Today I slipped backward fifteen years, and I'm not quite sure how it happened. I remember I needed to be alone and wasn't getting what I needed; I was followed around from room to room and poked and pestered until I finally fled to a bedroom and locked the door behind me. I was pissed.
It felt as though I had been drained of all my strength and the only thing I could do was lie in bed. The spirit of anger overtook me and I remember having thought that if I got interrupted one more damn time I was going to leave and head for a hotel room somewhere. Anger began to give way to sleep, and that's when it came.
Lying on the border between sleep and wakefulness, my five senses giving me very clear readings of the room around me as I struggled fully to wake; proprioception entirely intact but physically paralyzed and unable to move; my breathing slowed until I felt faint and my ears started to ring and my head felt full of fuzz closing in from either side as if I were going to pass out, and then the wave, that wave where the choice comes to give in to the enemy; it would come, I would actively catch it and give myself over to be a tool for the enemy, and the sensation of tilting backwards and rising, rising, in a silent scream of simultaneous agony and victory as I led a legion of hell.
This paralysis-faintness-falling event kept recurring and must have come about ten times over me, each time a little different. Once or twice, I fought the paralysis before the faintness started, trying as hard as I could to just open my eyes, hoping that if I could catch a glimpse of the world outside my mind it could help me be drawn back into being awake; one time I went fairly systematically over all the muscle groups, trying to move them, and all efforts failed except that I could get my tongue to move slightly forward and touch my teeth, and I could move my eyes in their sockets though not open them.
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame.
(Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
just rose to the surface, and it does feel rather apposite.
After the paralysis-faintness-falling and the wave, each time I would fall into a light dream of sleep before resurfacing for another round. Once I dreamed I was falling from a great height; another time I began to have a recurring nightmare (and, as I was aware I was sinking into that dream, I remember thinking oh brother, not this one again); but most of the time, the dreams were simple fulfillment of sexual and sensual desires.
Wave after wave, I gave over; the enemy had put me in a high-ranking place in his armies -- as I say, I commanded a legion -- and during one wave I was actually laughing in pure, triumphant evil as I lay there paralyzed; it was a laugh that was failing to escape my lips, not a scream, amidst the fluttering of hundreds of dark wings of my compatriots as we launched upward into the air.
I kept asking why is this happening; this hasn't happened for fifteen bloody years. What changed that it's now being unleashed again? I thought I was way past this part. When these used to happen so long ago, they were timed in such a way that I began to think of them as flashbacks from some horrible experiences I had. But back then, I was afraid to give in to the wave of evil rising; I turned back at the last second every time but once out of a hundred of these that must have come over me during those years.
In more recent years, my mentoring friend used to tell me that God had written me a specific destiny and that the enemy's efforts (and sometimes successes) to win my will were a testament to what a powerful tool for God's work I would become. Of course, as this stoked my ego, I readily believed and headed into reading the Bible and praying with confidence. I was stupid. Oh, so stupid.
Because then, something like this happens. Nothing so dramatic until now. I suppose that, as I was beginning seriously to walk in the Christian way again, the enemy needed to reach out and just show me what I was missing; fill a void of despair with power, pleasure, and demonic form; show me how good it could feel again.
Now, though I'm certainly awake, a very large section of my mind is silently shaking, rocking back and forth, and with every breath seems to come the threat, far away but closing in, of being sucked back into one of these episodes.
I'm of two minds, though: I feel as though I should care, and it's quite annoying.
To whomever can pray for me: please do.
To whomever re-planted this blasted thing in me: you're winning, for the nonce. Felicitations. Go report to them and tell them I'm going to start fighting back again.
Damn; where did I leave my Bible?
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There was some confusion as to whether this post was more literal or more literary, so let me say that I've described here exactly what happened to me, in as much detail as I can remember. No metaphor, no analogy, no fiction, no literary dance. This. Actually. Happened. Physically and mentally. To me.
ReplyDeleteFunny, Larry Randolph, when speaking at the Conference at Bethel, used this exact word, backslidden, in one of his messages. Almost creepy. Who the heck uses this word, like, ever?
ReplyDeleteOh and Larry, I mean this in the most endearing terms, but you kinda blew your "redneck" cover when you pronounced and used the word eschatological correctly in a sentence without missing a beat. Twice.