One year after discovering the Benedictines, my relationship with God was suddenly tested to its very roots when, for the very first time in my life, I came face to face with what I would later understand to be supernatural evil.  I was thirty-five years old.

I would learn that Satan seldom sends you a telegram ahead of time to announce his intentions. Instead, he pounces on you completely out of the blue, without warning.

This harrowing episode in my life began suddenly one night when I had a stunningly horrific nightmare. The nightmare repeated itself the next night. On each occasion, I saw and experienced exactly the same image and exactly the same event: a face-to-face encounter with the personification of evil arrayed in all his horrific wickedness and chilling repulsiveness.

The dreams were viscerally real. They were terrifying experiences. They were also profoundly bewildering. I could not understand where they had originated, and neither could I come to any kind of terms with the feelings of unfamiliar fear to which they subsequently gave rise. 

Not surprisingly, after the second episode I began to dread the night.

But then I had a sudden inspiration. Thanks to the Lord’s grace, my common sense told me that I was not to run from the fear caused by the nightmares but to face it, knowing that Christ was in the midst of it. I knew that what we run from retains power over us whereas what we face head-on we eventually tame. And so, on that third night, in the knowledge that Christ and I together could handle any fall-out, I determined to face with faith and boldness whatever the night held for me.

That night, the nightmare never returned.

In fact, the nightmares ended as suddenly as they had started!

The willingness to confront my fear in the faith that Christ was with me would prove to be the first step in healing it —but, as it turned out, only the first step.

Although the nightmares ended, the negative emotions of fear and discouragement to which they had given rise lingered. I continued to experience odd feelings of gloom and fear at a level which, until now, had been completely foreign to my nature.

In an effort to understand my plight, I tried to recall any recent events that might have contributed to the sudden arrival of the nightmares and of these subsequent negative emotions. I wondered whether the distressing injuries recently sustained by a young relative (which had eventually led to his tragic death) had affected me more than I had perhaps consciously realized, or had brought to the surface deep, repressed fears inside me. Yet I wasn’t convinced that this alone would have accounted for my situation.

God Disappears off My Radar

As the days went by, I continued to function, but I was definitely not my carefree, confident and optimistic self.

Even more disturbing was the fact that, for the first time in my life, there seemed to be some sort of unfamiliar ‘barrier’ between the Lord and me. Just when I needed Him most, God seemed to have disappeared off my radar.

God, in fact, seemed to be absent.

I was aware, nevertheless, that an inner reserve of spiritual strength and resilience still remained alive somewhere very deep down inside me. It was this that provided the strength necessary for me to cling to faith, and to the belief that God’s mercy and goodness would soon emerge somehow through the distressing and unfamiliar darkness and rescue me.

As it turned out, help would arrive in two weeks’ time. It took the form of a holy, humble, anchored, joy and faith-filled Benedictine sister who was also a well-trained and highly experienced Christian spiritual guide. The Lord would use this woman’s unquestioned gift and skills to lead me gradually on a path through my darkness to the full and genuine healing of my fear and distress and, ultimately, to a radical spiritual conversion. 

To arrive at that place, however, I would have to journey with the Lord quite a bit further.

It was only as I journeyed further with the Lord Himself, and learned more from Him, that I came to understand that these nightmares, and the feelings to which they had given rise, represented, in fact, my first encounter with supernatural evil.

This sudden, mind-shattering encounter with evil caused me to ask many questions —both of myself and of God. Convincing and plausible answers would emerge only as I journeyed through the radical conversion that, unknown to me, the Lord had waiting in the wings.

In this journey which lasted fifteen months, God would reveal Himself to me in a radically new way and would answer —slowly, but very surely —the many tough questions which my experience of supernatural evil had brought to the surface.

First Effort to Find Help

 

Although the nightmares had stopped, strange feelings of fear and anxiety continued to wash over me. These emotions were greatly magnified, of course, by God’s apparent absence. There were times that my inner pain was almost unbearable.

 I knew that these negative emotions were getting the upper hand when one day I found myself exhibiting a very uncharacteristic response to a group of young children knocking at our front door. I raised my voice loudly in anger to them, expressing a degree of irritability and frustration that I knew was not at all characteristic of me. I felt ashamed.

This incident served as my wake-up call. To inflict my pain on to innocent persons, especially on to innocent children, was anathema to me. I determined that something in me had to change —and soon.

I shared my discomfort with a close Christian friend who soon put me in touch with a pastor and his wife. My friend believed that this couple could offer me the necessary help.

I immediately arranged to meet with them.

Since my encounter three years earlier with the healing ministry of our priest-friend (see Chapter Three, section titled An Encounter with Jesus the Healer), I had become increasingly open to God’s healing. I had seen firsthand how the Lord’s healing actually worked. I had come to view healing as a priceless gift of God, one to be taken full advantage of. And so, with hope renewed, I looked forward with great anticipation to this visit from the pastor and his wife.

I was to be bitterly disappointed. They told me in substance that I needed ‘conversion’. They said that I should reflect on the exhortation of the Apostle Paul to the Philippians to think only about what was true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report and that then the God of peace would be with me (Philippians 4:8 - 9).

Apart from this they could offer me no practical help.

I emerged from our meeting surprised, disturbed —and crushed.

I knew that I was already converted to the Lord. Indeed, He was and always had been the centre and anchor of my life. Indeed, it was precisely because I completely took for granted and depended on His presence in my life that His apparent ‘absence’ was now causing me such excruciating pain!

For all my adult life I had remained true to my conscious commitment to follow the Lord’s leading. For the thirty-five years of my life to date, I had felt honoured to walk with Him and to seek His wisdom in each of my life’s big events (see Chapter Two) —right up to this moment!

I had always known and sought the Christ. Indeed, two years earlier, during my healing prayer sessions, had I not specifically begged the Lord to reveal to me more of who He was?

Clearly, I had never left the path of conversion!

So, what more could I possibly do at this point?

According to the pastor, conversion seemed to mean ‘obeying’ the scripture verse from Philippians. This didn’t make sense to me. If ‘obeying’ the scriptures had truly been the solution to my problem I wouldn’t have needed the urgent help requested from them in the first place! I could have meditated on God’s word on my own or with others. The scripture would have done its job. Besides, I had been doing precisely this. I had been meditating on the scriptures with a well-led group all along!

To my mind and heart and spirit, the pastor’s advice, though clearly well-intentioned, was meaningless. Something was dreadfully lacking. What exactly this might be, however, I had no way of knowing. I only knew that I needed to be shown explicitly how to connect to Christ again in a new way. I knew that only in this way could He and I re-unite.

Since the kind pastor and his wife could offer me no practical way of connecting to the Source of all conversion, the question now was: where, or to whom, was I to go next?

Second Effort to Find Help

 

I made one more desperate effort to find help. This time a woman acquaintance recommended a pastor who, like her, was very active in the local Christian healing ministry.

Though extremely understanding, this pastor, too, was unable to set me on the path to connecting or, more accurately perhaps, to re-connecting to the God who seemed to elude me.

Yet I continued to sense that this very God was calling to me loudly even in the midst of my pervasive darkness!

Why, I wondered, could these pastors not somehow help me answer His call? 

I remember as though it were yesterday the heavy, downcast, empty heart and drooping spirits with which I left the second pastor’s office and made my way home by foot over Winnipeg’s Red River Bridge.

As I trod wearily home, I encountered exactly the same people and traffic and landscapes that I had encountered on the way in. Yet I saw them now through tearful, darker, and even more despairing eyes. I could not pretend to myself that I was the same person now that I had been prior to my meeting with this pastor.

This was the second time that a pastor had not been able to give me anything whatever on which to hang my spiritual hat!

For the first time in my life, I was beginning to experience a profound sense of helplessness and the fear that comes with it. I felt I was losing control.

Bereft, alone, disconsolate and apparently separated from the God who was my anchor, I knew that I had to find a spiritual life-raft very quickly if I was to be saved intact from the choppy, turbulent seas that now threatened to engulf me.

The Missing ‘How-To’ in the First Pastor’s Counsel

It was not that I questioned the validity of the Apostle Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians that the first pastor talked about; not at all. But I knew that to simply reflect on the black words of scripture on a white page most certainly did not hold the key to resolving my dilemma.

Down deep in my spirit, I knew that a key piece of the spiritual puzzle was somehow missing. I needed something of an entirely different order. I needed to find a brand-new way to the Person at the centre of these very scriptures.

Even though my judgment was clouded by the negative emotions of distress and confusion, I seemed nevertheless to know instinctively that when one is experiencing spiritual or emotional turmoil or travelling through uncharted spiritual territory, positive thinking alone —even when based on God’s written word —cannot suffice. Something more radical has to take place.

Over the next fifteen months, the Lord Himself would introduce me to that radical ‘something’. He would reveal to me the missing piece of the puzzle: namely, a personal and direct revelation of Himself to me.

Only with this kind of direct revelation from the Lord Himself would I be able to re-connect to Him.

Only then could I start to lay hold of and make my own the truths articulated by the Apostle Paul that the pastor had recommended!

Only in this way would I be able to actually experience —firsthand for myself —the truth of the Apostle Paul’s words.

Only then would they be able to penetrate right through to my current situation!

The two pastors had been unable to guide me to the place where the Lord could reveal Himself directly to me. Yet this was the critical missing piece!

On reflecting back on this episode much later on, I concluded that the ability to guide a person to the place of genuine and direct connection to the Lord should be a requirement for all pastors. Only then will pastors be able to truly connect, or re-connect, people to the Way, the Truth and the Life —rather than merely talk to them about Him!

I thanked both pastors for seeing me. Despite my acute disappointment with the outcome of our meetings I recognized that they had genuinely wanted the best for me. Years later, I would realize that perhaps this had been a frustrating experience for them too.

Looking back much later at my meeting with the pastors, I was reminded of my mathematics teacher at secondary school. She could very easily regurgitate mathematical dogmas and formulas. She could certainly tell you whether something was mathematically right or wrong; but she could not explain the ‘how to’ of finding that out for yourself!

Though well-intentioned, therefore, she largely failed in her role as teacher.

In the spiritual life, the challenge is exactly the same. It is one thing to know that a person needs deeper conversion but it is quite another to be able to guide the person along the path to a personal experience of that conversion!

Yet unless this personal encounter with the Lord takes place, God will remain seemingly ‘absent’ for that person and she or he will continue to experience the profound pain of apparent separation from Him.

Truth is a Person, you see, not a concept or ideology. You must, therefore, experience this Person who is Truth at the level of your heart, not merely apprehend Him through your intellect! The role of a spiritual guide is to lead the one who is searching into that experience. Admittedly, this requires special gifts from the Lord and, in my opinion, a certain degree of training in spiritual guidance as well.

Amazingly, the Lord would soon honour my passionate recognition of this huge gap in Christian pastoral ministry. In the next five months, He would offer me an opportunity to receive a special year-long training in Christian spiritual formation (see Chapter Eight, section titled Final Stage: The Institute of Christian Formation: The Lord Answers All My Questions).

The unique gift of this training was that it was not dependent on a purely academic approach, although that certainly was also an important part of it. Rather, every day for the entire twelve months participants were provided with a real and palpable opportunity to encounter and experience the Lord firsthand and directly! 

As this beautiful experience steadily came alive, it was not difficult for participants to understand the theology and doctrine behind it.

Because we were encountering on a daily basis the Person at the centre of the scriptures, the scriptures quickly began to take on a life and an authority of their own. They became part and parcel of our experience of the Christ and not merely remote, black words written on a white page.

Prior to this, I would have thought such an experience of direct bonding with the Lord impossible, if not fanciful. In the Institute I learned that it was absolutely and truly available to anyone who sought Him sincerely.

With this training I, in turn, would be able to offer to others the guidance and help that I had found so hard to find. This, indeed, is exactly what the Lord has called me to do for the last thirty-four years. I understand fully that it is a singular privilege.

Meanwhile —to get back to my story: I knew that there was only one thing now left for me to do: I had to beg God to help me find this ‘missing piece’ of the puzzle, the piece that allows genuine, ongoing conversion to take place, the piece that would let God find me in my very bad times.

Within two weeks, the Lord would answer my prayer. He would use a holy, humble, joy-filled, well-trained woman, highly experienced in the ways of God with men and women, to become my very first Christian spiritual guide. The Lord would use her to direct me to the missing piece. This missing piece would play the lead role in the radical conversion process that God was now about to set in full motion in my life.

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This article is Chapter 4 in my book, How I Learned to Let God Find Me in the Good Times and the Bad: A Spiritual Memoir L

Note

Look out for new articles every 2 weeks.

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Can you relate to my experience? Did you feel my pain? Drop me a note in the comments to let me know. I’d really appreciate that.

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