Before anything changed
A few days later, I started thinking again about some things I had lived with for years.
Both spiritually and physically, I had gone through difficult periods.
Some of them, over time, had almost become a normal part of my life.
Among them were severe stomach pains.
Sometimes, when they caught me, I could spend two days lying in bed.
I didn't want to see anyone.
I would curl up my knees and just try to endure the pain until it passed.
My drawer was always full of stomach and headache medicines.
Even when we traveled abroad, we would take a bag full of medicines with us.
We often looked for German or American medicines, because we thought they had a better effect.
But for years I also had another problem:
Sleep.
There were nights when I was afraid to sleep.
It would happen that I would fall asleep and, while still asleep, realize that I was sleeping.
At that moment, what, for me, was a real torture would begin.
I would try to wake up.
To move.
To turn over.
Or to scream, hoping that someone near me would hear me and wake me up.
It felt as though I couldn't breathe and was suffocating, as I struggled in my sleep to get out of that state.
When I finally woke up, I was filled with a great fear and could barely breathe.
Often I would decide not to sleep anymore and would stay awake until dawn.
There were nights in a row when I would turn on the television and stay watching it, just so I wouldn't fall asleep.
Fear had entered so deeply within me that, even when I fell asleep for a few minutes during the day, the same thing often happened to me again.
This had been going on for years.
The turning point
Then, one night, something happened that I will never forget.
It was around four or five in the morning.
It was still dark outside.
I was asleep when that panic seized me again.
It was the same state I knew so well and that had tortured me for years.
This time I cried out loudly, in my sleep:
“In the name of Jesus, get out, Devil!”
Suddenly I woke up.
I was still in a panic and could barely open my eyes.
As soon as I managed to open them, I saw something that even today I find difficult to explain.
I saw many shadows coming out of my chest and flying towards the window.
They were shaped like bats and were approximately the size of a hand's palm.
There were many.
Perhaps more than ten or fifteen.
I saw them with my own eyes, as they were leaving my body and going out the window.
For a few moments I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Then I felt a great sense of deliverance within me.
It was as if a weight that I had carried for a long time had been lifted.
What I understood
What happened next made me realize that that night was not like other nights.
At the time I am writing this testimony, twelve months have passed.
Throughout this time, I have not had a single night in which I experienced what had happened to me for years.
The fear did not return.
Nor did the stomach pains return.
For years I had lived with these things.
And, without realizing it, I had gotten used to them.
I had accepted them as part of my life.
But, after that night, for the first time I began to ask myself a question that I had not asked in this way before:
“What if the darkness we experience is more than what we see?”
Sometimes we only see what happens before our eyes.
But beyond that, there might be something else.
And, if so, then we need to know:
“What does the Word say about darkness?”
Where you can continue
UNDERSTAND THE WORD → How did darkness enter human life?