After a summer hiatus it is time for me to continue the series, The Face of Satan.
As promised, this series is unfolding as I experienced it chronologically, highlighting the many ways our adversary attempts to stop our attempts to grow in holiness and serve God and others. One of the experiences I share this week illustrates the all-out frontal attack Satan launches at a soul that has stepped out of his grasp and has chosen to serve God.
As the following dream experience shows, though, his attacks are of no harm to a soul that has chosen God, as God Himself protects it:
October, 2002 (exact date unrecorded)
I dreamed I was lying in my bed (which of course I was!). I was awake and looked up. Satan was hovering over me screaming obscenities and launching continuous verbal tirade at me.
I was totally at peace and unconcerned and unafraid because there was some kind of bubble dome over me that he could not penetrate and therefore he could do me no harm…
Let not a soul think that it is able to generate this peace itself. God then showed me what I am of myself when he removes this protection – intense fear envelops the soul. He showed me this to demonstrate that no soul should ever grow boastful or proud that it is courageously able to serve God without fear. All these blessings come from God.
As you can imagine, I had begun to wonder at this point why I was experiencing so much satanic attack. It is true that Satan wishes to ensnare all people, but he especially wishes to stop souls who have been called to serve God in the dramatic ways needed today when the world is full of so much evil and so many people are suffering from it. Now that this website has been established and I am well into this – what you could call an expose – on Satan, I realize he was probably hell-bent (excuse the pun) on stopping me.
The picture started to become even clearer almost a year later, when I realized God was going to use me in a greater way:
Tuesday, September 30, 2003 approx 3 a.m
Dreamed God lit up a sign in my staircase (that was somehow like an escalator) that was so bright it lit up the entire room/area. I was in a large, dark old home and it was mine in the dream, but not mine in real life.
The sign was burning flame of gold letters that spelled out a word/message to me. It stayed lit for some time, but I could not read what the letters said. The letters were so large and long and tall and burning bright that I could not read them. At first I thought I could (and if I did I don’t remember what it said), but I could not, so I called a friend over to help me read them. I was so in awe and completely overcome with such love, power and majesty and I was so excited. I said “What does it say, what does it say?” “I can’t read it”
Then, before my friend could read the letters/message, God extinguished the light. The darkness seemed so much greater than before now and I was so upset that I could not read the message and now it had been extinguished. I said to my friend with sadness, but resignation, “God keeps us in such great darkness.” At this point I was walking toward the cloakroom in the front lobby of this home. I said to her, shaking my head “I don’t know why He keeps us in such great darkness, but I trust Him and I will keep walking in darkness if that is what He wants”.
I was so upset and disappointed that I had been unable to read the letters/message, because I love Him so much and am so eager for anything of Him and Jesus and Heaven because I miss it so much (because of the many things I’d been experiencing). I felt especially upset with myself because the message was burning there for a time for me to read and I could not and felt it was my own inadequacy and fault.
I was in the living room (in the dream) or heading back to the living room, when God called me back to the cloakroom because He started to speak to me. I went toward his HUGE, BOOMING VOICE, which was coming from the cloakroom (which was in darkness). He spoke slowly, powerfully, booming and slightly gravelly, in great and awesome majesty and power. (It reminded me of how they had Him appear speaking to Moses from the burning bush before He sent Moses on his mission. I still tremble at the amazing awe it created and the power with which He spoke!) He said:
SO THAT THOU SHALT NOT SUFFER BECAUSE OF THE FINITENESS OF YOUR MIND (and here was communicated to me something about my inability because of this finiteness), I SHALL ILLUMINE YOU TO READ MY WORD/LETTERS (not sure which) AND KNOW MY MESSAGE!
There are no words to describe this encounter with God. His voice sounded like talking thunder and each word sounded like the stomp of a giant’s footstep on the earth. I trembled for quite a while after I awoke from this dream and cannot convey just how humiliating this experience of my smallness was.
What is significant, though, in the sharing of this experience as part of an expose on Satan, is the dream that followed immediately after this one a couple of hours later:
Tuesday, September 30, 2003 approx 5:30 a.m.
Satan tried to deceive me in a dream after the last one – pretending he was God speaking to me. It was a long convoluted and mostly unmemorable dream of him trying to get me to follow him on the pretext that he was God and would speak to me.
He led me into a room and changed into an image that he knew would tempt me (regarding the purpose of a certain suffering) and as he stood in the corner he said I could ask him any question and he would answer me. I was tempted, but trusted God and so I did not ask. I don’t think I asked any questions.
Then he changed shape and became like a large lying mouth entity of some sort (I literally saw a picture of a sideways (lying) mouth) that spoke to me very weakly – so weakly he was whispering and I could hardly hear him. I became suspicious at this point and started to recite the prayer to discern spirits.
He changed shape again and stood in front of me this time in the shape of a human. I rose up against him with great immediacy, strength, purpose and firmness (mostly calm) and recited the prayer to discern spirits. I mixed it up a little and had to repeat it because I was somewhat agitated. I blessed myself with the sign of the cross and he disappeared.
The bottom line with experiences like this is that Satan will attempt to do whatever it takes to deter a soul from following and serving God, alternating tactics in his attempts to ‘take the soul down’. As I have said before, however, once a soul decides for God, Satan has already lost most of his power. Our strength and protection lie always in God and His son, Jesus. We need to keep in mind that God is infinite and that Satan is a creature – a fallen one at that. He only has the power we give him by being afraid or yielding to him. His temptations are many and it is particularly notable that he has infiltrated much of the media, as seen in the rise of the occult in our broadcasting. Without our realizing it, we are gradually becoming desensitized to the danger of the occult and new age language. However, the Catholic Church, in particular, has a special strength through the seven sacraments because they give us divine grace, which shares in God’s perfection and God’s life.
Please take a moment to reflect where you are at in your spiritual life. Are you one bound by Satan? Are you one just starting to break away and afraid to go further? Are you walking along the path and wondering if it is all worth it? Are you serving God and suffering for it? Don’t take the sharing of my experiences lightly. For all of us our safe haven is with God. It is a struggle, but it is so worth it! I cannot even begin to describe the joy, beauty and love that await souls that choose God (love) instead of sin and Satan. Don’t think for one minute that this life is not a spiritual journey with a destination after death. Don’t waste the time we have each been given to grow in love. One day, your time will come to an end…
Karen
The Deliverance Ne†work 