Defeating Dark Angels In Practice

March 8, 2024
blogging

Note: Now that I have caught up with doing this for old blogs, all new blogs will start with a Youtube video of a dramatic reading of the blog for those who would prefer to listen to it.

How do I even begin this? I feel like I fell down the rabbithole and entered Wonderland. Or perhaps I have emerged from that dark, cramped rabbithole, out of the insanity and contradictions that had me lost and confused and wandering mazes for most of my life, and am seeing a wide open meadow for the first time.

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

In January, 2024, my husband--Sergey--and I flew to California to visit our pastor and his wife. We had some concerns to bring to them, so we had a productive couple of days praying together, receiving counseling, and catching up over good food. At the end of our visit, the pastor produced three books from his shelf, handed them to me, and told me to read them. Preferably I should read them together with Sergey, but I should read them. They were:

Defeating Dark Angels by Charles H. Kraft
I Give You Authority by Charles H. Kraft
Spiritual Gifts in the Local Church by David Pytches

All the excuses ran through my head. It's still more difficult for me to absorb non-fiction through print copies, and Sergey and I take a long time to go through books together PLUS we were already in the middle of another book about Israel and I've already got a major stack to read and and and--in the end I figured I'd gatekeep a little and read the books myself and pass on any useful information.

I started with Defeating Dark Angels. The book is about spiritual warfare and deliverance, specifically deliverance for Christians. Kraft has come to believe through thousands of case studies that Christians can, in fact, be demonized (read: have a demon in their emotions, mind, and body, not in their spirit where Jesus is) and that we can be living in far more freedom than we do and acting in far more authority and power than we do.

As I started reading it, things immediately got weird.

Journal entry 2/9/24. Been some interesting times lately. [February 4] when I slept I had one of those dreams that stands out, but for the worse. I spoke with something, some murderous entity that threatened me. I was afraid but thought if I could act crazy or give it amusement there was a 50% chance I would survive.

I woke up to painful heartburn. My sleep was disturbed a lot that night. The next night I asked Sergey to pray over my sleep and I slept like a rock.

One or two nights later I encountered another malevolent entity in my dreams. The story of [the dream] was that this "person" intruded into my house and claimed the right to be there as I tried to throw it out. The power of the entity felt less frightening the second time but still stood out as foreign to my dream world.

The entry continues to describe a couple days later when I listened to someone I care about unburden themselves about a deep worry. I took on that deep worry and fell into depression for the rest of the afternoon. Sometime around evening I sat up straight in my chair and said, "This [depression] isn't even mine!" So I prayed and told it to go in the Name of Jesus and it lifted immediately. And I thought I heard a thought in my head that wasn't mine, "It stole your whole day." And in retrospect, I knew I had actually agreed to allow the depression, because when I'm depressed I don't have to be responsible for anything, and I didn't want to be responsible.

Around the time of that incident, I had gotten to perhaps chapter 3 of the book. At that point, due to some of the topics the book raised, I felt that perhaps I should start journaling more seriously about the book.

That right there is a problem I have when trying to read workbooks or self-help books. If a book requires me to stop and practice a step it suggested or journal about it, I feel like I HAVE to stop reading the book and practice or journal... except I never do. So then I never get back to finishing the book or workbook, because I didn't do the "required" step. And so I set this book aside for a few weeks.

February 15 rolls around. I was in the middle of an intensive ministry trip with my Mom as her roadie, and It had been mostly good until that day, when all kinds of weirdness went down. We were in the vicinity of that pastor, and he came by that evening to talk with us and pray.

He turned to me and asked, "Are you reading the book? You should read the book."

It felt like the time my dentist told me, "You are in the early stages of gingivitis. Do you want to bleed a little extra now, or deal with the major damage down the road? Brush TWICE a day."

I had brought the book with me, so I finally opened it up again.

And I read far enough that everything changed.

It was definitely chapter 5 that did it for me. Chapters up until then had given me the sense that demons were more bluff than substance and that, as a believer, I did not have to be afraid of them even if they were embedded in parts of me, as Kraft claimed. Chapter 5 lists several ways demons tend to attack and harass people. And then it did this: it gave me permission to experiment. It gave me the phrase, "IF this is the enemy, stop it right now in the Name of Jesus."

Back up. Maybe you don't comprehend just how much I need permission to do things like be imperfect or try new things or fail, but this combination of concepts broke through to me in ways no amount of reading Jesus' deliverance sessions in scripture ever has. What I took away from this, and it rang true, was that even if I don't hear perfectly from the Father, even if I can't tell a bit of demonic harassment from a real headache, and even if I fruitlessly tell the traffic to knock it off just to see what happens... that's okay. That is, in fact, how you learn what is and isn't demonic harassment.

It's... okay... to get it wrong.

It's.... even okay... to hedge your bets... and say, "IF..."

Another takeaway I had was that, perhaps, I should start to notice things that might be harassment more. There's an amazing Harry Potter fanfiction with a super rationalist Harry Potter who discusses why one of his most important tools is noticing when he's confused.

"I have a feeling," Harry said finally, "that we're coming at this from the wrong angle. There's a tale I once heard about some students who came into a physics class, and the teacher showed them a large metal plate near a fire. She ordered them to feel the metal plate, and they felt that the metal nearer the fire was cooler, and the metal further away was warmer. And she said, write down your guess for why this happens. So some students wrote down 'because of how the metal conducts heat', and some students wrote down 'because of how the air moves', and no one said 'this just seems impossible', and the real answer was that before the students came into the room, the teacher turned the plate around."

"Interesting," said Professor Quirrell. "That does sound similar. Is there a moral?"

"That your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality," said Harry. "If you're equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge. The students thought they could use words like 'because of heat conduction' to explain anything, even a metal plate being cooler on the side nearer the fire. So they didn't notice how confused they were, and that meant they couldn't be more confused by falsehood than by truth. If you tell me that [insert details of a situation Quirrel told Harry], I still have the feeling of something being not quite right. I notice that I'm still confused even after hearing your explanation."
--Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality chapter 26

Go on. Laugh at me for quoting a rationalist fanfiction of a witch and wizarding world while reading a book about how to tell demons to bug off.

Pure rationalism aside, open-minded experimentation combined with noticing when something seems weird or came out of nowhere is amazing. What follows is a partial list of things I told to go away IF it was the enemy, and what went away.

Self-righteous thoughts/critiquing a person in the room > The thoughts left, a tiredness and mental fog I hadn't noticed lifted off, my thoughts became sharp and clear.
Mild beginnings of a headache > Headache gone, exhaustion reduced to minor levels of tired.
For over a week I'd woken up at least every hour each night on the road > February 17th I woke up once, told it to go away, and after that was my first night of unbroken sleep on the whole trip.
During a conversation, got a heavy emotional trigger over old pain, spiraling to a downswing > When I could get alone and away from the conversation to pray, it lifted and I felt light again. There was no downswing.
One night I had a mental image of coming home to Sergey, exhausted and beaten down by this long stressful trip. I thought, "No, I don't agree with that, why would I agree to come home like that?" And immediately I knew, it was because I wanted the extra sympathy, and that I also am guilty of doing this sort of thing sometimes. I thought, "I don't want to be that person. I don't want to be like that. No!" > It stopped.
Hotel-room neighbors were carrying on in what sounded like a bachelorette party, being very loud and giggly well after midnight. On a hunch, I quietly told the enemy to stop > Volume level next door dropped within a minute. Then every time someone tried to get giggly again, another girl shushed her.
First day back home, at the gym, my foot started hurting as soon as I stepped onto the elliptical > I switched to worship music and told the enemy to go, and my foot stopped hurting.
Neck tension > gone
Surges of anxiety > gone
Various mild headaches > gone

I recorded every instance for a few days, but the minor ones got rather numerous, so I have stopped. Suffice it to say, when I got home to Sergey I shoved the book in his face and said, "We're dropping everything else, we need to read this book together now."

Of course, there's a fail list, too. One night I told the enemy to go away when I woke up, but I kept waking up all night again. One time I overheard my husband taking part in an intense family conversation that sounded like it was taking an emotional toll on him, and I was praying against enemy interference like mad... and it turns out that speaking in Russian just be like that and nothing was wrong. Sometimes my tiredness is just tiredness. Sometimes I can't focus because my brain be like that.

But here's the thing, up there, that's a list of all the minor things that went away, telling the enemy off has been working about 90% of the time. I haven't even gotten to the three big deal PERMANENT effects, which are:

The gorilla in my head. If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you know I have issues with a rather loud and intrusive set of thoughts that scream about how worthless I am/my writing is/how stupid I am. You may even have seen me compare it to the scene in the newest Tarzan movie where a gorilla slams Tarzan around like a ragdoll, because that's what it feels like in my head.

That gorilla got tossed out. I don't have to put up with it anymore. Now when I tell it to go, it goes. I don't mean it shuts up, it leaves. It tries to come back from time to time, but it has no power over me anymore.
Lavender. A while back I talked about getting off caffeine and taking lavender pills to help with my anxiety. A good external measure of its effectiveness has been that before the lavender, I was having long conversations every night with Sergey about The Anxiety Of The Day. After the lavender, we started having much more normal conversations that did NOT center on me. It was amazing. And every time I tried to stop taking lavender, the anxious conversation or pre-sleep anxiety came back, so my new calm had a clearly established connected to the lavender.

But as I read this book, I started to wonder... so I did an experiment. I stopped taking lavender again and braced to tell the anxiety off. At first, it didn't work. I told the anxiety off, but I started doing my anxious-talk-at-Sergey thing again. But this time, Sergey prayed over me... and the anxiety left so hard I went all jellybones. Then, he turned around and asked me to pray over a specific anxiety of his, so I did, and he said THAT left with a feeling like there was a hole where it had been. So it turns out, sometimes you can tell the enemy off of yourself, but if you are married, some things fall under the authority married couples have over each other and need THAT kind of prayer.

Neither of those anxieties have come back for us. It's been about three weeks since I've had lavender.
I don't feel helpless. This one is more like the logical outcome of everything else I've told you here. My parents are in ministry and have been since I was one year old. I'm no stranger to the weird things that happen and spiritual attacks. In fact there's a known phenomenon in my family that when Mom is going to go do A Tour of Roses overseas, weird shit goes down more than usual and it hits everyone in our nuclear family. We call it Collateral Damage or Spiritual Splash Damage. We back her and believe it she's doing what God has called her to, but it is always rough and I have always felt helpless to do anything about it.

Suddenly I feel like someone handed me a machine gun and outfitted me in full kevlar. I don't have it all worked out and my experimentation is going to be messy, but I'm no longer helpless when this crap comes my way and that is a level of feeling free and even bold that I've never had in my life.

I haven't even finished the book myself. Repeat, I HAVEN'T EVEN FINISHED THE BOOK MYSELF. Even so, I jumped onto my Youtube channel and started reading it there to my 1400 followers who probably think I've departed reality just a touch this time and gone all Fundie. But, I mean... if a book peeled back a few layers of reality and broke a bunch of chains that were holding you back, wouldn't you???

Here's the thing. I can't claim to agree with 100% of what he says so far, but the things I take issue with are, I think, minor quibbles compared to the benefit I've already gotten. If you have the chance, I cannot recommend this book enough. Even if there are parts that turn you off, even if parts directly offend you, if you can get anything useful from this book--ANYTHING--it is worthwhile.

I say "read it" but even as I do I wonder if it works that way. I can see so many ways that I was set up to be ready to read this book and how long it took me to get to this point. By the time I read this book I had to

Be ready to read and absorb non-fiction (which I wasn't for most of my life)
Have already faced the root of many issues in my life which, in turn, weakened the grip of the demons that had a hook in me
Be mentally flexible enough to not be offended by any bits of the book I don't agree with
Have someone else in my life who is working through the concepts of this book with me so I actually don't go off the deep end AND to compare notes with so I don't think I'm crazy (both my husband and my Mom)
Be at a point in my life when I'm willing to experiment and fail
Realize that keeping myself ignorant doesn't protect me from anything

And so I wonder whether shoving it in everyone's faces is a good thing or whether I'm trying to force something before a person is ready... and then I have to release it because I can't know that. I can't know, and all I can do is tell you that reading this book has helped me get free of things I thought it would take another two decades of intense psychological wrestling with to be free of--minimum--and leave it at that. And continue reading it on my Youtube channel, making it a touch more accessible to people.

And I look at areas where I'm not free yet, where it's going to take more work because the issue is entrenched a whole lot deeper. Things I'm not even totally ready to let go of, yet. Things like, for example, my compulsion to yank out my hair and pick at any part of my skin that isn't smooth.

Several years ago, God promised me that I would someday be free of fear. In this last month, He has guided me into a massive leap forward toward that promise.

I can't wait for Him to show me how to be free of the rest of this junk.

I'm only on chapter 6 and this is already a life-changing ride. Buckle up.