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 breath 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 possessions, 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 titled “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 living room, 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 was 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 to secrecy everyone who had witnessed these events. 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. 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 not think I was 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.
THE PLACE WHERE GOD FINALLY TRACKED ME DOWN wasn’t a church or a school or a hospital or anyplace you might think.
It was a Pizza Hut.
My daughter, Sabyre, had earned a free small pizza for winning a reading award at school, and we drove to the Pizza Hut to pick it up. While we were waiting, I ordered a diet Coke. Our sweet, elderly waitress brought over our check, which was for $1. Not a bad deal.
But as she handed it to me, I felt the nudge.
I call it a nudge, because I don’t know what else to call it. Actually it was more like a really insistent thought. I didn’t hear a voice in my head or anything like that; instead, this thought just popped
in my brain and started flashing like a neon sign. Have you seen the movie Ghost? When Whoopi Goldberg keeps hearing Patrick Swayze tell her to do something, and she’s the only one who can hear it, and she’s annoyed because she doesn’t want to hear it? Well, that’s a bit what this was like. I kept getting the nudge, clear and persistent.
Give the waitress a $100 tip.
I didn’t know where it came from; I just knew it wouldn’t stop. It made no sense to me, and it actually made me kind of mad. A $100 tip on a $1 bill? Huh? It’s not like Virgil and I were rolling in dough. We were pretty much going from paycheck to paycheck at that point. One hundred dollars was an absolute fortune for us. But the nudge was getting stronger, and I felt so overwhelmed, I went outside and walked around the parking lot. I called Virgil at work and told him what was going on.
“That’s God,” he said calmly. “Do what He’s asking. I can’t talk now, babe, gotta go.”
But there was just no way I was going to leave a $100 tip. Then another thought asserted itself: Okay, then leave $50. My nudge, it seemed, was flexible. Honestly, I felt like I was on the fast train to Crazytown. I went back in and paid the bill and left a $10 tip—and even that struck me as too much.
But when I got in my car, the nudging only got worse. Whatever it was that was all over me wasn’t going away. I was being reminded that I hadn’t done what was asked. I called Virgil again, and he said, “Babe, I’m in a meeting. I really can’t talk. Go to an ATM and get the other $40 and take it to her. Bye.” What kind of husband supports his nutty wife giving money away to strangers? I sat there thinking, Gee, Virgil, thanks for nothing. There were a million reasons why I couldn’t leave such a generous tip. The utility bill was due. We needed new curtains in the bedroom. JP and Sabyre were owed their allowance. Why would I give a stranger money I didn’t have?
And yet—the nudge. It wouldn’t go away. Believe it or not, I called Virgil again.
“Just do what God is asking you to do,” he said. No anger, no judgment, just calm, decisive advice.
Virgil knew we didn’t have much extra money, but he didn’t care. This was not his decision to make. This was God’s decision. Or at least that’s how he saw it. For me, it still seemed like lunacy. And yet I couldn’t get myself to turn the ignition and drive away.
Instead, I took Sabyre by the hand, marched over to an ATM, and withdrew $40. I stomped back toward the Pizza Hut, angry at the whole situation. I thought, Well, at least this will make me look like a really great person. Which is when yet another thought pushed its way through my brain.
Tell her who this is from.
By that point, I not only felt like I was losing my mind, but I probably looked it, too. I was arguing with myself all the way to the Pizza Hut. “Great, so not only do I have to give my money away, but you want me to walk in and say, ‘Oh, hi, this is from God’?” I wanted to turn around so badly, and yet I walked back in and spotted our waitress near the cash register. I took a deep breath and said, “Okay, let’s get this over with.”
The waitress seemed confused to see us.
“Hi, I gave you a tip earlier, but it wasn’t the right amount,” I said.
The waitress dug into her apron and tried to give me the $10 bill.
“No, no, that’s not it,” I said. “I gave you too little.” Then I handed her the $40 in cash and said, “God asked me to give this to you.”
She looked at me and said, “What?”
Naturally, she was hard of hearing.
“God asked me to give this to you,” I repeated, loud enough to draw stares from staffers and customers. I could feel my face flushing the color of tomato sauce.
The waitress looked at the money in her hands and seemed completely stunned. Finally, after a few moments she screamed, “Oh, my God!”
“Yes,” I said, “exactly.”
I grabbed Sabyre and got out of there, feeling agitated and confused. I was not a cheerful giver, that’s for sure. That night and the next day, I thought a lot about what happened and tried to make sense of it, and when I couldn’t, I just tried to forget it. But three days later, as I was dismissing my students for recess, I got a call from Virgil. The first thing he said was, “You need to sit down.”
My first thought was, Oh great, he got fired, and I just gave away $50. But that wasn’t it. “I happened to walk in on a conversation with the guy who manages that Pizza Hut,” Virgil told me. “He was talking about this lady who came in and gave a waitress a fifty-dollar tip. I said, ‘That was my wife.’ ”
It turns out the waitress’s husband had just lost his job, and they couldn’t afford to have their two children join them for Thanksgiving. So she prayed to God to somehow let her earn the $100 she needed on her last shift. By the end of her shift, she’d made only $50. Her kids would not be joining her for Thanksgiving.
And then, of course, I walked in—her very last customer. And she got to bring her children home.
When I heard this story, I was dumbfounded. There was no way this could be just a coincidence. “You have to be real,” I told God. “There’s no other explanation.” I finally had the proof I’d been searching for all those years. God, wouldn’t you know it, was real. That feeling filled me with a huge sense of relief and joy.
Or at least it did for the next three or four days.
After that, whatever sureness I felt slowly faded away. I couldn’t convince myself this was how God worked—by nudging people in Pizza Huts. I went back to thinking it had all been a big, annoying coincidence.
And just like that, I let God slip through my fingers.
When I think back on that incident now, I can see how incredibly patient God was with me. Over and over He spoke to me, and over and over He answered my prayers and gave me proof of His existence, and every time I chalked it up to coincidence. God even used me to answer someone else’s prayers, and instead of acknowledging that, I gave myself a nice little pat on the back for my good deed—when in fact it had nothing to do with me. Truth be told, I wasn’t even completely obedient to God when I left that tip. The Pizza Hut waitress had prayed to make $100 that day, and in the end she did, and she praised God for answering her prayer. But, God didn’t want me to just match her $50 that day. He had asked me to give her the entire $100. He wanted to go above and beyond for the child He loved. He wanted to give her more than what she’d asked for. I believe that sometimes God wants to bless us beyond whatever blessing we pray for. And sometimes what stops that from happening is us.
THROUGH ALL OF the dreams and scares and nudges, one thing was constant—my wonderful husband, Virgil. He was always a rock of support for me, and he knew how to defuse the drama that seemed to swirl around my life. He never got tired of all my questions about God—and he never tried to overwhelm me with his own beliefs. He just shared his incredibly strong convictions and waited patiently for me to come around.
We’d been married for almost five years when, out of the blue, I cornered Virgil in the kitchen and asked him a question.
“If it were possible,” I said, “would you want to have a child?”
Me having a child with Virgil wasn’t all that simple. The fact is, after Sabyre’s birth, I had a tubal ligation—which means your fallopian tubes are tied off and you can’t have any more kids. I did it, because I couldn’t handle another pregnancy that wasn’t part of a sound and loving relationship—and there weren’t too many of those floating around in my life. Virgil knew going into our marriage that I couldn’t have kids. He loved me enough to marry me anyway.
But now I was feeling guilty that I couldn’t give him a child. I could see what an amazing father he was to JP and Sabyre, and it pained me to think we couldn’t have a son or daughter of our own. I mean, JP and Sabyre were his kids in every way, except he didn’t get to experience the whole process with them—the birth, the early years, all of that great stuff. One day after brushing my teeth, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and started talking to God about it.
“God, I
know I don’t deserve another child,” I said, “but please do not punish Virgil for what I’ve done. He is such a wonderful father.”
This was the start of a series of bargains I made with God, a string of tests through which He could prove to me that He was real. I wanted to believe—I was leaning toward believing—but I was still a long way off from actually believing. I was the ultimate skeptic, demanding proof, setting conditions, challenging God. I don’t know what made me think I was in any position to do this. It wasn’t like God owed me something—in fact, it was me who sinned greatly against Him. Still, in our conversations, I set up hurdle after hurdle. The Pizza Hut nudge had been forgotten.
Within a week of that little bathroom prayer, I got a random e-mail at work from a fertility clinic in Oklahoma City. I knew we couldn’t afford the fee—it was something like $35,000—but since the first appointment was free, I scheduled one anyway. At the clinic, the doctors were kind and wonderful, but they told us they accepted only a few patients at a time and were completely booked for the next few months. Oh well, another disappointment—no big deal. Virgil and I were halfway out the front door when I heard someone say, “Wait.”
Incredibly, sometime during our appointment, another couple had canceled and the slot was ours if we wanted. Not only that, but the fee was drastically less than I’d first believed. If we scrimped and saved, we might be able to afford it. Virgil and I looked at each other, and a big smile crept across his face. We both knew what we were going to do.
The next few months were full of shots and tests and visits to the clinic. The idea was to harvest eggs and sperm and create an embryo in the lab. The embryo would be monitored in the lab for a few days before it was implanted in my uterus. We actually got to see pictures of the eggs dividing in a lab dish. We took to calling the fertility specialists our babysitters.
Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again Page 13
