Enough Rope To Hang Myself, Part 1 and Followup to Enough Rope To Hang Myself
Excerpt from Enough Rope To Hang Myself, Part 1
That was three and a half years ago.
I still can’t write her name here, my beloved dog, or even talk about her without getting choked up or outright crying. The apartment I found (another string of what ifs:, maybe for a Part 2)….
When I moved I tossed all my books, CDs, and DVDs regarding the new age and yoga and the Self. I didn’t burn them, but I didn’t sell them or give them away, either. Just threw them in the trash where they belong. I don’t dabble in even the slightest bit of it anymore, and continue to press toward the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.
Burn, Baby, Burn!
I neglected to mention in Part One (God hadn’t shown me yet where the verse was), that, in the New Testament, after hearing Paul’s preaching, many were saved and burned their books about worshiping other gods.
Acts 19:18 And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds. 19 Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. 20 So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.
That’s a lot of money up in smoke. Well, I can’t complain. My stash was worth a lot, but it didn’t add up to anything near 50,000 pieces of silver, even going by today’s inflation. It wasn’t easy, but those books on visualization, positive thinking, and all the rest had no place on my bookshelves anymore. The experience opened my eyes, realizing that 75% of my library was ungodly and I hadn’t even known it!
In this Part Two I’ll be brief. I won’t put you through the what-if thing again like in Part One. I just wanted to wrap up what I started in the first post on this subject. I hate loose ends, and since I said I might do a Part 2, I felt obliged to do just that. Besides, I didn’t want to leave you hanging with my being evicted and still in a grieving state.
A Hot Mess
Did I mention in Part One that the landlady who lived in a separate house on the premises with her husband was very heavily into yoga and meditation? She even had her husband build her a “meditation room” outside in the backyard. In fact one day, in just one of the multiple plumbing debacles I encountered there, the hot water line burst and filled the house with scalding water at least two inches high across the floor, and when I called them for help she was at “meditation practice”. (I find that interesting now, though at the time I was still oblivious about the place I’d called home for five years being filled with devils).
Thankfully, her husband was home and came to my rescue. Another of many bathroom emergencies was when the toilet backed up into the bathtub and sink; and the plumber who came to fix it was a nightmare on top of a nightmare with a snake machine that made more noise than a garbage truck. Let’s just say it was all over the walls, with me in my living room trying to complete my thesis to submit to university the next day in order to receive my master of fine arts degree in creative writing! Hey, just a slight distraction! No problem. (Yes, it was “the last minute”.)
What Else Is New?
And I know what most people would way: Look, everybody has plumbing problems, everybody gets mice and crickets and snakes, everybody has bizarre neighbors, everybody has mosquitoes and flies that stick to the wall and don’t leave their place for days, everybody has computers that go on in the middle of the night with screaming voices, everybody has radios in their car that go on by themselves, everybody has plants that suddenly die after years of being nurtured, everybody has experiences where they almost get killed, and then their dog dies, and everybody has this and everybody has that.
Sorry, but this essay covers only part of what went on; for me to cover everything that actually took place, I’d have to write a big, fat book! And I am not inclined to do that. I’m a believer of moving on, but I wanted to share this for the sake of anyone who might benefit from it. These demonic shenanigans went on daily (and nightly), not to mention my endless insomnia that went with it. It was pure chaos.
Anybody who’s been bludgeoned by evil spirits knows exactly what I’m talking about. Anybody who doesn’t believe in such things, well, I hope you never have to.
So, That’s Your Income?
It was difficult to find a place with rents being ridiculously high. After weeks (I had six in which to move) of one rejection (either mine or the apartment manager’s) after another of different places I looked at, I finally found a place.
One thing, a sure sign that God was helping me, was that the apartment I finally found which would accept me based on my low income (a couple of years before, I had quit a job for reasons of conscience – a story for another post, or not – and I looked terrible on paper) the apartment manager showed me both an upstairs and downstairs apartment, and said I could pick either one. An unexpected blessing!
Okay, Lady, What’s It Gonna Be?
Both apartments had their pros and cons, but I didn’t want to make a major project out of making the choice, and was almost wishing I didn’t have a choice. With so much going on in my head, it seemed impossible to decide.
Downstairs was a brand-new deck, which they were building while I was there. Fresh, clean wooden slats, really beautiful. Ground floor. Very nice.
Upstairs, there was no deck, but a big window looking out over trees and the parking lot of the next-door apartments.
Normally I would have picked the downstairs with the deck automatically. But after my recent experience of too many strange visits from crickets and mice and snakes at the other place, and wacko neighbors, being above ground with extra privacy looked good, too. (Sorry, I didn’t go into my “neighbors” at that house, and I won’t. Too bizarre and too much to cover. Let’s just say they would have been an inspiration to Rod Serling.)
So I went home excited, telling the manager I would take the downstairs apartment, only to call her back and say, “No, I’ll take the upstairs instead.” And then in the middle of the night I woke up and said, “Maybe I should take the downstairs after all.” When I was dizzy with this dilemma the manager called and asked me to come over and fill out more forms.
When I arrived, I was too embarrassed to admit that, though she now thought I was going to take the upstairs, I had decided to go back to the original choice of downstairs.
God’s Got This!
When I finally found the nerve to tell her, she said, “Oh sorry. Too late. I gave the downstairs to somebody else, since you called and said you wanted the upstairs.” I was disappointed but thought, God’s making this decision for me, like everything else. I’ll pray against snakes and demonic neighbors. But then she said, “But, you know, I have one other place which just came up that I didn’t know about when I spoke to you. Would you like to see it?”
I couldn’t help but smile, thinking God must be up to something. When we got there – it was upstairs – and when we went inside I knew it was perfect. Instead of the next-door apartment complex parking lot, it backed up to a creek which I hadn’t known was there, a beautiful lush, green canopy of maples and oaks and lots of ground foliage and no shortage of squirrels, birds, (and plenty of deer, I later learned, which like to stand right under my window and munch on the grass).
It was hard not to cry in front of this woman who I’m sure already thought I was a bit strange. Of course, I said, “I’ll take it!”
Escape from House on Haunted Hill
In the financial straits I was in, and with the rental situation in my area being what it was (and is), it would have never occurred to me to move, even with all the craziness, still unaware that the place was “haunted” by demons invited by myself and the female yoga master out back. Because, even as I was trashing my ungodly literature and such, I still didn’t know the house and grounds were a true ungodly stronghold. God protected me from that knowledge until I was on safe (to me, sacred) ground.
In retrospect, I can’t believe I lived there in such good humor, my usual self, every day trying to rise above whatever the last calamity that plagued me. That was God working in my life, even before I was saved, which He had done for years. Then He saved me, sacrificing my beloved pet in the process, bringing me suddenly to my knees spiritually and emotionally; a few years before, it was my sister who’d gone suddenly which sent me into a tailspin (which led me to quit my job–that other story). God gave me the boot by having me evicted (on my birthday–interesting touch), and to top it all off, He found the perfect place for me to live.
But the story’s not over. And Satan’s minions didn’t let go that easily. Stay tuned for Part 3 to hear the rest of the tale. As always, thanks for listening.
Enough Rope To Hang Myself, Part 1 and Followup to Enough Rope To Hang Myself
Where Is Your Faith? 