Blurry Creatures - EP: 361 The Exorcism That Failed: A Pastor’s Fight for His Adopted Son | Joe Anderson

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

In this episode of Blurry Creatures, Joe Anderson shares his raw and unfiltered testimony of encountering the supernatural, battling spiritual darkness, and finding freedom in Jesus. From childhood experiences and open doors to demonic oppression, to navigating family struggles and ministry under heavy spiritual attack, Joe’s story sheds light on the reality of spiritual warfare and deliverance. Exposure to occult practices and horror media can unknowingly open dangerous spiritual doors, a reality Joe Anderson experienced firsthand through encounters with demonic forces and even poltergeist activity. His journey led him to seek guidance from priests and exorcists, who provided powerful insights on confronting principalities and the unseen battles that rage around us. Through these struggles, Joe discovered the essential role of faith, prayer, and the support of a strong spiritual community in deliverance. Most importantly, his testimony highlights how the body of Christ—across all denominations—plays a vital part in standing united against darkness and overcoming spiritual warfare. - Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to Blurry Creatures 02:12 Joe Anderson's Bigfoot Encounter 07:48 A Haunting Experience 39:44 A Dark Path Begins 40:55 The Road to Recovery 45:08 Unsolved Mysteries and Spiritual Battles 01:21:19 A Chilling Conversation with Jimmy 01:22:09 Seeking Help from the Church 01:23:44 The Battle Intensifies 02:00:47 A Desperate Search for Help 02:01:43 The Exorcism Process 02:05:39 The Aftermath and Reflections Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Luke so often, people email us and they have this story. They're out in their woods and they're looking in the bushes and they got, What's that? And when you are pouring your dog food and your dog's bowl, that's the last thing you want to say. What is that? What is the stuff coming out of this bag? You know, I don't think a lot of us think about maybe what we feed our dogs. And that's why we partner with rough greens.

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Greens.com discount code blurry. Rough Greens makes any dog food better. The history of our earth is so different from what we can imagine. joy to join. The Smithsonian, that if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere, was to go get it. I'm going to assume at least one person is right, because if one person's right to bust the paradigm, it all goes back to the fallen church. And the problem with the modern day church, they have a very truncated view of the supernatural. This backdrop is just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Herman event.

And this guy defects. from the kingdom. That's a big deal. All right. Welcome back to blurry creatures. You know, a big part of our show is like people email us, they have some sort of like, they wrote a book or they sort of have their own lane and somehow they end up on blurry creatures. Like, Lee Strobel, you know, wrote this book case for Christ. And then every once in a while we get these emails where it's like, hey, this crazy thing happened to me. And we're always like, Don't tell us to all the details.

Just come on our show and Joe Anderson, that was you. You sent us this message and you're like, I'm not crazy, I promise. But there's this. Which is always a sign. And sometimes it just, the magic happens and some, the story sort of compels someone to come forward. And then they, they, you showed up in the basement. Isn't it what a crazy person would say? I promise I'm not crazy.

It's just like someone here. We just had Hardy on it. And I, I meant to, I thought about this a lot. We asked him if there was like any sort of, he brought it up, like the Illuminati and he was like, that's not real. And I meant to say, isn't that what someone the Illuminati? Exactly. Exactly. Well, you know what? You know what sold you, Joe, is you had a professional email signature. And so we thought, okay, that's your credential. We checked your LinkedIn. You gave us your number and you had a professional email. So it sounded like, you know, but you have a wild one of a kind story. And we can just let you go and we'll ask questions and do what we do. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome to the basement. you're a pastor and author. You've got the book. And what did your thoughts on Bigfoot?

Okay. First of all, thanks for having me here. And so my Bigfoot experience, it was about 10. You have one, of course. I do have an experience. Yeah. It was our Bigfoot adjacent experience, we'll say that. It was about 10 years ago in ministry, my buddies from Bible college, we all have stayed tight throughout the years. And one of them, his church in northern Minnesota, a guy donated this like retreat hunting lodge with tons of acreage and rooms and they were going to convert it over where their interns could stay there. And it wasn't finished yet, but he's like, hey, why don't you bring your family? So like five of us, we brought our families up there for the weekend, indoor, outdoor pool, beautiful area. They had all these trails for like ATVs to go on.

And so we're hanging out having a good time. Well, the owner, the guy who had donated it, showed up late one night. And he goes, hey, let's go on a midnight run with the ATVs. And these are like the Polaris razor side by side, like dune buggy, steering wheel, windshield, roll bars. And these trails go for miles. And so I'm a permit to carry holder, second amendment guy. And I had my gun locked up in a nice safe location in the car. Welcome. You're in your company, Joe.

Yeah, thank you. It's constitutional carry here. Right. And, you know, and so I thought, I wasn't going to have it around the kids. But if we're going to go out into the woods and it's midnight, I'm going to load up. So I had my, my chest bag. It's not a purse if it's a gun in there. but like my satchel.

Your nurse. Your man purse? Yeah, I've got that. I just put it on just in case. You're ready. And we're just tearing through the woods. We're following him. And he's going to take us out to this opening where he said it's the best place to look at the stars.

So we're going, going, just tearing through the woods late at night. We stop at this opening where there's a deer stand. And then there's a cornfield. And he gets us looking off into the stars. And all of a sudden, I'm in one of the back carts. And off to the like the back left, we start hearing rustling up in a tree. and grunting. And all of a sudden, this figure drops down from one of the branches and comes running at one of

the carts. And it's a tall, furry figure. Wow. And my hands go up towards the holster. And then I start hearing the grunting turn to more of a growl. And it becomes very clear that it's a man in a bigfoot costume. Okay. This guy had one of his buddies hiding out there to play a prank on us.

That's stupid. It was really stupid. And it was like when he started to growl was the dead giveaway and everything. But I went up to him afterwards like, hey, that was cute and funny. It was a really good costume too. And the guy was like six foot three, six foot four. But I was like, you know, first of all, the dead giveaway was when you did the growl, like very human like, er. Like work on your growl, pal.

The grunts were good. And, you know, the costume was kind of saggy in the drawers. Like they had a saggy butt. Like you can tell Bigfoot's going to have thick legs. You have a big back, right? Unless he's been lazy lately. Right. Skip and leg day.

And I told him, I go, you know what? I reached for my gun just so you know. And he's like, oh, you're carrying. I go, yeah, you might want to rethink doing this to people because someone might want to try and put Bigfoot down. So that was my adjacent. That's like Nate's always telling me you get you in a Bigfoot suit. And I'm like, I'm not doing that. That's how you get shot here in Tennessee.

Well, I mean, no, that's if like you and I are like filming a promo for something or like on Broadway. Like there's a reason to have it because we use so many like fun videos you can make. But it did make me think like if it really was big. what I start shooting and the answer would be yeah you have to yeah well it's always an existential question we talked to folks that have Bigfoot in a scope and lined up and they're like some of them say it looks too human for them to pull the trigger but you both you're you're big foot and you have to take it for the team right because you know we yeah he's gonna get a guy's gonna ruin your life and he's laying down and he's laying

down his life so you can you know you can show everybody he's real if you shoot Bigfoot your life's over yeah we interviewed that's gonna come after you you know you're done you you're gonna be in black the people that love Bigfoot will turn on you. The people that want to pull one out to prove that it exists will love you. You'll have a split crowd. The government will disappear you.

Yeah, we interviewed a paramedic who shot one and he thinks he killed it. Hit it in the chest like three times. And then the men in black showed up and took him to the spot. He didn't know how that happened. And it's a wild story. But yeah, I think it's hard to pull the trigger

once you're like in that moment. I think you rethink everything. Wait, this thing looks kind of like. like a human, but it's not. But, I mean, if you're terrified and you were protecting your family yourself, I'm thinking you'll shoot it, but I don't know. Would you shoot it?

Would I shoot Bigfoot? If it was like in my tent, I would shoot it. What if he was just being friendly and gentle? No. Well, you have to have a good story. You have to say. How gentle? What is happening here? This is like

a whole different turn. I don't know what he's doing in your tent. Bigfoot's always doing something We don't know. We know if he does kidnap you in your sleeping bag, all you got to give him a lip of skull or coat, whatever you got, because that'll...

He doesn't like tobacco. Yeah, isn't that one of the legends? Yeah, they didn't. They got sick. The guy that got kidnapped, supposedly they got into his tobacco, chewing tobacco, and they all got sick, and he snuck off. This is the story.

Give it to the whole family. They don't know their kids dip. I mean, Bigfoot's pretty aggressive. It's kind of like, you know, like when you're a kid and your grandpa's like, you should try this beer because you won't drink it, you know? I think that's what he was doing with his kids.

Teaching a lesson. Yeah. Well, Joe, I mean, I appreciate that story. I'm glad you didn't kill that guy that night. It would be a whole different episode if you did. Joe Anderson in prison. We got him here on the phone. It'd be that guy's fault.

I mean, I don't really think your peers wouldn't convict because you were just self-defense mode. But you have a wild story. I think that you condensed it in like a paragraph and we'll let you kind of bring our listeners up to speed of what you went through, but involved a, I will he's a haunted Pokemon doll. Yeah. Some wild stuff.

I can get to that. I'll give you a little background. Yeah, so you'll start at the beginning here. Yeah. So I grew up in Bloomington, Minnesota in a Christian family, both sets of grandparents, Christian, just always going to church. And really my first kind of paranormal experience was I was about 10 years old. And I have an older sister, just a year older than me.

My mom had just started working. So she would go in the morning. My sister would go to school. And I'd have about an hour before I had to go catch the bus. And this particular morning, I'm just watching TV, eating my Cheerios, waiting for a paper machet art project to dry in our basement. Okay. Super 80s.

Yeah. And I'm watching Good Morning America. And they have on the production crew and the director of the movie Poultergeist. Oh, wow. Okay. And they're talking about how the set was haunted and that they use like real skeletons and so all these crazy things. And he said it was, and they do say like several cast members died in the years.

following everything. But yeah, there's a whole like legend that goes with it. But this was earlier than that. And he was saying that the one thing that kept happening was light bulbs would explode on set for no reason. And for some reason that freaked me out. I just got like really scared, a little, you know, 10 year old turned off the TV and I'm like, I want to get out of the house. Like I'm scared, but I got to go down in the basement, unfinished basement and get my project. So I go down there and it's the, you know, just the the naked light bulb hanging with the the the string over the car table with my paper machet. So I go down there, turn on the light,

grab my paper mache. I pull the switch and it goes in the light bulb explodes. No. Yes. It explodes. And I run out of the house, terrified because I was like, I was just thinking that, I was feeling that. And it always freaked me out.

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And it was during my freshman year, my parents had to go out of town out of the country for a couple of weeks. And so they wanted me to come home. my home, my parents' home was only about a half hour from the Bible college. And I lived in the dorms, like, hey, can you come home for a couple weeks and let the dog out? And so I'm staying in the house at night by myself. And it's in the middle. And our house was at the top of this really steep hill on a cul-de-second.

The far back, no streetlights was dark. And I would work from, go to school during the day and then work three to 11. And I was used to having roommates and being around people. So it was kind of just weird coming home to an empty house late at night, middle of the winter. and I'm driving home from work late at night. And for some reason, I started thinking about that experience of the light bulb exploding, hadn't thought about it for years. And I'm like, why am I scared?

Like, I'm security forces in the Air Force, which is military police. I'm a Bible college student. I'm a grown man. I shouldn't be afraid of that. And I'm kind of like getting mad at being afraid. And then I'm also thinking, if I pull up that hill and our front light is out, because I know I left the light on because it's dark, it's slippery, it's winter,

but it's in my head and it's kind of almost like I'm anticipating this. I pull up the hill and the lights burned out. And I'm just like buzzing with that fear. You can feel like the static electricity in the air sometimes when you're scared. And I'm getting mad at myself for this and I'm praying. I'm like, okay.

And I go in, I check the light to make sure it's actually burned out. I'm like, okay, it's just a coincidence. And I go in and my dog, my parent's dog is acting really weird. like barking at the walls and just out of character. And I'm like, okay, what is going on? It's going up to the door.

It didn't want to go outside. And I call my girlfriend who's at the college. And I'm telling her this story. I'm like, I'm kind of freaked out. I told her the story about it. And I was a kid. I don't know why. I'm scared.

Would you just pray for me? And she goes, yeah. And I get off the phone and I go upstairs and I hit the light switch and it burns out. And it does like electric like, like, okay, this isn't a coincidence now. and I'm praying and I'm checking other lights and it's not doing it. And then I'm going to go down into our family room to watch some TV. And I hit that light switch and it burns out again. It's not that's three.

And so I'm freaked out. And actually it's kind of a cool thing because I turn on the TV to like religious broadcasting. And it's, um, I think it's a 700 club with Pat Robertson. And I catch the tail end where he would pray, you know? Yeah. And he's praying. He's like, I just feel that someone out there is battling with darkness right now. And you just need to know that Jesus is the light of the light of the.

the world and he's defeated the darkness. And I was like, come on, Pat. All the lights turned back on. But that was just kind of like a weird, unique experience that. And I was always interested, I would listen to talk radio at night. I'd go to sleep. And like before podcasts, I'm 51. So growing up well before the internet, talk radio at night, it was like long form

interviews. They'd have people on. Who was the guy at Casey Kaysom? That was more like music. Oh, yeah. Coast to coast. This was, well, coast to coast came a little later with Art Bell. I was a big Art Bell fan. But just normal, like local, they'd have like weird people on and just let them talk.

It's like sleep in Seattle, right? Yeah, but it would be like, tell us your story and they would talk about. You're like a second generation. And so I was going to go earlier, Luke. That what I mean? Like that whole thing where they call in and the kids like looking for like a wife or his dad. But these guys were always a little bit on the edge where it was kind of like, yeah, tell me more about this experience. It'd be kind of similar like the blurry podcast. And so I learned. just a false sleep listening to that. And I was always interested.

And friends, friends would make fun of me for being into like conspiracies and things like that. But I was always like on the download, which is funny now because it's so prevalent that like my wife's friends will call me and ask questions about conspiracies because they're into it. I'm like, okay, let me help you. You don't have to believe everything that you see online. You can be a little discerning. So that was that was kind of my upbringing. You had the, you had the spirit. of Thomas Edison's nemesis, like following you.

Yeah. Well, I do. Following you around. I do, I do think the demonic, for some reason, they mess with electrical things. They mess with electrical things. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Like, I've been, like, looking back, like, what do you think, what do you think was happening there?

Do you think you had like a, do you think that watching that about the poltergeist opened up a door or like a portal for something to, and then? I don't know if it was that in particular, but I do know this. that when I look back over my whole life, and especially with some of the more recent experiences that I got into, I really got reflective. I can see a pattern where there's always been something kind of around me. I'm super sensitive to spiritual things,

but you don't know that because you don't know what you don't. Like, this is my experience. And I could kind of always feel like lots of empathy to a point where it would be like, heavy, like, oh, I could just feel when someone's going through something. And my friends who've known me, my whole life, this has been my entire life, like the one weird person in the building or in the room or wherever you go is going to make a beeline for me. Like they will come up to me. That's how we found you, Joe. And the one weird, the one weird experience out of the group is going

to happen to me. And so there's been like this almost, and I actually talked to a priest who does exorcisms about that. And he said a lot of times when you kind of, I don't know if I'd call it a gift or just you have that on you is that the demonic kind of knows that you know because you're more of aware and they'll come up to you. And this is the way I could describe it, even now when people like that will come up to me, it's almost like how a dog will come up to you and kind of stand next to you in a little bit of a submissive way. I'm kind of like, I know that you know I'm not going to make eye contact. Sometimes it'll just frontally come up to me. But that's just been a part of my life. So I feel like that's been around me my whole life. And then with a call,

call to ministry and having just- Yeah, called evangelism. If you're sharing the gospel, you end up putting a target on yourself anyway. But that's an interesting idea. I mean, we've, makes me think Nate about some of the stuff we talked to Tony Merkel about, where certain, he has stories from his show

where there are certain people that have a gifting in a spiritual gifting in the sense like they're, whatever that is. But that's recognized also by the darkness. And so there's this attempt to, in some cases recruit or to also to derail these people because so they don't use those gifts for the kingdom. Yes. Which is a really interesting idea.

Like it feels like X-Men, right? You're sort of have this ability. I'm not saying that's necessarily like, I don't know how that works is what I'm saying. But I know that like we've heard something about this before on a different level like this sort of demonic recruitment happens in lucid dreaming. It happens in these other spaces. But also on sort of just a macro scale that. the darkest understands, as you said the dog, the darkest understands, too,

that people have discernment or they have abilities that are sensitive and they, and that part of the, they're doing is trying to. Or a way you can be derailed. Deerail, yeah, trying to derail you. If you have a, a call- A spirit to like alcoholism, those spirits are gonna go after you

and get you to drink or whatever it is. Which ironic, I am a recovering alcoholic. So, and I think that part of that, so I, you ever heard of synesthesia, it's like, it's considered a disorder. I have that, it's like basically you see, You see numbers as colors and letters as colors and you can kind of, it's just a weird sensory thing. It's not like debilitating or anything.

And some people, it's like rain man? Nope. Not at all. I wish you're like the mom. You're like the me. I am not a savant. But it's just a weird processing. And it would, I would struggle in school.

I'd have to just figure things out a different way. But I thought everyone did like, doesn't everyone see the letter A as red? And because it's all I knew. But I think just being extra sensitive naturally and then also like the spiritual giftedness of that, It can be exhausting. It can be a detriment, but it can also be a gift, especially in ministry, just feeling people. People open up to me. And I think that there is a principle of the enemy being like a nemesis towards a gift.

And so I've felt that around me my whole life, but not as profoundly and as strongly. So really, when I got married. So I went to Bible College, was in the Air National Guard, did the military thing to pay for school, met my wife at Bible College. we're dating. Now at this time, and I think what would, to give you a little step back, I went through all high school, didn't drink. When I got out of high school and I took like a gap year before going to Bible college, I'm like, I'm going to start drinking a little bit just to explore, just so my wild oats. And it was like, I'm one of those alcoholics where it clicked right away. And part of that was the shame and the guilt and my denomination, you don't drink. And it was like, you know, I'd go to church

and like, I didn't get struck by lightning because I was drunk last night. And I kept it hidden. So there was the secrecy right away. And I'm one of those people where it just clicked for me. And I kept it a secret. And so it's the first time in my life where I was really like living a lie. I was not a liar. And that just does weird things too. I wasn't trying to pull one over on anyone. But I'm going through Bible college. We're drinking is forbidden. And I was managing being an alcoholic while I'm there without anyone knowing, including my girlfriend and we're dating. And I kept telling myself, Like a lot of people in addiction will be like, I'm going to quit on Monday. I'm going to quit next month.

I'm going to quit next semester. I'm going to, and that guilt kept building up. And at the same time, I had that experience where I would like pray. Like God zap me. Take away this addiction. But like anyone who struggled with some kind of a besetting sin or addiction, like you pray that. And then when it doesn't happen, it's like, does he not care about me?

Like, what, you know, and it was messing with my theology and this. really looking back and it was a lack of surrender and honesty on my part. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions of

Apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Introducing the new Best Skin Ever Ultra Slim Precision Concealer from Sephora Collection. It's full coverage with a matte finish and perfect for any look, whether you're building it up for a full glam moment or targeting correction for a more natural vibe. At only $12, it's great for affordable touchups on the go. Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora. or at Sephora.com today. So that's kind of in the backdrop. While I'm going through Bible College, proposed to my girlfriend,

who then became my fiancé, she's from Michigan. And her dad, her dad pastor's a church out there. She's a pastor's kid, so we're going to go into ministry. Everything in our life is looking up into the right. I'd received a bunch of awards in the military.

It was just beautiful girlfriend getting married. I was doing an internship at this great church that was exploding and they were going to hire me. So we set our wedding for October 26, 1996. And she was back in Michigan the whole summer leading up to our wedding, preparing for the wedding. And I'm back in the Twin Cities thinking, this is my last time to like get this out of my

system because I'm not going to drink again after my wedding. And so I'm drinking, I'm parting, but still hiding it. Fully thinking that once I get married, it's all, I'm not going to ever drink again. And drive out to Michigan, 12-hour drive with my groomsmen. it's a beautiful autumn Saturday evening. And Milford, Michigan, which is like a pretty cool town. It's a town about 10,000. It's actually where, where Dak Shepherd is from.

Okay. Like, you've ever heard of him. He's from there kind of in the same era as my wife and her sisters. And but it's this nice community and safe, beautiful, kind of considered a village. And her dad had pastor there for years. And their church is off a two-lane road. And then behind the church, about a quarter of a mile was her parents' home that they had just built on three acres of land, just kind of giving the setting. So we have the wedding Saturday

night. All the leaves are brilliant colors, beautiful, bright blue sky. Everything went perfectly. And everyone's excited because it's the pastor's daughter getting married. And it's just, you know, he was crying. And her dad's this like super loving pastoring everyone in the community. Even people who don't go to the church. It's Pastor Billy hugs everyone, just a great guy. Everyone loves him. He does the wedding. After the reception, everything, we move all the gifts. from the church to her parents' home. And to get to their home, you had to go through the church parking lot, drive down a dirt road to their house. We put it all there. We say goodbye to them because we're going to come back in the morning, open gifts with her family, and then head off on our honeymoon.

So we go to our hotel. I remember the last thing before going to sleep is setting a wake-up call. And my thought was like, man, life is good. I just married the woman in my dreams. I just finished college, I'm going to get hired at this church that I want to work at, like, everything is looking good. Like, I am so blessed. Fell asleep in an absolute dream world, not knowing that the next morning, I'd wake up in a complete nightmare because the phone started ringing. And you know, like when you're in a hotel and you're like, where am I? What's going on? And I'm like, oh, wait, there's someone in bed with me. It's my wife. We just got married. Like, this is all, like, shaking off the cobwebs. And I look at the clock and this is 556. And that's not when I set the wake up

call for. I'm like, okay, one of my knucklehead groomsmen friends, like, we prank each other. I'm like, they're messing with me. And so I reach over to answer the phone and I hear a woman's voice and she is babbling and screaming. And I know immediately, like my heart just drops, like, something's wrong. And she's asking for my wife. We haven't been married 12 hours yet. So I'm like, Jen, I'm like, wake up. And she wakes up. I'm like, take the phone. And it's our sister, her brother's wife. And she gets on the phone. My wife sits up with the phone to her ear and she just goes, oh no. Oh no. Oh no. And she threw the phone down and started running around the room. Like, you know, like they'll show like a cartoon character going to shock. It was just like that.

Like she just was bad, like lost it. And what we found out that it happened is that over that night, it was beautiful autumn evening. This like storm front moved in and blew all the leaves off the trees. And then the thickest fog I've ever seen my life rolled into the town. So I went from like beautiful autumn to Halloween horror movie setting. And early that morning, in the darkness and the fog, a man went up to the back of her parents' home. And again, this is a safe community. They're on three acres of land. He's the pastor.

It's a two-story home with a walkout basement, unfinished. Guy goes to the back of the house, cuts the phone line, breaks into the basement, and goes up to the main level of the house. And that's where the living room is and everything. think turns on all the lights and unlocks all the doors. And in the living room is the mound of all of our wedding gifts and cards. And there's thousands of dollars. I mean, when you marry a pastor's daughter, you make out good with gifts. Doesn't touch a thing, doesn't steal anything. He's not there to steal. He goes up the next flight of stairs to her parents' bedroom. And they're sleeping soundly because it's been a busy week. They just gave away their daughter in marriage. It was a Sunday morning.

He took the morning off at church because we're going to do the gift opening. Their sleep, the guy opens the door, steps inside, turns on the light. My mother. My mother, in-law is on the side of the bed closest to the door. And she opens her eyes and sees a large man wearing a ski mask holding a shotgun. And she immediately just thinks, I have to be dreaming. This can't be real. And closes her eyes and just starts praying. The guy steps forward, leans over her. My father-in-law, he's waking up and he's kind of on his left side. He sits up, sees the barrel of the gun coming to him and is looking this guy in the eyes and the ski mask. And all he was able to do is get his right hand out. And from two feet away, the guy shoots him in the chest with a 12-gauge slug.

And anyone who knows anything about hunting, I mean, a slug will drop a deer. It blew a softball-sized hole in his chest, went throughout his lower back, through the wall into the front yard. The police the next day had to use a metal detector to find it and dig it out of the yard. Fires that one shot, turns and runs out of the house. And in the house, in addition to my mother-in-law and father-in-law, my wife's two sisters who were 16 and 18. they're in the bedroom just right next to her parents. And they also had two elderly women that they were caring for. They're just like real generous caring people.

And they were on the main level. Well, they hear this noise. My sister-in-law is thinking, like, was this a prank? Or like, what's going on? They run in. My father-in-law is bleeding to death in the bed, writhing around. Now here's like the nightmare part of it additionally is mother-in-law grabs the phone. And this is pre-cell phone.

It's 96. Phone's dead, but she doesn't realize the phone line's been cut. So she's like, this phone isn't worried. It's like running in snow and a dream, you know? Like, try the phone in the kitchens. They're running around. They don't know if anyone else is in the house. They're terrified.

And she's, and my father and my father was just writhing. And my mother-in-law, they had an old, like, early model car phone in a closet. She was going to try to get that to work. And she told the one daughter, Jody, who was 18, you got to go drive down to the church and call for help. And so she goes and gets in the car. So she drives down to the church. just she sees a light on in one of the offices. And she just felt like God told her, like the Holy Spirit said, don't go in there.

Don't go in there. And so she knew a 911 operator who lived like two miles away. So she starts driving down there. Again, no cell phones, no way to stay in contact. Back in the house, my mother-in-law tells their daughter, Leah, who is going through, you know, she's 16. She's going through like a rebellious stage where she's just like mad at God, mad at her parents for no reason, just teenage angst.

She goes, Leah, you need to go hold your dad down to keep them from rider around because he's going to bleed to death. So she takes a towel and she's like straddling, holding him down. And she starts just pleading with him. She's like, Daddy, don't die. I need you in my life right now. I'm so sorry for the way I've acted. And my father-in-law, he feels himself dying.

And he had been a chaplain with the police and he just knew he had the death rattle going. Yeah. And he's like, these are my last words. And so he's looking at his daughter. Like, what do you say is your last words? And he just looks at her. and it was hard for him to breathe, but he just kept saying,

serve Jesus, serve Jesus, serve Jesus. Like, that's all he would say. And it seemed like an eternity. Finally, the ambulance shows up. They didn't want to go in because it's an active shooter type situation. The cop who shoot up, knew my father-in-law from just in town.

It's like, he's swearing at them, you gotta get in there right now. And they go in and he had lost a tremendous amount of blood. Like, I think they said like seven pints. I mean, it was like a blood bat. They get him out and they rush him to the hospital. And kind of a crazy, like, little miracle with this is they took him to a smaller hospital because they're like, he's not going to make it to get to the big one. But they were taking a risk.

Like, they're not going to have as good at doctors. As they come screaming into the parking lot, there was a Chinese surgeon who had been called in for a car accident who was getting in his car to leave. And when you heard the ambulance come in so fast, he's like, I should go in and check and see if they need my help. And he's the one who then did the surgery, saved his life. So he goes through the surgery and they're like, they couldn't believe he was alive. And but he's going to be in a coma. Well, we, we show up at the hospital that morning. This is the day after your wedding, bro.

Yeah. Still, we haven't married 12 hours. And it's weird because like when we get the call and we're going to leave the hotel, I hadn't had anything really bad happened my life up to this point. And it's strange. We get so accustomed to things from watching movies and TV shows and think like, this is how I'd act. But in a moment like that, it's weird how your mind goes.

Like, we're going to leave the hotel room. But I'm like, should. Did I put diodorant on? Should I brush my teeth? But that seems like real petty, but like, but I don't want to have stinky breath at the hospital. And maybe we're going to be here. There's my tuxedo. It needs to get returned.

But, you know, you just, your mind, but like, we still need to go there. Yeah. And we get to the waiting room. And my mother-in-law and my two sister-in-laws are there. And they're in their pajamas and, like, the world and they got blood on them. And my wife goes up to hug them. And I look at her and she's wearing, like, pajamas she just threw on. And she's wearing her white wedding shoes.

because those were the closest shoes she could find. And I'm like, man, her dad just walked her down the aisle last night. She was wearing those shoes. And we're like hugging and people are showing up. And he was a well-known pastor. And it's a sensational story. So news teams are showing up. It's a Sunday morning.

So words getting out. People are going and I'm looking around like, who did this to him? Right. Like who shot him? And it was really sad. Like his elderly parents showed up and his dad was just like, you know, sweet old man just like, my father's name is Bill. and his father was just going,

who would shoot my billy? He's the nicest man there is. Who would try and hurt Billy? He loved everyone just like trying to wrap his mind around. And so we're going through a lot. And I'm telling like, we got to get these people out of here. And so the police cleared out.

They put the hospital on lockdown. And we're there. And wait, he gets out of surgery miraculously. And I kept asking my mother-in-law, like what kind of gun? And when she was describing a long gun, I thought she was like wrong.

Like, it can't be, like, he didn't take a shotgun to the chest and live, you know, but she's like, no. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week. Plus, you can earn fuel points to save up to $1 per gallon at the pump. At Ralph's, you can enjoy more ways to save and more rewards every time you shop. So it's always easy to save big every day with savings and rewards. Ralph's SoCal for over 150 years. Savings may vary by state.

Fuel restrictions apply. Seasite for details. And the day's dragging on, he gets out of the hospital, he's going to be in a coma, and we're like, the police are asking questions. We don't know. Like, nobody knows. But we think once he wakes up, we're going to find out. And that afternoon, my mother-in-law and my two sister-in-law is they needed clothes and

everything. And so I said, I'll go back to the house. My wife wanted to go with me because she wanted to kind of see the scene. And it's dumb. shock, you don't know you're in shock. Right. And some people are like, you guys shouldn't go back there. I'm like, I'm fine, we'll be okay.

And we went back to the house that evening. And we saw the bullet hole in the wall and blood down the stairs. Like someone took a gallon of red paint. And it's weird, again, with like my synesthesia and that, I could like get this metallic taste and it just felt like the static in there. You just felt evil. And we're looking. My wife just kind of freaked out in anger.

It was like punching the wall. Like, who would do this to my dad? And then as the sun was going down. we went we went from like being angry to just like gripped with fear like just an evil you know like in the Bible when when Abel's blood cries out. Yeah. You know, it felt like that. Like there was just something very visceral about the blood and action and the evil and the anger.

And we got to get out here right now. So to move the story along, the next day he wakes up from the coma and he had no idea who'd shot him. And that, and now the one person. Well, let me just say this. I'll speed it along. We ended up spending the next 10 days in the hospital waiting room floor sleeping there rather than going on her honeymoon, obviously. And because the police didn't know who did it, they had like a cop in front of his room

for the first night, but then they didn't have the manpower. So I'd sit in front of his room at night. And you know. I sure know. Like, yeah, the godfather. No one's coming to finish the job. Well, yeah. And when you, when someone you love get shot in bed while they're sleeping, it makes it

really hard to sleep. Sure. And so, and in addition to this, it's Halloween time. So there's a creepy vibe in the air. This hospital is under construction too. So the floor that he's on, you get off the elevator to go to the left, the wing that he's on, but to the right, it's under construction. There's plastic hanging, wires, construction lights.

And because of that, the power would go out occasionally. It'd be like intermittent power failure. Lights go out and be like that three second gap before the, the generate. were kick on. So it was like everything with your life, Joe. Oh, it'd be everything like, yeah, there's the lights again. But it was like you almost could hear the creepy music playing in the background. Like we're like we're in a horror movie right now. Yeah. And um, you know, it was, it was terrifying. And I saw something to my wife like the PTSD and back then people didn't really talk about it, but like something kind of broken her. Like it was like traumatic. And um,

the police are interviewing us. Right. And we're family, right? It's always family's a close, initial suspect. Oh, yeah. Like I, and I said to the police, I'll never forget, like, we're sitting there, they're interviewing, asking questions, like, do you have an ex-girlfriend? Does she have an ex-boyfriend? Does she have an ex-boyfriend? Because it's our wedding night. And I go, yeah, guys, it's been like 24 hours. I mean, the statistics on you catching him, like the percentage goes way down. They're like, why would you say that? I'm like, oh, no, no, I didn't do it. Like, you know, they start getting suspicious. But it was terrifying. And after 10 days, he was able to get out of the hospital. And they couldn't believe it.

he was able to walk out of the hospital. Jeez. The way the bullet had gone through him, they just said it was like a miracle. Like if you're going to get shot in the chest with a 12-gauge slug, the way it went through. That's the way it has to. And here, and I know people have different viewpoints of this, but I think it's important to, to share this. The way my father-in-law got into ministry is that years prior when my daughter, or when my, my wife was younger, he was a welder for GM for the automotive company.

and he breathed in some of the fumes and got a chemical burn on his lungs. So he couldn't work anymore. He was disabled for a while. He just couldn't work. He would cough all the time, couldn't catch his breath. And so he started volunteering at the church. It would drive bus to pick up kids. And it was through that, he had a calling to ministry.

So when I first met him when we were dating, I remember just like he was huffing and puffing all the time. And in the morning, like I spent the night. And she's like, oh, yeah, he's like, his lung is burned. Like he can't. We'd preach. He couldn't catch. his breath. And it was really like detrimental to his health. Well, it was six months before,

and this was like 20 years earlier. And in his ministry, he had a lot of healings. He's one of these guys that like more than anyone where he'd like pray for people and have like people get healed. Like physical healing was a part of his ministry. He wasn't like a faith healer. And it just, just for whatever reason, God used him to see people healed. And so it was a struggle for him. Like, why am I not healed? But I guess I'm not. Well, it was like 20 years later after the burn, he, it was six months before our wedding, he's at a pastor's conference and they're having people go forward prayer specifically for healing. And he's just sitting in the back, just praying.

And he felt like this impressed on him from God saying like, don't you believe I'm powerful enough to heal you now is when you first prayed for healing when you first got injury. He's like, oh, okay. So he goes forward. They lay hands on him. They pray for him. He's healed. to the point where he went to the specialist and did the breathing test and was 100%. He got re-rated for life insurance.

He was hardly at life insurance when you've got like lung capacity, like documented, healed. So he would not have survived the shooting had his lungs not been healed. And I know they come back to that is. And well, then why didn't God just not let him get shy? That's the mystery of everything. But you could see it all work together. And so miraculously, he gets out of the hospital. They're putting him in a safe house.

because still they don't know who did this. And I want to get back to the Twin Cities because I'm like, okay, he's alive. People are getting shot around here. Like, let's get out of town. My new wife, she doesn't want to move back to the Twin Cities because she wanted to be a daughter more than she wanted to be a wife. And now as a father of young adult children, I understand that.

You know, my daughters are 22 and 20. And she reluctantly went back to the Twin Cities with me, cried the entire drive back, like just had her head on a pillow looking out the windshield. We get back to, um, to Minnesota and, um, just terrible marriage from the start. But we'd go to church because I was doing an internship and act like everything was okay. Right. And I did the thing I'd promised I wouldn't do. And I was drinking behind her back. She'd be on the phone late at night with her parents.

Deep depression, PTSD. I would drink. I'd cover. She was just kind of like checked out. And six months into our marriage, I'd gotten credentialed as a minister. I was going to be hired at a church. And then everything came out about my drinking. I was gone for the military.

And I got drunk with guys that didn't think I drank. And they're kind of like, hey, we got the preacher drunk because I was like lying to them. They thought I was this. And I ended up going to a strip club with them. And the next morning, I'll never forget the shame and the guilt and the hypocrisy. Because one guy was looking at me, like an open baby. barracks and the one guy's looking at me who I'd led to the Lord. And he's kind of just looking at me like, who are you? And I just felt like his eyes pierced in my soul and I just felt that guilt.

And I got back home after that weekend. And my wife was, we fought all the time. And she just kind of knew something was up. And I just confessed to her. I was like, yes, what I've been doing. This is what I just did. A whole world falls apart then. I end up having to turn my credentials in as a ministry of losing my dream to be past. People are reaching out. to me for help, but I was just kind of like, screw it. I'm done. Like, how could God, I'm blaming God for all this. Like, how could you let me be an alcoholic? How could you let this happen on my wedding night? My wife, like, went from the person I loved more than anyone to, like, I hate her because we were just miserable. And I just was having a pity party. And I, I turned from everything and went down a dark,

dark path. Just like, now there's no breaks. Like, I'm going. And she moved back to Michigan. and I just I lived the alcoholic life. I was a bill collector. It would work long hours, make good money, drink myself to sleep every night. Every morning, the first intrusive thought upon waking was suicide. And there was a spiritual element to it too because impulsively I would wake up doing this with my hand like that and then it would like scare me. Like that's how I woke up.

Like just self-loathing like and then my roommate had a gun. in his closet and I would just start thinking about that and I'm like okay I just got to move on like and I was close I was not in a good place and um so she's back in Michigan I'm going through this and we ended up we initially we were going to just be separated for a couple of weeks as like a cooling off period when she went back to Michigan but it ended up being that we were separated for two years and 10 months and during that time near the end um I went to treatment I went to hazel and treatment facility in the Twin City is like one of the best of the world. And when I went there, um, I didn't want to go to like to a teen challenge or a Christ-centered place or

biblical because I'm like, forget that. That does not work for me. I go to Hazelden. I didn't know anything about the 12 steps. When I get there, they're showing the 12 steps. And I'm like, this is like talking about higher power. They're meaning God and like they have devotions. This is like camp. Yeah. I thought they were going to medically fix me. Well, there's like, medicine, shock therapy, a lobotomy. I was like, do anything. And so it was like the rug got pulled out from underneath me. And it was April 17th, 1999 when I was there. And I remember a psychologist came in,

I'm in like the detox area, which is interesting. Alcohol is the most dangerous drug to detox from. The guys were coming off heroin or crystal meth. They were like, but alcohol like will kill you when you come off. Yeah, because I was wondering if you had detox symptoms on your like honeymoon or you're like the night of your wedding

because if you don't drink and it hits you pretty quick. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice. that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade.

Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right. Yeah, and that's, I mean, I could go a few days. You get the shakes, what's dangerous? You get a heart attack? I think it's just your body just goes into shock. You know, it's literally, it's just...

Withdrawals are real. Yeah, and it's alcohol is the worst. I mean, who would, like, the guys coming off heroin. Like, they'll say heroin will make you wish you died, but it's not that dangerous for you. Like, you can come off and on your... I mean, so anyway, I'm in there, and the psychologist comes to talk to me, and she's just asking questions. And when I tell her about, like, my wedding night, her wedding anniversary was the same day,

and it just made her sad. And she started crying. And I'm like, I just made the psychologist cry. And because I'm so pitiful. I'm so pitiful. And the lights went out. So anyway, but it was right after that, it was growing up in a, in the church, I had never, my faith had been my own.

Yeah. But I could always lean on like, I'm a Christian family. And this was a part where it's like, my righteousness is that a filthy regs. I have nothing good in my life to point to. I am morally bankrupt. And it was like an exhilarating place to be to have to fully rest on the grace of Jesus. And like, there's no plan B. And I, I, I, it's where I fully, if you ever can, as close as I've come to fully surrendering to Jesus just with everything within me.

Like, there's nothing. I got nothing good. And that was when my life turned around. It wasn't like I got zapped. I mean, it was a struggle. Every day was a battle. I went through the month of treatment. Got out, got involved in my church again.

We'd go to AA groups. It was like, and I, I struggled. I never drank again. But it was like, it was intense. And after a year's sobriety, like the unthinkable happened because everyone had given up on our marriage. Like, everyone was telling us to get a divorce because people would say it without really saying it. Some would come out and say it, but they'd be like, dude, your marriage was cursed from the start. Right.

Or they'd say, look at what happened at the beginning. You don't have kids. You don't have a house. Shake the etch of sketch. Start over. No one recovers from this. Yeah. It was just like, it's such a sad thing.

Like, we understand. And after I had sober. my wife, she had gone through a lot of therapy. She was like really committed to us making it. And so she was a flight attendant. She's like, I'm going to move back to the Twin Cities. And without any counseling, we moved in together. Like we didn't, and that's what I try and tell people like, therapy counseling is awesome, a big believer in it. But what really matters are two people being surrendered to Jesus. Because that's really all it takes as a beginning point. We got back together and we'd been a part.

heart for so long. It was like we didn't really love each other. We didn't really know each other. We didn't really like each other. Because it's the two sides of the coin or like really the same side, love and hate, where the person you love the most, the world can also be the person you hate the most. And like, here we are. And it was just like a step of obedience and faith and love. And God took that. And he breathed life back into our marriage. And we were involved in our church. And we involved in a young marriage group. And I was involved in recovery. And that's like what led me back into getting credentialed again for ministry and started serving at the church

and then getting hired on there. And so that was kind of like a miraculous story with our marriage through this. I do want to pay this off because I know people ask about the shooting. Yeah, I was going to go, like, what happened? Yeah, and please ask because I know I sometimes... No, no, but...

But one of the suspects in the shooting was a guy that when my wife, because they had been at this church forever, when my wife was 14 years old, 13 or 14, this guy in the church in his 20s, normal. He's not putting off creepy vibes or anything, was involved, would show up at everything, just good, good church guy. He started telling people that God gave him a prophecy that he was going to marry Jen, who was 14, and her mom.

So he's telling people, God told me I'm going to marry the pastor's wife and daughter, that they're going to be mine. Weird. And he said it to enough people that word got back to my father and all the pastor. And he's thinking, there's got to be some misunderstanding. No one's going to say that. So he schedules an appointment for the guy to come into his office. He goes, hey, there's some things I've been hearing.

The guy just square looks from the eye and says, God has decided that you're no longer worthy to be in their life and that I will have your wife and daughter in every way possible, including sexually. They'll be mine. Dude. Can you imagine? And so this is how many years previous to the shooting? It would have been six or seven. So she was 14. She was 21. We got married. What is that seven years? And you know the guy. Well, they knew him. They knew him then. And my wife, like, she kind of remembers it. She remembers just being like, he never did anything to her. But it was just like, she remembers the story. But she was 14. Like, oh, weird, you know. But they basically, my father-in-law showed some grace to him and said, you're not hearing from God. You're hearing from another spirit. Like, like, you need help. Like, you need help. Like, you need help. Like, you.

Like this is so off the wall that's like something is going wrong in your life. The guy wouldn't back down from it, wouldn't receive help to kick him out of the church. Like, you can't come around here. Nothing else really happened for years. Okay. But that obviously made him a suspect because the unique circumstances of the shooting with a full house of people on a busy weekend. The bridesmaids had been staying there all week.

I mean, the house was just a beehive of activity. Skip's your mother-in-law. Obviously, he was the target. And my father-in-law had it. The way his schedule worked is he would sit in the church office late at night working on sermons. And you could drive by that road and see the light on. He didn't lock the door.

It's a nice, quaint community. So if someone just wanted to kill him, they would have plenty of opportunities. Would he be all alone in a church? You could walk in and do it. So why would someone go into a house full of people, not knowing what's in there to do that on a wedding night? It was like to make a mark. So the police are premeditated.

They go, he was one of the first people they went and talked to. Now, strangely, again, kind of small towns, a lot of people are connected. At the church, the children's pastor, who's a female, her sister was dating this guy at the time of the shooting. And when the police went and their family hated this guy because he was very verbally abusive, controlling, really like isolating her from the rest of the family and everything. When the police went to question him, he kind of went into shutdown. mode, but she was the alibi. And she said she was in bed with him and did not see him leave. So because he didn't talk to the police, they didn't have any evidence to track down. You know, if you don't say anything to the police, they don't have anything to build a case on.

And then she, and the police knew she was lying. But there wasn't anything they could do about it. And I think it's also, it was a different time. It was a small town. You didn't have the internet to help you out with unsolved cases. So these years go by, the case was never solved. they would they would look the police continued to work on it well it was about nine years after the shooting so you fast forward to 2005 and um the girlfriend who was with the guy she's with a new guy and she's in a custody battle over the daughter she had with crazy guy okay who's now like nine years old and um the daughter okay so girlfriend and her new boyfriend go to church They were not believers, but they go to this church on a Sunday and they give their hearts to the Lord. Okay. And she said something to her sister, who was the kid's pastor, along the lines of there's some things I need to come clean about. There's something implying that.

And within days, it was right around Fourth July. They didn't, she and her boyfriend who were living together, they didn't show up to a Fourth of July party. and then they didn't show up to work the next day. So the family got concerned and did ask for a welfare check from the police. Also, ironically, the daughter was with the guy for the weekend, but he never brought her home at the end of the weekend. He did take her out and bought her a black dress. When the police showed up at the house, no broken entry, doors were locked.

Whoever did this had a key to the house and locked on the way out. A couple was shot to death in bed, double homicide. Never solved. So both are unsolved, still to this day. Never solved, which is infuriating. And, you know, again, you watch TV shows, things are solved in a half hour. But there, and there's also, you know, I believe that there's a spiritual side, a component to everything. Yeah.

Like the longer I've lived, the more I realize that. And a spiritual suppression or influence. And there definitely was that dynamic working in that. And especially for those two families, you know, they died. And so they'd have billboards up. There was an America's Most Wanted thing. Like years later, they did a, like, they got a search warrant and went and took something out of this guy's house.

It's one of those things like everyone knew. And after that double homicide, the police circled back to my father-in-law. And they said, okay, it is now no longer a matter of who did this. We know who did it. We just got to catch him. But they never caught him. He ended up dying of cancer just like a few years ago, which was, you know, because you always wanted to like the justice and just even even just the truth or the acknowledgement or or anything.

Closure. But you know what? My father-in-law after he'd been shot, that was the end of October. He was home healing. He actually, it was like December Christmast time. He preached at church for a little after take one to the chest. He's just a warhorse. And the guy was, it was a big deal. It was like Pastor Bill's first Sunday back. That guy was sitting in the crowd. He came back to the church that Sunday. Wow. And it was. wasn't like a conf, they were probably like, he was probably the lead suspects. My father when I was preaching, looking out to the guy who probably shot him. Yeah. So that, you know, that that's quite the opening scene. That is. And we're not even getting to the paranormal stuff.

There was a spiritual. Welcome to the podcast, Joe. So I said there's a feeling of like things. So my, my life fundamentally changed from that point on with, you know, God even just using our struggles. My wife and I help out with a lot of marriages and obviously with my alcoholism. That was a big part my ministry. And with our marriage being restored, and this is something I try to really communicate to people, is that in the American Christian context, we love a good ending to a story. We want every testimony to be wrapped with a bow and they walk off into the sunset and never have problems again. Hollywood. Yeah. And we kind of had that feeling like our marriage was doing great. We're back in ministry. And my wife, her whole dream was to be a mom. That's all she was.

wanted. And so when we were together for about a year, we're like, okay, my sobriety has got some time. Our marriage is solid. Let's start having a family. And she got pregnant right away. And we're super excited. Like, this is like a culmination of God's goodness and faithfulness and what he's, you know, my father and I was alive, our marriage. And then, and then a few months in, she had a miscarriage. Well, we have that feeling of like, come on, God, why us? Like, you know, it'd be different if we just couldn't have a baby with like the disappointment and the loss and and again feeling like there's a curse on us and we try again have a second miscarriage try third time have a third miscarriage and it was devastating it was really really hard and and this is a um i've never share

i actually didn't share this with anyone until my wife about two weeks ago i don't know why i never shared this but the morning of that third miscarriage um and this would be when i was a kid i think i saw an angel. The only other supernatural thing that I saw was, was this morning. That morning that happened. I woke up and I was looking off the side of the bed and next to me, I saw a shadow figure. It was like laying in the bed. And my wife is in the bathroom. It was just a normal morning. And I'm like waking up, blinking my eyes, there's light on in the room. So it's not dark. Like, you know, When it's dark and you see a shadow, your eyes can play tricks on you.

And then you're like, oh, that was just a pile of clothes, you know. But I'm looking at it. And the best way I could say, it'd be like a shadow. Like if you're walking in the sunlight and you look at a sidewalk and there's a shadow. It's like dark, but there's light around it. And you can see through it. And I see it in this figure probably like four feet long, laying on the side of my bed right next to me.

And it's like laying there with like a Joker hat on, like the floppy hat. And it has this like impish smile. Like it just did. something. Like, it just played a joke on me. And I remember I'm looking at it and like trying to like, what, what am I seeing here? And then I just had this thought like, what did you do? It was like, like, you did something to me and you're like smiling like this. And it's just as I, I'm thinking like, what did you do? I hear my wife yell, Joe, I'm bleeding. And she had our, our third miscarriage right that. And I never told her that. I didn't tell. I mean, this was 20 some years ago. And I just told her.

And I just, I just, I felt like it was too weird and too hurtful to tell her. But like, it was, it was as real as anything I've ever seen. And the, the, the, the, the redeeming part of this is after, after that third miscarriage, the last thing we wanted to do was go to church. Because, you know, you're hurting and I don't like to cry in front of people. And I also don't like to be the like, the drama guy. Yeah. And we'd had a lot of drama.

And I was like, ah, because, you know, when you, you, when you, you know, when you see someone like, and then this happened, and then this happened. I just didn't want to be that guy. But we just decided like, you know what, we're going to go to church no matter what. And so we went there and we're just broken. We're vulnerable. My sobriety is still vulnerable. You know, like, it's just we're fragile. And we're in church and it was during the worship time. And I remember we just kind of consciously just made this decision. We're just going to raise our hands and just surrender and worship God. And then one of the coolest things that ever happened in my life happened is that the people, and that's why I believe in community so much, people who were in our small

group who knew us, in our story, they started like climbing over chairs. It's a packed church to come and like hug us and embrace us. And we're just bawling. And what I tell people is the miracle wasn't that we walked out of church with a baby in our arms that day, but we walked out a church with hope in our heart. We just had this like, God's got us. And it was that next week, like a few days later, we were invited to an adoption orientation. Someone just said, hey, and had we not had that experience, I think our hearts would have been too bitter, too closed off. We're like, sure, let's go. So next weekend, we go to an adoption orientation. And as they're explaining it, we both just are like, this is us. This is what we're supposed to do. And we told the lady, the director, like, we want,

she could see our excitement. And she's trying to like temper our excitement. She was, listen, this takes like 18 months to two years many times. So just, you know, you start doing your paperwork and everything. Well, we get everything done. And it's to fill out the paperwork for a domestic adoption is kind of like buying a house times 10. Wow. Like they need one more thing, background, you know, just do all that. Well, we're just cranking out all that. And then from the day we'd gone to that orientation to the day we flew from the Twin Cities to North Carolina to pick up our baby girl was a total of six weeks. It set a record for how fast an adoption could take place. We fly down there. We get our baby girl. And as God would have it, we flew home on Mother's Day,

which like meant so much to my wife. And it was one year later, we felt led to adopt again. And during that time, I got hired on the church. My wife quit her job. Our income was cut by like 75%. We took a huge sacrifice. And adoption's expensive. Yeah. So a year later, I'm doing this internship program at the church. I'm working. We don't have any money. And my wife comes home from Target. And she goes, Joe, God talked to me at Target. And I'm like, what you buy? And she's not one to throw stuff around like that. The other miracle would be I got out under $100.00. Yeah, no. That is a miracle.

Now $500.00. And she shows me this like little boy like onesie outfit. And she goes, while I was there, I just, I can't explain it, but I just had this image that we're going to adopt a chubby little African-American baby boy. Like, he's ours. And I'm like, and our daughter we adopted, she's African-American. I'm like, okay, like, okay, but let's see. Like, all right, cool. And a few days later, I'm supposed to, it's Friday afternoon and on Monday, I'm taking a team of 20 students on a two-week missions trip to Trinidad. Phone's ringing. I answer the phone. Almost in a. answer it. And it's the adoption agency in North Carolina. And they say, hey, we don't, we rarely do this. Because they show like your picture book to family, to birth moms. That's part of their engagement in

picking. We have this birth mom. She doesn't like any of the couples of the families we're showing. She's very specific. And we keep talking about what she's describing is you guys. Can we show her your bio, like your picture book just to see if. And I'm like, okay. And a lot of times they'll start the process in their first trimester or whatever. And I'm like, okay, I guess. And I go, I go, how far long is she, you know, and she was, well, the thing is she gave birth this morning. And my immediate thought, is there's no way we can do this. And I go, okay, tell me any details. She was, well, it's a, it's a 10 pound chubby little African-American baby boy at the chubbyest cheeks you've ever seen. I'm like, game over. It's, like, this is what we're supposed to. My wife comes home,

I tell her. But it's like, the, the fee to adopt there is 50, thousand plus like another 2000 for home study. I mean, this is back in 2004. And we had no money. And I don't know how we're going to do this, but we start the process. And we're getting everything done. And I go on the mission's trip. I come back and everything's going through. And I kind of forgotten about the money piece a little bit. But we're having to fly down there to get him. Because he's two weeks old. And like they want us there. But I had to do on this mission's trip. And we go to a Walmart to get a car seat. And I'm sitting there going, I need $15,000. and we go down there. And I don't have it. I do not have the money. But I know God has called us to do this.

And my phone starts ringing. Is my wife's going to go in? Because we're in a hurry. Like, we're flying out the next day. And I look at it. And I'd been in the Air Force for 10 years. Had a training accident injury to my shoulder and my wrist, surgeries and fusion, which got me a medical discharge. And I'd been out for about a year. And it's my Air Force base calling. And I'm like, why are they calling? I answer the phone and it's someone in the finance department. And this sounds made up, but exactly happened like this. And she goes, oh, hey, we've been trying to get in touch with you. I'm like, okay, you know, here's my number. And she goes, I need to know. She goes, you have a severance check coming to you because your enlistment wasn't able to be completed because

your injury. And I'm like, well, they gave me some disability payments for that. She goes, no, no, this is a severance amount because your enlistment didn't finish. I'm like, okay, I didn't hear about that. I think it's going to be like $3. Right. And I go, So okay, she was, do you want a direct deposit or mail? I'm like, well, direct deposit. But how much are we talking? She was, let's see here. After taxes, it's $17,193.

Yeah. And I just, I start bawling. And I'm like, I get off the phone. My wife's like stand outside the car. Like, would you hear it? I'm like, God just paid for our son. And she's like, what? And I tell him, he just did.

Like, they're going to like deposit it today. And that's exactly how it happened. Wow. And so we fly down there, we get our boy. And as God would have it, we flew back on Father's Day, 2004. Jeez. And then shortly after this. So we've got, I'm in ministry.

We got a baby girl, baby boy, things are busy. And my wife starts feeling sick in the morning. Finally, she's pregnant. Oh, man. And everything goes perfectly and gives birth to our baby girl. So we went from having zero children to having three babies. these in 23 months. How old were you?

30. So you were ready. Yeah, you could still survive. Yeah. So then we have three kids. And then I'm serving in ministry and God's bringing us through all this using our story. And this is kind of leading up to some of the more like paranormal part of the story.

Yeah. I hope I'm not dragging this out too much. But, but a big part of our life was being adoption advocates. Like we, I think I was counted up. Like, we've helped over like 100 families adopt with finances and just mentoring them and helping them with the process. And that's just a big part of our life. Like, just two different agencies that we had worked with used our family picture.

Like, we are like literally the poster family for adoption. My wife is beautiful. My kids are adorable. They like, they still to this day have like our family picture on their materials. People like, I saw an old picture of you. And so like that's a huge part of our identity. And I was serving as a lead pastor of a church in St. Paul, very busy. And my daughter, my youngest daughter, she started praying.

We always thought maybe we're going to adopt again. Who knows? At night when I tuck her in, she was five years old at this time. She said, I'm praying that we adopt twin baby boys. Just out of nowhere. She's just doing them like, oh, that's cute. Like twins are awesome. She kept praying that.

And out of nowhere, after like a couple of months, I get a Facebook message from someone I knew in ministry, hadn't talked to them in like two years. years and they're serving at an orphanage in Haiti. And she sends me this message. She goes, I don't want to be too forward or have this sound weird. But there, I was thinking about you guys. And I kept praying. I talked to my husband about whether I should send this or not. But there's these twin baby boys here. And every time I hold them, I feel like they're supposed to be yours. Because I don't want to be out of line, but I just want to do this. And I'm like, okay. So we start looking into it. They had the same birth date as my.

my daughter who'd been praying for him, five years difference. Wow. And I'm like, okay, like that means something. And so we start the process. And this time, it did not go fast. There was all kinds of red tape and like things that held it up. It was like super slow. It took almost three years for us to get them home,

which was a very critical piece of the story. So we went down there to visit a couple times. We brought them home in, in 2013. when they were three and a half years old, named him Jimmy and Johnny, James and John, son's a thunder. Excited about this. And we get him home.

And we knew that there were some risks of this, but there's one, Jimmy, he started exhibiting some attachment issues. And, well, there's something called reactive attachment disorder. And it's, you know, it's why America doesn't have. have orphanages, why we have foster care, is because it's kind of like the roots of a tree. When you just have people taking care of you, like in an orphanage, you get really good at bonding,

okay, because it's transactional, but the roots don't go deep. In a family, there's attachment, and the roots can grow deep, and you can pull that out and replant it somewhere else. That's the best way to describe it. And so he started exhibiting signs of that. And what we found out that kind of plays into the story is that, you know, Haiti's a voodoo nation. That's not just like a myth. It's like it's for real. And the town that these boys were born in,

they practiced the dark voodoo. Like America's a Christian nation, but not everyone's a Christian. Haiti's a voodoo nation, I haven't practiced. But this place, they practice it. Okay, right outside the orphanage. And there is a voodoo god called Marasa that is in the image of twin boys.

And like twin boys, you say that in America, everyone smiles. That's awesome. Twin boys. That's cool. There there's a fear associated with it because it's kind of like they're yin and yang and they fear the spirit. So it's not considered a blessing. When they were born, they're born in a dirt floor hut. We saw the area.

Nothing around. They're just desolate. It was a witch doctor midwife who helped the birth mom. And the first was born, Johnny, he was born. And so they would bless the firstborn. and then curse the second. Jimmy wasn't delivered for another four hours. It was an extremely difficult delivery.

So there would have been all kinds of incantations and bargaining and curses and things being said, whatever a witch doctor does during that time. He's born. And shortly after, birth mom tries to kill the boys and throw rocks at people and runs away screaming. And there's no doubt in our mind that there was a demonic. influence the demonization of her. So birth dad is trying to keep his boys alive, but they're starving. And this was in 2010 right after the big earthquake that happened in Haiti. So there was already unrest and trauma and going on. And they weren't fed very well. I mean, they'd have some rice.

They were kind of like their starvation going on in the womb to some degree. Birth dad is trying this. The grandmother tries to breastfeed the boys. And that doesn't work because they're just trying to keep him alive. So he gets a ride. He travels. He walks, gets to the orphanage and says, like, I have to give it my boys. So that's how our sons got to the orphanage. Wow. That was their like origin, their beginning. And so we got them when they were three and a half after that start. And we didn't know all the details about that. We knew there was an abandonment, everything we found out that out later. So there was definitely a spiritual piece to this. Well, as time is going on and they're adjusting to our house and our family,

there was like a little bit of a honeymoon period. They were very well-behaved boys because they'd been raised in an orphanage. Like we kind of joke, like, we should have had our older kids in an orphanage for a while because like they sit in their room in the morning and like until we can let them out and I just you know and and the orphanage that they were at they would get like like feed my starving children kind of food packages would be sent like they'd have like their bowl of porridge you see all these three-year-olds just like eat that not spill a drop because if you spill it that's your food right Jimmy who was the second born he was the only chubby kid in the orphanage and when we went down there to visit I saw him this kid

kid had Riz. I mean, he had charm. Like, he, he worked that place. And I thought it was really cool. They're fraternal twins, very different personalities. They didn't even have the concept of twins or brothers because they're with 30 other kids. They don't know what family is. They weren't close at all. But I saw, I would watch him. He'd like, he shimmied under a gate. It went into, like, the sick kid room, comes out with a bottle of great pedig light. He's like, sucking that down. He goes up to the cook, pulls on her apron. like smiles at her. She gives him a chicken wing. He just had this like scent. He was like the alpha dog there. Which later found out there was an influence there for him. So we get home,

Jimmy, he could charm anyone. We'd be at my older son's football games. He'd walk down on the sidelines. He'd go up to guys like, like you guys, and like, hi, I'm Jimmy and shake your hand, looking in the eye and start to tell you to remember your name the next week. People'd be like, this kid's going to be president of the United States. Yeah. Yeah. Like he's, this kid's amazing. and a lot of fun. Well, he started doing things about six months in, and he would act out and things would get broken in our house. And that's one of the things about this Marasa God is that they'll cause havoc and chaos in your house

and things will go missing and broken. We weren't even really that aware of this at the time, just thinking it was more behavioral. But all kinds of things were happening. And I was getting ready to go on a missions trip to Cambodia. and there was an intensity like that week before where a lot was happening. And there was one moment where I'm going to have to discipline him, like, where he would, something would get broken in the other room and he would say he did it, but he wasn't in the room.

And I don't like getting tricked by a kid, but I'm like, okay, am I losing it? And we've got five kids. There's a lot of activity. My wife is, we're homeschooling him. Like, she's homeschooling. Like, we're doing that. And so I remember I had him in the chair and I'm going to kind of like discipline him because he kept doing these things. And he gave this look.

It was almost like his whole persona changed. And it became a very feminine look. And his tongue started doing this, like this serpent type thing. And he kind of had this look like satisfied, like I got you. And it creeped me out. Wow. Now up to this point, over those six months, my wife was telling me something's wrong with Jimmy.

There's a darkness on him. And I'm thinking, you're stressed out. We got five kids. you've got a lot going on. I'm super busy at the church. Don't overreact because he was fine with me. And he was triangulating us. I'd come home.

He would treat her really poorly. I'd come home and run up to me. Dad, I'd pick him up and hug him. And over my shoulder, he'd look at her and like stick out his tongue. And she's thinking, like, okay, well, I'm starting to see it for the first time. And I almost didn't go on the trip because it just was giving me creepy vibes. And she's like, no, go. Her mom was coming in from Michigan to help her for the two weeks.

I get on the plane. It's like 30 hours to get to Cambodia. not an easy place to get. I'm there. And after the first night I get an email where it's my wife saying, Joe, I think you need to come home. And she describes what happened the first night I was gone. They went to bed. In the middle of the night, he got out of his room, which is totally out of character for him. Never would have done anything like this, even to get like a drink of water. He left his room and went through the house and did thousands of dollars of damage. Like they woke up in the morning, not knowing this happened, but they woke up.

Every TV was scratched up. Every power cord was cut. About 20 pairs of shoes were cut up with scissors, which I tried to replicate some of this. I couldn't do it. It's like really hard to cut a pair of leather shoes with just a scissors. How old is he? He was, um, he was four and a half. Wow.

He's a little kid doing this. Yeah, like a, he went through and you know what? And I remember this stood up my memory because when I was getting ready to go to Cambodia, we had a big house and like a big. basement with a workshop. I went down there to get a suitcase and brought him with me. He was a scared of the basement like a kid would be. But he, in that middle of that night, he went down there, got a circular saw blade, cut up a drum set. Every Wii game, if you remember, we games, like DVD, like just destroy things. Went into my other kids' rooms, like their track ribbons,

cut those. My older son, he went up to him while he was sleeping and cut his hair, which is like a bad sign. Yeah. So they're waking up in the morning. They're finding all this carnage and damage. My kids are all crying. Their stuff, they slept through it. And he's sitting at the breakfast table just has a maniacal laugh. Like, I did it. You were all asleep. You didn't know it. And just was like, pure evil. So my wife is like, she calls her mom who's coming in, who had been a nurse her whole life. Because Jennifer, that's something's not right. She calls the pediatrician. And she's like, you need to get him to Children's Hospital. And the Twin Cities, we got amazing medical care. So he gets taken at children's hospital. They have him there. I rush back. I take

emergency flight back to the States. I get there. I almost get arrested at children's hospital because they wanted to like get me a pass and I just ran up to the room and I didn't, I was in a panic. Like, you know, and they decided that they were going to give him an assessment. We got him into the Mayo Clinic, the Juvenile Psychiatric Department, Mayo Clinic, best in the world. So they take, And he's charming all the doctors and nurses. He's still acting like the coolest little kid. Like you'd love to see him. Like he almost, you can't help but get, knowing what he did, you can't help but get swayed by him.

Like, oh, man, this kid's awesome. He's talking about the button I'm wearing. Like he's, well, they take him by ambulance. It's about two hour drive to the Mayo Clinic. And I told my, they were to do, he was going to be there for a week. And I told my wife, I'm just going to get a hotel by the mail and stay here because I could visit him every morning. and night, and she's going to be back with the kids, about an hour and a half away at our house. And so I'd go visit him, and he's just kind of ruling the roost there. They're doing all the

assessments. The final day, it was a Friday when he's going to get released, I meet with the whole team of doctors and males thorough. And they said he's got reactive attachment disorder. They describe it. And the symptoms, if you look it up, of reactive attachment disorders, mostly acting out towards the love and attachment of a mother. It's like losing the ability to attach will cause you to act violently and aggressively towards that love. And some of the symptoms are a fascination with blood, gore, sharp objects, fire, death. It's like the devil's calling card. It's really weird.

Like that's a psychological piece of it. So they're diagnosing him with this. And the main guy, he goes, you're very fortunate that the best place in the United States for therapy for this is in the Twin Cities. It's not far from you. And so I highly recommend you get them in there for therapy. I'm like, okay, so I call there and I talk to, it's a husband and wife team. They're both psychologists that run it. They've got a bunch of other therapists. I didn't, they're not a Christian place, you know, like that in name, but the husband and wife are strong believers. I didn't notice. I call him, I'm describing the situation of what he did. And he kind of had this like a little bit

of an ominous, like, oh, okay. How old is he? Ah, I'm. I'm going to have you talk to my wife because this will be more her specialty because they had experience with spiritual warfare things. You didn't tell me that. So we're going to go there right away when we get back. Instead of just taking him straight from the Mayo Clinic home, I told my wife, like, he's getting released at like five o'clock in the afternoon. I'm just going to spend one more night at the hotel. I'll take him swimming, get him some food so we can kind of ease in. Plus, my other kids are traumatized, so we got to kind of figure this up.

So we go out to eat. He's acting fine towards me. He's my buddy. And we're in the hotel room. And I'm in one bed and he's in the other bed. And he's got his little like underwear on, nope, just a little brown body sleep in there like sprawled out on the bed. I've got the TV on, watching ESPN. All the lights are off. Light is on in the bathroom. It's kind of classic hotel go to sleep. I'm laying there and I don't know if I dozed off or what, but I'm just like laying there watching TV and all of a sudden I see him hop out of the bed. And between the two beds, he's running around the foot of my bed to the bathroom. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, Jimmy, because I want to keep an eye on him.

You know, like, he's done some dangerous things. I hop out of bed and I run to follow him. I go in the bathroom. He's not there. Okay. Now, I was a severe alcoholic and I didn't have hallucinations. Like, I'm pretty much asleep or awake. Okay.

And I don't walk in my sleeper. And like, I mean, like, it's just not prone to that. And I go there and he's not there. And it's like, I open the shower curtain. I'm like, where that is he? And then I'm like, did he get out in the hallway? So I opened the door to the hallway. And I look, he's not there.

And I'm like in full blown panic. Like, I just lost my son. And I'll listen look back and he's just still dead asleep in bed. And I start flashing back to all the times that he would break things in the house and say that he did it specifically, even though he wasn't in the room. And so this is all like, shape, 15, how, and I'm convinced, these are all things that prior to that, I've always been interested in paranormal. And I think this is a misconception that people have about people like us. I think we're

the biggest skeptics, really. They were actually skeptical of whatever is just being told us or taught to us. And we're like, I want to delve a little bit deeper. I want to learn more. We're not just suckers. Like, I'll believe anything. I think I'm skeptical by nature, but I love to look into things more deeply. And up to that point, even being a pastor, if someone in my church would have told me the story, I'd have been like, I don't know. I would have had a hard time believing it. So see that happened, kind of freaked out. We get back home and we put him in the room. He was sharing a room with his twin brother, but we get him in a room by himself, just for safety. We started to find out that he had like tried to kill him, tried to smother him earlier. There was some stuff that had happened.

and we get an appointment to go to this attachment center. And I'm still not thinking it's spiritual to this degree. I'm thinking it's just psychological, but in the back of my head, I've got this weird, because I didn't know what to do with it. I'm a pastor. He quotes scripture. We do Bible studies every night.

We're a Christian family. How could this be? Well, we go to this place and it's going to be all day assessments. And they're working with him. They do all this. My wife and I leave. We come back. The lady that's a psychologist, the wife,

the husband and wife team. She's given us the record. She's like he's off the charts on intelligence with gross motor skills, fine motor skills. She's normally when it's just like a psychological thing, there will be a deficiency in somewhere. He's very gifted kid. She goes, he definitely has reactive attachment disorder and we will give a therapy plan for that. She was, but I have to tell you, what he did in your home is not humanly possible for him with his age. And she goes, and I know that you're an evangelical pastor. And this is going to be hard. for you to hear, but your son needs an exorcism. Exactly how she said it.

And I go, what? I'm like, my head's spinning. I'm like, I was just in Cambodia. I come back from this. We go to the Mayo Clinic, the best of the world. This is the one place they recommend. We come here, you do the testing, and you're telling me, like, we need to pray for him. Like, what?

What? And she said, she's my husband and I have a lot of experience with this. We go down to the Caribbean. We're on the board of several orphanages. And she goes, I can't explain to you exactly why this happens. But we see this pattern happen often. When a kid, when a child is more intelligent and more aware of an abandonment, there's that wound in them, and the enemy will take a role in that. And she goes, it usually comes in the form of an imaginary friend that is a dark figure with red eyes.

She's, I can't tell you why, but that is the pattern we've seen over and over again. And she goes, I would bet that he has had an entity come to him. to be his imaginary friend that is a demon that is giving him access that is helping him to get food and I'm kind of flashing back like yeah he did have like a sixth sense with all these things so she's describing this she goes this is something we'll work on holistically we'll you know we'll go after it psychologically but I just want you to know that there's going to need to be a spiritual breakthrough with this as well and that he's going to have to be involved so we leave we get him from the other room he's not hearing any of this and I want to ask him about it

is imaginary friend. And my wife's the type that would just be like, do you have a red-eyed imaginary friend? And I'm like, I'm going to be more of an investigator about it. I don't want to lead the witness. Did you know he had an imaginary friend? No. Okay. Mm-mm. You just, you just, that's what they told you. This is all. We're finding this out. I mean, she's like, because usually kids will talk about it. No, she's kind of like spitball in here. Like, like, but saying it pretty definitively, like, we've seen this before and the, the, the characteristics are here. Right. It's like, I had this imaginary friend's name Shiloh. It's like checkers every day. That stuff always creeps me out when kids, like,

Oh, especially when they talk. So anyway, we get out into our van and he's in the back seat and I go, hey, Jimmy, let's talk about our friends. You know, okay. And I start naming some friends. And I go, do you have any friends that I haven't made? He's like, I don't know. And I go, it's okay. Do you?

And he's like, yeah. And I go, I bet your friend, is he light like me? No. What is he? He's dark. Okay. I go, I bet your friend has blue eyes like. daddy. He's like, no. I go, green eyes like mommy. No. I go, brown eyes like you, Jimmy. No. And I go,

what color eyes does he have? He goes, red eyes. And I'm like, oh my gosh. And I'm just like, like, both my wife and I are just like, what? Yeah, yeah. Well, I get out of the van. And here's the, kind of the weird thing is like, when you're a pastor and this is happening, like, if you're not a pastor, I'm going to call my pastor. But when you're the pastor, it's happening, like, who do I call? You know, like, I am. But I, in our denomination, like, some of our leaders, our leaders are like, we're great, like mentors to me.

And it just so happened that that night was the start of a prayer and fasting retreat for ministers within my denomination at a campground that I'd grown up at about two hours away. And I wasn't going to it because I'm doing all this. But I called our district superintendent, who's like an uncle to me, great man. God. And I knew I could just like, I go, this is going to sound crazy, but this is what I found out. I go, we got this going on. I go, there's prayer and fasting going on with like 200 ministers. I know kids don't go to this, but can I bring my boys? Because I'm going to bring both of them,

you know, because like, could I bring them to get prayer? He's like, yeah, let me get some people together who maybe have some experience. He goes, I, you find a lot of pastors don't, do not have experience with stuff like this. Like buckle up, we have an exorcism at the old campsite. But then this would be, in our denomination, like, this is not something that we would do often, you know, like, I never had been part of this, anything like this. So he's like, come up this evening. They'll be after the evening service. We can do it. So we get home. We're making plans. My wife is calling a bunch of women from the church to come and pray at our house because we're just feeling like it's on now. Like there's spiritual warfare going on. And so I get the boys. I get them in

my Chevy Suburban and we start driving up there. And I'm just telling me, oh, we're just going to go to a campground, you know. And we get about an hour out of the time. of Alexandria, Minnesota. And it's, the best way I can describe it is that all of a sudden felt like the devil was sitting in the car with me. Okay. Sun is going down. The phone rings.

And it actually had just gotten, just gotten dark. And the phone rings in my wife's like, hey, Joe, I really need you to pray because something weird is going on here. She was the power in the front of our house just went out. And it's not a fuse. And like the front of our house is like, dark and we kind of lived on a street there wasn't a street light there and there's trees and it's like our porch and she was i don't know what it's like not a fuse it's not she was so i'm actually

having one of the ladies stand out there to let other women know like yeah we are this is the place to come into the anderson's and i'm like okay and i just i'm feeling like the weirdness of like my skin is tingling and everything and um johnny um who um was not exhibiting any of these things he had a self-soothing thing that he did where he'd rock back and forth when he got nervous. A lot of kids out of orphanages would do that because they weren't rocked. And he would do that like kind of, he would do that to put himself to sleep. Actually, he would like rub a little bald spot in the back of his head. And so we'd try to help him not do it.

But you'd do it when he got really nervous. And I look and he's, he's in the seat back right. I look and he's rocking back and forth. And I'm like, what's wrong, Johnny? What's going on? You know, like, and I look in the Ruby mirror. And Jimmy's sitting behind me. and his face is full on contorted like a demon, just glaring at me, like a demonic face.

And the best way I can describe that is because we would call, we would call it when he would manifest like that is like going dark. And it literally would look like a different person, but it was still his physical characteristics. So I would compare it to it like you take the best impressionist, like Bill Hader, you know, Like when he does like Tom Cruise and you watch like, he kind of morphed into Tom Cruise. Or like Daniel Day Lewis. That was like a touch of CGI on top of it. Okay.

Where you're going like, or if you look at like, if you go to a funeral of someone you love and you look at him in the cast, you're like, oh, there they are. But they're not there. Like I can see it. It's like the uncanny valley almost like like you know it. And that's the best. Like he wasn't there, but he was, he was. And he's glaring at me like. And I turn and look.

And as soon as I look back, he's back. to me and Jimmy and smiles. And I'm praying out loud now. And I have this ominous feeling like, we're not going to make it to the campground. Yeah. Like a deer's going to jump through the windshield. I am terrified. And I'm like, okay, we're going to pray. And I'm playing worship music. Oh, and this suburban had just had electrical problems. So like the radio wasn't playing, the airbags. Like, we're having all kinds of electrical problems like these weeks leading up to it. So I have my phone out, and I'm playing worship music. And I'm playing the Hill Song United. to Jesus Blood from the More Than Life album,

like the greatest worship album ever, in my opinion. But it's just Jesus Blood never fails me over and over again. That's the whole song. And I'm playing that and I'm holding it back. And I'm like, sing it with me, Jimmy. Jesus Blood never fails me. And he'd go, Jesus Blood always fails me. And I go, no, Jesus Blood never fails me.

And he's having this battle with me like going in and out. And I'm like, oh my gosh. And I'm really thinking like I'm watching the mile. It was like the longest. Like pulling into the campground, boom, he goes back to be normal. It was like bringing a car to a mechanic and the clunk stops making. You know? Yeah.

I'm like, okay. And we get in there. And it just is a little, just a little subline to give something redeeming in this. The pastor was like closest to me in my life who had, who had like mentored me. He's like the closest man I got who I'd worked for. and everything. We'd had a falling out a couple of years prior. It's just a stupid thing where we were just really at odds with each other and it kind of almost became like our two churches, just dumb pastor stuff. He was up at this purr and faster retreat. He normally never went there because of his

schedule, like travels a lot. And he felt like God told him to go this time. And I always joke around like the only thing that's more dangerous than two UFC fighters running into each other before a fight is two pastors who don't like each other running into each other. I got my boy. there, I put him on the back pew, waiting for the service tent. I go back to the restroom. I turn, he's walking out of the restroom. Boom, face to face. And I just look at him. And God had convicted me of that, like, earlier in the day. Like, I'll say this. When you get really close to God and moments in your life and you just feel like, I just want to be holy. I want to get rid of anything in my life that's not right. You just feel like this extra level. The same

experience is when you get close to evil, where you go, I don't want anything in my life that's not godly. And I felt really convicted of the resentment and the problem we had that I just kind of like justify it. Well, if he wants to apologize to me and you know, so I see him, he looks at me kind of shocked and I just go, I rob, this is going to sound crazy. But the reason I'm up here and I start telling about my boy and I go, I can't live this way. I need your forgiveness. I forgive you. I love you. This is so stupid that we're doing this. I don't want to live this way. And he starts crying. It was like a God moment. Like we would not have been reconciled. I believe had we not had that moment.

If we tried to sit down, let's hash things out. But it was like this God moment, he felt it, I felt it. We hug, we embrace our relationship just completely was restored from that moment on. Because I want to share some redeeming things as we go on the story. So anyway, we go, the service ends, we get a group of like 12 people to pray for both of my boys. And when we get in there and like a couple of them had some experience with some deliverance things. And they're dealing with like little kids too. It became very apparent that my son Johnny didn't need to be in there.

Because he's acting like a typical four and a half year old, like, hey, oh, you know, Jimmy's just sitting there stone cold. Hey, gentlemen, like, what are we going to do? He just had that, like, and so I had one couple of my staff members. I had, like, a lot of people on staff at my church that were up there. And I'm like, could you guys just take Johnny out? They take them out. And we sit there for like three hours and have this prayer. He never manifested.

But I noticed this about these purmings. There was something enticing that just always kept people wanting to pray. Like, we're not quite cracking the cold. but we're not quite seeing it. It's a lot to have, like, people go deep into the night for a three-hour prayer meeting without anything really happening. And also for a four-year-old. And he didn't get tired.

Wow. He was, like, energized. He was calm. He would quote scripture at people. You could see him even manipulate. Wow. Because, like, someone would be, like, trying to kind of... Like an old spirits with, like, communicating.

Well, like, one example, like, one of the pastors is, like, Jimmy, do you know that Jesus went to the cross? He died for you. And then he rose again. And he was, and he went to the disciples and he said, look at the nails in my hand. And you can believe on me. He starts like quoting scripture back to him. And they're like, oh, he's doing great.

I'm like, no. No, he's not. Like, like, it was like this like weird manipulation going on. We go late into the night. It's like two in the morning. Nothing happens. I'm really disappointed. So like, this is my opportunity.

And, but everyone had this feeling like something's not quite right, but yet we didn't see it. So they're like, hey, we can get a place for you sleep. I'm like, I'm just going to drive home. I'm too, I'm too amped up. So drive home, get home at like five, six in the morning, and I'm just exhausted, wore out. And we had Jimmy's room. Everything was stripped down with just like a mattress on the floor. Because one of the other things is we would find shards of glass and packs.

It was like prison shanks that he had like hidden in kids books and stuff. Like I would pat. I was a cop in the Air Force, okay? I would do a pat down, pull the pockets out, like search him when he'd go. go into his room, have an alarm on his door, and we would find like 20 tacks stuck into the side of his mattress the next morning. No possible way.

I mean, so we've got him in the room, mattress on the floor, and I'm like, I'm just gonna lay down with him and just kinda pray. And so I'm gonna sleep the morning. He's laying there, I'm sleeping. I fall asleep. And I have like the most demonic dream I've ever had in my life.

and in the dream, I'm in, I'm in a waiting room and I'm sitting there and this woman comes in and, like, seductively sits down really close to me. And in my dream, I'm like, whoa, hey, like that kind of. And I step away. And she looks at me, goes, oh, is that the way it's going to be? And then disappears. Okay. And I get freaked out in the dream. Like, I'm realizing in the dream, like, real time, like, this is like a demonic thing.

And I want to get out of this office. So I go in the hallway. and I'm looking for a way out and I look down, this is all in the dream, I look down and she's at the end of the hallway and her face turns into like this evil witch demonic face

and starts chasing me. In my dream, I'm running from her. So it's like kind of the classic dream you're running, you know, and I'm feeling my heartbeat in my ears and I feel myself slowing down. Like boom, boom, boom. And in my dream, I feel like I'm bleeding out

like I'm passing out. I wake up and I hear my heartbeat to my ears and Jimmy's on his face, dead asleep, but he's backhanding me with a monkey grip on my crowded artery. He's dead asleep, but his hand is like acting independently choking out. And I peeled his hand off and felt the blood rush. Like, oh.

And he's just a little kid just sleeping, calm. And I just look at it. I'm like, my son's demon possessed. And I just, I'm sleeping night. It was heartbreaking. It was heartbreaking. This is after all the prayers and everything. Yeah.

So you didn't. Yeah. You knew we got to go back. We got to do it again. Oh, this was just the beginning. I mean, we're just, we're not, we're now just like encountering this stuff. And so at this point, and you got to understand, we have four other kids. And I'm leading a growing church.

And it's, so we start this. We're going to that therapy place. and we're doing that and we're putting like every dollar, every minute we possibly can. He's acting up really bad. I'd get calls at the church. My wife, like, you need to come home.

He's manifesting and like, I'd have to run home and be this. And, well, no, okay, later that day, after getting choked out, a really good friend of mine, guy who's just got, he's done everything. He can fix anything. He would do the maintenance stuff at our church.

Great guy, buddy in recovery. He's like, I want to come, his wife had come over to pray the night that the power went out. was just a few nights earlier. I want to come over and figure out that electrical thing for you. Cool. So he comes over and he can fix anything.

He's there and he's pulling off the panel on the light switch. And I'm talking to him. Jimmy's in the front room with my wife. I'm standing with Bill, my buddy. He's talking. He does this. And all of a sudden this huge blue spark. Like boom, almost an explosion comes out of there.

And Bill goes, did you just see that? And I go, yeah, of course they did. He goes, that can't happen. Like, the power's off. And he's, like, shocked and a part in the pun. But, and at that moment, we hear Jimmy going, I'm going to kill Bill and you. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I hurt you.

And this starts, like, this starts, like, a full-blown manifestation. My wife's like, Joe, come in here. We didn't Bill run in there, and he's just, his eyes are black. Like, it's, we would say going black. He hadn't manifested it until like this much. Not to this point. I mean, there were the things like in the, I would say, like, in the car, and then like choking.

In the car, and the car and I was looking at him. And there were, and my, he'd make like frowns and faces and things like this. This is full, like, unaggressive. And I think what was happening is like those times we had prayer, we're making a difference. Yeah. And remind me to tell you something I learned from. You're starting to really piss off whatever's in him. There's a retribution and there's feeling like the, the, the stronger the demon,

the more it will lay low. The weaker the demon, the more of a reaction they're going to give initially. I learned that from this. So anyway, I go in this room and we're just starting to pray. And here's something, you know, we talk about soul, spirit, body, okay?

And it's like hard, like where does one begin and end? There's never been a time in my life that I felt the difference between those parts of our life than dealing with the demonic. Because when I would encounter him, manifesting, my body would like go into shock, like, oh, fear. My soul, your mind, will and emotions would kind of feel like the fight or flight, but my spirit would be like, let's go. Like just,

like immediately like confidence and like righteous indignation. And I felt that like that separation every time, which was interesting. I would talk to other friends of ours who would be part of prayer times we had with him and they would say the same thing like, man, it just like, that was the scariest thing I ever saw, but there was just this confidence from God at the same time. Hard to explain. So we're praying. He's going off. Okay. And it ended up being about a six hour prayer time with him.

And I mean, his eyes look black. I smelled sulfur on his breath. He was angry. We started my wife's calling people. Where's he at? Is he like sitting down? We're in like a living room. We're like in a front living room.

Like couches, chairs. We're like, but he would sit and like, I'd have to kind of like restrain him. But a lot of times he'd just be standing there. And the thing is, he would look like he's a little kid, but he looked like a hardened criminal who just got out of prison who didn't care, at no fear. And this is something else I noticed. Did you get the electrician to stay or do you take off? He was there.

He stayed in pray. He's a good friend. Good friend in ministry. He's like, I know what came here to fix the house wires. But this is what I noticed the difference was. Like when you see a little kid have a temper tantrum. Yeah. Okay.

They'll almost always not look you in the eye. but kind of like, like, look away. When he would manifest, he'd lock in, not lose eye contact and just like, I'm not afraid. And that's where I could always tell the difference between what was like natural behavior and this. So he's doing this and this just sets off. Like, we are in it. And it was crazy even thinking about like my other kids came in the room.

They're on their knees with their hands in the air. Like we're crying out to God. It was like New Testament, upper room kind of prayer like just prayed. Our neighbors, they came over. They're praying. We're calling different people. And this went like long time into the night. And there was one moment.

He was going back and forth. Like he was kind of a- Is he saying anything? He would say things. Like he would just like, it wasn't like a demonic voice. Yeah. But it was like a growly thing that he would say back or he'd say hate things or he'd react out. He would try and pull my wife's earrings out.

That was kind of his go-to thing. But this was like another, when you talk about superhuman strength or things, I was sitting in a chair and my Bible open and he's standing in front of me. And I'm looking at him like eye to eye and I'm talking to him. I'm kind of like talking to the demon like praying like, but like we're making eye contact. And I'm quoting scripture to him. And without flinching, okay, he slapped me on the face so hard. No tell. I didn't see it coming.

I mean, if a professional boxer did it, I'd still be impressed. Just like, kapow! Like, he didn't blink. He didn't flinch. And I saw stars. I mean, I almost lost, I mean, he rocked me. Wow. Rocked me.

And it scared me more that I didn't see it coming when we're like staring face to face. So we saw that. And there was, it was cool to see God, the Holy Spirit, just giving me direction like verses that he would leave us to. Like, one of the verses, like, we found this about him. we'd sing songs. He hated the demon, hated the song Jesus loves me. Hated that song. He also, leading up to this time, we found out another character, he hated babies.

If he saw babies or pregnant women, he'd be like, I hate babies. And we're like, oh, we know his political affiliation of the demon, you know, but he's like, I hate babies. You just, like, he hated babies. In fact, we gave him a baby doll as part of his therapy to learn, compassion, and we'd find that in the morning with a bunch of tacks and nails stuck into it, like a voodoo doll. So he's doing voodoo as a four-year-old, but doesn't know he's doing voodoo.

Well, the demon, yeah. Yeah, the demon's doing voodoo. Yes, he was drawn to tax and nails. Like, we'd find, so we're doing, we're doing all these prayers. The verse that was the most powerful verse, because it pissed off the demons more than anything else. And it's kind of like my go-to verse now is Galatians 313. that says, Christ Jesus redeemed us from the curse by becoming a curse for us. Cursed as anyone who hangs on a cross.

That was such a powerful verse. Wow. Such a powerful. And just the fact that he was talking about curses and he was cursed and all that. So we're going through all this. The night is going on. We're still doing this long prayer. And we're calling missionaries.

We're calling people like, do you have any advice? Like what to do? And this was crazy. It's probably about 10 o'clock at night. It's dark up. Okay. and there was like a crescendo in the prayer. And I think there were things that had come out of him.

And I'm feeling like, I felt like I was in the flow. Like I'm praying things that I didn't know were even in me. And I'm saying things. And I'm quoting scripture. And I'm just like, I'm on fire. And I'm feeling like the momentum. And everyone's just like, ah, pray. It was things.

I've never seen this out of people that I've known for years. It was just this powerful. And it's like, and I even said, like, get a bucket. Like, I don't know. I thought I was going to throw up. Yeah. And like, we get that. And I'm feeling this like we're getting there.

All of a sudden, our doorbell starts ringing. Ding, ding, ding, ding. And I immediately go, that's a distraction. Don't, don't do it. And his head is wrenching back like this looking to where the door would be. And I'm like, don't. And it keeps ringing it. My wife goes, it could be someone here at Prague.

I go, don't do it. Don't go there. And she goes, I just have to because the guy kept ringing. She goes to the door. It's after 10 at night. A guy standing there with a package and a flashlight. And he goes, I know I'm not the wrong. but can you tell me where this address is?

And my wife goes, no, it's 10 o'clock at night. He goes, oh, sorry about that. Gets in his car, he leaves. And it broke the whole momentum. It was like, it was like we were winning the game and the enemy called a time out or was like trying to ice the kicker. It was like, you know, but here's the thing. And I thought about that afterwards and as believers, we're children of light,

you know, and so we get influenced by God, even when we don't know it in good ways. Like if you ever like, I stopped at a gas station I normally don't go to. And I did for some reason. And I mentioned something about the guy's t-shirt. And next thing you know, we got in a conversation about the Lord. And I prayed for him. And it was this total God moment. Yeah.

Well, I think if you're not a believer, you can be influenced by darkness. I don't think that guy was a demon. But I think he was in a hurry. He was driving around. And something influenced him. To go in a panic, go up to that door. I bet he got his car and drove away and go, why did I do that? That was rude.

I feel bad. that lady was mad at me and the enemy used him as a pawn in that to break the moment it just did and um as the as the night was going on this one um lady who's a friend of the family she goes on tons of missions trips their family's just super missions oriented she's just one of these prayer warriors and she kind of cuts through like hey this is how it really is you know like like the american style of of prayer and then there's i see stuff around the world called her and she goes How long have you guys been praying? I told her, she was, Joe, here's the thing.

You're going to learn a lot through this. She goes, the whole idea of just saying, be gone in Jesus' name is not going to work. You're dealing with something big here. And the enemy, the biggest tool he has against you, is to waste your time and to tire you out. She's probably feel like you've been on a wild goose chase. And I go, that's exactly, because when we pray

and kind of like talk to the demon, you start going down in different lines and you're like, you feel like your wheel is spinning after six hours. She goes, she was, this is going to be like, a war of attrition. And she goes, you really need to make sure you're getting your rest. She goes, you need to bind the enemy and go to bed. And I go, what do you mean by bind, bind the enemy? You know, I went Bible college and everything. She was, just bind the enemy in Jesus' name and tell them to go to bed. And she said it with such confidence. I'm like,

I was kind of mad. Like, okay, get off the phone and I go, I go to gym, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I bind the enemy and you're going to go to bed. And he goes, okay, he went to bed. No. Just like that. Wow. And, you know, binding and loosing isn't, it sounds like it's kind of like super spiritual. Is that like a shift in you? Like when you start to realize I'm no longer like on their rodeo. Like I'm moving towards like the power of Christ and I'm having confidence versus like I don't know what's happening. Yeah. And I learned that when you're not in that experience, I think we can look at things very black and white, like the normal. And we would get, we'd hear from people. And I realized how many people have just a false conception or perspective of spiritual warfare. Because they'll say,

well, we'll just say be gone in Jesus' name and it has to go, doesn't it? And I'll go, well, if that worked, why don't you go to the prison and say that to every prisoner? Why don't you go to the psych ward and say it? Go to, go to Al-Qaeda and say that to them. Let's make you a special forces because you can, like, that, that just doesn't work. Or, The biggest piece of advice that people would say is, hey, you should play worship music in his room. That'll make it go away. And they're like, oh, we play worship music in his room. But that's where you get these famous cases like the exorcism, Emily Rose, where it's like it's not your normal oppression.

There's like these outlier stories and you kind of have one. And it comes down to authority and having rights like demons. Sure. And I know people talk about how smart demons are. I think there's a whole range. But I had my impression was that demons are powerful, but they're kind of like a 12 year old with a law degree. Like frustrating, like almost saying,

I know you are, but what am I? I have a legal right to be here. And they're just going to, like, it's kind of like, you're dumb, you're stupid. Would you just like, and they will acknowledge that Christ is the victory. Yeah. Like there's like, there's almost kind of like,

oh, I know I'm defeated, but I'm going to be here anyway. Yeah. That definitely came through. So with the binding, it's actually changed the way I even do ministry today because we look at things so black and white. Like, I just want it all gone. But anytime I get up to preach,

because there will be demons in a church service. I'm assuming people bring them in, right? Sure. And they have some kind of an authority to be with that person. And maybe I don't have the right to cast them out without that person's wanting it. But there's a level of authority I have with binding. And all binding and loosing means is to prohibit or permit. So when you say, I'm bindings like, I'm prohibiting this.

And I'll always pray, Jesus, I bind the work of any enemy, any demons that are here, any work of darkness. I bind it any disruptions or deception so that they can hear the word of God communicated clearly. And I found that to be a powerful prayer. You pray that over the church and you just say that. Sometimes I'll pray it aloud. Okay. Joe, do you think that the reason this became such a difficult process was because you were dealing with a voodoo god, like a higher level, because this has been... Principality. It had been consecrated with a... It's funny you say that. Yes. Yeah. And put a pin in that because, pardon the pun, maybe we shouldn't say... Let's get layered here. Let's get real layered.

Bookmark that. Bookmark that. Yes. And I didn't want to cut you off though if you... No, no, I was saying because we know that like having done a had a lot of conversations on the show about, deliverance and exorcism that things become more complicated and difficult when you are dealing with principalities or um we know there's ranking there's within divisions there's layers there's like you're doing with there's a sergeant there's five star generals and that's why and that's why the principality piece so the again one of the the redeeming things that we saw from this is that The body of Christ is amazing in an ecumenical way with, you know, anyone in any kind of denomination, you know, I've always been like friendly with other churches and everything like that,

but you just kind of stick to your own doctrine. You know, that's just what happens with churches. But man, I saw an outpouring of every Christian denomination people. It was amazing. Like the word, I don't know why if people just felt compassion for us, they heard the story and it was a dramatic story. people who knew and they believed it from our church, one person would lead to another. And I'm having like missionaries and big name people who are reaching out to me to help. Like Greg Boyd, you know who he is. Like he's on the phone talking to me, like praying with me. Someone in my church had been friends with North Heights Lutheran Church in the Twin Cities was a huge Lutheran church at one time.

And the founding pastor is credited with being one of the founders of the charismatic renewal, which is like 20 million people strong within the Lutheran. Like it's huge. And he was a retired pastor in his 80s. And they got me in touch with him. And he had been a missionary in African, did a lot of deliverance stuff. And he wanted to meet with me.

He wanted to pray with Jimmy. And so we're getting all these connections. So we go up to this church. He's 80, 82, 83. The current pastor is there. And we get there and we're going to pray. And again, it was kind of. like going to the mechanic, like nothing really happened. We're talking, we're praying.

There was a little bit of influence of the enemy on this day because before we started to pray, they said, hey, let's, let's take communion. It's a hand-up communion. So it's the two pastors, my wife and I, Jimmy, take the communion, drink the cup. And it was wine. Okay. I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober 17 years. Haven't touched a drop of alcohol. And there's something about me that like waitresses and staff at restaurants always offer me a free drink. There's like a spiritual thing to it. I'll have like my best friend. You're like I'm not in a casino. Come on. I must just look like a guy that needs a drink. But like my best friend knows it and my wife knows it. I'll be like, hey, they're like cup bears for me. Like they test it because they'll

make mistakes and they'll just bring me stuff. And there's like a spiritual side of this. So when I put that and we always just use juice and like, you know, that's pretty common. Well, just do. But I take it, I drink it, and I'm just like, my wife looks at me. And it's like immediately like the enemy's messing with me. Because when you're an alcoholic and you have like a mistake like that, a lot of people can go off the rails because it gets in your head. Like, oh, it's my sobriety date gone. Or like, oh, I drank and oh, you know. And I just immediately was like, okay, God, I know what the enemy's.

I'm not going to let communion be my, you know, I'm just, but it threw me off a little bit. And we start doing like the prayer and everything. We're talking. And the pastor, he goes, he goes, I know, you. I know you're, you guys don't do infant baptisms. And with my denomination, he goes, I really encourage, and he's like four, which would be on the young side, in my opinion. And he goes, I really encourage you get him baptized because demons, in my experience, are dumb

and the physical symbols and the outward experiences matter to them. He goes, I would also get some wood crucifixes with Jesus on the cross. because I know his evangelicals, we don't do that, but Jesus on the cross and put that in his room. Because demons don't like to see that. I'm like, and he's talking like from his time in Africa. And I'm like, okay, I'm learning stuff. Okay.

And that was also a weird thing because I'm like endlessly inquisitive. I love to learn how things work. I'm like heartbroken that my son is going through this, but I'm getting a crash course and learning all kinds of things that I never would have experienced before. So he's telling me that. I'm like, we'll definitely think about the baptism and everything. And we prayed, nothing happens.

We're there like a couple hours. My wife takes him out into the light. We're in this big Lutheran church, beautiful, like historic landmark church. She takes them out into the lobby to go to the restroom. I'm talking to two pastors thanking them. All of a sudden we hear screaming. Because all my wife said was, dad's in there talking to them about you getting baptized. And he just, and they grabbed my wife's hair and he's trying, like, he's attacking her.

And the pastor was, oh, there it is. Like he just like, oh, we know what's on. Because when he would scream, it was, when there's the demonic influence, it's louder than the decibels. Like you feel it. Like I said before, you feel it in your flesh and in your soul and your spirit. Like, oh, like that shocked me. That's like there's more to it.

Like you knew that wasn't evil. That's superhuman. There's more. Yes. But it's a spiritual thing like, ah, you feel it. Yeah. It's like one of those things you had to be. there. So we go and get him. Oh, and he was telling me, the one pastor goes, I really sense

there's like a serpent spirit with this. And I go, interesting you say that, because his tongue, that was everything. His tongue would go like this. And when we pray, he would try to hide it. But that tongue would start kicking. Like, he'd be sitting at a chair and I would test it out. I would just kind of be looking the other way in the kitchen. I'd start praying in the spirit under my breath. And all of a sudden, it was like, he would react to it. So when he said the thing about the serpent, move like a servant. Well, so he said that.

And I go, it's funny you say that because it's telling you was, I just got this picture of this serpent spirit. So right after that, he screams. We go and get him. I pull him off my wife and we're going to pray for him. And he starts slithering like a snake down the center aisle of the church. Like, doing it like the best break dancer. I mean, it was like physically possible.

but it would have been remarkable like he should be on America's Got Talent doing this, okay? He's doing it and chomping like an animal, like a snake. And this like 83-year-old pastor is kind of walking alongside and I'm like trying to keep him from falling over.

He's praying for him and Jimmy's like, trying to bite him and his head's contort. We're following him down the aisle. Like we get to the front and I finally pick him up and in all of these things, one of the hardest things was trying to restrain him without hurting him.

Because he'd be strong, but obviously I'm bigger and physically stronger, but I don't want to, like, hurt him. Yeah. You know, I don't want to abuse. Like, and there's just like, you know, for many reasons. And so I've got him. And the one pastor goes, do you want to get him baptized right now?

I'm like, get the water. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do it. So he had one of the assistants go and get water and comes in and we kind of did like a baptism thing. And he kind of like acted kind of weird. He didn't get, you. He acted just kind of acting goofy.

Like, uh, water. Yeah. Splash. like kind of mocking it almost. Nothing really. And he goes, I really encourage you get those crosses and like, we'll follow up. And I'm like, thank you guys. And it was like happy.

At least they got to see that. But there wasn't a release. We get in the car. We're exhausted. And my parents are at my house watching the kids like 45 minutes away. We're driving back and it's like 2.30 in the afternoon. I'm like, we need to get some food. Oh, first of like, well, we got to get some crucifix.

Yeah. And I stopped at a Catholic bookstore. It's a place to find it. But I'm like, I felt like I was. cheating because I'm an evangelical. These are made in China. But it's just like, hey, like even just like buying the crucifix. And so I go in there and at this point, I'm like, I'm going to get like, everyone's

going to have a crucifix in their room. Like you get a crucifix. You get a crucifix. And they're not cheap, you know, but I go in there and I get four like, you know, wood crucifix. And the lady in their super helpful, she was like, oh, are these for like graduation presents? I'm like, not really, you know. And I wasn't going to ask you if there was a pastor discount, but I was too embarrassed to.

I just, I don't know. I'm like, so I get five crucifix. And I just felt weird, you know, like, because we normally don't depict Jesus on the cross. And, and then we're hungry or exhausted. I'm like, well, let's just get some food. Because he needs lunch. And we need lunch. And we go in there.

There's no one in there. We get her food. And he's acting normal. And we sit down at a table and we're eating. And he's just being himself. And these two ladies come in. And they just look weird. they're just like a weird vibe to them.

Their eyes are kind of darting. And they sit down at a table right next to us, which is just socially awkward. Yeah, because you're like an empty restaurant. No one's in the restaurant. 2.30. Dairy queen. You know, they sit down right next to us.

I'm like, and I'm immediately feeling like I had my whole life. Like, okay, the weird people are drawn, but I'm also like, there's a spiritual thing to this. We're sitting there, what, halfway through the meal. My wife's kind of not noticing it. And one of the ladies pulls out her phone. and she starts playing music. And it's the theme from The Exorcist.

What? And my wife wasn't aware of I go, let's get up. She's like, what? I go, grab the food, let's get up. She's like, well, what's going to? I'll tell you later. Let's just get up. Let's get out of here.

So we get out and we get in the van. She's like, what happened? I go, they were just playing. She's like, oh, my gosh. And so we get home and. What is going on? And when we get home, like, we're going to go put the crucifix in everyone's room. And I go up there and in front of all of our bedrooms on the upper floor of our house,

there is a tack in front of each person's door standing upright. Your son hasn't been home. My parents, so unless my parents. Yeah, but now, yeah. We're going to play a trick on me. Like on the floor? Yeah. Like, like, and he would, that was one of the things like,

our kids would like step on tag. And like, we're all these tack. Like, we had tax, but like we kind of were putting them away and like broken pieces of glass stuff. And, um. Well, those things manifesting. They're just showing up like, popping out and. I don't know.

They just, you'd go, you'd look and like, oh, there's a tack. I mean, another time... Where'd come from? I mean, we had tax in the house, so I didn't like have like an inventory of... Right, right, you're like, we've got 14 and... Or like a little broken piece of glass and I'm like, I don't know, you know, but... So we had that night. I told my wife like at the end of the day, I was like, so Pastor Joe, how was your day?

And I'm like, well, we went to the founder of the charismatic renewal. My son slithered down the center aisle of that historic church like a snake, tried to bite that pastor. We did an infant baptism. I drank alcohol for the first time in 17 years. and we met two ladies at a dairy queen play in the exorcism and bought, and bought five crucifix. That's how my day was. And tax runner.

Yeah. So we had that. But then what was led to next, and another like superhuman thing just because I know people ask these questions is at one time he was freaking out in his room. And again, we had everything limited to just his mattress. No clothes in the closet. Nothing. Mattress with like sheets in a blanket.

nothing else. Okay. So we'd keep his clothes in another room. It was like, we had to. And he picked up the mattress and threw it airborne against the wall, which like a mattress is one of the most awkward things to move. It usually takes two guys. It's just, it's weird.

It's hard to get a grip on it. Whom, like a piece of cardboard, hit the wall. And, yeah. So there was that. But as we were going to the therapy and we're hit. this and we're getting war down. I mean, it's, it's exhausting. The, the, the therapist, the psychologist of the first place we went to were seeing them like multiple times. At one, at one appointment, they had the play therapist work with him while she was talking to my wife and I. And this play

therapist, I forget, they said she had like 20,000 hours of experience. She's like super, but not a believer, but she was like really, really good at this, had been with him for a long time. She comes in and interrupts our appointment. And she opens his door and she goes, what have you guys been letting him watch? And we're like, what do you mean? She was, do you let him watch horror movies? We're like, no. She's like, what does he watch? We're like, veggie tails. Like, she goes, he, she had him playing with like little people to like play out a scene. Like, tell me what it's like in your family. And he played out a whole scene where I'm at work. He's home with this. He cuts off my older son's head, there's blood on the ground, he's dancing in the blood that my wife comes in, she slips on the

blood and falls down. Then he cuts her head off. And he's getting excited as he's done. And they're slipping on the blood and mom's head is rolling. Like very graphic. And it, it again, louder than the words he was saying, the feeling that was in the room freaked this lady out. And she's, she deals with kids with me. And after she left, the, um, the psychologist goes, she's, She's not a believer, but she just felt, I know that. She just felt something she can't put a finger on. She can't put it back on the bottom. She experienced something.

So we had that and the psychologists, they really had a heart for some people are trying to help us. One of the appointments, she goes, she was, okay, she was, I got in touch with someone and the one Catholic priest in this area who's authorized to do the right of exorcism. She goes, it's very secretive. She goes, I don't have his number, but I have someone that has his number, I could put in contact with him. The only way they'll do it is if I, as the psychologist, write a letter saying this is what you can't just like make an appointment. Okay. So we go through that process

and we get an appointment. So again, I'm an evangelical pastor. I'm going to go to a Catholic priest. It was not on my bingo card for like bring my son for X. I'm like, let's do it. And so we had it all scheduled. We go there and it's on this, it's like we couldn't tell anyone about it. And, you know, it's just because they just don't want people showing up. We go there. and it's like a church grounds. They have a church in some different buildings. And there's like a parsonage there, a house, an older house. And that's where we're going to do it.

We go to the Catholic priest is there. Super nice guy. He's in his robe and everything. He's got a lady that works with him who's like an assistant. And they're like, spirit filled. This lady was the most kindhearted, sweetest, humble. And that's, I'd warn anyone. Anyone who's doing spiritual warfare deliverance, look for humility.

If there's an ounce of pride in them, run. Like humility, humility, humility. She was so humble, so sweet and could just like, I sense the Lord is saying this. And it would be like, whoa, that's right on. Like God spoke to, I mean, and she would write things and show the priest's like they work together. And they had six men.

There'd be three on either side because they had a padded, like, therapy table that he would lay on. This is like the Supreme Court of Exorcisms. It is. he would he would he would lay back down on the massage to the therapy table they put a sheet over him and then three each side would kind of be there to hold him in case he may have so you get six men the priest the assistant the psychologist and a nurse geez we didn't pay a dime because I'm also a little skeptical enough where I'm like I'm not going to let I mean if I have to pay

money for something there could be some benefit I just kind of want to like make sure and they're like no we do this to the Lord and like we believe I'm like okay because at that point they could manufacturing in order to get their price. You just like, hey, we're making progress come back. You know, like, but the seriousness is there. And I felt this, yeah, the sincerity and the love. And they go through the whole thing and he's saying things in Latin. And again, Jimmy didn't bat an eye at it.

A normal kid would be like, what are we doing or scared? Again, he's like charming the guys. Hey, how are you? And they're being nice to him because they're not going to like treat him mainly. And he's being a kid giving him knuckles and everything. Like, okay, Jimmy, when he comes up, okay, boom, hops up on the table, doesn't question. But then. And when he laid there, he kind of had that like, like, I'm going to hold out now.

And I saw at times his tongue go like this, but he didn't. I mean, they're doing holy water, the whole thing, all the prayers. She's writing stuff down. He doesn't react. He doesn't manifest. And I'm actually thinking he's going to, they go, hey, dad, we come back in the kitchen? So I go back there with the priest and the assistant. And I'm really thinking he's going to say, there's nothing here, you know, for us.

As soon as we get back there, she just goes, I am so sorry. I am so sorry. He goes, it's bad. He goes, this is one of the worst cases we've seen. And I go, he didn't do anything. He goes, well, that's, he goes, we can see this. And that he told me, he goes, the stronger, the demonic force, the less of a reaction they're going to make.

He goes, it's kind of like a little dog making noise as a sign of defeat when they'll put on the display. And he goes, it's, this is big. and it's trying to lay low in there. And she goes, they started talking about like another case. Like we think this is worse than this. He goes, we're talking like principality here. That's why when you said the word principality.

And they knew about the background with the voodoo. And she goes, she goes, I saw these witches faces coming at me when we were praying for him. And, and there is, it's like there's a feminine thing going. There's a serpent. Like they're just like, boom, boom, nailing this. And he goes, he goes, he goes. keep doing what you're doing. We need you to keep coming back.

He goes, we can make appointments and we're going to be here for you. And he goes, we can do monthly appointments. And I'm like, can we do weekly or daily? You know, you're like, you won't get this thing done. But that started off, of course, where I ended up bringing him there 13 months in a row. And our life got so crazy where there'd be points for my wife and I, because I'm leading this church, we got kids home. My wife and I, our text message would be like, she'd be like, I've got joy. I'm taking him to football. Johnny's got soccer, Jojo's got therapy, Jada's got this, and

Jimmy's got the exorcism. Okay, go. Like, it was just like, exorcism was like another practice. And I'd take him there because we had to like take care of our other kids too. So for the rest times, I would take him there myself. And it just took us down a road where I, I mean, the experiences we had going there and just learn. Again, it was that like right brain, left brain. I'm learning things. And they kept talking about how bad it was and that he needed to be engaged in it. And it was, that was like a two-year process we went through with all these things. One of the, at one point, we were trying to just cleanse our house and do everything we can because it gets in your mind. And I do caution people.

I kind of have used this term of Christian witchcraft. That in an effort to have power or freedom, people can get off in the weeds very quickly with solutions. and remedies spiritually. And people would say, you know what you need to do? You need to sprinkle this kind of salt in your yard. Yeah. Pour some grape juice in your front yard. And then take a wooden steak with a Bible verse in the north,

south, east, and west corner of your property and it'll be dedicated to the Lord. And it's like, okay. All right. That sounds like Christian witchcraft. But when your son's possessed and you're in the middle of the night and you wake up, you're like, huh, maybe I should. You know, like it messes with you. Yeah.

But I mean, our house, it was like living in a haunted house. It felt chaotic. We had electrical problems. We had a security system that I had, I canceled the service like two years earlier. They fire department kept showing up at our house. Like it was, I would show them this is disconnected. We'd have one time when he's manifesting, he's like, I'm going to break the window of your, of your truck, my suburban. The next morning, a branch had fallen through our windshield.

Like, it was things that I saw things that I did not think, I would have said are not humanly possible. Like, even in a spiritual realm kind of thing. Like one of the one night after praying with him, I rushed home from like a board meeting and finally got things quieted down. I'm exhausted. I go out in my kitchen. It's late at night. And I'm just, I'm tired. I'm kind of doing like the thousand mile stair.

And I'm leaning up against the counter and our center island is in front of me. I have a one liter bottle of water, like a soda stream bottle, like hard plastic, not flimsy, all full of water sitting right there. And I'm just like staring at it for no reason and just being frustrated like with demons. And all of a sudden the bottle just tips over and rolls off the island. I mean, you could throw a tennis ball at that and it probably wouldn't get knocked over. It was just like and I just kind of did the chuckle like, all right. Okay.

you know, there would be nuisances, probably one of the things that we felt led to do because we're trying to do everything. And it was messing with me as a minister. I got to a point where I was going to quit the ministry. Really? Well, for me being authentic is super important. It's very important to me. And I told my, our denominational leader who again is a great man. And he was there for me every step of the way. I just told him, I said, I think I need to step down. And he was, and I, because you know the saying, are you smoking what you're selling? Yeah.

I'm like, how can I stand in front of the church and talk about hope and victory in Christ and defeating darkness and the power of the gospel when I'm not experiencing that in my own family? Like the freedom of home. You know, and like I was looking at myself like, is it me? Are we, you know, I was feeling kind of defeated. And he worked me through that and helped me. And my church was amazing. The people around and like lifted us up. there were those moments where I'm like, I don't know.

Like, why is, why are we not getting relief from this? We're trying everything. We're going. Yeah. We're looking at all this, the voodoo stuff and trying to, we did like an extra special dedication. It was like a covenant ceremony. And he, you know, one of the things that we did to, um, to again, like just cleanse

the home. Because like, is there anything in our house that's not supposed to be here? Maybe that's the missing piece. And it wasn't like we had anything bad at our house to begin with. But I've been on a ton of missions trips. And so I'm like, I collect like wooden boxes from different places and things. I just have a bunch of that. And I'm like, if anything isn't overtly Christian, I'm getting rid of it because maybe it's got something to it.

You know, so I'm going through throwing stuff out. I also was like all media in the house. And this was back in the teens where people said DVDs and CDs. And so I joke around. I instituted the Kirk Cameron rule. If a movie didn't star Kurt Cameron, it got thrown out. I even threw out the movie Gladiator. Oh, man.

Because I'm just like, there's that creepy, you know, some incestual things that go on. And he's got the little figurines. Like, I just, I don't want in the house. I want to be pure. I want to get rid of it all. And we're clearing things out. Now, one of the crazy things that had led up to this, an additional crazy thing, here's the Pokemon story. My oldest daughter who has autism, sweetest girl in the world.

She collects stuffed animals. And when I was at a fair, I won for her a big, big yellow Pikachu, Pokemon character, stuffed animal. About two feet. She wasn't into Pokemon. And you know, there's the legend with Pokemon

that it's like evil and you shouldn't do it. And I would always kind of like, whatever. My kids weren't into it. I didn't give it much thought. But there is something to it. It's like pocket monsters and there's some kind of a demonic thing to it.

But I never really thought about much. And she wasn't. And it was just she liked the color yellow. She liked stuffed animals. I won it for it was special to her. Well, that Pikachu would show up in his room. we'd get up in the morning, go to his room, and there'd be in his closet. My daughter would be like, my Pikachu is missing.

It may happen like five, six times. He had some kind of an obsession or the demon did with that Pikachu, and it was like mocking us. It would show up in his room. And I'd look at it and be on the top shelf in the closet. I'm like, how, it's messing with me. Yeah. And so the day that I'm cleansing and getting everything,

I'm filling up a trash can with stuff. And I just kept thinking about that Pikachu. And, you know, with someone with, autism, they get really attached to things. And I didn't want to, and I was already feeling really bad about the impact things we're having on my other kids, you know. And I said to my wife, I go, I think Pikachu's got to go. And so we went to my daughter Jojo and I told her, she's so sensitive to the spirit and

just loving, she goes, yeah, I think it needs to go. I'm like, cool. So that was the last thing. I go out to the trash can. I put it in the trash can. I took some anointing oil, poured it over the trash can, laid my hands on it, prayed. It's gone. Next day, the trash picks it up, okay?

Nothing happened in the house, anything like that. A week later, we're in our front room looking out at the street. My daughter, Jojo. Shawson just declares, hey, there's my Pikachu. We live on the corner of a cul-de-sac. It's garbage day. You know truck drivers will put a stuffed animal on the front grill? Yeah.

Okay? That garbage truck has that yellow Pikachu tied to the front grill. No. Of the truck. Drives down the street, picks up the trash, it's coming back. I see that stupid face and that Pikachu coming right down the street in front of him. I was like mocking me.

I just look at, I'm like, damn you, Pikachu, go to hell. Like, I really, I was like, even Jesus would tell that thing to go to. And my wife and I kind of have like, with the stuff that we've, we've been through, we have a gallows humor. We'll laugh at things. And we're just like, we start laughing like, you've got to be kidding me. It was kind of like with the water bottle thing, too. We're like, yeah, really?

You know, and I was telling a friend of mine who does a lot with deliverance, he goes, Joe, that's why you got to burn the stuff. You don't just throw it out. It'll find its way. It's so like the yellow Pikachu was mocking me as it went down the street. But we went. Jeez. It was a whirlwind of going through all those things.

And it got to a point where, I mean, I will say this. I did a, I did a, I did a 28 day fast. And in January, which is a brutal time in Minnesota to fast. It's cold. It's dark. And it was real war down from it. But I think that I did see the impact of our prayer and binding, that it was as if the chaos that was running free in our house.

Because there was, there was probably a good year where all my kids would sleep in our bedroom. Our dog was scared. We'd worship music blaring. It was like being in a haunted house, it was scary. Jeez. And we didn't find a reef. And it was like, things kind of like got contained to him like a black hole.

It was kind of like collapsing on itself where there was some or we got used to it. But there definitely was a significant change in him, of it being more condensed with him. And we continued to pray for him. We had all these experiences of people reaching out to us and helping us. But it got to a place where we could not go any further out. I do want to tell one other story that was at our church. And my church was awesome to me because I felt guilty because I had a staff, like, 12 people, church. And I'm, like, getting pulled away and I'm kind of neglecting my family, neglecting.

I felt a lot of guilt. And they'd give me time off. And we'd have these late night prayer meetings in my office. And this one couple, we were good friends with their, she's from Argentina. And he's a missionaries kid. And his parents are, like, legendary missionaries down there. and they were back from the field and we became good friends with them.

And she had a ton of experience with deliverance ministry in Argentina. And they wanted to pray for Jimmy. So we were gonna do it in my office one night. And it's late. My staff would know that of like, it's gonna be a late night in here. Like, okay, Pastor Joe.

And we're in there and she's talking and kind of going, and she's using Spanish. Just like, hey, I'm gonna play the car that I have. And as he's sitting there, he starts like again like you did with the doorbell thing kind of looking over shoulder and looking back and I had a bookshelf with a ton of books on it and she's kind of talking to the dean but like what are you looking at what is it he's like I hate that book like something was like annoying and she's like what book he was the yellow book and she goes oh it's like the one yellow book stands out she grabs

it ironically that book is called in awe in Argentina really really written by her father-in-law, the guy that was the missionary there. Wow. Huh. It was like, it was like that was, and I was sitting there was, there was no way that could have, it could have just been a coincidence. But we go through all this and it got to a point where even, because he had to go like a behavioral school and he got kicked out of there, like, because of his outbursts would scare

them. Like, they felt it and they didn't know what to do with them. And they, the county was involved. And we're starting to feel like we're losing control. Plus, it's very unsafe. for my kids. We went to one specialist who was world renowned who was in town. We got a grant to go and talk with it was very expensive. And she was just like when she looked at the case, she was real blunt. Like basically said there's not, she was, he's going to kill your dog.

He's going to kill one of your kids. He's going to try and kill you. You guys have four other kids and also you're not running a prison here. She's like, he is going to kill someone. You need to know that. He's going to light your house on fire. Like this is, and she was going out from a psychological standpoint. And so the main therapist, the psychologist that we'd been with through the whole time, who was awesome. And my wife, at this endpoint, she had kind of, she was done probably like six months earlier because she was taking more of the brunt of it. And the psychologist goes, you guys, I just want to tell you in 25 years of doing this, I've never seen a couple be more tenacious and dedicated to getting their kid help. And I've never seen a case as severe as this.

She was, so I want to commend you for that. And I'm like, it's not really an honor that I want to have. Right. She goes, but there is, you have four other kids and you have a marriage and I see the strain it's putting on you. There is a time and a place where this can bring the whole ship down. And she said, there is an organization that will allow you to relinquish your parental rights so that another family can adopt him because psychologically, with the reactive attachment,

a lot of times kids will make an adjustment to a new family. and kind of blame all of their hurt and wounds on the first family that adopted them. She's like, it's just a phenomenon that happens psychologically and it'll work. And there are families that will do that. And she goes, I highly recommend that it's time for you to do that.

And my wife was all on board and I go, over my dead body. That'll happen. He is our son and he will not leave our family. It's very prideful. And my wife just started bawling because she was seeing what it was doing to us. And in hindsight, I think in my ministry, I had kind of built up some pride.

Like, look at our marriage. We were separated for two years and 10 months and God restored it. I was suicidal, an alcoholic. God restored me. We're like, we're like the comeback kids. We don't give up. We don't give up on people. They're not going to give up on my son.

There's a story here, you know. Plus, we were advocates for adoption. Yeah. It was part of my identity. They're twin boys. The embarrassment, the stigma, we couldn't explain all this to people, in the church, you know? Because it's like you guys. You have a following here. If you said one day, hey, I've been dealing with a scratchy throat. You're going to get 50 emails with remedies. You're going to

have a couple of people who have some kind of a spiritual insight for you. They're going to, and then they're going to ask a bunch of questions because they care for you. That's the same thing with being a pastor. When you share something, you get a lot of input. And so I had to be careful about all the details. A lot of people just didn't understand. But I'm like, all of a sudden one day, may have to announce that my son's no longer here. And I held on, I kind of forced us to hold on for another six months. And it really could have destroyed. It's just by God's grace that my marriage and my family survived that. And it came to the point where I was like, okay, he's got to go. And so we'd made, and dad, insult to injury, you know, we'd spent all our money trying to get

him help. And to do this, we had to pay all of the costs of the adoption with the legal fees. And that was kind of the benefit to the family. So I'm like, okay. okay, you know, we gotta do this. And the silver lining is it gave us the feeling of what it's like to be a birth mom giving up their child for adoption, which I was always on the other side of it. And it was really like, okay, it made me thankful for the gift that we've received in our other kids and what they've gone through and just the heartache with it. And so it came down to the wire and the therapist said, don't tell him to the last minute.

there's no reason to tell him sooner. And we could pull out of it at any moment. And it was the day before we were going to take him to his new family that drop him off with him. And they're from out of town. He's going to have a new name, new identity, new state, everything. And they're going into it with their eyes wide open from the standpoint. So like, how do we describe all this stuff?

And they said, well, just give the facts. Like, he bites, he screams, he attacks. And like they had the, they had access to the psychological. reports and that there was prayer, but like not, not right about like demons because you can't necessarily prove that. So it was just like, here's all the actions. Right. And the physical things that he would do so that they're aware of that. And they were going to, they were going to go ahead with it. And I knew we could still pull it. And so I'm sitting with him and he could still be great with me when the two of us were alone. And I'm sitting at the table and I go,

hey, Jimmy, um, do you still talk to the bad spirits? Because that's what we would call them, the demons. I go, you can be honest. And he goes, yeah, I knew he did, but it's, and I go, you know that they're bad for you. He's like, I know. And I go, you know that Jesus is good for you. He's like, I know. And I said, you know that Jesus has the victory over the bad spirits. He's like, I know.

And he's getting agitated. And I said, you know that we can pray right now. And Jesus can make those bad spirits go away. He's like, I know. And he goes, you know that if you choose to follow Jesus, he will give you life. He's like, I know. And I'm waiting. And I go, Jimmy, do you want to pray that?

He just goes, no. And for me, everything came full circle because I felt such a responsibility. Like, why can't I get him freedom? what are we not doing? Where's the simplicity of the gospel? Why is it have to be so difficult? Why do we have to do all these other things? Why is he not getting relief when we see stories in scripture?

And, you know, like one of the things I identified was with the man in the synoptic gospels right after the transfiguration. The first miracle that Jesus does is the man who has the demonized son. And Jesus, the guy says, you know, are you able to do it? He goes, if you believe. and the man says, I believe, but help my unbelief. Like that story, for some reason God had given me some kind of a way to resonate with that guy. You know, different Bible characters?

You just kind of feel like a closeness. I always felt this compassion for that guy. Even before I had kids, I'd like, that would suck. And I could feel the desperation as a man with his son. And as I'm going through this, I would cling to that story in that verse. I would cling to it. And I'd be like, that was my prayer. Like, I believe, but help my unbelief.

And I'm like, I'm going to meet this guy. in heaven. We're going to be like the two dads, you know, you know. And now I'm at a point where it's like, and when I, when it all came full circle because I realized, and I believe this with all my heart, had Jimmy just surrender to Jesus, everything would have to go away. And that's just like anyone that we love, a parent of an adult child who's desperately wanting them to get free, talking to, you know, it was like talking to someone who's addicted and so you keep doing this. You're going to lose your life. You're going to lose your family. And they just go, I know. And the gospel is powerful.

The gospel is not weak, but it's simple, but it takes the person surrendering to Jesus. That's the key. And so for me, if I hadn't had that experience with him right then, I wouldn't be in ministry today. Because I was really getting disillusioned. Like, what's the two-step dance I have to do and to make this happen and what are we waiting for?

And why is God holding out? He was like, no, he was there all along. And it's hard to see that in a little kid. but he had the maturity. If we believe a child can receive Christ at a young age, we also have to believe the child can reject Christ. And that's what he was doing. And so the next day, we took him to that family

and, you know, explained him what was going to happen. And he was sad about it. And I was sad and dropped him off. And I said goodbye. And it was tough because, you know, they had two older kids. And I'd spent some time with them. And they were smart people. And they said, hey, we'd love to stay in touch and we can zoom and do all that.

And I just go, you know, I go, this isn't like we have one too many puppies. This is, this is heartbreaking for us. And I said also, I didn't want to tell them this, but we didn't want to have any spiritual connection of any kind, you know, once this was broken. And I also said, you know, you're going to probably start resenting us in about a month because you're going to claim him as your own. And that's good. Like, you want to feel that protective nature. And so we never saw him again, dropped him off. And I remember it was a cold February, Minnesota morning, like bitter cold,

which usually makes like the sky bright and clear. And I didn't know where to go because it was like a death. I lost my kid, but like nobody understands. We didn't know. There wasn't, there wasn't, there wasn't, my friends didn't know what to say. Everyone was just kind of like, oh. And I drove, I drove behind a Taco Bell. and I was just parked like staring at a dumpster and a brick wall and I was crying and I was just like

looking up at the sky looking through a dirty windshield and just thinking about you know like now we see through a glass dimly but in the future we'll see face to face and I was like I don't understand this and um it made me again think about the dad with the demon my son and it became kind of like my mantra my prayers like I believe help my unbelief but even still, I'll continue to believe. And I realized then that there's a different level of love you have for Christ when you don't get what you've prayed for. Because you know he's still there.

And you know he's still within. It doesn't diminish his love for us or for me. And it's a wound that I'll carry. And it's not that like, oh, you need healing for that. I think sometimes we're too quick to say that. Like, I'm not going to forget about him. I'm always going to love him. I'm going to continue to pray for him.

And one of the things that keeps me going, even just in terms of him, is my goal in life is pretty simple. I want to go to heaven. And I want my wife and kids to go to heaven too. I think that's like my ultimate responsibility. And I'd include Jimmy in that. And whether that means I never see him again until eternity, you know, when we dedicate our kids to the Lord, that's kind of what we're saying. main is there's always a selfish aspect to being a parent. I don't care what anyone says. We love our kids. We want to kind of live through them. We enjoy that. But like ultimately, and I pray

that somehow, some way he'll come to Christ and receive victory. I believe that for him. But it doesn't take away the pain, the damage. It did to my family. It was really hard. It was, I threw myself into work and like started a second campus at the church and did this big multi-million dollar remodel just to make up for lost time. And it was probably six months after he left our home. My wife and I, like, nobody knew this, but we almost got a divorce. Like, it was bad. We got really just because we didn't go to therapy after he left because we, that's all

we did. I was like, I can't take any more time. I'm done with that. And, but God, God healed us of so much. And, you know, my older kids, one of the prayers I've had, because they got to see things. They don't, they do not deny the power of God because they have. They got to see the supernatural. And I just, my prayer for myself and my kids is that they would see at least twice as much

of God's power as they saw of the enemy working front and center. It's wild, man. That was, that was incredible. Thank you for being so honest and vulnerable. And I think that, you know, having one of those one-of-a-kind stories is, I mean, after five years of doing this, Like, I think Luke and I run in from a story aspect, we run into a lot of these like confusing conclusions. We don't really know what to make of this person's story. And I think like you said, Christians just want us to like get in the sunset and drive off and everything's great.

But, you know, on this side of paradise, there's some weird, bizarre stuff. And but sometimes through working through the journey, you know, coming back to God every day and saying, I'm going to give it another go. I'm going to give it another go. where you learn you know it's not getting anywhere it's like that that tenacity of pushing through going back and figuring out where we going where we going what are we doing and just the level of evil is is sometimes we we scratch our heads and go man it's it's unlike anything we ever expected and we didn't we were just talking about some weird stuff and it got really dark really quick you have an incredible way of telling a story

and a vulnerability and your tenacity to push through with your marriage and your kids and your family. This is like a one of a kind podcast. And also it reminds me of like we recently, we've had a few deliverance folks on the show like Catholic exorcists and also some of our friends as well that are now in the deliverance ministry now. And we, I was talking with one of those friends recently and he was talking about how people are now coming for prayer and deliverance that have heard the episodes and stuff. And he was saying, interesting enough, he said we prayed recently for someone who traveled to see us. And it was a good procession, but there was no deliverance because he didn't want to let go of his demons.

So there's something to that one, like you have to want the freedom. It's, you know, otherwise you, you, you don't. That's why Jesus with the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda, which is a mouthful to say. Yeah. He went up to him. It was it 38, 39 years that you've been laying there. Yeah. And he says, do you want to get well?

Yes. And if I, and this is, I'm sure you have people in ministry or who work and help other people. This was one of the biggest lessons I learned from all this. It actually kind of revolutionized how I do things in ministry. Because I realized when, like I learned, one of the biggest tools the enemy will do is to take your time. Suck up your time and take you on a wild goose chase. And if you've been in the church world for any amount of time, like in a youth group, the one kid comes in and she's full of all kinds of drama. And all of a sudden, the whole service thrown off and all the youth leaders are with her and trying to

helper and all their kids are neglected. And then all of a sudden, they're gone and they're not there a week later. You see that in churches all the time. Yeah, they're energy vampires. When I learned that, I started practicing this with people. Like there was one lady who would come. It was always drama. She'd always come to the church. She always had to meet with Pastor Joe. Couldn't meet with another pastor. It's got to be Pastor Joe. She'd always find a way. There was like a manipulation, a seductive type, how she'd get through the secretary, everything, would get back to me, would get me at a time. I'd have to meet with her. And she'd always give enough compliments to kind make it be like, okay, this was good. The time of time, I felt like we were spinning our wheels.

And after learning this, I was like, I need to ask her this. And so at one point, I was given her biblical counsel and I said, I've given you this, do you want to get well? And she was, well, no, but no one else will listen to me. And you're such a good listener and I love your, she admitted it. Yeah. She like, and I've had other people, like, if you're ministering people, don't let them waste your time because even unbeknownst to them, they'll be a tool. of the enemy to suck up all our time. Also learned, don't respond to the drama and the chaos. Like if someone, oh, they need prayer.

Right now they're doing this. Nope, we're going to go ahead with the service. Bring them in that other room. We're going to take care of all these people who came here for a church service or whatever. We'll deal with that later. We're not going to go on the enemy's timeline or respond to the drama or the chaos. It's a huge piece of advice that I have for people, even with kids.

When you have multiple kids, it's one of the things I feel bad about. five kids, we put so much into Jimmy and kind of to the neglect of the others that I feel bad about that. And that's what the enemy wants to do. And like we were just talking about, you know, not walking off into the sunset with a testimony. I love it when Jesus said, he said, I've told you these things that you have peace. In this world, you will have trouble. A lot of pastors that they stood up and said, hey, in this world, you have trouble. people get mad at that.

Like, don't speak that over me. Jesus said, in this world, you will have trouble, but take heart. I've overcome the world. We need to remember that. We need to remember that and walk in that. And if I can just add one other thing, we moved to Florida in 2020, right in the middle of COVID. I took a position there.

And it was a big move for my family. Like, kids are in high school, big change, to work at a church organization. And I thought we were going to be the rest of our life. Felt called there as clear as anything. Quickly, it became apparent that it was not a good fit. And there were a lot of things going on there that I could not ethically agree with or go along with. I tried to make it work. Yeah.

Tried to see a path forward. But it came to a point where after one year, I resigned. Like there was no way forward. Did not have a backup plan. Did not have money for anything else? Like, we were depleted. No, like Dave Ramsey, 6 to 12. It was like, we were living on faith.

We went there. And it was Thanksgiving of 2021. And my three older kids are in high school, young son, Johnny's in grade school. I quit there. And I thought God was going to, I knew I did the right thing. And I stood for what was right.

And I took the faith step. And so I thought God was going to give me an answer. And he didn't. And he was silent. And over the next two weeks, I was praying. I was carrying the way to the world. my kids, my son, older son, he's going, all my kids, really, they're aware, like, we're single

income family. And dad doesn't have a job. We just bought a house. They just moved down there. And they're like, hey, dad, are we going to get Christmas presents? Hey, dad, you said you were going to buy a car. And I'm behind the scenes talking to my heavenly father going, hey, dad, I got a mortgage payment coming up.

Hey, dad, you know, like, where are you? That went on for two weeks. I was not handling it well. super stressed out. And I was up all night. And the next morning, hadn't slept, wasn't eating because I was fasting, trying to make something happen. Do you ever done that?

And I was, I was, I was, I was, I was ornery. And I knew I was going to get in an argument with my wife. I stayed around. So I'm like, I'm going to go to the gym and work out, because if I'm going to be unemployed, it might as well get jacked, you know, like, let's go work out. And I took a big pre-workout drink because I hadn't slept, hadn't ate, kinds like creatine, caffeine, something. kind of unacked, some unknown African root that no one's heard of makes your skin tingle.

Took that, I go to the gym. Within about five minutes at the gym, I had this weird feeling, weird feeling. And ironically, I had just two days prior talked to this deliverance ministry, kind of just about the situation with this church and like, why these things keep happening to us. And she couldn't get back to me because she had just had an accident. She goes, for some reason, we're coming on attack. A lot of our staff are having accidents. I'm at the gym, I have this weird feeling,

and it felt like an out-of-body experience, and almost dreamy. And I found it later, it's called an aura, not like the Asian kid in the front of it. But like it's a precursor to a seizure. And within me, all I knew is I got to go home. I've got to get home. And I was scared because of the feeling I had.

I said goodbye to the guy at the counter, walked out, don't remember another thing. I got into our Honda Odyssey minivan, which is like one of the safest vehicles. And fortunately there were security camera footage outside the building, but I got in the van, drove up to a stop sign, stopped for like a minute, which is a real, that's a long time. And I started having what they said was a stress-induced seizure,

full-blown seizure, which caused me to jam my foot into the gas pedal. And I ended up going full speed through an intersection, into another parking lot, hit a median and went airborne had a head on collision with the tree. And then flipped sideways into the building. building and it was a home health care center filled with nurses. They thought a bomb had gone off. They ran out. I was still convulsing and seizing. The engine was still revving. It was smoking. It was going to catch on fire. And I was pinned in there. And fortunately, the fire department was like a

block away. They get there. They hose it down. Use the jaws of life to come out. I'm unconscious. I don't remember any of this. Give me on the backboard. They get me in the aims. I wake up in the ambulance. And my first thought was that I'd been abducted. Because I didn't remember getting in the van I'm in a car accident. And I'm like, I knew this moment was going to come. So I start throwing fists. Like, no, you've been in a car accident. I'm trying to like process this.

And as like the levels of consciousness are coming to me, I look down and the one paramedics holding my leg up and my foot is dislocated. It's turned sideways. And I feel like the searing pain. And I'm begging him like, will you put it back in the socket, please? And he's like, we can't do that. Only the doctor's can. I'm begging him.

Finally, he looks at the other guy who is a supervisor. You guys him a nod. He does like a judo move and pops it back in the socket. pass out. And I get to the hospital and they do the, like all the scans on me and everything. And the surgeon comes in. He couldn't believe I had feeling in my legs. He used like this metal poker. And he's like, here's kind of the laundry list. Your foot was dislocated and broken two places. Two your ribs are broken. Your kidney and liver numbers are off the charts. And he goes, and your spine is really bad. And he couldn't believe I'd feel in my legs. I exploded three of my lower vertebrae cracked, 12 of them.

broke my neck in two places. And he's like, I can't help you, which you don't want to hear from a surgeon. No. But another surgeon came later and they operated. And I have, they ultimately put four cobalt rods from my pelvis bone up through 12 in my vertebrae with 24 screws, fuse my neck. And when I think back on that moment and I was messed up, but God spared me of that, it was the closest I've had to a near-death experience.

Yeah. And never kept telling me, you're so lucky to be alive. And the one thought that I had, because I always thought if I had a moment like that, my feeling would be like, thank you, God, for sparing me. But instead of that, I had this overwhelming feeling of thank you, God, for saving me. And I had this new concept of eternity. Like, I didn't want to die. I don't want to leave my wife and kids, but I was okay with dying.

And I've never said that before in my life. Like, I felt it at a real level. like heavens are home. Yeah. When you're following Jesus. And this life is very short. And the troubles we have are momentary. And they don't compare it all to the glory that we'll receive in heaven being with him.

And that's reframed a lot in my life that no matter what I'm going through, no way and else is going through. When you know you're going to heaven through Christ, he's the way, the truth in the life, you'll get you through anything and he'll never leave you, never forsake you. Powerful. That's heavy. That was good. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, man. I feel like we've sat back and listened to the two and a half hour ride of your life

and do some of the wildest stuff. And I think that it's taking us a long time to appreciate a story like that. And thank you for being so vulnerable. And don't be so hard on yourself in those moments when you probably feel like a failure as a father. Don't be hard on yourself. Yeah. I think that, you know, some of the people who share on here, let's go through the hardest stuff you can imagine.

And then there's this whole other realm of skeptics and energy vampires that attack us all the time, trying to steal our energy or trying to attack our show or trying to, like, get something from us. And I can only imagine what you've been through and keep going. And I know a lot of people are going to email us after this one and be like, wow. So I think you went through a lot of that, and you're going to have a, probably a lot of emails come in your way, but you know, like you, you just really spoke to a lot of people. And I feel like some episodes, that happens where like that story really can connect with our fans and people listen. So maybe that's a big part of why you went through it to tell,

tell the world. And so tell people where they can learn more about you. Yeah. So what you just said there is I wrote a book. People were telling us for you, you got to write a book. And then And when I broke my back and I was laid up at home, my foot was in a cast, my back, and it was like God said, now is the time to write the book. And so I wrote a book very conversationally, just like I did right now. And it's called The Tension of Redemption. And you can get on Amazon. Our ministry is, you can find it at mysurrender.org, surrender ministries.

But the book is on Amazon. The Tension of Redemption, Joe Anderson. And what I, it's interesting you say it because what I say at the beginning of the book is our whole prayer in this. And it's really, my wife and I, it's our ministry, is like, let our pain be your gain. We just want to use and be open and vulnerable with what we've gone through to help other people because I know that there's a lot in our testimony that touches on people's lives. And what I try to say is, like, we don't have some answer within ourselves. But I still come back to, like, the greatest answer for anything is what my father-in-law said to his daughter when he thought he was dying.

He just said, serve Jesus. Serve Jesus. serve Jesus. And I feel I'm a pastor at heart. And so I feel for people who are listening and maybe they're just like going through stuff right now. I feel that. And for, I don't want to sound weird, but this is a place I can sound weird. All week for some reason, I've been listening to O Holy Night. And I think that one of the biggest problems with Christmas is that the birth of Christ gets wrapped up in the Christmas nostalgia and motif. when really it was more of like a military invasion

that Jesus was dropping in behind enemy lines. And I've been listening to the song, Oh, Holy Night by Martina McBride, and when you listen to the words, and I'd encourage people, do that for me, if you listen to my story, but really listen to the words when it says, fall on your knees and a weary world rejoices.

And the one line where he says, till he appeared in the soul fell, it's worth. Hmm. That Jesus can appear in your life as profoundly and as powerfully today as he did 2,000 years ago. And your soul will find his worth. Amen.

Amen, dude. Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Joe. It's kind of a wild story how you even got on this podcast. Yeah. It just sort of felt like you were supposed to come on. And that's a cool thing here. It's like, I don't, you know, I don't think Luke and I know what we're doing half the time.

You know, we don't claim to. and just sort of the story writes itself. And I just had no idea what to expect today. And this is just blown my mind. So thank you. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming home. Thank you guys.