Shaken Foundations

At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens.”  This phrase, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of things that are shaken—that is, things that have been made—in order that the things that cannot be shaken may remain.  Hebrews 12:26-27

The first year after our family moved to Switzerland flew by with lightning speed. Our primary focus was ensuring our kids were well settled into their new community and school. Moving halfway around the world and immersing them in a culture and language about which they knew nothing was a tall order. But by the grace of God, they adjusted extremely well.

It was a time of significant adjustment for me as well. I was just so thrilled to be in Switzerland that no obstacle or inconvenience could dampen my rosy outlook on European life.

Around that time, I was busily working on the small business that I had felt called by God to build. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was really building with my own hands was an idol. Much more about the things in my life that were displeasing to God would be coming to the light soon enough, but at the time I was totally ignorant about how compromised my life was as well as how much demonic oppression I was truly living under.  

It was during this time that I started to question some of the things I was taught in my evangelical Christian upbringing. In particular, I started to wonder about God’s provision and will for divine healing. Something in my spirit was awakening me to the possibility that I’d missed something significant. The more I studied the topic, the more I became convinced that healing was provided for all the children of God at the cross.

My emotional life started to unravel during the second year of new life in Switzerland. My parents had decided to relocate to France to live with one of my sisters. Their reasoning was that all of their youngest grandchildren lived in Europe. Martin and I were delighted with the prospect of remaining near to both sets of our parents.

However, right before my parents planned to make the transition over, my dad began having catastrophic health problems. 

God remained gracious. 

Through our periodic international phone calls we became acutely aware of very serious medical issues that my dad was battling. Several times after he’d had some type of major medical event, we’d feared his chances of recovery had been greatly diminished. But, he always pulled through. 

We’d started to make jokes about how resilient he was. 

My parents' transition to Europe ended up being delayed by several months, but they did make it over.

Almost immediately, dad began to experience one health emergency after another. 

With deep concern, we began to routinely observe the steady decline of my dad’s health. It was one of the hardest seasons of my life. 

Dad was my hero, my mentor, and my biggest cheerleader. He was the only person for whom I had any genuine admiration.

To watch the person whom I always held in the highest regard be felled over and over with significant health problems was both tragic and traumatic. I’d suffered the devastating loss of a close loved one at a very young age, a death from which I had never recovered. But the prospect of losing my dad was unbearable. I could not imagine living in this world without him.

In the last year leading up to my dad’s death, I made five unplanned trips to France in a matter of months. 

Dad had been having tortuous nightmares, and started to have unusual symptoms and experiences. He didn’t go into detail about what was happening, but he did ask me for prayer. 

That’s when I began to share with him what I was seeing in the Word of God. With hope and a mind to encourage, I told him with all sincerity that I believed that divine healing was for today. 

I believed that God not only could bring total healing of any disease or condition, but that it was always God’s will to do so.

Dad was open-minded and eager to hear more. The time we spent together studying God’s word was precious to me. Sharing insights and revelations about the Bible had always been one of our favorite things to do together. 

As time wore on, the reality that dad was drawing closer and closer to the last days of his life weighed heavily on my heart. Grief covered me like a cloak. Without recognizing it, I had already started to pull away emotionally, trying to self-protect from what I knew would be a devastating personal loss whenever it happened.

Then the call came one afternoon. 

Dad was in a deep coma and wasn’t expected to live through the night. I made arrangements immediately to travel by speed train to France. After arriving, I went directly to the hospital where he was being treated.

In the last few times I’d been to France just before my dad’s passing, I’d perceived something demonic plaguing him. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew something was seriously wrong. I’d been taught that Christians could not have demons. 

Nothing that I was observing made any sense to me. Even so, I knew intuitively that whatever it was I was picking up on, its roots were spiritual and not physical.

What I observed disturbed me so much that it shook the very foundations of my Christian belief system. 

I had no understanding and no context for explaining what I sensed.

After laying on hands in faith and praying for Dad in his hospital room, we went home expecting to be notified that he’d left us in the night. 

To our great surprise and astonishment, he woke up out of the coma the next day. He began improving steadily over the next few days. We were all greatly encouraged and hopeful that Dad would make a miraculous recovery as had been the case in so many other seasons of his life.

When I returned home, I heard in my spirit, “Consecrate yourself”.

I didn’t understand what it meant, but I was hopeful that Dad was going to be made whole again through a supernatural act of God. 

I began chronicling online his steps to recovery and sharing updates with friends and family.

He died peacefully about two weeks later. 

Dad’s passing was every bit of the emotional earthquake that I feared it would be. But God gave us the strength to make it through.

After returning home from the funeral, I remained plagued by fears and doubts about some of the things Dad had said or claimed to have seen. It disturbed me so much that I began to question if he’d actually gone to Heaven. The possibility that he hadn’t made it there terrified me to no end.

After I’d gotten the kids off to school the following week, I opened up my laptop and began to research if it was possible for Christians to have demons. No one that I knew back in Houston believed in such a thing, so I didn’t bother asking anyone from my hometown. 

I ended up on a resource-rich deliverance website that I read through fervently.

As I began to look closely at the  signs and symptoms of demonization, my concern quickly turned from my dad’s spiritual condition to my own. 

Like a flood, the memory of unusual experiences throughout my life beginning in childhood came to the forefront of my mind.

• The night that my grandpa-like beloved Forest passed away when I was only four years old, I had seen him waving goodbye to me. The appearance was so real that I’d gotten out of bed and ran to hug him. It never occurred to me that what I was seeing was not actually him, but a familiar, demonic spirit.

• I’d experienced sleep paralysis several times and had had the feeling of profound pressure and the sense of something unseen trying to gain entrance into me.

• Watching scary movies had been a favorite family pastime. 

• Because of my job in the health coaching field, I’d studied and practiced many different “natural” healing methodologies, assuming they were preferable and safer than standard medical practices. I’d also had a supernatural healing experience that scared me, but seemed to address the symptoms I was suffering with at the time.

• I’d watched a plate move across our kitchen table on its own one Halloween before we’d moved to Switzerland.

…and much more

To make matters worse, as I read through the doors that people can open to the demonic, whether in ignorance or intentionally, I began to see example after example of attitudes and activities that I had held or participated in. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that I had a major spiritual problem. 

At the time, I was convinced that I was secure in the Lord and a “good” Christian. My standard of evaluation was comparing myself to more carnal Christians rather than measuring my character and behavior against the standard of scripture. If I had done that, I would not have jumped head first into a subject that I knew absolutely nothing about: spiritual warfare.

The combination of hubris and ignorance inside of me flung me violently into a tsunami-level, catastrophic tearing of the thin veil between this world and the next. 

Becoming tangibly aware of the spiritual world would also be the means by which I came to realize that I had shaken foundations. The structure of my Christian life, the belief system that my world was built on, had crumbled and given way from beneath me.

That was the bad news.

The good news is that the situation that unfolded ended up forcing me to call on the name of Jesus in a desperate plea to come and save me.  

And because He is faithful and true, Jesus responded.