Continued from Friday...

Two weeks later she called to say that she was experiencing more blackouts. I told her to come and see me right away.

Twenty minutes later her friend yelled for me from the top of the stairs leading to the center. Jane began to experience a demonic manifestation halfway up the stairs. When I got down to her, she was leaning against the wall, stiff and motionless. I managed to get her up another ten steps, but as soon as she turned the corner, she ran ahead and threw herself headlong over the balcony.

I automatically ran after her, grabbed her and screamed for help. Two friends who were in the center rushed to assist me. I held Jane by her legs, while the rest of her dangled over the twenty-foot drop to the floor below. I knew that I had her life in my hands! I don’t know how I hung on, as her body weight was over the point of balance, and with everything she had, she was trying to fall. We managed to pull her back and carried her to my office.

As soon as we began to pray, Jane grasped her fairy necklace. She held it so tight that the blood drained out of her knuckles. It took me about thirty seconds to loosen it from her hand. I walked across to the other side of the office to an eight-inch-long piece of railway track that sat on my desk (at that time I was still making a few leather jackets for people, and I used the metal as a base to hammer domes onto jackets).

Jane was in a blackout state behind me. Two people stood between her and me. I had my back to her, so there was no way she could see what I was doing. I took the ornament and smashed it with a hammer. God is my witness -- the second the hammer hit the necklace, the demons in her screamed. I hit it five times, and each instant the hammer came down upon it, the spirits in her screamed in terror. It was like something out of a horror movie! I picked the pieces up and threw them out the window to the ground five stories below.

Over the next few hours twelve spirits named themselves and came out of her. The first one to leave called itself "Joseph Smith." Jane apparently had contact with Mormonism, and had even been baptized by them. The other spirits named themselves as Mocking, Lying, Deceit, Schizophrenia, False Tongues, Music, Affliction, Soal, Marinda, Strength, and Lucifer (which I would think was a lying spirit). The two that had the greatest stronghold were Strength and Marinda. I commanded, "Marinda, what is your function -- what do you do?"

"I cause blackouts!" Jane had been having blackouts since her early teens.

During this time, Jane writhed across the floor, screaming, groaning, and choking. The spirits tried constantly to afflict her. On three occasions she grabbed lamp cords and tried to strangle herself. It took all the strength of four of us to hold her down.

She kept hitting her head against the wall or the floor, and she would pull her hands free and attempt to gouge her eyes out (I heard of one young man who actually did so recently, while being held in a police cell).

At one stage I noticed that she, in a total blackout state, put her hand down her blouse, pulled a safety pin off her clothing and with incredible dexterity undid it with two fingers and attempted to swallow it.

As I ripped it from her fingers the spirit said, "I’m going to kill..." I replied that it couldn’t harm us because we were Christians. It spat out, "Not you. Her!"

Jane lay in the corner in a blacked out state. Every time we prayed she would scream, and Strength would reveal itself by making her very strong. We found that if we named the spirit and commanded it to relax, it would obey our command. (Jesus said, "Do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names are written in heaven"-Luke 10:20, emphasis added.)

For no apparent reason she began sucking her thumb like a baby. So I said, "Jane, I want you to answer, not Marinda. Marinda, you must stay relaxed-you must obey! Jane, tell me what happened to you when you were a baby."

She writhed in anguish. "They’re taking me away from my mother. No, no!"

Jane, who was adopted, then spoke in a clear voice about her scarred childhood. She told us of her father who didn’t love her. She talked about a séance at school, in which a spirit was manifest who said that Jane’s friend would die in a car accident. The girl, aged twelve, was terrified. She became afraid to even get into a car. She was killed at the age of fourteen, when one struck her as she stood on the sidewalk. This left Jane completely filled with fear.

I always believed that hypnotism was delving into the spirit realm, but something happened during this time to confirm that fact. Even the snap of my fingers (as done by hypnotists) could either put her under or take her out of a blackout state.

She then spoke of different pains that she had suffered throughout her youth, including the physical pain of an ear operation. I asked her what significance her fairy necklace had. She said that it gave her a feeling of power over people, saying that as she held it, it caused her to "freak out."

I asked her about the card that she sent me. I said, "The Scripture reference that you gave me, in Psalm 58..."

Jane interrupted, "Not Psalm 58-Psalm 56:9."

We turned to it and read it aloud, "When I cry out to You, then my enemies will turn back; this I know, because God is for me."

The moment that Scripture was read, Marinda manifested with Jane screaming in terror. It became clear that Marinda and all her works needed to be renounced and turned from, by a conscious act of Jane’s will. Jane then verbally renounced Marinda and everything associated with the demonic realm, and freely confessed that Jesus Christ came in the flesh (see 1 John 4:2,3).

The next day Jane came into the center and said she was totally set free -- and this time she was. Although she was bruised, she didn’t remember a thing after reaching that halfway point on the stairs.

From, Out of the Comfort Zone (Bridge Logos Publishers).