went to church sporadically, but after I met Virgil I became a regular churchgoer again. I even taught Sunday school at Grace Methodist Church – the same church I’d grown up in. Virgil and I decided to get married there after Sunday school. We both agreed we wanted a low-key affair. It was the second marriage for both of us, and we didn’t feel we needed to have a big fairy tale wedding. We didn’t invite many people – just my mom and my Aunt Bridget and Uncle Al, my brother Jayson, and, of course, my children, plus a couple from the church who would be our witnesses. Virgil’s parents, unfortunately, couldn’t make it down from Oklahoma City.
We wanted the ceremony to be warm and informal, and it was. Virgil wore a simple white shirt and a nice pair of slacks, and I wore an autumn-colored skirt and a burnt orange sweater. That morning I’d gone to the store and bought some peach roses and peach-colored ribbon, and that was my bouquet. Simple, yet beautiful. Sabyre and JP – who was out of the clinic and doing better – got dressed up in their Sunday finest and pranced around that morning like it was Christmas.
Right after Sunday school I told the nine teenagers in my class I was getting married. They were all so excited they stuck around to watch. It was like having our own little cheering section. The service itself took less than five minutes. The pastor, who was more like family to us than just a pastor, took us through our traditional vows – Do you take this man? Do you take this woman? – and then, just like that, we were married. Virgil leaned in and gave me a sweet little kiss, and all the kids, including my own, began whooping it up. During church service we have what we call a ‘thankful box’, and if you want to share anything with the congregation you just put a dollar in the box and start sharing. JP and Sabyre ran up and put a dollar in and yelled out their good news:
‘My mom and dad got married today!’ they squealed.
And so I got my fairy tale wedding after all.
The honeymoon was a weekend in a fancy hotel in Oklahoma City – with the kids. They were at least as excited as we were and probably more. As soon as we got there Sabyre helpfully told the receptionist, ‘We’re on our honeymoon!’ And once the hotel staffers knew, they sent a fruit and cheese plate and sparkling cider to our room. That weekend was one of the happiest weekends I’ve ever had.
You see, my marriage to Virgil brought something to my life that I never, ever had before – it brought stability.
For the first time, I felt like I had solid ground under my feet. I got over my pre-wedding jitters and even started using the word ‘husband’ freely (okay, so it took me three weeks into the marriage to stop referring to Virgil as ‘my boyfriend’). We bought a house in my hometown, and not long after that I got a new job teaching third grade at a local elementary school. JP was doing better, and both he and Sabyre loved their new dad. If life is a great big puzzle with a million tiny pieces, a lot of my missing pieces were starting to fall into place.
And yet, I didn’t react to my new stability like you might think I did.
Don’t get me wrong. It was wonderful to have someone who loved me and was always on my side, and Virgil did indeed become my champion. He took over my fight to get JP on his dad’s insurance and finally got it done. He helped me get JP in to see the specialists he needed. He made it so I didn’t have to hustle quite as much as I had to when I was single. All my adult life I’d run around like a maniac from one job to the next, cleaning houses, ironing clothes, serving beers, finishing college, raising two kids, you name it. I don’t remember ever slowing down. And all that working and running around made me lean and tough, if nothing else. I probably weighed less as an adult than I did in high school.
But then, when I finally put that burden down – when I finally stopped running – I began to put on weight. And not just a little weight, but twenty extra pounds, then thirty. Before I knew it, I was more than fifty pounds overweight.
The real reason I got heavy, though, has nothing to do with working less. The truth is, once I stopped running from my problems and started putting down roots with Virgil, all the things I’d been running from just smashed into me all at once, like a chain reaction pile-up on the highway. All my bad feelings about my abuse and abortion, all my fears and insecurities, all my guilt and self-loathing – it all just suddenly showed up together in my brain. I’d never really dealt with my problems; I’d just covered them up with anger, denial, avoidance, bad relationships and long work hours. Basically, I’d just tried to outrun them. But now they finally got me standing still, and they overwhelmed me.
And so with my new outer stability came a new inner turmoil, if that makes any sense. I felt like I was always battling myself, always wrestling with my emotions. I know it sounds strange to say, but it truly felt like my mind and my heart were a battleground – only I didn’t know who exactly was waging war.
At the center of this turmoil was my continuing confusion about God. It would have been nice if Virgil’s certainty about God rubbed off on me, but it didn’t. In a way, it only made me question God more. I tried to find God everywhere – in the beautiful rolling plains of Oklahoma, in the moody mountain sunsets, in the beaming smiles of my children.
‘Virgil, look at that beautiful tree over there,’ I’d say, pointing to a magnificent elm. ‘God had to have made that. He has to be real, because all of this works so perfectly. There has to be a God!’
Patiently, Virgil would say, ‘There is.’
But still I couldn’t be sure. I truly wanted God to be real, but in my life I’d learned not to believe in anything I couldn’t see with my own eyes. When Virgil came into my life I started leaning toward the belief that God was real. But that was still a long way from truly believing. Much of the time I just didn’t think He was listening to me. Whatever faith I had was kind of hollow. The truth is, I was still searching, still running – only now I was running toward something, not away from it. Because I needed Him more than ever, I was trying desperately to find God. ‘Come near to God,’ it says in James 4:8, ‘and He will come near to you.’ So, where was He?
It was then that God, who had never stopped trying, very clearly came near to me.
One of the first strange things that happened was a simple dream. And it involved my brother, Jayson.
Like me, Jayson was a headstrong little kid. He liked doing things his way, and he didn’t like caving in to authority figures. I’ll never forget what he did to my mom after she spanked him one day for not cleaning his room. He was nine or ten at the time, and he was so angry about the spanking that he cooked up an ingenious plan to get revenge. Back then my mom was working as a dental hygienist, so we always had a ton of dental floss in the house. Well, my brother took the floss and tied long strings of it to every single object in my mom’s bedroom. I mean everything – tubes of lipstick, underwear in drawers, hairbrushes, shoes, the works. Then he tied all those strings around the doorknob of the bedroom door. It was a pretty heavy door, and to open it you had to give it a yank. So when my mom came home and pulled it open, everything she owned came flying at her and wound up in a big pile on the floor.
Jayson was waiting for her in the bedroom. Right on cue, he said, ‘Mom, your room’s messy.’
Jayson was in his early twenties when I got married to Virgil, and – like me in my early twenties – he was having a hard time with life. Everything we’d gone through as kids had left us battered and scarred. Only instead of turning to food or long work hours to treat the despair, he drank. And, unlike me, he wasn’t struggling with the existence of God – he had a firm belief that God wasn’t real. See, here’s the big problem at the root of both our struggles. If God was real and loving, we wondered, how could He have allowed what happened to us as kids to happen? Why didn’t He stop it? I wanted an answer to this question, but Jayson didn’t need one. He didn’t want anything from God at all. My brother flat-out didn’t believe that God was real, and he never let me talk about God around him.
Then, Jayson was arrested for driving under the influence for the second time. I lay in bed and asked God to help my brother. Before long, Jayson was facing his third DUI – and he hadn’t budged an inch in his stance on God.
‘God,’ I said during one of my prayers, ‘You’re going to have to go get him, because he sure as heck isn’t coming to You. You’re going to have to show Yourself to him, or he’ll never believe in You.’
One night, after just such a prayer, I had an incredible dream. I was in church – only I wasn’t standing; I was hovering over the worshippers. I could see all these people on their feet with their hands in the air. They were singing and worshipping, and it was a beautiful sight.
And in front, on stage, the person who was leading them in praise and worship was my brother Jayson.
Jayson is a great singer. As kids, we sang together all the time, and he’s still a karaoke champ. And there he was, in my dream, arms raised and head thrown back, weeping out of sheer love for God and singing at the top of his lungs – singing praise to God! The guy who didn’t believe God was real was leading a congregation in worship! When I woke up, the image of my brother seemed so real and so beautiful. It was more vivid than any dream I could remember having. I told Virgil and my mom about it, but I knew better than to tell Jayson. I just filed it away, and after a while I forgot it.
Then, in the summer of 2007, I had another powerful dream. This time, I was in my own bedroom, and once again I hovered high above it. I could see Virgil on his side of the bed, fast asleep, and I could see myself sleeping peacefully next to him. Then I became aware of this beautiful light encircling me as I hovered over the bed. The light began to outline this perfect plan for our lives, and in my dream I soaked up each and every detail. I woke up and nudged Virgil and groggily said, ‘Wait until you hear God’s plan for us.’ Virgil looked at me funny, because I’d never actually said I believed God was real, yet here I was telling him how God shared His plan with me. I drifted back to sleep, with every intention of telling Virgil every detail the next morning. But when I woke up, I couldn’t remember what God had told me. I could only recall two odd and random things that seemed to have come from the dream: two numbers – 16 and 6 – and the image of building a great wall. I didn’t know what any of it meant, and I chalked it up as just another weird dream. I mean, the only great wall I knew about was in China.
Those two unusually vivid dreams were just the start of this strange period in my life. What happened next was frightening, and I wish it had happened in a dream … but it didn’t.
Virgil and I had recently become friends with a young couple in town. They were a typical family – two beautiful daughters, a great house, all of that. I was very friendly with the wife. We talked a lot, and we had a really easy camaraderie. One summer night, shortly after my dream about the wall, Virgil and I went to dinner in their home. Afterward, the wife and I sat in their backyard talking about this and that.
By then, she had confided in me about her childhood. To my horror, what she described was even worse than my own history. She grew up in another state, and she told me that when she was just a kid her mother joined a satanic cult and dragged her into it. She wound up being badly abused and raped by male members of the cult. The few details she shared with me were the stuff of nightmares. They seemed too horrible, too outrageous to be real. I did my best to console my friend and give her a sympathetic ear, but deep down I don’t think I really believed her story. Or maybe what she described was just too evil for me to comprehend. On some level, I was still that terrified little girl who ran out of that sewing room thinking she had met the devil. I didn’t know if Satan was real, but I didn’t know that he wasn’t. And I didn’t want to believe what my friend told me, because if it was true, that would mean the devil could very well be real.
When she confided all that to me, she also said that once her friends knew about it they usually stopped being her friends. And, you know, I wanted to run away from her when she told me, too. But something inside me wouldn’t let me leave her. I just couldn’t turn my back on this wounded little creature. So I remained her friend.
That night, in her backyard, she seemed quieter than usual. Out of the blue, she asked me something she’d never asked before.
‘Crystal, do you think God is real?’
Of all the people in the world to ask.
I wasn’t sure what to say to her, so I told her about my dream. Then I told her how I was searching hard for God and how my faith was slowly growing. She sat silently for a while, then asked another question.
‘Do you think God could love me?’
I don’t know why I said what I said next; it just rolled out of my mouth without stopping at my brain first.
‘Do you want me to pray with you?’
I’d never personally prayed over anyone in my life. I mean, sure, I’d prayed for people in church, but I’d never laid hands and prayed over someone, like I’d seen people do in charismatic churches I’d visited. After all, who was I, the skeptic, to pray over anyone? My friend nodded her head and started crying, so I took her hand and started to pray. She bowed her head and listened, but before I was done she suddenly lifted her head and looked straight at me.
What I saw startled me.
Her expression had gone from sadness to something that looked like anger. She had this hardened glare, like she’d just sucked on a lemon, but about ten times worse than that. She looked hateful and frightening. She began to laugh at me, but it was a laugh unlike any I’d ever heard. It was this cruel and unsettling cackle. Then she began mocking me and mocking the name of Jesus in a high-pitched, evilsounding voice. I sat there thinking, What is going on? What is wrong with my friend?
Her husband, who had joined us earlier, was just as shocked as I was to see how she was acting. Now, she had been diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, a result, her doctors believed, of her childhood trauma. Sitting there, listening to her evil laugh, I put two and two together and turned to her husband.
‘Is this one of her personalities?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them all, but I have never seen this.’
I ran inside the house and found Virgil. ‘I don’t know what I did, but I did something to her!’ I said. Virgil ran outside and up to my friend, who was on her feet and still ranting and raving in that strange, childish voice. Instantly, Virgil sprang into action. He put her in a bear hug from behind and began talking in her ear. ‘Tell me your name,’ he said over and over while she spit out curses. ‘I will not listen to you until you tell me your name.’ I couldn’t wrap my mind around what was happening. I was watching the poor woman go crazy, and it broke my heart. I was also confused why Virgil was speaking to her that way. Meanwhile, she just kept on screaming – not at Virgil, not at her husband, only at me. I took a few steps back and tried to catch my breath. Honestly, I was scared to death. I didn’t know what to do or what to say, but I knew I wanted the madness to be over.
In a tiny mutter under my breath I started repeating the name of Jesus.
Suddenly, she stuck out her head and looked right at me with hatred in her eyes. She broke free of Virgil and lunged at me, but stopped just before she touched me, almost as if she’d hit an invisible wall. Then in a low but clear voice that was not her own she said:
‘Where’s your Jesus now? You got what you deserved as a child.’
I hadn’t told my friend about my childhood abuse. I hadn’t told anyone, except Virgil. My first thought was that Virgil must have told her. I started crying, and Virgil told me to go home. I got in the car and drove home and locked all the doors and windows. Virgil came home a while later, and I hugged him tight when he walked in.
‘She’s crazy,’ I said. ‘She is nuts. We need to get her some help.’
‘No,’ said Virgil quietly, ‘I don’t think that was her.’
Virgil told me he reacted the way he did – quickly and forcefully – because he recognized what was happening as demonic. He was commanding what was inside her to say its name, so that with God’s authority he could make it leave.
I stood there, more confused than ever, not knowing what to think. My husband was a smart and serious man; in all the time I’d known him he’d never told a lie or even exaggerated anything. He was as plain spoken and honest as a person could be. And here he was telling me our friend was possessed? What was I supposed to say to that?
Virgil told me she returned to her normal self after I left. She didn’t remember anything that had happened, and she was deeply frightened when her husband and Virgil told her about it. It chilled me to the bone to think all of her venom had been directed squarely at me. I asked Virgil if he had told her about my childhood abuse, and he said he hadn’t. I believed him, but that meant I had no idea how my friend knew what she knew.
That night I insisted we sleep with all the lights on. I jumped at every sound and lay in bed crying until the sun came up. To say I was terrified doesn’t really convey what I was feeling. All I knew for sure was that my friendship was over.
The next day I told my Aunt Connie about what happened. Without hesitating, she said what I described was a demonic event. I knew the Bible talked about demons, but the truth is I hadn’t read the whole Bible, only small parts of it. And no one had ever talked about demons in any church sermon I’d ever heard. Maybe they did in some churches, but not in mine. I listened to what my aunt had to say, but deep down I had already convinced myself that what I saw was either part of the poor woman’s personality disorder or evidence she was just plain crazy. Still, when Connie gave me the number of a Christian counselor she knew, I agreed to call him to ask if he could help. I didn’t want to be around my former friend anymore, but I also didn’t want her to suffer. If I could direct her to the help she needed, I would.
I called the counselor and told him everything that happened, and when I was done he had one question.
‘She only said these things about you?’ he asked.
I said yes, that was true, and the counselor paused.
‘Then you’re the one I need to talk to,’ he said.
Sorry, not interested, goodbye.
After that, I tried to let the matter drop, but I couldn’t shake a sense of lingering dread and anxiety. For days I couldn’t even be alone. Virgil had to sit with me in the bathroom while I showered, and in bed I’d get as close to him as I possibly could. Was all of this real? Was any of it real? It was easier for me just to believe she was crazy, and that’s what I tried to do.
At this point, some of you might be saying, ‘Now hold on just a minute.’ Some of you might believe in demons; some of you may not. I am not here to tell you what to believe or what not to believe. All I can do is tell you the truth of my story, even if some of it is hard to fathom.
For me, the easiest explanation only held up for so long. How did she know about my past? Was it a guess? It seemed too specific for that. Had I forgotten that I’d told her? I was pretty sure I hadn’t. And why was Virgil so sure he’d seen demonic influence? Didn’t his opinion as a man of deep faith and strong character carry a lot of weight? All of these questions swirled in my head, but even so, I might have sided with the skeptics and forever believed what I’d witnessed was just a case of mental illness.
I might have believed that … if it hadn’t happened again.
A few months had passed since we ended our friendship with the couple. I’d returned to my normal life, or as normal as I could get it. I taught school. I watched my kids play in the school band. I made them lunches and put notes on their napkins telling them how much I loved them. I didn’t need to sleep with the lights on anymore, and – after not praying for weeks out of fear and confusion – I’d even started to pray again. Most evenings in our house were quiet, just the way I liked them.
On one of those evenings I invited a family friend to our home. She was a respected businesswoman and an all-around wonderful lady, and I was very close with her. I’d known her all my life, and she was down to earth and thoughtful and someone I considered a dear friend. I knew she didn’t drink, but that night in my home she treated herself to one glass of wine. I didn’t think anything of it, and our ordinary evening continued.
But within an hour or so, her mood changed. She started talking loudly and got very aggressive, and she said things she knew would upset me. My first thought was, If she’s drunk I don’t have time to babysit her. And I don’t want my kids to see this, so I better drive her to her aunt’s home, which wasn’t too far away. I called ahead, got my friend in my car, and we drove off.
On the way, she got even louder and meaner. At one point she grabbed the steering wheel, and I had to push her away and back in her seat. At her aunt’s house, we sat her down in a recliner in the living room and let her cool down a bit. Instead, she only got more worked up. I’d never seen her act this way, and I could hardly believe a single glass of wine could cause it. She was staring at me now, just like my former friend had, with hatred in her eyes. And when she spoke she used a voice I didn’t recognize as hers. Her uncle watched her and tried to make sense of her behavior, and her aunt was unnerved enough to grab a Bible and start reading passages aloud. And, just as it happened in the last incident, my friend started spitting the verses back in an ugly singsong voice. Then she started reciting the verses quickly, as if she knew them by heart, though I was sure she didn’t know the Bible that well.
I felt a sickening knot in my stomach. One glass of wine could not explain all this. Her aunt kept reading the Bible, and she kept mocking her, until suddenly she stopped and looked straight at me.
Then she said something so vile and so brutal I can’t even repeat it in these pages.
Using horribly vulgar language, she told me I got exactly what I deserved as a child and took responsibility for all the horrible sexual abuse I’d suffered. It was like she felt proud of the hell inflicted on me when I was young.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The things she said cut me to my very core. How in the world did she know about my childhood abuse? Why would she use it as a weapon against me? I averted my eyes from her cold stare and looked straight at the wall and muttered ‘Jesus’ under my breath.
That only made her cackle and mock me louder.
‘Where’s your Jesus now?’ she spat out.
The blood drained from my face. She had used the exact same phrase. I might have been able to shrug off what had happened before, but now I couldn’t – now it was happening again. I sat there absolutely terrified, but I put on a brave face and tried not to show my fear.
‘I’m not afraid of you,’ I said, still looking straight ahead and avoiding her stare.
She leaped to her feet and lunged at me. She put her face inches from mine – so close I could feel her breathe on my cheek – but she didn’t touch me. Then she screamed:
‘YOU SHOULD BE!’
I got up and walked out of the house and drove home. I found Virgil in the living room.
‘Call the hospital,’ I told him. ‘I need to be admitted to a psych ward. I think I’m losing my mind.’
However you feel about demons, they are part of the wide-ranging conversation about God and faith in our world today. The Bible talks about demonic possession, and there are several documented cases of possession throughout the history of Christianity. Even someone as mainstream as Bobby Jindal – the governor of Louisiana and a rising political star on the national stage – has written about witnessing a demonic attack while he was a student at the campus ministry University Christian Fellowship.
‘Suddenly, Susan emitted some strange guttural sounds and fell to the floor,’ Jindal wrote of a fellow student in a 1994 article called, Beating a Demon: Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare. ‘She started thrashing about, as if in some sort of seizure. I refused to budge from my position and froze in horror. I will never forget the first comprehensible sound that came from Susan; she screamed my name with such an urgency that the chill still travels down my spine whenever I recall this moment.’ Later, ‘Susan proceeded to denounce every individual in the room, often citing very private and confidential information she could not possibly have known on her own. It was information capable of hurting individuals – attacking people, as she did, by revealing their hidden feelings, fears and worries.’
Sound familiar?
I told Virgil what happened and begged him to have me committed. I truly, truly believed I was going crazy. Even though other people had been there when these incidents happened, I simply couldn’t think of any other explanation. The alternative – that I was being spiritually attacked – was just too far-fetched for me to believe. It was much easier to think I was losing my mind.
It didn’t help when, a few days later, I asked my friend’s aunt why she hadn’t stopped her from speaking to me the way she did. Her aunt said, ‘What way? All I heard was gibberish.’ Both her aunt and uncle were right there with me in the kitchen, as shocked as I was by what was going on, but they didn’t hear her say those horrible things to me? How could that be? Had I misheard? Or was I really losing my mind?
Only many years later would I realize why I’d heard those things – and why, when I invoked the name of Jesus, it only made whatever was inside her attack me more. I was like someone who is home alone when a burglar breaks in. I grab a shotgun and confront the burglar, but he can see I’m holding the gun backward and my arms are shaking and my finger’s not on the trigger. And maybe I even say, ‘I’ve never shot a gun before, but I will now!’ The burglar knows I won’t be able to defend myself against him. He sees the fear – he sees I have no authority over him. And so he steps up his attack.
Virgil, as he always does, sensed how truly terrified I was and calmed me down. He told me I wasn’t crazy, that what I had seen was Satan at work. He talked about Satan as if he were talking about a next-door neighbor – matter-of-factly, without fear or drama. None of what was happening was too hard for Virgil to believe. And because he had the benefit of being certain about his beliefs, he wasn’t a terrified, quivering mess like me.
I allowed Virgil to talk me out of the idea that I was crazy, but once again I insisted we sleep with all the lights on. I’d drift off with Virgil holding me and wake up terrified and drenched in sweat. I made sure I was never alone in any room for the next several weeks. And I swore everyone who had witnessed these events to secrecy. I didn’t want anyone talking about them again, ever. I was a schoolteacher and a mom, and we were a good family – a normal family.
Worst of all, I stopped talking to God. I was simply too afraid to pray. I was afraid that if I began to pray the attacks would happen again. What I did do was call the Christian counselor I’d spoken to previously. We made an appointment, and I drove to see him in a nearby town. On the way I felt scared to be in the car by myself, so I rolled down all the windows and blasted Christian music on the radio the whole way. I didn’t usually listen to this type of music, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
The counselor was a pleasant man in his fifties, with a calm demeanor that reminded me of Virgil. I sat across from him in his drab office and told him everything that had happened. He listened with no expression, betraying nothing, and when I was done, we sat in silence for a long minute.
‘I am going to tell you what God has told me about you,’ he finally said. ‘What you are frightened of is demonic. And it is attacking you – specifically you.’
I sat there absolutely stunned. How had my life taken such a strange turn?
‘What do I need to do?’ I asked. ‘Is there something you can give me?’ I was hoping he had some special prayer or oil that would make it all go away.
‘I’m not going to do anything,’ the counselor said. ‘God is going to help you fight this off. God has told me He is raising you up to be a warrior. And God is going to send you into the world to fight for others.’
My only thought was: I guess God doesn’t know me very well.
On the drive home I blasted the Christian music station again. A song came on about a man who was trapped by demons and calling out for help. He looks up and sees Jesus standing right in front of him, and the demons shriek and scurry away. ‘Do you want to be free?’ the lyrics go, ‘Lift your chains/I hold the key/All power on Heaven and Earth belong to me.’ I remember being surprised the demons had fled in fear of Jesus. Why hadn’t that happened with me? Was it because Jesus wasn’t there with me?
I don’t know how to explain it, but when I heard those lyrics I got the powerful feeling that God was speaking to me. It wasn’t that I heard His voice in the lyrics; it was more like I received a message through the whole song. And what I heard God saying over and over was: ‘Did you think I was not strong enough?’
That night I started talking to God again. The conversation was distilled into a simple prayer. I asked for an answer to the question that was haunting me.
Was He real, or was I insane?
It had to be one or the other. Either what was happening to me was real, or I was going out of my mind. Either there was a God and an adversary, or I was a lunatic.
Which was it? I needed to know. God gave me no immediate answer, so I kept praying and living in fear and hoping that maybe one day He would.
Then He did, more than once, only I wasn’t paying attention.