This Weeks Stories From Pastor Baz (25/09/09)

Forward from Bryony: Here are some experiences had by Pastor Baz. These stories remind me to listen to the following verse from the bible:
Deutoronomy 18 v 9-14 “When you enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, be very careful not to imitate the detestable customs of the nations living there. 10 For example, never sacrifice your son or daughter as a burnt offering.[a] And do not let your people practice fortune-telling, or use sorcery, or interpret omens, or engage in witchcraft, 11 or cast spells, or function as mediums or psychics, or call forth the spirits of the dead. 12 Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord. It is because the other nations have done these detestable things that the Lord your God will drive them out ahead of you. 13 But you must be blameless before the Lord your God. 14 The nations you are about to displace consult sorcerers and fortune-tellers, but the Lord your God forbids you to do such things.”

2 Corinthians 11:14
14And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.

Here's Baz's stories...

THE HOUSE AT RICHMOND NSW AUSTRALIA
The old house that we lived in at Richmond in 1978 was pretty scary for a little kid. It was two stories, with high ceilings and a ‘secret chamber’, that I worked out was just an attic door. At night, it would creak and moan in between an incredible silent lulls in the darkness, only broken by the haze of a distant streetlight and the roar of a car up Windsor Street every couple of minutes.

One night I was asleep upstairs. I was woken up by a sensation and when I turned over I saw something I will never forget. To this day I am unsure if it was Angel or demon. It was around 8 feet tall, bright white with it’s robes blowing around it, faceless and menacing. I was terrified. Every time I recoiled from it in my bed, a hand reached out from it and pointed at me, but the apparition did not make a sound. The strangest thing was that even though my brother was in a bunk above me and my mum was in the next room, my screams did not wake them, yet I was completely awake and not dreaming. It was as if the air had become viscous and incapable of carrying sound. This went on for about five minutes before I basically passed out. The next morning, I told the story and was chastised for having a bad dream. I have never questioned the reality of this encounter.


THE WALL AND THE DARKNESS
At about the same time, my grandfather became heavily involved in the spiritualist church. Every week, the ‘congregation’ would gather inside a ‘circle of protection’ in a hall in Campbelltown and communicate with the ‘dead’. Grandad had been reading a lot of books in his search for knowledge and spirituality and this is where he had ended up in the late 1970’s. As he became more involved, he specialized in helping the ‘departed’ move on through a series of ‘exorcisms’ and ceremonies.

I found this incredibly interesting until one day Grandad played a tape of the exorcism to a group of us kids. One of my cousins had to have counseling for months afterwards and even today I can hear the sound of evil manifesting on cellophane tape, a sound unlike anything I had ever heard until I was exposed to Christian deliverance ministry. Next time I went to my grandparents, I avoided the music room unless I heard the familiar scratched sounds of one of granddads favourite post war records doing laps around the turn table.

My grandmother relayed the following story to me when I was about thirteen years old. I didn’t want to sleep for a week.

One night, my grandfather kissed grandma good night, walked out into the blackness of the Menangle night, got into his old Vauxhall and drove the five hundred metres down the dirt track from the old farmhouse to the front gate that met the highway. He was off to a night at the spiritualist Church.
Grandma was used to being left alone on these nights and although the closest neighbours house lights were hundreds of metres away over paddock and barbed wire fences, she did not feel ill at ease.

As she read herself to sleep, her eyes became heavy and she lay her head back on her pillow. Above her she noticed a black form on the wall. She thought it was a shadow, until it reached out from the wall, put it’s inky black hands around her throat and began to tighten it’s grip. She was gasping for air, and with a mind full of fear did the only thing she could think of!!

“I screamed out ‘in the name of Jesus leave me alone’” Grandma told me, while I clenched my cup of tea in my now sweaty teenage hand “And it just disappeared. It never came back again. But I know where it came from. It came home with your grandfather from the church he was involved in”.

Not long afterwards I was going on a long drive to a camping ground with my mum. I asked her if these sorts of things were real.

“When we were about sixteen” mum answered “We were playing with a Ouija board. A whole group of us. It was pretty harmless until we asked it a couple of serious questions. The glass on the board spun around and around by itself until it flung itself off the board, against the wall and smashed. It scared me so much we never played with anything like it again”.

Make that two weeks I didn’t want to sleep for.