Deliver Me From Evil Series

LIVING IN SECRETS

So where do I begin?  Perhaps, I should start with my new beginning; I am delivered by the grace and mercy of God.  He has saved me, and set me free from the ties that bind. It is through his strength and the leading of the Holy Spirit that I will share my life with you.  The word of God declares, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” (John 8:36, KJV).

There was something oddly different about me from my other eight siblings, not just the fact that I was the smallest of my mother’s children, not that I was the only child who struggled with weight issues. For the longest time I could not place my finger on it. I was the object of my siblings torment, the butt of their jokes; my mother’s sounding board. I was emotional. I would cry if I thought someone had looked at me too long.

Mommy didn’t help; even a mother bird would shoo away predators from the nest. Not my mother, she would laugh heartily all the while directing me to “Stop being crazy”. Mommy didn’t do too much more for my self-esteem. I was always her, “ugliest child, her blackest child, her dumbest child. I would not measure up to the prestige of “other people’s children”. Despite their taunting I had a definitive love of myself, I was clueless as to where it came from, but whenever a camera was near I would strike poses that would lay waste to any super model, then and now. Yet, despite these brash behaviors, mommy needed me.

Mommy had an infinitive knack for playing the lottery, bingo, and the slots. One would believe that Atlantic City was her home, gambling was her profession, and winning was her hobby. She was an “old’ pro”, as the saying would go. She had a stockpile of number books tucked conspicuously under the covers on the underside of her bed. She covenanted them daily and would consult them frequently, throughout most of her life. She would base all her gambling decisions on those little written experts. I don’t recall when it was or even why it was, but at some point mommy began to consult me as habitually as she did those books. It started out that she would say to me, “give me a good number to play”, and me, being happy just to have her acknowledge my existence I would gladly chirp out a series of three and four digit combinations.

She noticed me.  As time went on she began to take me out for rides in the car with her.  That in and of itself was a major miracle, she never wanted to take any of us, anywhere, with her, let alone riding in the car.  Whenever mommy would leave the house we would beg to go with her.  She would tell us we couldn’t go with her because she was going to see a man about a horse, a dog, or some other animal that she never did return home with.  I still don’t know what that means.

But, our drives had a purpose, they were working trips.  She would stick me in the passenger seat right along side her and I would extend my head out the window like a puppy taking in the cool breeze.  She would then put me to work.  I had to find what I thought would be a “good number”.  Cars and trucks, trailers alike would wiz pass us.  Mommy would yell, “Hurry up girl, with your dumb self you almost missed it”, ever time I hesitated to get the numbers, forgive me, keeping my head attached to my shoulders was part of my priorities.

But one day I received a promotion.  My employ went from picking numbers to the telling of dreams.  Mommy would eagerly erupt into a “what did you dream last night, every Saturday and Sunday mornings”.  At first I could only remember the physical stress that accompanied them, remembering very little about the actually occurrences.  But as I got older, they became more vivid, more expressive; I now had imagery to go along with my dreams.  Once I had a dream that a woman, wearing white, tall and slender was beckoning me to come to her.

I don’t know why I was afraid of her, but I was, and I certainly was not going to her.  I awoke from that dream in hysterics or as what Mommy called affectingly as “one of my fits”.  I ran to the kitchen where mommy was cooking cream of wheat on the stove and as I told her my tale, my mother, surprisingly, didn’t seem surprised at all.

However, the countenance of her face did change to concern when my brother, who is just above me in age, tumbled out of his own bedroom, telling Mommy.  “I saw a woman in all white coming to take Judy”.  That night my mother placed a small mountain of salt under my bed, and in the four corners of my bedroom, and then she positioned a straw broom at a 90 degree angle in the frame of my bedroom door.

Mommy said it would keep the spirits away.  It had never dawned on me why spirits would need to count the number grains of salt poured onto the floor or the number of straws from a broom.  Wouldn’t it have been simpler for the spirit to just sweep the salt away with the broom and then enter in?

I wish I could tell you that that was the last time these things had ever happened to me, but it wasn’t.  I’m about to tell you a series of stories, all true, and all happened in my family.  I’m not telling these stories for a fear factory but rather to help each reader understand the spiritual torment we endured.

Tune in next month for the continuation of “Deliver Me From Evil.” Series.

Judy Washington, Spiritual Counseling Director and Co-founder of the Christian Counseling and Wellness Center for Women, has over 20 years of experience in mental health counseling, counselor training and consulting. Her teaching and interests include life structuring, career and education counseling, spirituality and mental health, integrated with prolific teachings based in theology and spirituality.