Usually, I try to change things up from day to day, but yesterday’s post elicited a personal account from a reader whose story deserves to be heard.
Praise God for deliverance from evil!
If your knee-jerk response to this account is to scoff dismissively–if you discount the reality of demonic activity out of hand, you haven’t been paying attention.
It is incumbent upon all men of good will to oppose evil. At the very least, stop cooperating with it.
The Prince of Darkness never ate, they say;
Not even souls could sate his appetite.
His angles brought him more throughout each day
And sometimes posed as beings of the light.
When they did not, to see them caused much fright—
More fright than those still sent by God Above—
For they were serpents shrewd, devoid of love.
The demons didn't cause my typo. I'm just a doofus.
Pobody's nerfect.
If one of the enemy's servants were an angle, it would have to be one of those creepy incomprehensible ones that one finds in Lovecraftian horror that slowly drives the narrator mad.
Praise God. The prayer to St. Michael the Archangel was a good choice. I’m glad he had the presence of mind.
Great time last night Brian. It was a good talk. Dave has some good people for his regular listeners.
Ditto on the St. Michael prayer. It may not only have been the OP's presence of mind that recalled it to him.
Thank you for listening last night. Not to cast aspersions on anyone else, but I felt like David and I were able to develop the ideas under discussion more fully than was possible on other recent streams.
I agree. I love Geek Gab. It’s fun, but last night made me a David subscriber. It really was a very good talk: good questions, good answers. Seemed like good people all around.
Any thought of having your own weekly podcast?
I used to have one under the Geek Gab umbrella, but doing the show prep every week detracted too much from my writing time.
And I’m not saying you were referring to Geek Gab. It’s just they’re the only regular podcast/live stream I listen to.
Just read both posts: My family has had multiple sort of things like that. We live in a bad part of Saint Louis, not so bad now, but pretty bad still. Several times events have been arranged that we are preserved against disaster, either by angelic interference or by circumstance of High Strangeness.
One time my father and I were working on the house and gardens when a man came to my father and told him that he had planned to rob the house, but that when he had come by, he saw our lawn was full of men with clubs, watching over us. He became scared and felt compelled to tell us. It amuses us to this day.
Another time I and my brother fell ill and could not attend church. I was downstairs preparing lunch for when the family would come back, when I heard someone breaking into the basement. I roared a challenge and they ran.
Another time my mother was sleeping, when she heard the hose turn on. someone was using it to cleanse themselves off. When he noticed that my mother had saw him, he waved, and asked to be let in. She did no such thing and he left.
So my father was a nondenominational (Southern Baptist without the trimmings, to those who don't understand Protestant denominations) pastor fresh out of college. He had taken my mother as a wife, and I was on the way/a twinkle in my dad's eye. This continued until the church died away, but not before he did much good, and many strange events happened. Here are a few.
part 2 to come
There was a family of elders and deacons there who were corrupt. They had hired my father to be pastor because they thought a young buck with a family would be the perfect moldable victim for their thievery. They dominated the church and stole from the offering plate, among other things.
They realized their mistake as my father was, in a word, a firebrand. He was the schismatic Protestant every good Catholic mother warns her daughters about. The man has a spirit for the Lord that was absolutely uncompromising, if you deviated from Scripture, even an inch, it was dangerous. This came good and bad things, as you might expect. What's more, he has the body of a sumo-wrestler, and brawled often in his youth, so physical intimidation is something he does not comprehend, even in his old age.
So, he became a thorn in this evil family's side. He refused to let the stealing and domination continue, and came into conflict with the family many times. At first, since my dad is not a little autistic, it was good and he didn't recognize their evil. He was allowed to pray away a tumor in the patriarch's head, and, in general, led a small revival within the church, including being a mentor to many fatherless young Gen Xs and older Gen Ys. Much good did he do, and does.
When things were outed, it got nasty, fast. The family had lazily put everything in the presumably manipulable pastor's hands, so they, alone, could not vote to oust him. So, one time they hired a black belt, bigger than my father, to throw him out bodily. The black belt was paid, and agreed to it. At the appropriate time he would throw my father from the pulpit and evict us from our home. I might tell you that this was in Dupo, Illinois, where the cops prefer not to deal to often with strange and insular events, and are more preoccupied with drug dealers and domestic disputes in the numerous trailer parks than in churches. So, safely thinking they could get away with the coup, they settled in for the anticipated very entertaining sermon.
At the appointed moment, the black belt was ready to stand up and do the job he had been paid for when a voice spoke to him from nowhere. "If you get up, I will kill you." The man, fearing God for perhaps the first time in his life, stayed seated, sweating through a particularly fiery sermon. Later, he confessed everything to my father. My mother was angrier than my father was, which amuses us to this day.
These things continued, though, without the hired goons for a few years. Eventually, the patriarch of the family was out mowing when he fell over, dead as a doornail. The autopsy revealed that a malignant tumor had come back, and, in the briefest of moments, it had ravaged his brain, practically turning the whole organ into itself in a bizarre medical event, as which still happen more than doctors would like to admit. It is well-believed by my family that this had happened because he had crossed a line or that God had decided that now was his time, and his ingratitude was far enough.
There are many healings and quiet victories over Satan, his minions and the corruption of the world, from prostate cancer being healed from a holy pastor, to my own life being preserved by the changing of physics, so that I do not careen my car down icy roads to my death, or ruination. Another time a Christian man refused my prayers for his success in surgery, calling me a boy rather than the man I was. I rebuked him, but prayed for him, as is right. His surgery went poorly, and it is not likely that he is alive today, though I hope so.
There are other stories, but they're stranger, or more non-sequiter. Things that happen every day and are so strange that, without the whole picture, it can get very strange indeed.
Thank you for your powerful testimony. God is good.