

## Standing on the Edge

### A fight for Freedom

### N. K. Wilson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright ©2016 by N. K. Wilson.

Published by N.K. Wilson Publishing Company.

All rights reserved.

Except otherwise stated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book should be reproduced, stored, distributed, edited, sold, photocopied, or repackaged in any form without prior written permission from the author or publisher. This eBook is licensed for your enjoyment and your enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re- sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

To the weak

Contents

Prologue

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Epilogue

About the Author

Prologue

When I first shared my written story with a friend, I was told I had a writing voice. The second thing I was told was not to change a thing but protect the story. A writing voice however does not necessarily come with spell check, good grammar, punctuation, and sentence construction. Some things have had to change.

In the process of sharing my manuscript with many people over the years, I have come to realize that the core story and personal expression of my world and reality remains true. To many, it may not be believable, and there has been some criticism or at least caution to my openness. For others, it's a welcomed relief to know they are not alone; and it has begun the process to set many free from their own _demons_. This story was written as I felt God would have me tell it. I have been ruthlessly honest about my deepest shame, as I believe this is often a hidden area in so many people's lives. Once we expose the things we believe we need to take to the grave, then we are set free in this life, and darkness thus has no place to hide.

I have chosen to share this adventure with you to encourage and help those who have found following God more of a challenge than they could ever have imagined. It has also been a welcomed help for counsellors and caregivers who live with friends and family members suffering from multiple addictions. For those who struggle with so much in life that others seem to take for granted, believe there is a place for you in God's heart. He has never forgotten you and He will not forsake you.

### Introduction

The Call

Now I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse. And he who sat on him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war. For He judges fairly and then goes to war. His eyes were like flames of fire, and on His head were many crowns. He had a name written that no one knew except Himself. He was clothed with a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word of God. And the armies in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, followed Him on white horses. Revelation 19:11-14.

When I read this verse, I felt a stirring in my Spirit and I began to pray for my position in heaven. I wanted to be in the Tribe of The Lion of Judah and I wanted to be one of the riders on white horses following Jesus. I asked God not only would I be riding with Him, but also be in front as the flag bearer who would let everyone know that the army of God was coming. I then wrote this prayer from my heart as I experienced God at that time:

I praise you because my heart has seen you,

It no longer matters,

The ways of the world or what happens,

I have had a revelation of the King of Kings.

Although my flesh bleeds and I am caught without breath,

I have seen you on a white horse and requested my place in the tribes of God.

Every day that is given to me, I can dedicate to you,

My spirit rejoices that there is no defeat in tomorrow,

Every day I am born anew.

Your love alone, my God and my King, is worthy of praise.

Over a year later, I was going through a period of waiting on God when the next revelation came. As I meditated, I pictured myself sitting comfortably on the floor like a little girl watching all the comings and goings of my Father's business. The throne room where I pictured myself sitting was busy with angels coming and going with their orders. I sensed God knew I was there and I continued to sit and watch. After some time, the room began to quiet down, talking stopped, and most of the angelic beings left. Then an angel came in with a white horse and gave it to Jesus. Jesus walked over to me and said, "If I give you this horse, will you ride with me?" Desperate to know God's plans for me, I said, "You know I will ride with you! But where do you want me to go and what do you want me to do for you?"

Jesus patiently replied, "My child, I want you to learn to ride first, I can't have you falling off every five minutes. This horse is your calling and it will carry you to where the Father wants you. Your job is to look after the horse. Praying will feed the horse and fasting will increase its speed."

I had no understanding at the time of what God meant by me learning to ride but have realized that falling off the horse meant falling into sin on my journey with God; the bigger the horse, the farther would be the fall.

A few months later, I was counseling a man who had suffered from depression for most of his adult life. One evening during this period, I felt the Lord urge me to pray for this man. Not knowing what I was supposed to pray for, I closed the door to my room, sat on the floor, and started to pray as I felt the Holy Spirit was leading me. As I continued in prayer, I began to get a series of pictures that showed me what was happening in the spirit world. I wrote the following shortly after the event, which captures everything I saw and sensed:

I wait in the throne room mounted on horseback. Another horse is given to me. I leave the throne room and ride as fast and as hard as I can with this horse released. I ride beside it, armed with sword and arrows. As I gallop beside this horse, I know my purpose is to protect it so it may reach its rider. The landscape changes, we begin to ride through a fiery abyss and the fury of hell is stirred; a black dragon rises from the flames, set to kill the stallion released from God. His command of demonic hordes released to discourage is stopped as God gives me the words to pray against discouragement. I reach the edge of the abyss—a towering cliff above the flames of hell—and stand. My master Jesus, the rider on the white horse with fire in His eyes, joins me. He shows me how to use the arrows given to me to maim the dragon. The horse is now free to find its rider, the man I was praying for. As I stand on the cliff with Jesus, I sense the battle is over; I look behind me and see a multitude of white horses and warriors who stand at the edge of the abyss and behind them the earth, suspended in space. Rising from the earth are millions of hearts—hearts being released to God, hearts destined for the New Jerusalem. This is the purpose of God's army.

I prayed for two hours and felt the battle was over by midnight. The following day, I found out that night my counselee had been drinking very heavily. However, it wasn't until our next session did I learn that he had a revelation from God the following day in a vision. He said he had felt the powerful presence of God and could see God smiling at him and he knew God loved him.

Three months later, I received a word and a picture from God while in a church service. I saw a white horse walking down the aisle and when it reached the front of the church, it turned to face the congregation. As I watched and waited, another horse came and then another and another, until there was a whole line of white horses facing the congregation. I felt a powerful presence of the Holy Spirit in me. The interpretation I received was, the horses represent a unique calling to ride with Jesus. Many have accepted Jesus into their hearts and they live righteously. Now, Jesus says to those who will hear, "Will you ride with me? Lay down your life and take what I have to offer. The harvest is ready but the workers are few." If this word touches your heart or you feel your spirit is responding, pray this simple prayer in your heart:

_Lord of the harvest, I want to follow you. I want my unique position in your army. If you will give me one of these horses, I will ride with you. You know my circumstances and my heart, come and show me your secrets; lead me and guide me. I don't want to accept anything less than your best for me. Your kingdom come, your will be done (Luke 10:11). Amen_.

If you choose this, you won't have to worry too much about how to ride a horse. All you will need to do is hang on for dear life; Jesus is on the lead horse. The call God has for you is already in existence, God has planned it—and it's waiting. Similar to a shelf company, somebody went to the trouble to form the company, you just have to go in and pick the name you like and pay for it. Yes, this is going to cost you _something_. Trust me; it will cost you _your_ life but you have no idea how precious your life is and just what it will buy for God's glory. Christ's life bought and paid for your sin, thus giving you the ability to walk into God's presence and have rule and dominion over the earth, to walk as kings as Christ did—kings who are to rule now and for Eternity, kings who hold onto nothing but have everything.

### Chapter One

A Troubled Start

Images of demons have been in my mind for as long as I can remember. These images would usually come as I was going to sleep. They were either evil, demonic wolf-type creatures or men who change into hideous creatures, snarling and intimidating. Every night, once the light was turned off, I would force myself to draw pictures in my mind to counter the flood of twisted faces. The landscape I chose to recreate was of a mushroom house with a garden path, a gate, fruit trees, flowers, and green fields. It took a while for me to learn the images could not hurt me and I didn't have to force them out of my mind. Although the pictures constantly changed, they were generally on the same theme, demonic faces, sometimes fields of mutilated bodies with rotting flesh and skeletons stretching for miles. Sleep brought release as I very seldom had nightmares. When I did, it was always the same one, black oil running from a pot into a metallic basin; I often found the smooth action hypnotic and terrifying.

Outside of these images was a physical desire that went beyond normal childhood sexual curiosity. It was a bunch of sexual fantasies of being abused by men in a manner that was too complex for a young child to imagine if they had not been exposed to sexual abuse or graphic sexual material of a ritualistic nature. Although I could feel lust in my little body, I had no understanding as a child of how it came or what I should do with it. Nor did I even think about it, I have since learned that children don't process information like adults. Desiring sexual stimulation is beyond most children of a certain age unless an adult or a more educated child (peer) has abused them.

I grew up in a small town that served the local farming community just outside the capital city. At the end of our street was a dust road leading to the local graveyard—a picturesque spot with beautiful Msasa trees overlooking a meadow. Often I would ride on my tricycle to the graveyard and sit there wondering what it would be like to be dead, not being able to think or feel anything. I wondered if I would be able to perceive non-existence and what it would be to exist in darkness.

At some point, my father told me about death. I was sitting on his knee and he told me we didn't really die but rather, we would go to a place called Heaven and there was a God who created us. I must have been about six or seven. I recall it clearly, because ever since that conversation, I wanted to meet God and speak to Him. I believed the only way to meet God was to die physically and I was so desperate to see Him I decided I would have to kill myself to make the journey. One afternoon when my mother was out shopping, I got a sharp kitchen knife and took it to my bedroom. Kneeling down in front of the mirror, I placed the point of the knife on my chest where I thought my heart was. I pushed very slowly at first and then tried a few quick dramatic jabs before I realized I would have to find a far less painful way to go about meeting this God.

Death continued to fascinate me from this point. I also had a highly developed and disturbed sense of emotional drama and would often ponder killing both my parents in their sleep. The reason? I loved them and wanted to protect them from the pain I believed I would cause them in the future. I remember reading a magazine article, when I was about eleven years old, about a little girl who had killed her parents and said she had done it because she loved them. I understood exactly how she felt. It was many years before I realized there was a different reason for this obsessive attraction to death.

Outside of my dark, internal world, I grew up in a safe and loving environment. I was a quiet but active child who lived in her own world. I must have been about five or six years old when I found out I was adopted. My brother and I were fighting with the girl from next door, as children do name calling and such. She triumphantly told us our parents were not our biological parents. I argued that this was not possible as I had photos of myself as a baby, after my brother confirmed what adoption meant. Somehow, the brat from next door had more information than we did— _my parents were not my parents._ Mum, who had beautiful auburn hair on their wedding day, dyed her hair blond to look like me, light blonde. My brother who was not my real brother was picked up from a hospital in Harare three years before me. No one had any more information than that. I can't remember my reaction but my brother said he remembered me crying.

In general, I was happy. The overriding feeling of those early years was light and safe. We had a quiet and beautiful home, a place where I was always proud to bring my friends. I remember my first day at school and some poor child crying desperately for his mother to return. I was quite content, my brother was in one of the classrooms nearby, and I knew I was safe with him. I used to sit outside on a bench under a tree reading my early reading books, and waiting for him to come out to walk me to lunch. Then I had to go to the girl's hostel for afternoon rest and sports. At five o'clock, we got on the bus that took us back to the town center ten kilometers away where we'd be picked up by my mum, or a driver from Dad's workplace, who would drop us at home.

I was never very popular at school or unpopular for that matter. I was a loner uninterested in large groups of friends and the politics therein. The dynamic was just too complicated for me, and I never understood the rules. I was happy with my own company and confident within myself to be alone. I spent equal time alone or with one or two friends. I remember doing strange things like making spells and organizing my friends to be positioned correctly so the spell would work. These were just games but I am aware now that I instigated them. Dyslexia kept me frustrated and uninterested in school. I could learn, and loved learning but I counted the teachers who could teach me on two fingers, and unfortunately, they were too few, too late and now I can count the number of 'O' levels I have on the same two fingers. Rules were quite firmly set by my parents, and I generally played happily within those boundaries. I had a safe childhood with no drama, deaths, or major losses. The first time I ever heard my parents fighting, I was fifteen years old. My mum ran an ordered, safe, and controlled environment. I later learned this was part of a survival mechanism she had learned as a child growing up with abusive, alcoholic parents. Life passed uneventfully for me as a little girl in a quiet, calm world devoid of any notable achievements on my part, but only a concertina file full of school reports stating, at worst, that I should try harder and, at best, that I was a polite member of the classroom.

It's only with hindsight that I can so clearly speak about the demonic images I saw in relation to my childhood. How I was able to separate them so clearly from my day-to-day reality and not let them affect me, I am not sure. Children mostly observe their surroundings and experiences; they don't necessarily need to make sense of them. We have a saying in counseling that children are very good observers but very poor interpreters. The same was true for me. I remember one occasion on which I had a vivid nightmare. I must have been about seven years old. In my dream, I was playing with some children in a playground climbing through a series of open-ended barrels. As I climbed through one of the barrels, I noticed there was an entanglement of thorns inside. These thorns seemed to come alive like tangled shards of electricity hovering in the air crackling. Frightened, I managed to pull myself out the barrel. As I was waking up looking at the ceiling, the body of electricity and thorns had followed me from my dream and now lay hovering above my bed. Terrified, I got out of my bed to go to my parents' room. Immediately, the shard of electricity moved to the door and became a sphere of vibrating strings at least a meter in diameter. I backed away from it and stood at the far corner of my little room. The sphere began to move towards me. Before it touched me, the light in the room flicked on, and the sphere vanished. My mum and dad were at the door asking me what was wrong; apparently, I had been screaming. The following afternoon when I came home from school, my mum asked me what I had seen. There was no way I could explain the dream or images, I told her I had seen a rat.

The journey I am about to take you on in this book may sound like fiction. Some may feel distant and unaffected. Some will read with interest, but may not be able to relate to the exact experiences. Some will feel a deep relief to know they are not alone.

### Chapter Two

Getting Lost

The dieting started between the ages of eleven and twelve, carefully guided by my mother, moving me from a little girl to a young woman. I learned how to control my eating. Totally unaware of my body, I dutifully obeyed my mother and tackled the 'no sugar, less quantity' food project with enthusiasm. A few months before turning thirteen at the beginning of my first senior year, everything seemed to happen at once. I transformed overnight physically from an unnoticed girl in piggy tails to an object of male desire. My long blonde hair was permed and styled. My clothes became a little more sophisticated and with the modeling course I attended, so did my behavior. I was fairly indifferent to the process but the attention I got was intoxicating. It didn't become obvious to me at the time but that intoxicating feeling was a sense of worth and acceptance, something I knew would not be there if I did not maintain this newfound look. Looking thin and attractive became my new all-consuming goal.

For my senior schooling, I became a boarder at a co-ed school. I was very aware of male attention and some sort of power I had over men. However, whatever confidence the senior boys gave me with their wolf whistles and double takes, the senior girls made sure it was knocked out of me behind closed doors. My natural inclination to keep to myself helped a lot and by my second year, I seemed to have fitted in, like any other person. I had a natural ability to blend in with the wallpaper. I was never outspoken but was never considered shy either. Academically, I always hovered in the bottom B classes. Sport, which is very important in Zimbabwe, I did well in. I joined the cross-country team when I came in fourth during first year run-offs. I never did well at any sport in junior school and now I was suddenly getting praise because it seemed everyone else was being ridiculously slow. This newfound source of attention kept me working and pushing myself as hard as I could physically.

Although constant exercising helped maintain my key goal, it wasn't enough and by the end of my first senior year, I had learned from one of the senior girls how to diet by making myself sick after eating. I became bulimic and within a few short months was unable to stop myself compulsively overeating and forcing myself to be sick. I kept promising myself that I would stop but once I had eaten, I just could not allow myself to keep the food down. I did, however, eat a lot so there was never any evidence of weight loss, and I maintained a healthy athlete's figure of fifty-six kilograms.

Therefore, in those first few months of high school, many changes were taking place that I was unprepared for mentally. Just as I had no idea how to handle changes that took place in the physical world, the dark inner world of mine that I experienced as a child shifted up a gear. Often at night, I would wake up totally alert in my mind but paralyzed physically. I felt a part of me lifting or floating. I was terrified as I sensed a spiritual detachment from my body that could result in death. I often dreamed repetitive dreams of dying violently and leaving a lifeless body on the ground as my spirit moved away from the earth, directed by some invisible force that I had no control over.

Once, the experience was so real I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck rise and my bed started to shake. Then I felt my spirit leave my body and begin moving incredibly quickly up into the night sky. There was a power that had complete control over me and where I was going. As my spirit gained speed to an unknown destination, I felt God ask me if I was ready to die. I knew I wasn't and was deeply afraid. I begged God to let me go back, and very quickly I found myself back in my bed. A month after that incident, I read this passage in the Bible and knew the same thing had happened to me:

Now a word was secretly brought to me, and my ear received a whisper of it.

In disquieting thoughts from the vision of the night. When sleep falls on men, Fear came from me trembling, which made all my bones shake.

Then a spirit passed before my face; it stood still, but I could not discern its appearance.

A form was before my eyes; there was silence;

I then heard a voice saying,

Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can a man be more pure than his Maker? Job 4:12-18.

Alongside reading the Bible, I also started to read about astral travel and other spiritual phenomena as I would often get the sensation of leaving my body soon after lights out. Anything on the subject of the occult fascinated me. Once I found a book on Black Magic in the school library and learned a lot about Satanism. I kept most of what was going on to myself. When I did try to speak about it, no one seemed to understand and I just assumed it was something I had to work out for myself. Some of my close friends who saw what I was reading would laugh at me and call me a witch. Neither they nor I had any idea of how close they were to the truth. As I read about spirits and past life experiences, I began to form a belief about how the spirit world worked; and because I had had a personal experience I found in the Bible, I also used the Bible to form my beliefs. I went to religious education classes, knew about Jesus, and always prayed. I also found I was quite influential in the private Christian meetings we would have at night when others went to sleep, and they could see now in hindsight that I was a natural leader.

At the age of fourteen, I fell in love with an attractive rugby player. He was a senior, and girls my age didn't date the senior boys. However, it wasn't long before he asked me out once he knew how I felt. I was head over heels in love, the way only a teenager pursuing their first love can be. I knew he was the one and I was going to marry him. I remember showing him the Bible and the things I was learning, but had no real knowledge of what I was supposed to be doing with it all. The deeper I got into the relationship with him, the more and more the pursuit of my spiritual ideas were pushed to one side. I had never had any sex education. He was _it_. I didn't believe for a second that anything we were doing physically was wrong. It just felt like the most perfect and amazing thing that had ever happened to me. It is difficult to contrast that feeling with how I felt when we actually made love for the first time a year later. I somehow moved from feeling intoxicated to feeling ruined. The feeling didn't last but then neither did we. It wasn't long after that he dumped me for another woman. I was devastated by the intense feelings of that rejection, and the events that followed began a cycle of depression that lasted over ten years.

At the age of fifteen, shortly after my break up with my boyfriend, I moved from boarding school to a school back home. I felt it might be the only way to really get over him. Looking back, I can see I was just running away from the pain of rejection. Unable to control how bad I felt, a new start looked like a solution to all my problems. Unfortunately, it just brought new ones. I have never been able to understand why this breakup affected me so badly. Everyone goes through the same thing and gets over it. For me, the pain was mental, emotional and physical—unrelenting and cruel. A mere geographical change just brought more to deal with.

Chapter Three

### Back Home

First, I missed being at boarding school with all my friends around me. Now I only had my parents to talk to. My brother worked for my dad for a while and then moved overseas. I was alone with a loving but uncommunicative father and a loving but highly controlling mother, something I hadn't noticed before. I knew she loved me but also felt I did not make the grade and really wasn't sure what the grade was. Our fundamental differences were that my mum's idea of a happy future for me was to marry a good and financially stable man, and I had no idea about the future. On changing schools, I came into my O' level preparation year. This is the time friends and acquaintances start to enquire what you want to do when you leave school, or at least what your interests may be. I felt I wanted to go to Bible College. I didn't really understand about Jesus but I knew I would learn all I could there and become a missionary. Neither of my parents could understand this choice, and they felt I should be able to do far better for myself. My other suggestion was to go to America and join the Police Academy. I think both options scared them half to death. Like all parents, they wanted the best for me and tried hard to steer me in a direction they felt would be the most suitable.

Unable to make my voice heard, with no idea how to follow my own desires, I just did what most people in my situation did: the next thing. The next thing that happens in the average teenager's life is meeting with your friends, dressing up, dating boyfriends, smoking cigarettes, and indulging in alcohol consumption (not necessarily in that order). If I were unable to control my destiny, at least I could fit into my present. Once again, making sure I fitted into my new school with the least amount of attention focused on me allowed me to focus on my key goal.

By this time, Bulimia had a firm grip on my life. Compulsively overeating helped numb the pain I felt and then forcing myself to be sick, and emptying my overstuffed stomach made me feel clean again. I felt guilty and fat after every time I ate; but purging usually took that feeling away. My overeating became a bad habit and the purging very quickly became an addictive habit. Within that year, I lost nine kilograms. I was very skinny but not anorexic in looks; and I never dropped below forty-six kilograms. I would not eat all day and then I would overeat at night, making myself sick after eating anything. This would usually happen twice or three times a night and during the day if I did eat. My parents were unaware of my behavior and I kept it well hidden. It was only when visiting old family friends that my bulimia was discovered.

My mother's friend had been a nurse and began to notice how often I went to the toilet after eating. She confronted me, and we both had to disclose it to my parents. My dad made it his mission to keep an eye on me, so he watched me closely and would follow me to the toilet and wait outside the door listening. As any bulimic knows, this is not a helpful behavior and all addicts will do anything to protect their addiction. I began going into our large garden with its many shrubs and bushes—and being sick there. I'd move spots and dig holes trying to keep our pet dogs away because they would just eat up the vomit after I left. If I were unable to leave the house, I would go into the spare room at the back of our house, and be sick into a plastic packet and then hide it until it was safe to dispose of the contents. Many people glamorize eating disorders but many women (and men) who suffer from them know just how ugly it can become.

Then there was the alcohol, a new addition, which began as a cure for tonsillitis. One winter morning, I was very sick with a very sore throat and depressed (as usual) and could not get myself up. My mum insisted I went to school and there was no persuading her otherwise (as usual). Before we were ready to leave for the bus, my father called me into the bar and gave me a tot of Scotch whisky to gargle with. My dad had an amazing belief in the healing qualities of alcohol as do a lot of doctors out there. "There you go," he said, "that will heal anything!" I gargled and swallowed. I don't remember my tonsils feeling better but I do remember the fiery liquid going down into my stomach and my whole body feeling warm as a result. I felt an ability to cope with that warm feeling that came over me that I had never felt before. My dad, in his innocence and desire to help, set off a trigger that had been waiting to be pulled. It would appear that I had some predisposition towards the effects of alcohol, and this helped me become addicted very quickly.

At a very young age, I had identified alcohol as being a substance that made you feel wonderfully happy. I don't remember feeling bad as a child so it just made me feel happier. My parents had always allowed us to have a glass of wine at the dinner table if we had guests, to introduce us to alcohol and moderation. However, I was always the first to ask for that glass of wine, and always the first to be told I wasn't allowed any more. At the age of thirteen, I drank too much at a Christmas party and ended up on my own, as a paralytic drunk on the beach, being violently sick. It took me three days to recover from that hangover. I swore, of course, that I would not drink alcohol again until the legal age of eighteen; a promise that didn't last very long. I believed I had learned my lesson and now I knew what alcohol could do I treated it with more respect. I tried hard to make sure I did not go over the limit, but did not always succeed.

Unbeknown to my parents, I began to have a scotch or two to help get me to school in the morning and a couple at night to help me unwind. I took Dad's words literally about scotch being able to heal and although I knew it couldn't heal the pain I was in, it did take the razor sharp edge off the depression and dull the constant ache in my chest. I often felt out of control, but alcohol and purging were the only ways I had to cope with my excessive emotional pain. Boyfriends were part of the pain management programme too; as long as there was someone interested that would hold me in his arms and make me feel desirable and loved, that would do. If I had had any belief in my value as a person and knowledge of my unique talents, I would not have allowed this to happen. But all I knew was the intoxicating feeling of being pursued; once that feeling wore off, I would be looking for the next fix. I fell into this well-known statement: men use love to get sex, and women use sex to get love. I had no idea how to separate the two.

Often my behavior was very difficult for my parents to understand. I fought constantly with my mother. I learned that shouting could push her away from me, so I shouted a lot. Whatever she tried to do to fix my pain only made me resent her more. I felt trapped and locked in a world no one could understand, not even me. I cried a lot, and in fits of rage, I would hit my head and hands against the wall until they bled. There wasn't an ounce of fat on me, yet I would stand in front of the mirror naked telling myself I was fat and ugly. Mostly I suffered in silence, working hard to conceal my secret addictions.

But there was some fun too in all this madness; the Madonna age of the eighties was my heyday. My friends and I spent hours putting peroxide in our already blonde hair, and then an equal amount of time doing hair treatments to counteract the damaging effects the chemicals had. We were rummaging through our mothers' cupboards, and digging out old gloves from the fifties that were in perfect pairs, only to have one discarded for the sake of fashion, then forever lost like socks. We smoked like troopers, shared information on the pill, and talked endlessly about our love lives. Maureen, one of my closest friends used to say, "Well maybe, just maybe, naughty girls need love, too." It was her motto, and we all thought it was terribly funny. We helped each other home if we had drunk too much and if some prospective boyfriend hadn't taken us home first. Although I couldn't speak for my friends, I'd say I was promiscuous, although I wouldn't have said so at the time. Slowly over the months and years, as my teen years wore on, there came more notches than there was belt.

### Chapter Four

Out there on my Own

At seventeen, I had moved to Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe and was attending a secretarial college. Away from home with newfound freedom, my addiction to food had nothing to hold it back. My Mum had allowed the option for me to have an account at the college canteen that they would pay at the end of every term. They served basic meals but mainly pies, pastries, chocolates, and chips. My bulimia had free uncontrolled access to food and no Dad following me around. When the college was closed, I used the shopping center, which was a short walking distance from the hostel where I stayed. After a few months of uncontrollable bingeing, I met with our schoolmistress and told her about my problem, and asked that she cancel my canteen account. Obviously, she had to inform my parents who took me to see a psychiatrist. I had one session with the person and chose not to return. I'm not sure why, I was looking and desperate for help. I was making myself sick up to nine times a day, and buying junk food was becoming an expensive habit. I knew I was out of control and could not stop. I began to focus more and more on exercise. I started going to the gym for two hours a day and worked very hard on a lean and muscular body.

My routine had changed a little since coming to the city. Now I got a lot of exercise, dancing late into the night at nightclubs. After my first boyfriend, there was never anyone I dated that had not been drinking when we met. All the people I associated with were relatively heavy drinkers. I lived in a girl's hostel in the city when I first moved there, which was similar to college accommodation. I was the only girl I knew who smuggled bottles of wine into my room so I could have a couple of drinks before going out. It was only years later in recovery that my roommate Tracey told me a few times that one of the girls had come to speak to her about my drinking habit, and that some of the girls were saying I overdid it sometimes when we went out. She, however, did not feel she had the right to confront me. My only criticism came from my brother. I believe he was aware of the bad reputation I was getting with the boys around town. Instead of listening to his advice, I destroyed our relationship. I could not see my self-destructive behavior nor did I care about the hurt or embarrassment I might have caused him among his friends. I just wanted someone to love me for who I was and not leave me or abuse me. It never occurred to me that if that was my goal, I was never going to achieve it by behaving the way I was.

Often I had attacks of paranoia and visions, which probably had a lot to do with the increase in alcohol abuse. I related these to my experiences with the spirit-world and chose not to worry about them as I knew they attacked only my mind, no matter how real and vivid they were. By the age of twenty-one, I was drinking daily and began to drink in the morning to help me cope with the hangover. The bulimia was not as bad as it had been in my late teens but I still used it after I had had a big meal, or sometimes over the weekend if I was alone and bingeing. Alcohol helped control food cravings and so I drank more than I ate, and the bulimia became less of a problem.

Between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-two, I worked as a sales representative. During this time, all I focused on was working around my drinking. I had one female friend who tolerated me because she felt sorry for me, and a flat mate who got annoyed with me for allowing my boyfriends to live in. My two best friends were drinking partners, both men. Everyone else I knew was getting on with life, settling down, and beginning to raise families. Inside me, I was desperate, lonely, and heartbroken. I was an attractive girl and able to win almost any man over. They enjoyed my body but they never stayed long and were not right for me or, better still, I was not right for them. One man I loved very much asked me to marry him but I laughed at him and gave him a 'couldn't care less' attitude. Somehow, I had reached the point when someone did want to love me and I loved him but I didn't know how to do it. All I knew was how to seduce men and play them, guarding myself at all costs against the pain of them leaving me, which often meant me leaving first. Alcohol made this pain almost bearable and allowed me to continue living that way, though I desperately wanted to die. I wrote dark poetry and drew disfigured portraits of myself. At times, I felt I was bordering on madness but managed to pull myself through. I would wake up the next day, have a drink, do my hair, makeup, and get through another day. By now, I was on Prozac and self-prescribed codeine to cope with the effects of alcohol and depression.

Although I was out of control in many aspects, I worked hard and achieved good results in my capacity as a sales representative. I handled myself well in business and came across as a confident young woman. Through some friends, I met a local businessman who knew of my father's business back home. We struck up a friendship, and he seemed interested in employing me. It began with him needing an escort for dinner dates and how a woman with the right training can manipulate a man's ego to her advantage or at least to the advantage of the man who had hired her. I showed interest so he went a step further. He explained how it all worked. I would have my own penthouse and could continue working on my own career. The more independent I was, the more attractive I would be. I would get to keep all gifts and live in comfort. The only thing my pimp required of me was information on this man and his business deals. I agreed to meet the man he wanted to set me up with. I had reached the point where I felt if I was going to be sleeping with men, I may as well get something out of it. I liked this idea as it put me in control for once. I was taught over the next few weeks how to conduct myself and what was expected. It was not long before a meeting was set up between a potential client and me. We had a drink together in a local hotel and got acquainted. He was eloquent and we were very much at ease in each other's company. I was instructed not to stay long, not even to finish my drink, just to give him a taste and then leave. A few days later, my pimp confirmed the client's interest and his desire to proceed with our friendship. Another meeting was set up. I don't know why to this day, but I chose not to go to this meeting and broke all contact with my friend and the client. He was very angry but I just insisted I had changed my mind. He did not pursue the matter and I never heard from him again. I learned many years later this man worked undercover for the government in the CID (Criminal Investigation Department) and had groomed other women. I assumed the men he wanted information on were currently under investigation.

Much of my memory between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five is very hazy. It took at least two years to reconstruct what I am telling you now. I could remember random events but could not tell you what sequence they happened in or what year. The most shameful confession I have is not that I was an alcoholic, bulimic or promiscuous—to the point of considering prostitution—but that I contracted a sexually transmitted disease. I was lucky it was curable and that I hadn't contracted the HIV virus. For some reason in our society, sexual promiscuity is accepted but sexually transmitted diseases are dirty and shameful. It is very hard to separate the two.

I do remember clearly the sense of being lost that I experienced at this time. Looking back, it seemed to me I literally fell from one circumstance to another. I did not to know how to navigate my life outside of moving towards something I knew would give me a little relief from the pain. I lacked so much confidence due to the effects of dyslexia, which can negatively affect an individual socially and academically. This was reinforced by the fact I was not encouraged to speak to adults as a child nor have an opinion of my own. Although I was still expected to have something to say for myself when in public, my mother became increasingly frustrated by my quietness. One day when she was venting her anger on the subject, I remember my dad who was as quiet as I was coming to my defence. I remember it clearly, because it did not happen very often and when he did, it was not always a successful rescue. However, that day, Mum backed off, while Dad dropped a nugget of gold into my heart. Deep down inside, no matter how withdrawn I was or whatever academic challenges I faced, my dad thought I was okay.

My actions were those of a child in very much an adult world. The combination of looking to be rescued by men and the use of alcohol to keep the pain of my choices from physically choking me led me further and further from the love I desperately needed.

### Chapter Five

The Dawn of a New Day

Life generally continued with the parties and the alcohol until I met Richard (not his real name), the man who was to become my husband. He was twenty-one years older than me, with three children from previous marriages, but neither of us considered that an issue. We met just before I turned twenty-three and were engaged two months later; I was to become his fifth wife. It was an intense relationship, and we were both head over heels in love. It wasn't long before I moved out of my flat to live with him. I never questioned him about his previous marriages. I was very aware I had had a disastrous past and was in no position to judge his. I wanted both of us to wipe the slate clean and move on with our own future.

Richard did not like me drinking during the day, so I began to hide what I was drinking from him. Often I would get drunk and this caused countless arguments between us, but no matter how bad things got, he was always there for me. Life was manageable for most of the time and with Richard's help, I formed a company and ran my own business from home. It was a perfect set up, as I was able to work my drinking around clients. I managed to juggle things well enough, for a couple of years but one of my biggest problems was mounting debts, which I hid and was too afraid to talk about.

At the age of twenty-five, I had been living with Richard for two years. Depression had reached its peak and a bottle of whisky a day was failing to fix me the way those couple of scotches could at the age of fifteen. Two weeks before we were to be married, arguments had begun among Richard, his three teenage girls and his ex-wife regarding my drinking habit. This led to a complete breakdown in communication, and the girls moved out permanently. Shortly after that, having been drunk one night, I decided to take my own life. I could no longer bear the pain and the loneliness I felt inside. Two months' supply of sleeping pills from my fiancé, I believed, would do the trick, with no room for mistakes. As I poured the pills into my hand, a very clear thought came into my mind. If Richard had not taken his pill that night, he would find an empty bottle and rush me to the hospital. I did not want it to be a suicide attempt. I wasn't looking for help. I wanted to die. I put the pills back in the bottle and decided to take them in the morning; I would be dead by the time he came home that evening.

I woke the next morning with the usual throbbing hangover but I was sober. I remembered the decision I had made the night before and thought about the pills. In the cold light of day, the full weight of how serious I was about killing myself the night before hit me. Did I really want to die? If Richard hadn't been there last night, I would have taken those pills. I'd be dead now. What occurred to me was the fact that I was very capable of taking my life drunk but now I was sober, I was rethinking my decision. Two things stood out in this decision-making process. One was heaven and hell, the other, reincarnation. If I did die now, I knew the chances of going to heaven were slim. I had been out of my body enough times to know that once you die, you no longer have a choice over where your soul goes. A force out there has direct control over you—your soul. The only real time we have for choice is here and now. However, if reincarnation was waiting for me, another life, another chance, I didn't want it. I had just got out of my teenage years and there was no way I was going to go back. The only thing I really wanted was to be old, the older the better. In my confused mind, the older I was, the further I would be from the pain. So I ruled out killing myself. It would not improve my situation. At that moment I realized if I did drink again I would once again have the courage to choose death. A sense of impending doom came over me. I had an instinctive knowledge that if I drank again, I would die. This put me between a rock and a hard place, as I could not get past ten o'clock in the morning without a drink. Most mornings began with neat whisky before coffee. How was I to stop? I knew it was impossible but now the alternative was death. Somehow, that sense of doom carried me sober for the following two days. During that time, I contacted Alcoholics Anonymous and met up with an elderly man by the name of Terry. He told me I was not a bad person but I was sick and alcoholism was a disease, and there was a way I could get well if I wanted to. It was a huge relief to know I was not totally helpless, or to blame, but it was my responsibility to take the tools offered by AA to change. I grabbed them with both hands.

Two weeks later, I was married. I looked at the wedding photos and saw a slim, young blonde girl in a white dress, all smiles. I was happy that day and very much in love with my husband. It's hard to believe how well I looked to the world and how devastated I was inside. I had learned to hide my depression and confusion about life so well.

My first year in AA was my first year of marriage. Although I had lived with Richard for two years, I had not been in a relationship ever without drinking. With the help of AA, I realized I had started using alcohol to cope with emotional problems at the age of fifteen and now at the age of twenty-five, I had the emotional capability of a fifteen year old. For the first time in my life, I had to face my emotions. Members of AA call the first year of recovery the roller-coaster year. My emotions were hugely excessive. I was told to do anything but drink. So I threw furniture pieces around the home, smashed my car door against a tree once in a rage, and at a time while returning from shopping, I threw one tin can into the house smashing a window in the process. Richard had to dodge the odd flying glass and escaped a plate throwing fit, physically unharmed. Alcohol had spent a long time keeping this rage suppressed and it took a long time for me to learn how to manage it myself.

My marriage, although difficult, offered a security and stability, which helped me to recover. Outside of my husband's own problems and abusive behavior, his support of my recovery and pride in what I was doing encouraged me; whatever our problems were, I loved him deeply.

As I painstakingly worked the Twelve Steps of AA, my life began to change, slowly, for the better. It took a few months for me to realize that my compulsive overeating and bulimia would kill me just as slowly and painfully as the alcohol, if I did not do something about it. I ended up going to the Harare Christian Counseling Centre, to an Eating Disorders Group, and began to learn why I had become bulimic. I had to look at my own issues and found I had to focus a lot on the relationship with my mum, which had never got any easier. I blamed her for so much of my pain for which she was not responsible. The more I concentrated on her past and looked at how she was brought up, the more I could understand why she was unable to help me when I needed her the most. My mum had been the eldest of four children; two brothers and one sister who was the youngest. One brother died in a hunting accident leaving questions as to whether it had been an accident or teenage suicide. As the eldest, she appeared to have taken the brunt of extremely controlling parents, who argued and drank a lot. She was very reluctant to talk about these things, but hearing only a couple of her painful childhood stories defused my anger and judgment of her immediately. This gave me the ability forgive her and even admire her for creating such a beautiful and safe environment for me to grow up. I could see we were both just children trying to cope with a world that gave us very little pleasure and a lot of pain. We were angry at each other for not giving the love we both desperately needed from each other. The pain of her disappointment and mine was fueling unforgiveness in me.

As children, we all have parents or an authority figure to protect and love us for a while. However, that protection and love will always be tainted by their experiences and hurts received while they were as children, too. I have learned that we all grow up and do our best, but our best is generally not enough for another human. We need our best, their best and God's best to balance all the faults. Even with extreme abuse and hatred, the only way to heal a broken family is through forgiveness.

The first three steps of the Twelve-Step program of AA were simple. One, admit you are out of control. Two, begin to understand a power greater than you could restore you to sanity; and three, make a decision to turn your life and will over to the care of God, as you understand Him. I had already struck a bargain with God after my first AA meeting, though I had no idea who He was. I had walked out into the garden that day and said to God, "Okay, here's the deal. I won't put a bottle to my mouth and drink, I am responsible for that, but you have to take care of my mind because I am crazy." I kept my side of the bargain and God must have agreed because He held me together with all the insanity going on in my mind. Slowly, but surely, all my old ideas and theories of God began to come back and I began the process of trying to find God and sort out what I truly believed.
Chapter Six

### Calm before the Storm

I met a man in my late teens who, with hindsight, was a key influence on my spiritual development. Tom (not his real name) was training to be a hunter and worked in the Zambezi Valley. We met in a Harare nightclub and ended up talking until the early hours of the morning. He was the first man I had ever met who understood about the spirit realm. As a Catholic, he introduced me to the church he went to. Needless to say, our relationship did not last long but his relationship with God had a profound impact on me. Over a two-year period, I would often go and visit the two priests who lived in a house next to the church. I talked often with one of the girls who offered help at the church crèche. I remember her being so in love with God. It was wonderful just to watch her face shine as she talked of this person Jesus and all He meant to her. Obviously, I didn't get it but it was great to watch all the same and listen to all the explanations of why God this and why God that. I did not know if I agreed with what they said but I liked to visit and they were always welcoming and had time for a chat.

At the age of twenty-one during one of my visits to the Church, I was invited to do a one-week Saint Ignatius of Loyola retreat to learn more about the faith. I agreed and made plans to take the time off work. The retreat consisted of one week of teachings, time of reflection and prayer. It was a silent retreat with time being given to those that might desire to speak to the mentors when necessary. A bell rang to tell us when to get up, when to eat, when to pray, when to stop praying, and for lectures. I began to appreciate that bell and the structure and order that it brought to my otherwise boundary-less life. I accepted all the decrees of this particular branch of the Catholic Church and studied Catechism for a year. In time, I seriously considered joining an order for nuns in France.

Unfortunately, I still did not have control of my drinking. During the retreat, God had spoken to me quite clearly through a picture that I should give up drinking completely. In one of the teachings, we were told a story about a little boy who had a terminal disease. He was dying of cancer and could not come to terms with the fact he would have to leave his favorite Teddy Bear, Albert, behind. His mother asked him to try to let go of his teddy and give it to a poor child who had never had a teddy as dear and wonderful as Albert. It took a lot of thinking but the little boy did eventually decide to give Albert to someone who really needed him. A few days later, the little boy died and his spirit went to heaven. A lovely old man met him at the pearly white gates of heaven and as the gates were opened, the little boy saw a thousand teddies just like Albert with wings waiting for him. After telling the story, the priest asked us to go away and ask God what our 'Albert' was. We were given an hour for this meditation. I had a total blank for fifty-five minutes. In the last five minutes, I said, "God, is there really nothing you want me to give up?" Immediately, a bottle of wine with wings appeared in my mind.

I approached both the priests at separate times about this—playing one off against the other, a very common tactic for an addict. One agreed and the other disagreed. Naturally, I went with the one who advised me to drink in moderation despite the fact that this was not something I had been capable of doing in years. As a result, my disobedience to God kept me in and out of the confessional on a regular basis. It was in this context a year later that I met Richard through one of my old school friends. We would go to a pub near where they worked together and got to know each other over one too many Vodkas. He came to the Church with me on one occasion but said he would not have anything to do with it. He said he was impressed with my convictions and would never stand in the way of them. I had a choice to make. I went away for a weekend with a friend of mine to do some thinking and talking to God. Deep down inside, I did not feel Richard's love was wrong. I felt good and happy when I was with him and I chose to leave the Church. I knew I could not have both. Shortly after that, I moved in with him.

Often I would wake up in the middle of the night, feeling terrified that I would die and go to hell. Sometimes after drinking, I would wake in the night desperately thirsty. I would think of the Bible verse that says there will be no quenching of the tongue in hell, and once that judgment had been made there was no reversing it. I did not know how to fix or change my situation so I just kept going, numbing my feelings with more alcohol. During this time of deep spiritual fear, a friend of mine gave me a book on spiritual enlightenment, whose author put forward the idea that there was no hell, and began to introduce what I know today as the New Age Faith. I returned to my combined ideas of how the spiritual realm worked which I had formed as a teenager, and tried to find God through suggested esoteric meditations. I spent a year doing this, mostly using the Internet for information, and tried to contact like-minded people. A very broad and basic explanation of New Age mindedness is the belief that there is one God, who is light. We are all connected to this light, and to each other. By opening our minds to this idea through guided meditation and hypnosis and the inviting of spirit guides (higher evolved spirits than us that some believe are aliens) into our bodies, we can receive a personal transformation. This will lead us to heal others and ourselves physically and spiritually. By connecting to our higher self, which in effect is a spirit, we will be able to enlighten others and ourselves to the true state of the earth.

It made sense to me and ticked many of the spiritual boxes I had experienced. As I progressed very quickly into this faith, I found everyone had a different agenda, as no one person believed the same thing as the others. This was good as far as I could see. We should all be allowed to follow our beliefs but I could not understand how you could only be interested in auras, angels and the healing power of stones when you could have the ultimate enlightenment of ascension. The belief of ascension in this context is that you can literally ascend as Jesus Christ did in your physical body. I had always been an all or nothing person and considering all I ever wanted to do as a child was to meet God, this looked like the way forward. However, no one really knew what they were doing besides exchanging ideas and meditating.

Eventually, I got tired of asking spirit guides and people for directions to God. I had a deep sense that there really is only one truth and if that was the case, then the God who made me was perfectly capable of telling me what and who the truth was Himself. So I made a decision to ask God Himself to tell me. I would wake up early in the morning and take my dog for walks in a nearby park. I spoke to this God of creation every day asking Him to tell me who He was, and how I could get to Him.

It must have been at least two weeks before I got an answer. I had been going to the Harare Christian Counseling Centre to a weekly eating disorders group. That week, I borrowed a book which had caught my eye. It was called _Angels on Assignment_ , written by Roland Buck. I have a very strong belief in angels and wanted to know what Christians thought about them. The book literally explained God's plan for mankind through Jesus Christ and how the angels were the messengers and helpers for this plan. This was through the personal experience of a series of visitations by angels to Roland Buck. It was while reading this book I began to get a series of personal revelations. I felt as if scales or blinkers had been removed from my eyes and I could suddenly see into another world. It was like God had instantly downloaded information into my head, much like the science fiction film _The Matrix_. Similarly, God was giving me information in a way I had never received before.

I think I was most astounded by the reality that God was not in some mystical heaven looking down or channeled through some spirit guide or angel but that He resided in my heart and had always been there waiting for me. God was in me and knew every detail of my life. Over the next two days, I felt as though I was floating on a cloud and being crushed by a wave all at the same time. God actually spoke confirming the words I had been reading, "I am the God of the Jews, and Jesus is the Messiah." As God said this, I had instant understanding that the Bible had been preserved for those who wanted to seek God. Regardless of the arguments of who wrote what and who took out what, God Himself has preserved this book, as He required. God showed me the spiritual reality of how the word of God through the Bible breathes life into the soul of man. The last revelation was I could see God in my heart and feel His overwhelming love for me. I did not need to die to go to Him; He was in me and had always been with me.

It is very hard to explain a spiritual revelation. You can see and understand things instantaneously that you did not know existed before. It's like a thousand eureka moments all at once. For me, there is also a physical pressure of receiving information this way that was overwhelming. When God breaks through our ignorance, He shakes us to the very core, and the experience changes us forever. This revelation came one year after I had stopped drinking. I believe it was the combination of my desperation for God and the prayers of those who could see my spiritual struggle, that set me free to see the truth I so desperately desired.

After this experience, I asked God what I should be doing next. I felt God was asking me to stay at the counseling centre, which I did. After a lot of counseling myself and being discipled (taught about Jesus and how to read the Bible), I began the counseling training and over the next two years, I became a counselor. I also learned that I had an aptitude for teaching and found a great sense of security, significance, and self-worth in all that I did there. All the pain I had suffered now had a very strong purpose and greatly aided me as a teacher and a counselor. I specialized in helping people with eating disorders, alcoholism, and depression. For the first time in my life, I became useful and purpose filled, being capable of giving and receiving more than I ever dreamed possible. For four years, I grew stronger in myself and in the knowledge of God. I had a well-ordered and structured environment, which was due mostly to Richard's support.

I wish that this was where my story had a happy ending. However, it was not all roses. Richard suffered with his own issues and no amount of counseling seemed to help. The day came when my husband told me he no longer wanted me and by then, I was relieved to be set free. I am sorry to say that no previous experiences of rejection and pain at the hands of men had prepared me for the pain of divorce, and the bewildered and lost state I found myself in.

Chapter Seven

The Storm

Richard had supported me for three years in our marriage, and the divorce forced me to deal with the financial practicalities of getting through each month. This left me unable to do what I loved most: counseling and teaching. I once again formed a company and worked from a flat I rented. What I didn't realize at the time was that I had become deeply afraid. God warned me that Satan had asked to sift me as wheat, just as in the gospel story of Luke in the Bible. Jesus had forewarned Peter, before Peter denied Christ. In my immaturity, I told Satan to do his worst instead of asking God to protect me from being tempted or attacked. As a result, instead of growing stronger in the Lord, I grew weaker and reverted to the only survival mechanisms I had ever known—men and alcohol. I became involved in a relationship and ten months I later, started to drink again. So for the perceived love of this man, I lost my servant role in the church, my counseling role, four years of sobriety and worst of all, I lost my peace—the peace which came from having a close relationship with God. However, the Lord was faithful and never stopped wooing me back. Many months after starting my new business, I planned a trip to Mozambique to sell some of my products, mostly African jewelry. I ended up in a beautiful coastal town called Vilanculos where I decided to camp for a few days and see if any of the tourist shops were interested.

One morning I woke up early and after making a pot of coffee on my gas stove, I took a long walk along the deserted beach. As I walked along the water's edge in this strange new land soaking in the atmosphere, I was thrilled by the sense of adventure and excitement that stirred within. I was also aware in this otherwise perfect moment of my life that I had lost the peace of God's presence. I knew that whatever I did was worthless without God. In deep despondency, I fell to my knees and as they sank into the soft sand, I cried out to God. I will never forget the words He spoke to me that moment, clearly and directly, "My child, I have never stopped loving you and I will never leave you, but I cannot give you peace when you are living outside of my will for you."

It is not and has never been in God's character to give us less than what He knows is the best for us. At that moment, I realized there was no way I could live without my God in my life. When I returned from the trip, I gave my boyfriend an ultimatum. He could in no way give his life to the Lord so we parted. Once again, the pain of another failed relationship cut deep. Trusting that time would mend my broken heart, I began the process of trying to get my life back to the place it had been before I met this lover of mine.

Going back to church was the first step. It was good to be back, worshiping the Lord and feeling that indescribable peace return. Even though I felt shattered and ruined from all that had happened, I had the comfort of knowing I was back in God's will. I was happy to be home. I was angry at what I had done but God gave me words of comfort and encouragement not unlike those He gave to Peter. I had been as desperate to follow Jesus as Simon Peter was;

Peter replied, "Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will."

Jesus answered, "This very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times."

God reminded me that Satan had asked to sift me as wheat, and what my careless response was. Then He comforted me with the following verse:

" _But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers. (Luke 22:31-34)."_

I knew as God had a plan for Peter, so also He had a plan for me.

On returning to the church, I was received with a warm welcome and no judgment, although I assumed I would have to gain trust over time. I got involved again with the Counseling Center and Brenda, my friend and overseer, began to use me to teach a healing course called Journey to Wholeness in the church we attended. It was a fun and exciting time for me, and I was amazed at the grace of God allowing me to continue where I had left off. I was also very impressed with my own church; not all Christian families are as forgiving. I found I had an even deeper compassion for people, as I now truly understood the struggle a lot of single Christians have with the whole idea of dating or waiting for 'the right one' scene. I had a new depth in understanding the wounds and pain of the divorced and the rejection that is felt by some Christians on this subject, which I had experienced firsthand. I believe that the greater sin is not the actual separation or divorce but the judgment that comes from many Christians. All marriages can be saved if both parties are willing to work hard at saving what they have. On the other hand, unfortunately, some Christians make marriage the idol and worship the marriage, not God. Separation and divorce brings all sorts of issues to the surface and when individuals are going through this, they need all the help, compassion and understanding they can get.

I also learned how fear and stress can attack those who seem so stable and strong in God. We all have weak points in our lives and as humans, we can fall from any level. It is no different for Christians although there is often a higher level of expectation upon them. The greatest lesson I learnt was how trauma affects us on a deep spiritual level. Time and time again, I have seen strong Christians fall due to disappointment with God, often after the death of very close family member or a serious accident. Regardless of our personal beliefs, trauma shatters our world and weakens our defence. We need time to learn how to walk in a new world when our loved one is suddenly taken from us—by death. What I did not know was the spiritual consequences of my backsliding but I was about to find out.

Chapter Eight

Consequences

" _When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he says, "I will return to my house from which I came." And when he comes, he finds it swept and put in order. Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first."_

Matthew 12:43-45; Luke11:24-26

I only had one problem I didn't know how to deal with. Whenever I went to church and tried to pray, my throat would tighten up and I began to feel very angry. Sometimes, when I was praying, I would start to hiss and felt like spitting. The traumatic images of blood and violence of my younger years were now a constant mental reality mostly in church. Once when the whole church was in prayer, I could not stop the image of a knife pierced through my throat and the pulsating blood spilling everywhere. I had to go and stand outside before the image subsided. I kept quiet about this for a long time but could not shake the feeling that there was something inside me that should not be there. Eventually, feeling a little embarrassed, I contacted Sue Marland, a lady I knew had given many talks at the Harare Christian Counselling Centre on deliverance from evil spirits.

When I met Sue, I wasn't sure how much I should share about past experiences, for fear of rejection. I decided just to stick to some of the images and experiences over the last few weeks. It was hard to describe my relief when no matter what I said Sue did not stop me or even look puzzled. She was just attentive and was encouraging me to carry on as if I were explaining a relational problem to a friend. As a result, I grew more and more confident opening up and telling her more. Eventually, I got to the stage where I didn't think I was making much sense at all, all my experiences just poured out of me in a jumbled heap in front of her. The only thing I didn't tell her that day was the problems I had had with sexual images and lust as a little girl and how I still masturbated. Those things were just too shameful and embarrassing to talk about.

Sue explained that from what she had heard it sounded like I had a long history of occult involvement in my family. I shared with her that though my father was a Freemason, he had stopped going to meetings quite a few years before; and outside the odd fortuneteller and some superstitions, my mother lived in the real world. I also told her I had been adopted and was unaware of who my biological parents were. I explained how I had been involved in the occult and my fascination with the black arts as a teenager. I had tried to stop the weird spiritual experiences but had used eastern esoteric methods to connect with spirit guides and reach enlightenment during early sobriety. I had also visited fortunetellers from time to time in my life and had studied horoscopes. However, shortly after my revelation from God, I repented and asked God to forgive me for looking to other gods for answers, and I burned all the books I had in connection to this information.

I had learned about generational curses shortly before going to Sue and had done what I could to ask forgiveness on the behalf of my parents and ancestors for their rejection of the God who created them. During this repentance process for generational sins, I become very angry with God, saying how I was happy to take responsibility for my own sins but should not be paying for mistakes that were made generations before I was conceived or anything I had not chosen to do myself. God gently reminded me that Jesus had taken on the entire responsibility for the sin of the world and that not one single decision to curse God was His fault. I had chosen to be a follower of Christ. Would I follow Him by taking full responsibility for the sins of my parents and bloodlines, and stand before God and ask for forgiveness as Jesus had done? After God had explained this, I gladly accepted and stood for my whole family and began to pray for the family I had been adopted into and anyone connected to me by blood, even though I did not know who they were. I still pray for them and trust one day I will meet this lost family.

I asked Sue why God had not set me free after this process, I had asked for forgiveness and confessed every sin for others and myself. Why was I still in such bondage? Sue explained that when there has been occult activity, bondage can be particularly strong. I had been set free from all of this when I came into the full knowledge of God and my freedom was complete. However, I had then actively chosen to turn my back on God's warning (to turn away from youthful lust and to do the right thing) and had instead entered into a sexual relationship. I could understand where my promiscuity had deep roots but I had never been involved deeply in occult practices myself. Sue showed me how, if I had opened the spiritual door in my rebellion towards God with the full knowledge of who He was and what was right and wrong in His eyes, Satan now had permission to throw anything he had on me and my family at me. I had opened the doors of spiritual rebellion and now Satan and his followers were allowed to step through that door into my life at will.

I had known before that when you sleep with someone, you become _one flesh_ with him or her. Because humans are both flesh and spirit, that also means you become one spirit with them. If another man or woman's spirit has been involved in the occult and has a demonic force attached to it, it now has permission to attach itself to your spirit as you have chosen to become one with the person you are currently sleeping with. This process is often referred to as SOUL TIES. Demons move very easily from one person to another in a séance and that is why everyone sitting in the circle usually joins hands. They actively voice their desire to be used as channels for these dark beings. When you sleep with someone, you don't ask for demons but sex is a communicative language that Satan will use in our ignorance. The shrine prostitutes spoken of in the Old Testament kept nations enslaved to Satan in this way. I ignored this teaching, and God allowed Satan to take a legal foothold in my life. I would never have noticed this demonic attachment if I had not been trying to come back to God and if He had not allowed me to see and feel these things. By my praising and worshiping God, the demons were beginning to become very uncomfortable.

With all this information, the question was what to do next and did I really have a demon in me? Sue suggested we take authority over any being in me that stood against God, and cast it out. She said, with that approach, we usually learn very quickly if there is something there or not. I agreed and she began. The response was immediate, I felt myself stiffen as if I no longer had control over my body and a man's voice spoke out of me, "She is mine and I will kill her." Sue bound the demon in a command and asked what permission it had to stay. Making me lose control of my body, the demon thrashed my head back and forth, as if it were trying to get away, but Sue told the demon to be quiet and told me to look into her eyes. My neck stiffened as I looked at her and I did everything in my power not to spit in her face, as I knew the demon wanted to. The demon repeatedly said it had a right to me and would kill me before it left. Soon I relaxed and then began giggling in the voice of a little girl. I felt delighted and happy inside, and very sure of myself but knew at the same time it was not me acting out that way. I acted coy, shy, and bashful. Sue did not even need to ask this demon its name. "Seduction, I bind you in the name of Jesus, be quiet and stand aside." Immediately, the light feeling I had when the demon was speaking left me and I shut up. I realized then why becoming a master of seduction had been so easy for me. From then on, several demons rose claiming their right to me. Demons of suicide, murder, control, and lust were just a handful of what I remember.

One by one, Sue bound them and commanded them to come out. It was not a fun experience. The demons mostly seemed to come out from the pit of my stomach through my mouth. I vomited up large amounts white foam and coughed uncontrollably. All the time, my body was being thrashed about as I clung to the chair. At one point, I was forced to the floor and could not get up. I told Sue I felt I needed to read the Word of God aloud so she handed me an open Bible. My throat tightened up and I was struck dumb. It took a little while to force my voice out and when I did, it sounded like someone with a severe learning disability trying to read. Mentally, I was unable to connect with the words and physically read them. It took an enormous effort to say one word at a time. After two hours or so, I said I could no longer carry on and needed a rest. We had bound and were in the process of casting out demons of power, seduction, lust, witchcraft, suicide, and murder and a demon that had set itself to be my comforter. I learned through this experience that a lot of the feelings or emotions I felt were not always mine. I realized that a demon could attach itself to my emotional state and manipulate me. This works with feelings of happiness, comfort, joy and depression, fear, anxiety and anger. I could feel the demons inside me were able to use my intellect to gain attention to what they wanted, and the whole time I was unaware it wasn't really my idea; they don't call it manipulation for nothing. And like anyone else, when I realized I had been manipulated, I became very angry. Unless I had had this experience, I would never have known the power a demon can have on a person's subconscious.

I got a lot of information from these demons about my birth and biological parents but chose not to speak about it, as it is very hard to state facts when you are gathering information from the spirit realm in this way. Very often, the demons did not want to speak when questioned and it was as if they were being forced to talk against their will. Although much the information helped me understand some of my experiences in life, such as the demonic images, childhood sexual fantasies, sexual lust, and bloodlust, I can't claim to have all the answers. I have no way of being able to separate reality from fiction when it comes to my biological parents so I wait to confirm these revelations if God allows the full facts to be revealed. Mostly, it felt bizarre; it was the most fantastic experience of my life. It is one thing to believe in angels and demons, read the Biblical accounts of demon possession, and watch documentaries on spiritual phenomena; it is quite another thing going through it yourself. I remember being left feeling that I had just gone through something quite abnormal but undoubtedly real.

One experience of the release of emotions I thought were mine I can describe very clearly. Ever since I was a little girl, I have always been suicidal; I explained this in my opening chapter. The feeling had been constant throughout my youthful life; the desire to die had literally been with me for twenty-six years. After a demon of suicide had been cast out, I felt a total relief and lightness. I noticed the desire to die had left me, just gone. Something I believed was part of me was now no longer a part of me. A bit like having a third arm amputated, it should never have been there in the first place. Although I had to go back a few more times to Sue and endure a lot more uncomfortable sessions, this relief was immediate and gave me hope.

I was afraid now of these demons because I had experienced their physical power over me. Although Sue had bound and cast many out on that first day, there were still more that did not intend to let me go. This worried me, as all the stories in the Bible of demons being cast out looked fairly quick and painless. I went to bed that first night holding a copper statue of Jesus in my hand that had belonged to my mother's father.

I had no further trouble after that other than an overwhelming feeling of lust. With that, I often felt as if a demon was forcing me to do things I did not want to do. Learning to physically fight the demons was hard but I learned fairly quickly that I did have full control and was able to stop the demon if it tried to use my body. However, I often gave in to the lust and did not want to stop. I was always left with a terrible feeling of unsatisfied emptiness, but it was not long before the lust grew and grew until I could no longer or no longer wanted to fight it. It was so much easier in the days when I believed my body was mine to do with what I wanted. Now this was no longer the case, my body was a temple of the Holy Spirit.

What I did learn from this experience is once again how easy it is for demonic forces (inside or outside) to lead you to something. It's like falling in step with someone on a journey; you can fall in step with the Holy Spirit, or Satan will fall in step with you. This does not mean everyone you meet is demon possessed, but God taught me how I had been blind to knowing the difference. These experiences brought into full focus that there really are only two sides in the spirit realm.

After a few weeks, I stopped going to Sue as I could not handle all the physical and mental exhaustion and truly believed this problem could be dealt with in an easier way. I talked to her about this decision and told her who I was thinking of going to for help. She gave me her consent but still advised me against it. I went to a couple who taught inner healing. It was the first time I was to speak of my secret sin to a man and felt very apprehensive. However, I was desperate to be healed and gave the meeting up to God and promised Him I would be ruthlessly honest. As a result, I opened up my heart and spoke of my deepest shame, masturbation.

This turned out to be a significant lack of wisdom on my part. This Christian man and his wife rebuked me and told me to come back when I had stopped sinning if I really wanted help. They seemed to have no comprehension of the deep roots of behavior that can be in a person. I was devastated and unwilling to go back to Sue. In my anger, I told God He would have to deliver me Himself because I was never going to expose myself like that again. The whole time this was going on, I was still drinking on and off. I never went back to the heavy consistent drinking of my past but tried to control the cravings. The feeling was very similar to that of the lust. I would have a few drinks in private, get a little drunk, and then not need another drink for a week, or a month. But the feeling always came back and grew until I gave in, promising myself only one or two glasses of wine. It wasn't long before I was drinking Vodka straight out the bottle when the craving came. Doing a good job of convincing myself that since it was not every day I drank the thing, I was okay. I honestly believed I would stop for good every time I made the decision not to drink again.

It was another year before I attempted to broach the subject of the demons again. I knew I was not healed but lived dependent on God's mercy with my secret little sins. I was running my own business and doing quite well. I met a nice Christian man and we got engaged. Although we had a lot in common and had a lot of fun together, we argued about more than we agreed on and failed to complete the pre-marriage course because it caused us to fight so much. I was still very wounded from past relationships and though I tried hard to trust this man with my emotions, he constantly let me down. Through an old family friend of my fiancé, I was led to a married couple who were known to have a deliverance ministry. Joe and Nancy (not their real names) very kindly agreed to come to my home as they lived out of town and would visit after they had run their errands in the city. I was ready to do battle if they dared to judge me, but was still desperate to be healed. As we sat in my lounge and drank tea, I became fond of this couple very quickly. I explained that I was battling with habitual sin and wanted to know if I needed deliverance. They began to give me teachings on sin, which I had heard too many times before and I myself had taught to others in the same position. So I cut to the chase and said, "All I want to know is if I have to drag myself through this sin by the grace of God, because right now that's what I am doing and I can do it for another fifteen years if I have to. But if God can and wants to help me in a way I can't help myself, then I'd like to know."

"Well," Joe said, "only God has that answer, let's pray and ask Him." So we stood together and began to pray. Immediately, a demon seized my body and I threw myself at the man and began to hit him as hard as I could. He was very large and strong and held me at arm's length. I was shocked and apologized after thrashing about for a few seconds. They looked relaxed and totally at ease with the situation. I tried to control the demonic physical attacks but it was not easy. I knew that the demon was trying to get away from this couple and although I shook and fought, I chose not to run away. I could feel the demon looking through my eyes, desperate to break free and I felt the pure hatred it felt. I can't remember any conversations but knew somehow this large man got control over the demon and I felt free to walk about, but the battle was not over. The man told me he was not able to cast this demon out, I had to do it. I got angry and frustrated. "I can't, I can't! You have no idea how long I have been trying to fight."

"I can tell you what to do and even open the gate for you," he said. "But you have to walk through it yourself. This is a battle you have to fight."

I stood in the middle of the room with my eyes closed and he told me to picture the Father, the Son, and the Spirit in front of me.

"Do you see them?" he asked.

"Yes, I can."

"Now walk towards them."

I tried to take a step forward but could not physically lift my foot to step forward.

"I can't."

"Kim, you have to fight this fight!"

"I can't; there is something behind holding me!"

I was desperate. Frustrated, I turned around trying to see in the spirit what it was that was holding me back. I couldn't see anything but felt a presence. I got very angry and started to shout, rebuking this thing to let me go and get out of my life. I then realized this was the demon sent to comfort me in the form of sex and I knew I had believed I needed him. "You are not a comforter and I do not need you. You have destroyed my life and I have now given my life to Jesus. I choose God." With that, I turned and walked towards the image of the Trinity before me. Moving forward, I felt a weight physically lift off me and I opened my eyes. Joe wasn't where he had been standing a few short minutes before, he was coming in through the front door. I was a little confused and disorientated but he just smiled when he saw my face and knew I had been set free. We all hugged and rejoiced in the Lord. "What were you doing outside?" I asked Joe. He showed me the three African masks he had removed from the lounge and had placed in the flowerbed. "Your breakthrough came at the exact moment the masks left the room," Nancy observed.

Joe went on to explain that certain accursed objects permit demons to anchor themselves in a person or a place. This usually comes if we feel a particular attraction to an object and place it in our homes. I loved my masks and wanted to collect more, but I had read the teaching on demonic objects and images of other gods in homes, and knew masks were not good. However, I felt these masks were okay as they did not look like some of the evil masks in the African marketplaces. I told people you can discern if an object is evil or not, obviously I couldn't. The demon in me knew what it needed to keep him locked in and used my emotions to get it.

Over the next few days, the feeling of total freedom swept over me. I felt light and at peace and then it slowly dawned on me the compulsion to drink had gone too. I know now that there was so much Jesus could do for me that I could not do for myself, and although we do have authority in Christ, there are some situations or conditions where demons have a stronger hold than usual. I really can relate to the excitement of the people in the Bible when they proclaimed, _He even has authority over demons!_ They knew there were demons causing convulsions and inflictions of various kinds but were unable to do anything about it.

The absolute joy of finding someone who does have authority to cast out demons is something I understand. This can be a very difficult process for the victim as well as friends and family. As I explained, at one time, a pastor told me to only come back when I had stopped sinning. In cases like that, I would encourage you not to disregard God or the church or even the person. In my case, he was just not the right man for the job. I know he has helped other people, and the Holy Spirit works in his life. Try not to take it personally. It will hurt, there is no doubt about that, but know that God has your back covered. People in general will not understand demonic fights and it is just as frustrating for them as for you. Just don't stop fighting. After this, I had a time of rest as I entered into a new phase of my life. But the fight against demonic hindrances in my life was far from over.

.

### Chapter Nine

Walking in War

By 2004, political instability and the economic crisis were causing everyone in the country tremendous stress. I and millions of others were struggling to make ends meet. Zimbabwe had been through much turmoil since the 1980 elections. The seizure of land owned by established farmers was the last of a long buildup to the country's demise. Between 1982 and 1987, an old ethnic war broke out between ZANU-PF Robert Mugabe's ruling party in the North and PF- ZAPU Joshua Nkomo supporters in the South, thus leading to Nkomo being exiled and many deaths before Mugabe regained military control over the fractions. Many believed this in itself was a type of ethnic cleansing to regain complete control over the Northern Matabele people. During the 1990s, students, trade unionists and workers often demonstrated to express their discontent with the government. A national strike in 1997 showed the extent of the people's concern with the government. Riots and military presence in the capital city Harare were a common occurrence. In 1998, Zimbabwe became one of the main contributors to the Second Congo War. By the new Millennium, the land reformation act had been passed, and the traumatic land grab of farms began for both white (being the majority) and black farm owners. As tourism and agriculture sectors collapsed with the increase of violence within political struggles, the ripple effect was devastating for everyone. Inflation began to erode the quality of life for all Zimbabweans. Businesses—both large and small—began investing in other countries, or collapsed altogether. And the nation desperately needed revenue for the survival of the country's infrastructure.

Another huge stress during this time was the death of my adopted father, the only one I knew. A year before these incidents, he had been diagnosed with leukemia and within nine months he was dead. It was a terrible time for my mother too, who was left alone at the age of seventy, after forty-seven years of marriage, to pick up the pieces in a country that has taken away her life savings, her pension and her home. My brother, who lived overseas, spent some time with our mother sorting out financial affairs after the funeral and I spent all my time trying to keep my business going. The only good thing about that situation is that my father, a former Freemason, with the help of a Spirit-filled pastor, made peace with Jesus two weeks before he died. I know now I can look forward to spending eternity with him, in heaven. So regardless of all we lost as a family, I know we have that to look forward to.

The current market changed so quickly with world record-breaking hyperinflation; I could not keep up. I had been stalling on decisions I should have made a lot earlier, due to my desire to get married. Eventually, I knew if I did not take drastic action I would not be able to pay my employees the following month. I had been doing research for a friend on jobs overseas so knew I could get a work visa as my father had been born in the United Kingdom. After careful consideration, I realized there was no way I could survive financially and I had to take the drastic action of leaving the country to find work overseas.

I wrote the following in my diary two months after arriving in London:

_The very surreal experience of a life-style changing in thirty days from bumbling along in my Land Rover around Africa to riding a red double-decker bus which can only be captured in my imagination the following way; and after falling so very far down the tunnel, Alice landed to her surprise softly only to see the rabbit disappearing in the distance glancing anxiously at his watch, muttering how late he was (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carol_ ). _So, yes, the landing here was soft and God's provision in all areas of my life abundant, but the fall has been far. At once, I am in a world disconnected from my reality, uncertain in my step, with only one in mind: to follow Jesus. However, the truth is, I often find myself chasing the white rabbit caught up in his anxiety over time and place. Upon reflection, I wonder how on earth I fell down the hole in the first place and God gently reminds me of how I had been chasing the rabbit for some time._

Looking back during this time to April of 2001, where my separation from Richard began, I realize that it was then that I began to chase the animal of anxiety. Fear of failure took many forms, finance was the most pressing need, and then the realization that I might never have a family of my own became a desperate desire. Most men and women want these things, they are pure and natural but when we move towards them out of a motivation of fear, we are headed for disappointment. Breaking off my engagement was very hard to do. I felt I was giving up my last chance to be married as a young woman. It was, however, hard for me to face a future where Jesus was not front and center of everything I did. Deep in my heart, I believe my fiancé and I were on different spiritual paths.

It was during this time of leaving Zimbabwe that I felt God speaking to me about my future. I had a deep sense that even though I had given God my heart, with all of its faults, He was now asking that I would, without reservation, give Him my life. I agreed in tears knowing deep down inside, this had always been His plan for me. If God had told me then that my life would be another five years of carnage to the point of almost losing my mind, I might have changed religion altogether. A Christian friend who lived on the streets of London helping the homeless told me he was thinking about converting from Christianity to Buddhism saying, "It looks like they get better food (on account of Buddha's belly)." I nearly fell off my chair laughing. Unless you really know your God in times of testing, you will fall away. Those that fight and hang on for dear life know a good joke when they hear one. And it is a fight. I came to understand that when I set my mind to find the God that created me, it was God's will that I be grafted into a type of Army. I could see now, in hindsight, with demons threatening to kill me and very reluctant to give up their host, that somehow we were in some kind of war.

In my church before I backslid, there was only ever talk of God's love and grace, how would I ever have guessed what I was in for? However, when the Holy Ghost did warn me, I failed to heed so many of the warnings that were in the Bible and indeed, when God gave me verses directly in black and white, my desires were in Technicolor, there was too much pulling me in the opposite direction. Once I had repented and come back to being obedient to God, I thought I could just dust myself off and start again. I had no idea of the true reality of my backsliding. I also had no idea, as I said before, that the fight was not nearly over. So here, I was, still largely broken by the negative choices I had made and shattered by the extremes of a nation in destruction. But I was desperate to find God's will for my life. On reading General Montgomery's memoirs from the Second World War, I could relate to the following words personally:

_I have said enough to make it clear that by the time the 1914-18 war was over, it had become very clear to me that the profession of arms was a life-study, and that few officers seemed to realize this fact. It was at this stage in my life that I decided to dedicate myself to my profession, to master its details, and to put all else aside_ _(The Memoirs of Field Marshal Montgomery by Bernard Law Montgomery of Alamein)._

It became clear to me that focusing on God's will was to be my new career; and this idea that I have entered into an actual army is how I now see my life. The second thing that became obvious as the years unfolded was that I had entered a very real war. Backsliding was the beginning of this understanding. Christ had saved me, and now Satan would do anything to destroy the life I was offering to God. I now believe God allowed the demonic fight that lay ahead so that I would truly know in some small part what the world is up against.

### Chapter Ten

Another Fight

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12).

It took about a month of settling into my new life for me to realize that the last deliverance I had was not the end. I still battled with fierce lust and from time to time compulsive eating and bulimia. What bothered me the most was that I knew I still had a demon inside of me. The frightening thing was that I learned that I could use this demon if I wanted to. I could communicate with it if I chose. I also sensed there was some kind of power associated with it. I never used this power but it became apparent to me one day when I got angry with the attacks I was having; and because God wasn't giving me any answers, I decided to let the demon loose as it were and see what would happen. As I allowed it to take control, the flow of energy through my body was ecstatic. I can only describe it as a drug flowing through my veins. Not only did I sense tremendous power but I could also feel such joy. I could feel the power taking over my mind and I remember thinking I should stop this, but I totally lost the will and with it the strength to take back any self-control. I wanted this power to consume me forever. My energy levels went up instantly and the power I felt physically at this exceeded my natural physical strength. I was able to physically test this strength by jumping up and holding onto the edge of a door frame with the tip of my fingers, pulling my head above the door effortlessly with three consecutive pull ups. I could have easily done more and was not able to do one pull-up in my own strength prior to this. But it was short lived. As with any compulsion and high, there is always the crash of the aftermath, and the reality hits home. I was just being used. I realised unless God held this force at bay, I would want to be used by it, I would want this demon. I had made my choice for God and I knew this power could not satisfy me but I still wanted to be consumed by it. I also knew if I decided to use this demon to my advantage, I could manipulate anyone I wanted and have anything my eye lusted. It gave me a tremendous sense of power and control. At the same time, I knew I would never be completely satisfied by it. I still knew all I wanted was Jesus. The peace of the Holy Spirit in me was so much more powerful than the consuming power I knew I could have through this demonic being.

Many people cannot understand how women can allow themselves to be raped and abused by their husbands and not leave them. I felt I was abused by a demon but for some reason chose to stay in the relationship. A part of me actively participated in being possessed. I didn't have any inclination of how to fight it and hardly the will most of the time. It wanted me, demanded of me, and controlled me, a combination of factors that can keep anyone in a dysfunctional relationship. It was this specific demon that I had to learn to overcome.

Far greater the lesson for me than the demon was knowledge of the weakness of my own nature—that deep down inside of me, there was part of me that wanted this evil. I might often have fooled myself into believing that God had tempted me but the truth is it was my own evil desire that allowed this demon access to my body in the first place. So now, I knew what I was up against and I felt helpless. I clung to the memory of the first experience I had ever had of God's presence. I knew this heavenly power was stronger than any demonic being and I knew God wanted me to have it.

### Chapter Eleven

Step Eleven

" _Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for the knowledge of His will and the power to carry that out" ~ 12 Steps and 12 Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous_

As the months passed in my new environment, I struggled daily with my emotions. The sudden change and being catapulted into a new life in London was not without its challenges. I had excessive emotions that were amplified at this time by my loneliness. Tears and insomnia were nightly companions. Also, a lot of demonic images were on the increase, which I got used to as a result of putting up a fight. It seemed the more I prayed or stood firm on commanding demons to be bound in the name of Jesus, the more intense the attack became. I constantly bounced between emotional highs and lows. These vicissitudes were something I had become used to since my first recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous but perhaps they were more pronounced due to the fact I was alone with no one to talk to.

I am always surprised by just how quickly we humans adapt to new environments, and England is pleasant enough but vastly different to Africa. Rather than finding the change of weather or living in a new city difficult, I found the ease of the country the hardest thing to adapt to, which I am sure sounds very strange. I had just come out of an economic war zone and now I had a relatively easy job, though feeling isolated as I was self-employed, and every day commodities were affordable. I did not have to worry about where I was going to get petrol for each week, or spending the cash I had in the bank as quickly as possible to avoid inflation stealing it. There were no stress-filled nights and days from planning the next business venture, to paying the bills the following month. I would watch mothers pushing their prams along beside duck ponds in neat quiet parks and wondered if they knew the world was falling apart or that their worlds could be shattered as easily as mine had been.

It was a while before I realised there had been a lot to deal with before I left Zimbabwe. Outside of demonic influence, a lot of what I was feeling was extreme tiredness, the result of massive loss and I was in a grieving process. In one year, I had lost my father to leukemia, my inheritance, my home, two dogs I loved, my cat, business, friends, fiancée, my hope for a family and children, and the country I loved. It was also during this time my brother was diagnosed with a kidney disease that finally resulted in complete renal failure. So it was no surprise that I was battling with excessive tiredness. It did not occur to me that it might be a result of stress and all I had been through, I just thought of how I was failing and trying harder than my strength could bear. I asked God to help me with my energy levels, which were consistently low. I suspected it had something to do with my diet. I found a diet book that worked and tried hard to stick to it and exercised regularly. I disciplined myself to a healthier eating plan, though I still had to battle with bouts of bulimia and compulsive behavior. I really believed I could be totally free, and desperately worked to that goal. Dealing with my long-term compulsive behavior without any support from my usual groups was hard. In hindsight, I could see that fighting this through with only God had its advantages. Over time, however, God gave me a scripture, which gradually healed me. It said, _His mercies are new every day_ (Lamentations 3:23). What a great truth, if you really take it to heart. No matter how I failed during the day, I could sit with God in the evening, go over the day's events, and ask for forgiveness and the strength to get through another day. So every morning I woke up, knowing God had wiped the slate clean and it was a brand new day.

It took a few months to begin on the path of recovery, but I must admit, the sheer grace of God healed me in those few months where four years of group therapy and counseling training had failed. I want to make it clear that prior to my backsliding, if I had not had that four years of grounding in the truth of God's word and love with a solid counselor, I might not have been able to handle my current situation or what was to come after. I had literally lain for four years like a baby in its mother's arms as the Holy Spirit ministered to me, to heal many of my deep emotional wounds. Much of this healing came from understanding the truth about God and how He sees me. I had been given enough milk (1 Peter 2:2) in my early years as a Christian to be strong in my heart with the Lord and to know my salvation, and this gave me the ability to begin to stand and fight with Him on my side. I believe being alone with God did what He probably wanted all along and that was for me to learn to cling to Him, something we usually only do when there is no one else.

I also had a huge struggle with being single again. Although I knew I had made the right decision not to get married, it did nothing to help the feelings I had to endure after losing the man I loved and the hope of a future with a home and children.

Diary Entry

My gut keeps longing for companionship. I sometimes go cold thinking I made a mistake by leaving my fiancée and then a little while later, I have the same feeling about going back. Although I stop myself occasionally, and can't believe the sudden change in my life. Lord, I am amazed how you are leading me in every little thing I do. It's just nice to know that no matter how traumatic the big things are, you are there in the day-to-day running of my life. For all the challenges I have had to go through, you have given me a routine, privacy, rest, opportunities, enough energy and joy. Thank you so much Father for your grace and blessings upon me.

Not knowing where my life was heading, I also prayed a lot about direction. For the first time in my life, I had come to realize that I wasn't just saved as we born-again Christians like to describe ourselves, God had set me apart and He had done so for a reason. For five months, I sat in this isolation before I returned to finalize my affairs in Zimbabwe. It was during this time God called me into His service, asking me to forsake everything for Him. The idea frightened me but deep in my gut, I knew God had been calling me for some time. So, finally, I agreed and for an entire year I prayed one single prayer consistently. It was an idea I had got from the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Step Eleven states—praying only for the knowledge of His will and the power to carry it out.

### Chapter Twelve

Will you follow me?

As I felt God was calling me to full-time service, I began to look at my options. Firstly, I considered completing my counseling training by getting accredited in the United Kingdom and then perhaps studying theology. As the months went by, I began to see a pattern forming with how God dealt with me and I began the training process of following a simple and small light in total darkness. I spent a lot of time reading the Bible and writing down words and impressions I felt were from the Holy Spirit.

Reading passages of the Bible and then jotting the words down that I sensed coming from the Holy Spirit was becoming more important than any other thing at that time. I would then sit and write what I sensed the Lord was speaking to me. I have often found that I hear God's voice so much more clearly when I write. I love this method as I am always reminded that this is how the Bible was written by the Holy Spirit through chosen men.

As I kept searching for direction, I often felt God leading me to one thing; then as time passed, it would transpire not to be what I thought. I learned God sometimes gives me something to keep me busy because He knows I'm hopeless at waiting and things must be done according to God's timing and not ours (Ecclesiastes 3:1). It's also a great way to learn we can make mistakes but God is still in control. An example of this is when God called me to give my life completely to Him, I assumed He would want me to go to Bible College. I prayed and made plans and was accepted by the college, but when the time came to pay for the course, God stopped me and clearly told me He wanted to train me Himself.

I always thought standing firm in your faith meant being unshakable in action, not making mistakes, and passing all the tests God sends. Perhaps it is for some who may find this walk easy but I find it's a little messier than that for me.

I continued writing lots of little notes and words I felt God giving me. It was a lonely year as I had now moved out of London and was once again finding my feet in a new city; but I found a Church and a women's ministry that was a great source of comfort. This is where I met a couple, Marion and Eric, who were to become part of my true family in Christ and have always been there for me. They helped me through the year with many dinners and Sunday lunches. Marion has a gentle, stable, and wise manner and Eric is larger than life with his sense of fun, spontaneity and gift of encouragement. They watched me trip along the highway of the Lord, not really sure what I was doing as I myself never knew.

Most of the year for me was about learning to listen to God and just sit with Him. I fasted from time to time but found my best method was long periods of abstinence. Mostly, my fasts came with just fruit and vegetables, and sometimes very few intense, short fasts of no food or water. I found out these fasts helped me stay focused, and I noticed increasing spiritual breakthroughs in my personal relationship with God.

Although my battle with bulimia had come to an end in that year, lust was still a personal issue I had to contend with on a regular basis. Sometimes I'd go for months before I felt an intense urge I was unable to fight, always coming when I was tired or run down. When I did try to fight, I often lost the battle because the attack would increase dramatically. Depression was also a familiar foe that I constantly battled against. Although I was not completely healed, this in no way stopped God's intense involvement in my daily walk with Him. His forgiveness at my failings was instant, and His power to keep me in a state of hope unrelenting.

Often I battled through a feeling of deep emotional pressure, hating every moment of where I was geographically. Bouts of homesickness made every day black as night. I could understand the lamentations of the biblical Babylonian exiles and would often repeat those ancient words, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" (Psalm 137). Throughout all of this, I stayed in relationship with my God, consistently crying out for His healing, and asking Him to take my life and make it what He wanted. This time of confusion, fighting sin, isolation, lamenting, and prayer was a time of foundation building between God and me. It was a time of stretching, which made my nerves feel like they would never recover. A necessary foundation was being built between God and myself, which enabled me to deal with the trials that were still to come.

### Chapter Thirteen

Do you love me?

Towards the end of that year, I was going through a time of deeply seeking God when I felt Him ask if I would give my life to Him and stay single. At the time, I was so content with God and our relationship that I agreed but asked if that was what He was asking, and if He would confirm it with a sign. I also wanted the matter settled in my mind because, as any single person knows, the desire for a mate is always there. No matter how content you are, you always wonder if there is a special person out there for you somewhere. I specifically asked God if it was really Him asking me for this sacrifice, so I would like Him to give me a ring by way of confirmation.

Therefore, it was during this time of waiting, praying, and getting really excited about God confirming His calling on my life, that Eric started talking about introducing me to a friend of his called James (not his real name). I spoke about my dreams and desires and how I didn't want a home or the usual trimmings of domestic life and that all I wanted was to go on a great adventure for God. Hearing this, Eric said I really should meet James. A couple of times, friends had tried to _match-make_ , but I found this very uncomfortable each time. Twice I was invited to Sunday lunch only to unexpectedly find a single man smiling at me from the other side of the table. So between my nerves and the belief God was asking me to be single, I began to get irritated with Eric's suggestion.

Eventually, I spoke to my friend about how I felt and that I really did not want to meet this person. He asked if we could pray about the situation, to see why I was reacting the way I was, and his wife joined him. As they were praying, Marion told me about a picture she had of a kernel being broken off a seed. For some time after their prayer, I was left feeling quite raw and vulnerable. A few days later, curiosity got the better of me, and I came to the dinner they had organized for James and some of their mutual friends. James turned out to be tall and handsome. No one else came for dinner, so it was just the four of us and the evening was fun, light, and easy. At the end, we had a time of prayer where we each prayed into each other's lives and let the Holy Spirit guide with words and pictures. I don't think I can remember a more perfect evening of fun and fellowship. I knew I had met more than a man, that night I had met a king. I don't mean that in a romantic way but in my spirit knowing his authority in Christ.

The following day, a friend of mine called me unexpectedly from Zimbabwe and said she had been praying frantically that morning for my husband and my ministry. I told her I had just met a really nice man. Shortly after that, I got another two unexpected messages from people about a husband and marriage. I had also had a dream the night before of James proposing. Well, that was all I needed to start getting romantic notions myself. After only a few short meetings, James declared his affections for me and I thought, 'this is it, this is the one.' Now, because I had put this man on such a high pedestal and because he said he hadn't dated anyone for six years, I assumed he knew exactly where he was going with all of this. Unfortunately, it soon turned out he didn't and as I have never been coached in the area of how to make a man wait and really discern the situation, I went into the relationship like a run-away truck on a long, steep slope. As you will know, it never ends well for the truck.

### Chapter Fourteen

A Longing Heart

Shortly after we had met, James decided to go north to Scotland where he lived and we agreed I would try to come and see him at some stage. We stayed in touch via phone and text but he was in a very remote area and communication was difficult. The first sign of disaster for me was when I invited him to come back south for New Year's Eve. This, I felt, was a wonderful excuse for any couple to spend time together. After a brief conversation on the phone, he declined, saying he really didn't want to come back south and hoped I understood, which I did, but it did not stop the disappointment choking me as I forced myself not to cry. Stiffening my back and pushing away the tears, I resolved to end the relationship. Nothing serious had begun, only a bit of emotional involvement, so I would cut my losses and move on. Long distance relationships don't work, would be the excuse. I'd work on the wording and phone the following day.

I woke that morning at two o'clock. As I lay there in the dark, anxiety began surrounding me. Unable to go back to my troubled sleep, I used the energy from my building anger to get me out of bed and made my way to the kitchen. Tea did nothing to help. Growing in me was fear and rage. Fear had always been an old foe and anxiety seemed easy for me to shake off, but the rage I felt building up within me was not something I could ignore. "God what am I so mad at?" I asked, "I know I am afraid of a relationship and opening my heart again, but that is easy to deal with. I'll just end the relationship. You are my safe place and I have learned to live with you alone as my comforter and protector. I don't want the complexities of human love, it has done nothing but break me." The tears started again, the same ones as yesterday and the rage turned to a crying howl from the pit of my stomach that I could not stop. Slowly, the weeping subsided and in that quiet broken place, I asked God to show me where the lie I was believing came from. Anxiety and fear are not of God, not the God I know and who loves me. He has taken me through too much for me to know that what was happening to me was not in His plans for me. "Father, what's the lie? Why am I so afraid of this man?" Then after a while in the quiet, I heard it, loud and clear and I could see myself screaming with as much force as my whole being could muster. "GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!" The rage rose from the fact that I was loved but left—if not deserted. Isn't that what James had done, made some big fuss over me, opening my heart and then headed for the hills, unable to return for a few days around New Year's Eve? I had been unable to change my situation for six or seven weeks. "No, you come to me," he had said, "I can't come back to you." It was something about not being able to breathe in the South. "Okay Jesus, if that's the lie (looks like the truth to me), then what is the truth?"

"My Child, the lie is that you are not loved and you are abandoned."

"Well, that's pretty accurate from where I am standing."

"I love you and have not abandoned you."

"Yes, exactly, that's why I want to give my life to you and end this silly relationship thing."

"So, I have you only because you are afraid of a man?"

"Well, yes," came my embarrassing reply.

I'm ashamed now because I know this was not the heart that God desired from me in those days. I now know I have to invite Jesus to show me what I am incapable of doing myself. When you are at the end of yourself, it is not such a hard thing to do.

"Okay, Jesus, show me. I invite you into my heart to show me how to do this." I quietly bowed my head and closed my eyes to allow the Holy Spirit to minister to me. After a short time, the images I associate with God when He is talking to me began to form in my mind.

I saw a very vivid picture of me standing at the door of my heart as if it were the room in a house. I walked through the door and turned the light on. It looked like a deserted old attic, with old junk collecting dust and spider webs. On one of the many shelves, I dusted off some old books and knew they are the books I had always wanted to write. I looked across the room; there was a rocking horse in the corner. I thought of the real horse I had always longed to own. Photo albums lay open on a coffee table. Images of a loving husband, and the family I believed would never be mine. A big wooden desk, a stained glass lamp and two big leather armchairs were the only other furnishings. I knew this was my precious study, a place of quietness for me to read, write, and meet with my Lord and King. I took the first book off the shelf and blew the dust away. I could barely read the faded title. I pulled the dust cover off one of the leather chairs and sat down. I open a book and read the index.
Chapter 1. A Troubled Start

Chapter 2. Getting Lost

Two chapters for a whole book? I flipped through the pages; less than one third of the contents was written, and the rest were blank pages. What happened? Why did I stop writing? Were all the other books empty? I didn't have to check, I knew they were. Snippets here and there, ideas that died before I gave them a chance. As I looked round this long forgotten place, I felt perfectly at peace. Here I was surrounded by the shadows of all I really wanted I knew as soon as I walked out of that door I wouldn't even have the shadows of what I desired. Why at nearly thirty-four years old, was I alone? Where was my family? Why had I stopped writing? Why couldn't I even ride a horse properly? And the study? My place of refuge and inspiration, I didn't even have a home. I then realized that these were the things that had been stolen from me. These were all the things that had been lost in all the years of pain and desolation. Jesus was showing me they were still mine but that I would have to fight for them.

Fear and anxiety will only stand in the way, keeping the heart closed. An open and free heart is what the Lord desires for us. A quiet excitement started to come over me. "Father!" I said aloud, "We are going to have to do something about this! I have spent the last year studying theology and preparing for counseling training for the future and pushing inner healing courses. Those are all empty compared to what you have shown me in my heart. My books are my message to the world that you want me to share. My family is my relational heart and your relational heart, not created for me to hide. Here are my horse, my joy, and inspiration for my journey in the spirit and the many battles I am to fight to release hearts to you. Here is my study, my place of refuge with you; and my home, a place for my husband and children.

At the time, it had not occurred to me that the key to my destiny lay in writing not in chasing James. I was so caught up in my emotions I swallowed my doubts and forced myself to be available for this man. I mistakenly did not ask God for the strategy to fight or how I should handle James. Although God wanted me to fight for the things that I had lost, this did not include calling James on the phone when I did not hear from him. I should have protected my heart in this matter and tested him by literally being less available rather than more so. I have since learned that any woman with a healthy sense of self-worth or, at least, a sense of preservation does this naturally.

It was during this time of confusion and hurt over my feelings for James that the demonic attacks in my mind and body intensified. I was able to trace them to being triggered by feelings of anger and rejection. As a recovering alcoholic, I have learned to deal with negative emotions in order to survive but the intensity of the hurt from relationships is just one area in which I know I am totally unbalanced.

My dear friend Marion spent the next couple of months helping me through and was there for me. When I finally admitted I thought I was behaving excessively in my reaction to the rejection I felt, she quietly and gently agreed with my confession. I was just very grateful that part of my fighting strategy was to deal with all negative emotions within myself and not put them on James, who was a few hundred miles away and totally oblivious as to how I was reacting to his casual manner. So, between fighting demons of lust and my own evil nature, and hurting because I had never had a sane relationship in my life, I was very much looking to the beginning of a new year with some hope. I had planned a two-week holiday to Penang in Malaysia with my mother, and after that I was planning to go to Scotland to spend some time with James. I was also looking forward to leaving my job as it had been a very long year and all round, I was ready for a brand new start.

In the last two months of that year, I felt God was asking me to keep the first half of the next year totally free for Him. I interpreted it as a walk of faith in that I would let my job go and trust God would lead me into the next thing, and I automatically assumed this would include James. The idea of stepping off a cliff for God in this way didn't seem quite daunting to me, and I happily canceled my accommodation plans for the New Year and entered the New Year with high hopes. If I had known what was to come, however, I might have made a concerted effort to stay in 2005 and not ventured into 2006. In fact, I might have put all my faith into building a time machine that would keep me exactly where I was.

### Chapter Fifteen

A Breaking Heart

A couple of weeks later after my trip to Penang with my mum, I returned with only one view in mind and that was to head up north to see James. The terrible pressure on my emotions to get out of my immediate environment had been with me for about six weeks. It was unrelenting. So, as soon as I got back, I contacted James and expected he would have me on the next train up there but it did not work out that way at all. He said he had organized to go to a conference with a family member so it would be another week or so. A knife went through me.

I felt the Lord had asked me to fight, so I forced myself not to sound disappointed and agreed to come up when he was ready. It took a while but the day finally came when I had the train ticket. I would leave London that evening and James would borrow a car to come and pick me up. Before I left, a friend called to meet with me for coffee and I went to her house after I had finished packing. After a few minutes of light conversation, she stopped me in mid-sentence and apologized. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I have to tell you that you are not supposed to go to James."

"What?" I stammered.

"God is telling me you are not supposed to go, I didn't want to tell you, but now I have said it, it is in your hands, it's up to you to decide."

I could not believe it, I had waited for months to go and see James. The emotional pressure I was feeling of being alone for so long was exhausting. It was two years now since I left Zimbabwe, living and working in London, disconnected from the life I was used to. I honestly felt walking through this door was my only way out to a happier life. But my friend had never been wrong before and I had always been in agreement with what the Holy Spirit was saying to her even if I did find her character a little hard to deal with at times. She was a true friend and an even truer servant of God. I had no ability to discern this and absolutely no time to lay a fleece for God or wait for signs. I was supposed to be on a train in two hours, a journey that was supposed to change my life. What should I do? I left her house and began walking home. In extreme turmoil, I spoke to God, "Father, I have no ability to discern this. I have been saying I want to do your will and nothing but your will for over a year and a half now; so I am going to decide not to go. If I am wrong and the prophet is wrong, I trust you will know I made this sacrifice because I wanted to do your will. I choose you but I trust you will cover any mistake on my part and read my heart on the matter." When I got home, I called James, who was at the petrol station filling up the car he had borrowed to come and pick me from the train station. I felt awful, for myself as well as him.

However, when I woke up the following morning, I felt a lightness and joy in my spirit. Two months of extreme crushing emotional pressure had just vanished. I deeply felt this was God's way of telling me I had done the right thing. For the record though, doing the right thing does not make life less confusing or painless. I had no idea why I felt the way I did or why I chose not to go. I guess I really did trust my friend but deep down, I knew that God would honor my decision for Him, and that was ultimately what He did. Perhaps I had been wrong to allow someone else's opinion to affect my life so drastically. I had been over it in my mind a hundred times. In the end, I always came to the same conclusion—I was doing my best to be obedient to God. Being right or wrong did not factor in the equation.

A few months later, James did finally come back down south to visit friends and family, and he asked to see me. By then I got the impression he was quite wary of me and who could blame him? Sadly, I was just too confused to enjoy his company and had no idea why being around him caused me so much stress. On one occasion during this time, I invited James to meet my friend who had suggested I shouldn't go and see him all those months ago. While we were there, she asked him quite bluntly if he knew I was his wife. James said he had no idea and, to tell the truth, we were both very embarrassed by the question. However, before we left my friend's house, she asked to pray for him. While they were praying, my breathing became labored and I started to feel quite nauseous. I quietly made my way to the bathroom so I would not disturb them. I knew from experience I was under some kind of demonic attack but the suddenness of it caught me off guard. Within seconds, I was curled up on the bathroom floor screaming and then suddenly I felt something rise up inside me and block my throat. I could no longer breathe. I tried to call for help but was unable to make a sound. I knew whatever it was, was trying to kill me. My friend, however, had heard the commotion in the bathroom, and came to find me and commanded the demon to release me in the name of Jesus.

It was the first and the last time I ever experienced such a severe attack. I believe it had something to do with a sense of deep-seated rejection triggered when I heard James say he did not know I was his wife. It seems so unreasonable now but all I felt in my heart was rejection. I was now learning that there was a link between my reactions to men and demonic manifestations.

I had no doubt it was also difficult for James. He was so gentle and unassuming. Desperate knowing God's will, he spent a lot of time praying about the situation. In the end, he heard God on the matter and told me that I was not the one for him. I accepted what he said, but my heart was breaking all the same. I had told God I was quite prepared to give my life to Him and not have a husband or children. However, when it looked like God might be giving me someone to love who was prepared to give up everything for Christ just as I was, it appeared to be all I really wanted. For some reason, God allowed this situation but it completely broke me. For two months, I felt a crushing pain in my chest as if I had been physically hit. I felt sick in my spirit whenever I thought about how wrong I had been.

I walked away from this thinking that perhaps after all, I really was cursed. But I did the only thing I knew how to do—I hung on to Jesus and prayed for him to remove the physical pain I had developed. The answer to my prayer came one morning, a few months later, quite out of the blue. I woke to find the pain in my chest had lifted during the night. It took another three years for the feelings of deep love for this man and the sense of loss to go completely. They were three years of teaching, training and most importantly the breaking of sin over my life. I would like to say that those three years taught me how to heal and love men more but it didn't. I don't think I have changed much at all to be completely honest. However, God did take me on a journey, of which I thank Him for, every day. It's feels as if as I died inside, He sent a wind that would carry this dead seed to a place where I could never have gone while weighed down with my own life.
Chapter Sixteen

The Wind

Despite my confusion over what had happened with James, I still believed God had asked me to keep the first six months of the year free just for Him. So my very first walk of faith relying on God for my income began, albeit without James. It was the time where I learned not just to listen or hear God but also to follow His voice, in a new way. Surprisingly, not too much actually happened. I thought following God meant He would lead me into the ministry of helping and counseling that I had always wanted. The reality instead was, rather than God giving me more during this time, He began to take away.

As I sat and waited for God's instructions knowing He did not want me to get a job, I began to feel I was losing myself. Letting go of a financial income was an interesting experience. I did not become homeless or hungry but I lost my self-sufficiency and following closely behind, self-pride which is closely linked to self-confidence; either way a lot of _self_ was being erased. And it did not get any easier when my brother pointed out at the time someone else had to pick up the bill. I also lost the ability to defend myself when people questioned what I was doing. Regardless of how crazy it seemed to others, I knew God was asking me to do this. There was no point trying to explain it, it was not rational. It did not make sense to anyone, even myself. There were times I thought I might be going mad and my mind and nerves were stretched beyond anything I had ever experienced before but deep in my gut, I knew God was answering the prayer I had prayed for so long asking for His will and giving me the strength to carry out what He demanded from me.

Possibly, the worst thing about not working and waiting was the boredom. Although my confidence in God was strong, my self-esteem began to take a knock. There was one point where the pressure of not doing anything was too much for me to handle. I decided that sitting around and waiting could not possibly be God's will, so I began to work on a business plan to start a charity where I could teach a counseling course I used to teach in Zimbabwe. I knew I could influence hundreds of people, and my goal was to take the material into prisons and to the poorest areas of London. I made my plans and then sat down to pray about it. After praying, I felt Jesus said that wherever I went, He would be with me, but I also got a sense that His heart was not in it.

One day during this time, I went to see my friend (the same one that spoke to me about James). It was not long into our visit when she began to cry. I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit in the room and knew I could not comfort her. Tears turned into the huge sobs of someone racked with pain. After a while, she stopped crying and told me the pain in her heart and the reason why she was crying was the pain God felt over what I was planning (I had not discussed my plans with her). She looked me straight in the eye and said, "You are running around with half a glass of water and my people are dying of thirst." I knew that was God speaking directly to me through her. I realized at that point nothing I possessed within myself was going to help God or His people. He Himself knew what He wanted of me and I had to learn to be obedient to the call He had on my life. I was fast learning the difference between good works and God's work. God's work is infinitely more expensive as the life of Christ clearly shows. Once again I had to submit to the call over my life—and that was to completely give up my life to Him, no matter how painfully boring and useless it seemed to me.

For the first time in my walk as a Christian, the words Jesus spoke recorded in the book of Luke were coming forcefully to life:

Seek the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you. Do not fear little flock, for it is your Fathers good pleasure to give you the Kingdom. Sell what you have and give alms; provide yourselves with money bags which do not fail, where no thief approaches, nor moths destroys. For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also (Luke 12:31-34).

God was taking everything from me including my ability to be proactive (which I felt was my greatest strength) and I had to trust He would replace it. I did not intend to do good work if it had nothing to do with God's work in my life. So the wait continued

Things moved painfully slowly in the physical during this time but I did begin to notice a change in my spiritual life. The Holy Spirit began to show me how to interact with strangers in the street, giving words of knowledge or just showing kindness. The following story explains one such occasion:

I first met John on my regular bus. He caught my attention and everyone else's by scratching the glass window idly with some sharp instrument attached to his key ring. The irritating sound of glass being etched sent many glances his way but no one spoke. I made eye contact with a lady, who just shook her head in a typical youth of today expression. I don't know what made me do it, perhaps it was just the obvious and deliberate act of defacing public property was screaming at me—HELP! The problem was not the irritating noise or the illegal act but it seemed no matter what this kid did, everyone was determined to ignore him. I asked the man next to me to change seats so I could sit next to this overweight young man.

"Are you alright?" I asked. He looked me up and down and then turned back to his etching.

"Are you alright?" I asked again.

"Yeah," he shrugged as he replied.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah," he said, and the etching stopped.

"You don't look okay, I insisted. "Why are you doing that?" I asked looking at the window.

He shrugged his shoulders again, saying, "I'm bored."

"What do you like to do?"

The shoulders just went up and down again. This is going well I thought.

I went to inquire, "If you could do anything you wanted, what would you do?"

"Dunno."

"Anything you wanted. I mean if you had magical power and could do anything, what would you do?" Another shrug came. I decided to stop applying the pressure of a dream. He looked about twelve or thirteen. If a stranger asked me the same question at that age, I would have offered an equally stimulating response. My favorite past time at that age was daydreaming that I lived in a spaceship. Children instinctively know not to give this information to adults. He started rapping under his breath and chuckling to himself. We passed a second hand Ferrari shop. Here we go again.

"If you could have any car you wanted, what would it be?"

"Lamborghini."

"Ah, that's nice. I have an old Land Rover so never get to feel the speed." He laughed, but kept a steady eye out the window.

I gave up again. The key, with the sharp object attached to it, kept coming out and going back in his pocket but he left the window in peace.

"Where do you get off?" he asked. I nearly fell off my chair.

"At Putney Heath. I'm from Africa and haven't been here long. Have you lived in London your whole life?"

"Yeah."

"Do you like it?"

"Yeah."

My stop was not far off. "I have to get off here," I said. Someone else pressed the bell. "Well," I said, "it wasn't a long conversation but it was good to meet you." I got up and left the bus. Once on the pavement, I turned, made eye contact, and waved as the bus pulled off. Why did I do that?

In hindsight, I do know why I got up and interacted with that boy. Exactly a week before that time, I had been on my way to Guildford to visit a friend. While waiting at Clapham Junction during rush hour, I noticed a professional-looking man nodding off on one of the platform benches. I remember thinking to myself, I'm sure he's waiting for the Guildford train. When the train arrived some fifteen minutes later, he did not hear the announcements. I got on the train. Turning back, I looked at him thinking to myself, just go ask him, if you are wrong no harm done. But I was too frightened and convinced myself it wasn't important. As the whistle blew and the door closed, he woke up startled and ran to open one of the train doors. I was two inches away from him on the other side of a glass door on the crowed train. It was too late, the train had started to move. He looked terribly distressed, and I was very aware a little gesture of kindness could have saved this man another half hour wait. I felt gutted. Anyone living in London having to travel by trains and commute on a daily basis knows just how painful an extra half hour wait can be and who knows what or who was waiting for this man at the other end of his journey. I know the Spirit was trying to teach me something about randomly interacting with others' lives. It had nothing to do with telling people about Jesus but just moving among people being aware you can touch their lives as and when God shows you. The boy on the bus was about not missing an opportunity to be kind. I had learned my lesson the week before. Add to your faith, gentleness and to gentleness, kindness. God literally lightens people's burdens and shows them love through us if we will let Him. Jesus loves people and literally died for the opportunity to live through you.

These were possibly the hardest six months of my life but within them, I began to see the glory of God shining through my overwhelming weaknesses. It was also during this time that God clearly told me what I was called to do in His kingdom and why my life had been so hindered with curses.

Chapter Seventeen

The Harvest

It was almost two years now since I started praying for God's vision for my life and that He would tell me what that was. I say this because I believe God's will is not always our heart's desire and I wanted to make sure I had God's vision for my life to anchor myself to. One day, I asked God in my heart, "Where is your vision for me?" At that instance, my phone beeped with a received text from a friend, which read, ALTHOUGH THE VISION TARRY, IT WILL NOT DELAY. Then, in God's typical fashion, silence prevailed.

A few months later, I was out for a walk and ended up standing in a big green field on a hill overlooking the country side, speaking to God.

"Lord, there is so much I have done for you and so much I want to do. I love the idea of going to prisons, working with the poor, teaching, and counseling. Please pick something for me to do so I can just get on with it!" I felt deeply frustrated.

Then I heard the Holy Spirit speak to me, "That's how I feel."

"You feel frustrated?"

Then rising up in my spirit, I felt the words, "The harvest is ready but the workers are few."

The words rose up so strongly in me I had to start shouting them out. Then I heard the Holy Spirit say, "Call My Army."

My immediate response was, I think you have the wrong person here. But in my gut, I could feel an excitement rising within me, which I could not deny.

"Okay, Father," I said, "If that's what you want, you have got to show me how to do it because I have no idea how to call your people." I knew I did not have an evangelical bone in my body.

That was that. God did not give me another word on the matter. Instead, He moved me to Brixton in London. There, I joined a large Church and got involved in street and prison ministry. Although those were structured things we did in the church, God still used me more and more in random encounters, which I had never grown used to. I also began to know when God wanted me somewhere geographically. I realized for me it was less about praying for hours but more about listening for His voice. I do pray and ask, and I must be careful not to neglect those things but my greatest strength in Christ has turned out to be _silence_ and being alone with Him.

Even though God moved me to Brixton and I was able to be a little more involved with others, not working still left me feeling bored and frustrated, with not much to do during the day. Much of my time was taken up sleeping as I still suffered from extreme emotional highs and lows, and was often exhausted. The battle against lust was also still there. The frequency of attacks was now less but the intensity of the desire had grown. There was nothing natural about this sexual desire and that is why I call it an attack. It was a compulsion rather than the need for the love of another person—just as with my drinking. I never felt I just wanted a drink with the ability to refuse the idea if I chose but rather, I always felt compelled to have a drink. If I did not give in to the compulsion, it would increase until I finally gave in. Feeling compelled to do something I did not want to do, I believed, was nothing less than demonic activity getting the upper hand over my will. And, quite honestly, I was getting sick of it. It was hard to justify the underlying demonic issues I was having, and the amazing things God was doing in my life as I grew with Him. How was I going to be able to call God's army when I was such a mess? How could I tell people of the power of Christ when I was so defeated?

I knew Jesus; I knew how much He had helped me through the journey of life. I was no longer banging my head against walls and scratching my face until it bled due to self-hatred. I no longer had food binges and threw up until the blood vessels in my eyes burst, or drank my way through the day. Outside of the depression and mental struggles I was going through, I knew God's love in my heart and carried a deep peace in my gut. I had come a long way and I knew God would eventually get me out of this. It wasn't much longer before God began to give me answers that took the understanding of how I had been cursed to a whole new level.

### Chapter Eighteen

The Curse

The answers came slowly and were never welcomed enthusiastically. It was as if God was giving me one piece of the puzzle at a time, though I often had to wait for other pieces to begin to fit them all together. In hindsight, I realized this was the wisdom and kindness of God giving my natural mind the time to adjust to the information. One of these pieces came through a dear friend of mine, her name is Renate. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other and being Polish, she knew the hardships of a country with historical turmoil. We understood much about each other; you know, it's refreshing when you move to a strange country, and have to make new friends. As we spent time praying together and waiting on God, a deep understanding and friendship between us grew.

There was a time when we were praying together with another friend of ours and an evil spirit in me began to manifest. It did not take long for my friends to get control of the situation, and in the name of Jesus, they commanded the demons to leave. They did, in the usual manner of being coughed up or vomited from the pit of my stomach. This sort of thing really was becoming a common occurrence with me, but it did not make it any easier to accept. I was distraught that after so many series of deliverances, I was still not free, and expressed my hurt and anger at what was happening to me by asking why God was allowing this and why it was taking so long.

Renate began to explain a series of visions the Holy Spirit was giving her about my questions. These visions went right back to my conception and at last seemed to shed some light on the things I had struggled with or found out that I carried in me ever since I was a little girl. She said God had shown her that there were a group of people who were (or had) actively tried to destroy me by using methods of cursing, attaching objects to living trees in my name, and for some reason burying objects in the ground that were connected to me. She explained three dominant pictures. The first was ritualistic conception. This is the act of conception where a child is conceived for a specific purpose in relation to the occult world. The second picture was of a baby being offered up over a type of altar between two columns with a large glass ball on top of each one. The third picture was of a young girl playing in a tree. The tree had some sort of spiritual significance, and in the ground under it was buried a spoon and a key relating to the child. Although the picture of this child playing in the tree looked bright and colorful in the physical world, there was a heavy darkness surrounding it in the spiritual realm. She said she could also see someone next to the tree making a road in what looked like a sandpit, then pouring oil so it flowed like a river through the in-roads they made.

I have never spoken to anyone about the awful nightmares I had had as a child of oil being poured out into a large metal basin. Renate's vision was a confirmation of both the reality of my dreams and the ritualistic picture both Sue and I had had when I went through my very first deliverance sessions. Slowly, I began to realize that everything that I had experienced as a child in my mind was the consequence of me having been being used by some sort of cult or group that could only be described as Satanic. Children are often used in such rituals. The idea is to offer, by satanic dedication to a demonic deity, a child's life to gain supernatural power for oneself for any number of reasons. This can be done either with an actual child or with unborn children. I just happened to be one of those children.

I began to understand why my life had been filled with so much destruction. Drawing rivers in the sand is similar to a fortuneteller reading the lifeline on your hand. Creating a river in the sand represents someone's lifeline and then pouring dirty oil into it represents an act of willingly destroying that life. It is the complete opposite to one of the names of Jesus Himself—The River of Life. What totally mystified me was why anyone would want to do such a thing to someone else, let alone to a child.

Renate also explained that God was delivering me bit by bit and would give me answers slowly. The reason for this was that because the assault on me in the spirit realm had been so great that if God delivered me all at once my physical body would not be able to contain the violence. This was just a person talking to me, so she could easily have been wrong, however, because I had personally experienced what she was saying, I knew it was the truth. Three years later, God gave me this scripture by way of explanation:

And the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will be unable to destroy them all at one, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. But the Lord your God will deliver them over to you and will inflict defeat upon them (Deuteronomy 7:22).

It was not long before God gave me more answers as to the state I was in and more importantly, He told me why my life was the object of such destruction. When you decide to take the offer of riding with Jesus, you never know where the journey will take you. I had to remember time and time again that the one whom I was following was faithful and true (Revelation 19:11). I had put my complete trust in where He was leading me.

### Chapter Nineteen

The First Degree

But the danger which, traditionally, would have awaited you until your latest hour had you improperly disclosed the secrets of Freemasonry, that of having the throat cut across, the tongue torn out by the root and buried in the sea at low water or a cables length from the shore where the tide regularly ebbs and flows twice in twenty-four hours. This inclusion of such a penalty is unnecessary, for the obligation you have taken this evening is binding upon you for as long as you shall live.

Worshipful Masters words over a new apprentice into Freemasonry

First Degree Initiation

At times, the depression I struggled with was like a thick cloud that consumed my mind. I did not live with this feeling all the time but when it did come, it was like a wave, paralyzing my brain. If I was walking in the street, I would often end up having to shuffle into an alley-way and literally hold onto a wall or fence until the feeling lifted. Then I would make my way slowly home through the tears and confusion of what was happening to me. The feeling of losing my mind was very frightening. I'm not sure why this had been made so hard for me but I truly believe there are others out there who have had to deal with some heavy demonic stuff either by direct involvement in the world of Satanism by inheriting it through an ancestor's involvement. I truly believed God could and would completely heal me and as I continued to cry out to Him to show me why I was having such fierce ongoing physical demonic manifestations, I came across this verse in the Bible:

So rend your heart and not your garment; Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness; and he relents from doing harm. Joel 2:13.

At the time, it did not make much sense but it kept turning up in my readings and I felt as if God was asking me to rend my heart. I began to study the verse in Joel in a bit more depth. The first thing I learned was that the word "rend" in this passage is the Hebrew word _qara_. Qara means to cut or to rip out. I felt God was asking me to rend my heart. It sounded painful but I continued to dig a little deeper. This took me to the Old Testament book of Leviticus, where the word was used in the removal of mildew from garments. One particular passage talks about how mildew should be handled. For some reason, this really stuck with me. As I read, I learned the handling of it was taken very seriously. If it was discovered in a garment knitted or woven or on leather, it should be set aside for seven days. If after that time the disease continued to spread, then the garment must be burned. If it did not spread, then it could be washed; and if the mildew faded in color and did not spread after a further time of separation, then the infected area would be cut or ripped out and the rest of the garment saved. The passage did not seem to have any obvious spiritual enlightenment; it was just a rule or law concerning cleanliness. I didn't think it had anything to do with me. However, as I passed over the text, I felt the Holy Spirit prompting me to read it again. So I did. Still nothing. But I felt the word "mildew" was quite important and I should focus on it a little deeper. I did a study on mildew. The King James Bible uses the word leprosy rather than mildew. But the original Hebrew word used in the Torah regarding this particular type of infection is _Tzaraath_ , meaning smiting, which in Talmudical explanation serves as a punishment for sin.

As I thought about this, I realized everything the Israelites wore and lived in was made of woven or knitted fabric or leather. They were nomads, a tent dwelling people constantly on the move. Even the temple, for which God gave Moses instructions to build, was made almost completely of woven fabrics. The inner temple walls were made of pure white linen woven with refined gold and the most beautiful and expensive dyed cloth use in those days to create rich blues and purples. As I meditated on these things, I saw in my mind's eye a picture of my heart and within it hung these beautiful temple curtains. A patch of mildew infected one of these curtains. As a Christian today, I understand that it was always God's desire to dwell within man by His Holy Spirit and not in a temple made by human hands but in the temple God Himself created—man. I felt God was trying to show me that my heart had been infected with a similar disease to the mildew (a consequence of sin) and He was asking me to cut or rip it out. I took this very seriously and decided to set myself aside and fast for seven days so that God could show me what this fungus really meant and how serious it was.

As I went through this time of fasting, I began to do a lot more research on the temple of God in the desert and how it had been made and what materials they had used. I used the Internet as a resource and whenever I typed in keywords to search for the temple the Israelites built, the search engines kept bringing up websites about the temple of the Israelites' God and the Secret Order of Freemasonry. I started asking God what on earth the Freemasons would have to do with His house. My adopted father had been a Freemason, so I knew they had absolutely no idea who the God of the Jews was and the truth of our Savior Jesus Christ according to the Bible.

As I studied and read deeper into these things, I felt God begin to show me that the disease that was in my heart was like the disease in the church of the West and that there were powerful links with Freemasonry. This particular illness has the ability to keep the spirit of man in a very deep sleep. It did not take much more study to see the size and magnitude and influence of this particular secret order. It literally built the modern western world. I don't know if you have ever had an experience where someone shows you something because you asked and afterward, you wish you hadn't. The magnitude of what was being revealed to me was overwhelming; I just did not want to know.

Knowing nothing of European History, I began to learn more about the Freemason Order. As I explained earlier, I used to be very involved in the New Age Religion. It is from this involvement that I was able to recognize the very same ideals within Freemasonry. I began to relate symbols and objects within this order to the spiritual attacks I had been having and realized how important the worship of goddesses is in this secret society. God showed me that the sin of the Freemasons is the same sin that God revealed to the Old Testament prophet, Ezekiel. God showed Ezekiel several ways the priests and the people of Israel were worshipping foreign gods in His holy temple. This was the last and final insult:

So He brought me into the inner court of the Lord's house; and there, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about twenty-five men with their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces towards the east, they were worshiping the sun towards the east.

He said to me, "Have you seen this, O son of man? Is it a trivial thing to the house of Judah to commit the abominations, which they commit here? For they have filled the land with violence; then they have returned to provoke me to anger. Indeed, they put the branch to their nose! Therefore, I will also act in fury. My eye will not spare nor will I have pity; and though they cry in my ears with a loud voice I will not hear them. Ezekiel 8:16-18.

There is a definite mixing of religions in Freemasonry with the Christian Church, and God is not happy with it. Despite the insistence of Freemasons, themselves, that Freemasonry is not a religion, it obviously is. They have a god, rituals, and an altar—three very basic symbols of a religion. They worship, but they do not worship Christ, or follow Him. A Freemason who does not follow Christ in a biblical way won't see the problem with this. They will continue believing all they are taught because of the high level of intellect and good works involved and quite literally, because influential men tell them, _this is Christian behavior_.

An example of the religious deception is evident throughout the Entered Apprentice Degree, the first initiation of a new Freemason. A Chaplain is present throughout the proceedings giving the appearance of being godly. Before he enters the initiation, the new candidate is assured by the Secretary of the Lodge that, Freemasonry is far removed from all that is trivial, selfish, and ungodly. Its structure is built upon the everlasting foundation of the God-given Law referred to as the Brotherhood of Man, in the family whose father is God. It is the secretary's job to make sure the new candidate has agreed to all the questioning and rituals that will follow. He is then prepared for the ritual bare-chested with a blind fold and a noose or cable tow around his neck. The Worshipful Master leads the proceedings and asks the new candidate whom he puts his trust in. The candidate answers, _God_. The Senior Deacon then announces the candidate's name declaring him to be a poor blind candidate who is desiring of receiving the rights to lights and benefits of the lodge, erected to God and dedicated in the memory of the Holy Saints John, as all Brethren and fellows have done who have gone this way before him. Then after it is confirmed once again that this is an act of his free will, the ritual continues where at one point he kneels before the Sacred Altar of Freemasonry, where there is a square, a compass, and a Bible. Once again, he is asked if he is sure he wants to take the obligation. If he agrees, he makes a lengthy oath that he will uphold all duties asked of him (even though at this point, he does not know what they are) and will never reveal any of the secrets of the lodge. It is made known without a doubt that, at best, all Masons will ostracize him if he defaults; and at worse, he agrees to consequences of a horrendous death. After these solemn promises, the noose is removed from his neck. Spiritually, however, the noose remains due to the curses he has of his own freewill just placed over himself in front of friends and business colleagues. The noose remains connected to his spirit until the time he renounces all curses in the name of Jesus. The Worshipful Master reassures the initiate consistently that what he is doing is sacred—a bunch of godly things—and he is entering into the Light. At the end of all of this, he is presented with a white apron, which is an emblem of innocence or righteousness, and the badge of a Mason. He is assured by the Worshipful Master at this point that he can now face God on the Day of Judgment with confidence. There is then a closing summary and an examination confirming all his agreements with the Lodge and his full understanding of them and that his first desire on entering Freemasonry was for the Light of Freemasonry, which is promised to him as he continues to follow the steps of the entrusted Freemasons before him.

I studied at length all the three initiation degrees and the symbols behind the trestle boards of these three degrees, and was disturbed that someone as down to earth and independent as my father could have been part of such rituals and agreements. I remember reading the coded books they give to Freemasons who are entering the Master Mason Apprentice that my father had in the house so I know the information I had read was accurate. The illusion of Christianity is a clear deception and I could understand why God likened the Freemasons to the rebellious priests in Ezekiel.

The Holy Spirit did not heal me after giving this information, it was just information. I had asked why, I had cried why, I had begged to know why I was struggling so much spiritually—now I knew the answer. I also knew of the direct relationship between God and my body being the temple for the Holy Spirit to dwell in, just as God dwelt in the Temple of the Israelites. I could see now I was no different to the rebellious priests. Through sexual immorality, I had defiled the temple of God and mocked Him. My own ignorance was no different from my father's.

God, however, also showed me a deep tragedy regarding Freemasonry in the church and the larger effect this has on wider Church. If this 'virus' affected me so deeply, what is the essence of a pastor or priest being involved in the rituals of the masons? God asks us not to take communion lightly but examine our hearts before Him or run the risk of illness entering our body. What are the spiritual implications of allowing our spiritual father (priest, pastor, or elder) to give us communion when they are obviously in rebellion to God through Freemasonry? I believe God had shown me that the effect over the larger Body of Christ is that it brings about a 'sleeping sickness' in the spirit realm. In other words, the body of Christ is being defiled by its own leaders:

For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment on himself, not discerning the Lord's body. For this reason many of you are weak and sick among you, and many sleep (1 Corinthians 11:29-31).

God made it clear that my intense struggles spiritually, mentally and physically were due to curses both through my adopted father's involvement in freemasonry, as well as my bloodline family's involvement in the same. He made it very clear that I was to break every curse over myself up to the thirty-third degree.

The reference to degrees in Freemasonry is similar to earning an academic degree - "The word degree, in its primitive meaning, signifies a step. The degrees of Freemasonry are, then, the steps by which the candidate ascends from a lower to a higher condition of knowledge." Albert G. Mackey, The Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, 1873.

Chapter Twenty

Judgement

Confusion for the most part still prevailed after these revelations. I had a handful of close friends like Renate who were there for me when things got too hard to handle on my own. Most days, however, were long and lonely. Living seemed to me an endless toil of nothingness. Christ was with me; of that, I had no doubt, but I just could not understand why my path was so hard.

Not long after my latest revelation, I felt my time of living by faith financially was coming to an end and I began looking for a job. Waiting on God was a tiresome experience for me with only brief glimpses of reason and hope. I was keen to start working again. Through my brother, I met a friend of his who offered me a job working on the front desk at his office. I accepted and found I loved my new work environment. My boss Alex (not his real name) was very good to me and I spent a lot of time praying for him and what God would have me do in this position. A couple of months passed and I felt settled and happy. One day, God supernaturally showed me the pain in Alex's heart. He was a good man but with a quick and aggressive temper. Although I prayed, I had no idea how to help him outside of constantly being kind and gentle towards him.

At work, Alex was consistently flattering me, and I think this attention made me sorry for all the negative relationships in my life. That may sound like a strange statement but for me, positive attention from men never ended well. I, like any woman, wanted the love and attention of a man whom I loved in return. The constant pain of failing in this area left me feeling quite sick.

One summer weekend, I was sitting alone in a park in London talking to God about this matter. I had been reading a book by Rebecca Brown a few months prior to that time, which explained how God was a judge. We are His children and He is a good judge. As I have explained in the previous chapters, when we are in active sin, we leave ourselves open to Satan's attacks. God wants to protect us but there are spiritual laws just as there are physical laws. If you jump off a building, gravity kicks in. When we go against God's will for our lives, Satan kicks in, simple. If, however, as a Christian you feel that you really are not getting the upper hand in your life and one bad thing just keeps happening one after the other, Satan may be attacking you for no good reason. You have full permission as a child of God to walk into His courtroom and ask Him to judge the matter at hand. If you have no guilt, God will have to judge in your favor, for He is a good judge and Satan will have to be stopped.

Rebecca Brown tells a story of the first time she called on God's judgment. She and Daniel, her husband, had been called to deliver Satanists out of Witchcraft and Satanism. They were up against many battles in this area but through it all, God had always protected their lives. On one occasion, however, a group of Satanists came into their town and sent out leaflets to every home with the most terrible lies about them and their ministry. In anguish, she called out to God, stating that He had led them to this ministry so why would He not protect them. She then decided to ask God to judge the situation. Obviously, she knew if she or her husband were guilty of anything, then the judgment would not go well for them and she would be calling God's punishment on herself. As it turned out, however, two weeks later, every single slanderous tract got retrieved and the end result was as if nothing had ever happened.

I could understand the danger of this request and I deeply understood Satan having free rein to attack me due to disobedience. However, at this point, I was quite desperate with the pain I had, and believed I had been cursed and hurt by men unfairly. I saw this as an attack by Satan that needed to be stopped. Therefore, that afternoon, sitting in the sunshine, I asked God to judge between me and the men who had hurt me—to judge the attacks on me so that I would be free to love and be loved.

If there had been a dark cloud over me spiritually before, I don't quite know how to explain the blackness that began to roll in after that request. It did not happen suddenly, but slowly, so I did not even remember my request to God. I would never have been able to work it out mentally anyway. Depression began to seep into me in a new way and on a level I had never experienced. I fought a growing tiredness for as long and hard as I could. Until one day, I physically could not get out of bed or stop crying. The exhaustion was extreme. I phoned Alex and asked for the day off which he granted, very concerned that I was in tears and unhappy. His attention on me had grown, and his flattery was a never-ending one.

Following that day, although I still managed to get to work, I would go to a church at lunch time and hide in the prayer room and sleep just so that I could get through the rest of the afternoon. I did this until I discovered I could take lunchtime naps in an unused room at work. Alex kept offering to help and was nothing but gentle and caring, making it very clear he was there for me. He offered to help and I was too weak to even want to refuse his care and attention. It was not long before he began to invite me out. This started with an opportune Valentine's dinner and then a rugby match (a sport we both loved). As he took his time with this dating ritual and did not rush in as most men do, I felt safe and cared for. Then one afternoon after lunch, we went back to his house to watch a film, it was not long before I was in his arms, being held. Two weeks later, I was in his bed. It was if I had no defence against the affection he was offering. In my depressed state, I had lost sight of everything I had fought so hard for. How could this have happened? Four years prior, I had done exactly the same thing and paid the most extreme consequences spiritually. Had I learned nothing?

The weeks that followed were horrendous for me. I knew I could not be with this man and yet I desperately wanted him. The attention he gave was intoxicating. I lost all peace to the point of feeling a sense of danger in my spirit. Through a lot of pain and confusion on both Alex's part and mine, I eventually left him and leaving him meant I had to leave my job too. The worst part was that in all this confusion, I knew Alex had lost all respect for me. I cried to God, desperate to know how I got Alex and myself in such a mess, and He reminded me of my request for judgment. Then came the spiritual revelation of what I had done. Firstly, God showed me my position of working with Alex could have done an incredible amount of good in healing his broken heart. Then He showed me the horror of what I had done by sleeping with him instead. When I say horror, there is no way I can explain to you what I saw in the spirit realm regarding sexual immorality. It made me feel so sick inside it was hard to forgive myself. God showed me that I had been judged by Him, and I was found wanting.

This was the judgement—it was not the pain men caused me but the pain I had caused them through my own acts of sexual immorality, which I had created by my own desire to be worshiped by men and fell for the simplest of flattery. My unfaithfulness to God caused untold injury in this area. I was completely undone by this revelation. I repented from a true position of knowledge, though not just repenting from behavior that I knew in my mind was wrong but from actually seeing the true consequences in the spirit realm. I could see now why God's judgment brings purity. It was only with this level of understanding that I could truly repent and make a lasting change to my behavior. I now no longer look to men as the opposite sex, who are supposed to love and protect women but the other way around. As a woman, it is my responsibility to honor men. I will do that by not falling for flattery and giving in to the desire a man has for a woman just because of how it makes me feel. I will love them by holding my position with God and treating them as special people deserving of a lasting love, true love.

Through this knowledge and complete repentance, I was healed of my depression but God supernaturally did so much more for me. From that day on, the demonic attacks of lust stopped—something, which had felt so completely out of my control when it came upon me, suddenly and completely, disappeared. I went from fighting a feeling of lust to not thinking about it at all, overnight. I knew God had delivered me from a powerful demon and although my life was so very far from perfect, I was now able to, at least, begin the process of recovery from the abuse my physical body had been through, with the depression and exhaustion resulting from the experience. A large part of my depression had been caused by an infection on my ovaries, and after a relatively simple operation, I spent some time recovering and then moved out of London.

I still suffered from exhaustion but I felt God was asking me to start writing my life story, all being short and full of trouble. I got a part-time job and wrote as much as I could between large chunks of sleeping and work. I did this for six months before I felt God releasing me to go back to Zimbabwe. The excitement of going home after nearly four years of being away was exhilarating. I was going home! I felt like screaming it to the world. Homesickness and a sense of being displaced had hung over me like a dark cloud for the whole time I had been in the United Kingdom and since leaving Zimbabwe four years earlier. Now at last, I was going to be set free to go back to the Africa I loved.

### Chapter Twenty One

A Trip Home

The moment finally arrived when my airplane touched down on Zimbabwean soil. Harare, battered and bruised from her many years of economic neglect, still looked like the most beautiful city in the world to me. I had arrived in the spring when it is extremely dry and dusty from a long winter of no rain. Msasa trees still in their autumn colors, as they never totally lose their leaves in winter. The light smell of smoke from outdoor fires in the cool crisp mornings filled my lungs with delight. The sound of local music playing in the streets was pure joy to my ears. I walked around day after day as if I were on a cloud, smiling at the huge blue sky.

My enthusiasm was a mystery to some of my friends who had had to stay and fight a very serious struggle for survival every day for years. Looking at a perfectly blue sky was the last thing they did when inflation was at world record highs, and prices on products literally had to be changed every day if not twice a day. What little was available in Zimbabwe had to be fought for. It was so much worse than when I had left. Any basic luxury had to be ordered from South Africa or bought in illegal shops (someone's garage at home or a warehouse you could only find out about by word of mouth) in US dollars. While I was in the country, the final financial crash came with government officials finally realising the local currency had to be dropped. Printing one hundred trillion dollar notes did not keep anything stable.

On arriving back in Zimbabwe, my main focus once again was where God wanted me during this time and what He might want me to do. In this broken country, there was so much help needed I could have made myself useful anywhere. It soon became apparent that God wanted to do a deeper healing in me regarding the reason for all my previous struggles. It was as if He had brought me home to do little else than face a dark truth.

Often when we are deeply wounded, we repress memories. Some things become too horrific for the brain to cope with and it completely chooses to forget. However, the mind never truly forgets but rather it hides. God often wants to reveal these things not to cause us greater pain but because the truth really does set you free. Hidden memories cause us problems through our subconscious, and can affect every area of our lives without us being aware of it. The truth I felt the Holy Spirit asking me to accept was the fact that somehow I had been sexually abused as a child. As a trained counselor, I had always been aware of and hated the idea of False Memory Syndrome. Because of that training and the fact there was no way of confirming any abuse, I had always pushed the idea to the back of my mind and refused to entertain it. However, the evidence was in my spirit and I could not deny it even though I wanted to. There was no way a suggestion of being abused (suggestions begin to build the foundation for a false memory) had created the original problems I had been living with all my life. I also do not remember any counselor I've been to ever suggesting it.

Once again, God began to open the door of revelation. This time He dealt with me alone. Slowly, bit by bit, God began to show me what had happened to me. Through a series of short visions, I saw that I was a little girl being used in a satanic ritual that has one purpose, releasing demons from the pit of hell. I was literally used as a vessel to make this very powerful ritual successful. I could see a ritual was held during one of the solstices (perhaps spring for new birth) and was being carried out around the world at the same time using other children. The only other thing I could see was a black and white checkered floor, as I was hung upside down during the ritual.

Once again, it was information and then nothing. So I sat with it, not very happy about the revelation because there was no way in my mind I could have ever been taken from my safe, comfortable home and in no way could my parents have allowed that to happen to me. There was just no one to point a finger at, and there was no way my rational mind could work it out. But I knew. I understood now where those complicated sexual fantasies came from and why the body of an innocent little girl was filled with lust she could not understand, and also why demonic images were so prevalent throughout my life.

It was to be another two years before the Holy Spirit completed this picture, pulling together over seven years of jigsaw pieces to complete one picture. I have since learned that what I described happening to me is called Satanic Ritualistic Abuse or SRA. SRA is a hugely controversial subject and I have read a lot on it. I'm not an expert, I just know from experience it happens and why. The effects of SRA on a victim are multiple and complicated. It differs from the effect of other forms of sexual abuse due to the nature and the knowledge of what someone is using the ritual for. Sexual abuse is always about power over another person. SRA is about using a person (as a sacrifice) to gain demonic power to control the world and others around you. The direct demonic involvement creates a level of bondage that makes it very hard for the victim to break out of completely. As we take a newborn child to church for a ritualistic christening, so also these rituals are performed in the dark and in secret. Jesus offered Himself up to be a sacrifice for the whole of mankind, Satan still relies heavily on humans sacrificing humans in one form or another to gain ground.

The evidence lies only in me, and in the belief that there is a reason for everything. If I was an innocent, untouched child, how was it possible for me to have complicated sexual fantasies at such a young age? Television in Zimbabwe in the seventies was not anything compared to what children are exposed to today. Also, I am the only person I know who has lived with consistent images of blood, cut-up body parts, and what I can only describe as human carnage. That was all before mentioning the demonic images that plagued my mind. My question was always, why?

For now, however, God was silent again. I knew there was more healing and understanding to come, and He was gentle with me, letting me get used to each idea as He presented it and then giving me time to grow inwardly with Him, that I might get stronger for the next revelation to come. I was only in Zimbabwe for six months before I felt God calling me back to London. It was a particularly low time in my life and an extreme test of faith.

Diary Entries

27 February, 2009

My complaint is a big book. A novel written in my heart. Its pages are filled with the journey of following Christ, only to end here lonely and afraid of His voice. Four years of pouring my life out for Him only to arrive truly empty. I never expected this, a hollow and wounded spirit. How do I begin this complaint? When I know standing before the Judge, this book I hold before Him would turn to ashes and fall through my fingers. I see I would be left with one or two small nuggets of gold in the palm of my hand. His work I could not see as sorrow had me blinded; and self-pity, a thick black cloth, tied over my eyes. I can feel and hold these nuggets knowing that this is truly what God has done. But even the gold is not mine to keep. I must step forward and put them on the scales that stand next to me in the Hall of Judgement. I see the nuggets are my free passage and God's to keep. All I get is freedom and in truth that is all I require.

" _Now has come the time for the son of man to enter His glory. I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many kernels–a plentiful harvest of new lives. Those that love their life in this world will lose it. Those who care nothing for their life in this world will keep it for eternity" ~ Jesus (Luke 12)._

1 March, 2009

It's all very well getting poetic about nuggets of gold when my real complaint is this;

Every story I have ever read where Christians give up everything and follow Jesus and listen to Him ends with [a good] meaning. They are either martyred, imprisoned or worked steadily, healing, helping and preaching. There was a time where I had that for a while, then the depression came again. In 2007, for six months, I lived with a paralyzed brain and exhausted body. By 2008, I was still recovering and it was ready to return back to my homeland Zimbabwe. I won't speak of the barren wasteland in my heart that I traveled through while back in my country but of the words God gave me in Church today.

I love you with an everlasting love. With unfailing love, I have drawn you to myself. I will rebuild you, my virgin Israel. You will again be happy and dance merrily with your tambourines (Jeremiah 31:3-4).

### Chapter Twenty Two

Freedom

God was faithful to His promise and brought complete understanding two years later. During a time of intense prayer, I was once again given a series of pictures. They came in three parts and were not easy to get through. The truth does set you free but that does not mean it's pleasant to face. The pictures followed in my mind's eye along an underground structure with a tunnel. The tunnel represented a time line with different rooms branching off it. The rooms were representative of events rather than actual places. Similar to events I talked about in chapter fifteen herein, the Holy Spirit showed me a series of rooms and walked me through them. The first room was completely made of cement and I got the sense it was underground like a bomb shelter. It was structured like a large honeycomb. It was bare except for a large five-pointed star painted on the floor in the middle of the room. I understood that this room was where a conception ritual would have taken place. In some cults, children are conceived on purpose for specific reasons.

I left that room and turned into a dark corridor. Not far to the right, there was another room. I did not want to enter it at all. It was white and cold with a metal table in the middle and covered in blood. It reminded me of a butchery. The images of fields of cut-up body parts and blood from my youth came from this room. I knew this room represented a womb. Sometime after my conception, my mother had an abortion. I survived only because I had a twin who died instead of me. While I stood outside the room, I saw a whirlpool of water wash through the room and clean all the blood. On the metal table in the room lay a baby as if in a morgue. I was able to now go into the room and observe the dead child. There was no clear definition of features but I got the impression it was a girl. There was no sadness in all of this, the water had washed and purified that part of my life. I saw the room represented the womb where I was while my baby sister was being killed. The Holy Spirit washed the room clean and gave me a chance to say goodbye to the memory of her traumatic death. I left the room and returned to the tunnel, which was very dark. As I walked slowly feeling my way, I saw a torch burning on the side of the tunnel wall as it turned a corner. As I reached it, I saw the tunnel stretch before me lit up with torches, over some miles. I had an understanding that this long tunnel represented time and that the people who had been involved in my conception were now waiting for me to reach a certain age.

When I reached the last torch at the end of the tunnel, there was another room. This room I already knew about. It was the same room I remember from my childhood fantasies and was the same room where the solace-type ritual took place. Due to the evil presence and fear of what I might see, I did not want to enter this room. Once again, the Holy Spirit went before me. I saw the younger version of myself tied up. The purpose of this ritual was to open a type of portal or tunnel directly into Hell to release demons by them entering into me. I did not see this happen though. The presence of the Holy Spirit changed everything about the room. I saw my whole body turning into a blazing, brilliant, white light. No evil force in that room could ever withstand this light. The porthole that had been opened for demons to pass through, I also now was able to pass through and I traveled as this light into the pit of Hell.

The Holy Spirit showed me from this picture that whatever had been done to me was now going to be used for God's glory. Because I had been used in this area of the occult, God now gave me authority over it. Basically, because evil men invited me in and gave me permission to operate in this place, I now had automatic authority in the Spirit realm in this area. The Holy Spirit made it very clear I had just received the keys to death and hell. The effect of this picture made the last thirty years of depression and struggle worth every single minute. The effect of overcoming and understanding this matter was glorious and very humbling. Everything in my life in that moment made sense to me—every question got answered and every tear turned to joy. For eight years, I had forsaken everything to follow Jesus, believing He would lead me to great things—plus a ministry, a husband and perhaps children. Instead, He was just beginning to teach me of His love and faithfulness.

I spent the next two years working near London as my brothers' renal failure continued to make him severely ill. A dear friend of his had offered her kidney for a transplant and traumatically, that donation fell through at the last minute. I then offered to go through the necessary tests to see if I could be a viable donor. After many months of complications, I was able to donate a kidney to my brother. After we both recovered, I was free to continue to follow my dream of becoming a missionary. I joined an outreach team and travelled to Kenya and India. Then I felt led to travel alone to South Africa and Zimbabwe where God began to teach me about a new anointing on my life, but before I left, He gave me a little gift.

### Chapter Twenty Three

The Ring

And everyone who has forsaken houses, or brothers or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands for my names sake shall receive a hundred fold, and shall inherit everlasting life. Matthew 19:29.

I mentioned earlier that before I met James, I felt God ask if I would give up marriage, a right to a home and children. I happily, at the time, agreed and asked God to confirm His request. I bargained with God saying if He really wanted me to stay single for Him, I wanted, at least, a ring as confirmation. I was unaware that I was about to meet a man my heart truly desired. Seven years had passed since that request was made, and a few months before my fortieth birthday, I felt God approach the subject again. Over and over, the idea of completely committing my life to Him came into my spirit, and I knew He was drawing me into a commitment to remain single. The truth is I did want a husband and after eight years of following the Lord alone, moving from place to place, a lady can get a little tired and want a bit of help and companionship. In the time since I first met James and Alex, I had only had a boyfriend very briefly. I even agreed to marry him before I realized I wasn't really in love. I wasn't sure if God really did want me to be _alone_ for good or if it was just a season. So this new awakening to His asking was interesting.

I had tested God's original request and learned over the past seven years the cost of walking alone. After some time of thinking about it and meditating on the subject, I finally gave God, Jesus in particular, an answer, "Yes." However, this time, I told God that I would not test Him by asking for a sign as I did last time. I knew His voice and fully understood what He was asking of me. I decided I would go and buy my own ring as a sign of my commitment. The particular ring I had in mind was a Russian wedding ring, with three separate bands of gold—white gold, red gold and yellow gold. Each, for me, represents part of Godhead; the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. I ended up buying a silver one with three silver bands, as I did not have the finances to purchase gold. After a small ceremony between the Lord and me, I placed the ring on my finger and did not think much about it after that.

A few weeks later, a friend of mine Lucinda invited me to stay with her over my birthday, it was my fortieth, and she wanted to make it a special occasion for me. I happily agreed and arrived the night before that day. On the morning of my birthday, she woke me with a cup of coffee, a card and a present. As she handed me a small box, she said it's important you know this gift is not from me but from God. She seemed almost embarrassed to give it to me, and insisted once again, as I was pealing the wrapping off, that it was a gift from God. I unwrapped a little black box with gold trim, opened it, and found a single-band wedding ring wrapped in the three colors of gold. As I sat staring at the ring, tears began to run down my cheeks. She asked, "Does it mean something to you?"

Rather than me telling Lucinda's version of the story, I felt it was important to explain why she gave me the ring in her own words.

Lucinda

_I have been scouting about for bits of info about your ring in my diary and have not found much. I bought the ring on 3rd of March 2012, but it was a week or more before that, that I knew I was to get you a ring. I asked the Lord what to buy you for your birthday, and He told me a ring and it was to be in three colors of gold. Don't ask me exactly how I knew, I can't remember_ — _just an inner voice is the usual with me. I have to admit I was a bit surprised and not very enthusiastic! I started by looking in Argos (sorry!), then Samuel's and other high street jewelers. I knew that this was likely to be fruitless as I had Paul Eaton's in Cranleigh at the back of my mind. I was a bit anxious, as I knew I did not have the money for that type of jeweler, but I really felt compelled and reassured that it was not from me but God to you, so He would pay for it. So I accepted the commission. I also asked for enough money for my nephew's birthday present as that was on the10th March._

Two people then gave me some money. I went to Cranleigh on the 3rd, saw the ring in the shop and knew it was the right one. It came to nearly all the money I had been given with a little left over for my nephew. I had a look at it, checked it could be resized and went away to think i.e. PRAY!! I actually asked my sister's advice, I was having lunch with her, not explicitly, but a sort of 'what would you do if God asked you to buy something for someone?' question. She told me to trust in God and that he wouldn't let me down. So I went back to the shop and bought it. I also had a lesson on how the three-color bands of gold were made, which I can't remember now. One major part of my hesitation was that it was 'non-returnable' and I had no idea what your reaction would be! It was from Him and definitely not me (you would have got some nice hand cream if I were buying you a pressie!) so I made it clear in the card that went with it. What I was sure of was that He wanted you to know that you were His and that wherever you should go, He would never leave you nor forsake you. It seemed like a husband's covering or protection. It had to be three colors as it was Father, Son and Holy Spirit. You were staying with me so I gave it to you on the 8th and you received it very well, and with tears!! Clearly, you knew it was from Him and it was okay. That was the end of my part, except that it was a bit small, as I had guessed, so we went back to Cranleigh on the 10th so that Paul could resize it. Then you had your birthday tea party on the 11th.

I'd like to say I felt suitably wooed and ecstatic with receiving the ring, like a woman in love receiving an engagement ring or having her wedding band placed on her finger by her husband. I was more in awe of God and to be honest could feel only the spiritual weight of the sacrifice. Giving yourself to God is not very romantic. I felt deep hopes and dreams of my own die when faced with the reality of this gift. Hearing God in your head is one thing; having physical proof of it is another.

Over the last few years, as I have been on various missions and then later setting up a home in Scotland, I have constantly wondered if God would change His request at some point. However, always upon reflection when I draw from a place in my spirit that is stronger than my heart, I know He has called for my undivided attention, at least, for now and as long as He leads me this way, I will follow with the hope and promise I have always set my eyes on—Eternity.
Epilogue

I have felt the incredible raw power that comes from allowing a demon to operate through me. I can understand the addiction and the fact that some people might want to be used by this sinister force. For me, it felt like the closest thing to perfection I had ever experienced. I understood completely why men and women would go to such lengths to get this kind of power. But I also felt the control and abuse that comes with it.

God took me to the pit of hell for a reason. Protected from its horrors, I shone like a light in its darkness. None of its raw power could touch me. I was protected and I was free. You may want to ask why He allowed these terrible things to happen to me in the first place and for that, I have no answer. All I know is that evil exists and it is real and powerful. Now that I have come to know God, I know He loves me and never planned evil for me. He was there when that little girl was being abused and neglected by man. He was there while I was being controlled and manipulated by demons, and He never left me. He suffered everything I suffered. Out of a sad story, He brought victory and healing and then so much more, I now have power over the very evil that manipulated me, and the ability to set others free.

After so many years of depression, exhaustion, and fighting, I am learning how to cope with success and feel God building me up in a new way. Healing, these days, flows easily and I have a sense of stability and boldness I have never known. I have always during these years of troubles looked bravely towards eternity, not caring too much for this life. These days, I look at my life with hope and enjoy every moment by His grace, for life is not easy. I know deep down inside that, I have lost a lot and cannot have my youth back. But I understand for once the words of Jesus: "I came to give life and life in abundance." If we can just focus for a moment and believe the mind of Christ is so very different from ours; I know what it is to suffer from mental illness but nothing prepared me to lose my mind so I could gain His. Nothing prepared me to forfeit my way so badly, so that I could find His way.

Yours in Christ,

N. K. Wilson

About the Author

Kim lives on the east coast of Scotland. When she is not traveling for work, she spends her days writing, painting and mountain hiking. Active in service in both her church and addiction recovery groups.

Find out more about the author on her website and to follow on Facebook or sign-up to her inspirational blog @ <http://www.nkwilson-author.com/>

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