The Confessionals - 837: The Secret Hill Where Autistic Children Meet Jesus
Episode Date: February 17, 2026In this episode, Tony sits down with Joseph Infranco to unpack the claims presented in his book, Decoding Cody, regarding the documented accounts of non-speaking autistic individuals who communicate ...through spelling. Drawing directly from the book, they examine the description of “the Hill,” a place where participants report meeting Jesus, angels, and one another beyond physical limitation. They explore the fascinating portrayals of spiritual warfare, angelic hierarchy, prayer as incense before God, and the insistence that everything on the Hill worships Christ. They also evaluate the book’s themes of discernment, counterfeit spiritual realms, and the possibility of a thinning veil between worlds. This episode carefully analyzes the book’s claims and wrestles with what they would mean for the Church.Please pray for Tony's wife, Lindsay, as she battles breast cancer. Your prayers make a difference!If you’re able, consider helping the Merkel family with medical expenses by donating to Lindsay’s GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/b8f76890Become a member for ad-free listening, extra shows, and exclusive access to our social media app: theconfessionalspodcast.com/joinThe Confessionals Social Network App:Apple Store: https://apple.co/3UxhPrhGoogle Play: https://bit.ly/43mk8kZThe Counter Series Available NOW:The Counter (YouTube): WATCH HEREThe Counter (Full Episode): WATCH HERETony's Recommended Reads: slingshotlibrary.comIf you want to learn about Jesus and what it means to be saved: Click HereBigfoot: The Journey To Belief: Stream HereThe Meadow Project: Stream HereMerkel Media Apparel: merkmerch.comMy New YouTube ChannelMerkel IRL: @merkelIRLMy First Sermon: Unseen BattlesSPONSORSSIMPLISAFE TODAY: simplisafe.com/confessionalsGHOSTBED: GhostBed.com/tonyCONNECT WITH USWebsite: www.theconfessionalspodcast.comEmail: contact@theconfessionalspodcast.comJoseph InfrancoWebsite | BookMAILING ADDRESS:Merkel Media257 N. Calderwood St., #301Alcoa, TN 37701SOCIAL MEDIASubscribe to our YouTube: https://bit.ly/2TlREaIReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/theconfessionals/Discord: https://discord.gg/KDn4D2uw7hShow Instagram: theconfessionalspodcastTony's Instagram: tonymerkelofficialFacebook: www.facebook.com/TheConfessionalsPodcasTwitter: @TConfessionalsTony's Twitter: @tony_merkelProduced by: @jack_theproducerOUTRO MUSICTony Merkel - On The Hill
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hey, everyone, before we get to this week's show, this is just your weekly reminder to please continue to pray for my wife, Lindsay.
She is battling breast cancer right now, and we're praying for complete healing in Jesus' name.
Thank you.
Merkel.
Media.
This was all circulating around the base that a giant had to kill, but no one was supposed to talk about it.
I saw three long, boning fingers, reach up underneath the door, curl up to grab it, and then disappear.
When he came over to me, dude, he slithered over to me.
And this giant comes out of the cave and they're all frozen.
And he starts running and firing at this giant.
Well, the giant moves.
He's got a spear in one hand, and he's running really fast.
And spears, Dan, holds him up like this.
Somebody else, shoot him in the face, shoot him in the face.
They basically decapitated.
closer got closer
When he got about
Feel something pulling at my leg
And I look over and there are two
Small gray entities
Cooling it
And they're literally, I'm getting pulled off the bed
I reached my hand into this bush
And I touch air
Couldn't breathe
And I couldn't move
Because I know I'm seeing a monster
Welcome to the show everybody
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All right.
Now, today we have Joseph and Franco here in studio, and I'm telling you, friends,
this was a conversation that I was taken back by, I was fascinated by, and I was deeply, spiritually impacted by.
This conversation with Joseph Enfranco explored the supernatural worldview surrounding non-speaking autistic individuals who describe a shared spiritual realm known as the Hill.
We discussed spiritual warfare, regional oppression, discernment, counterfeits, and the possibility of multiple unseen dimensions, all leading back to the Hill as a place where these individuals,
report meeting Jesus, receiving instruction, worshiping, and interceding.
The Hill was examined as potentially a suburb of heaven rather than a deceptive realm,
distinguished by its Christ-centered focus and atmosphere of love.
We wrestled with questions about access, spiritual bridges, counterfeit spiritual experiences,
and the broader cosmic battle unfolding around us.
At the center of the entire dialogue was the Hill, not a fantasy, but as a spiritually-charged reality
that may reveal how God is working powerfully through those the world once overlooked.
This is a fantastic conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Let's get to Joseph and Franco right now.
Today we have Joseph and Franco in studio. How are you, sir?
I'm doing great. Good to be with you.
I'm glad you're here. I think Tina at Destiny is one who brought you up to me at first.
I said absolutely yes, 100%. And I mentioned to you before we started recording about how
your connection with the telepathy tapes and my hesitations with the the telepathy tapes because of
the the um i guess what you would call it new age theology that's being pushed on it and um when i found
out about your story and the book with decoding cody um i was like this is exactly why i had this
like inward hesitation right and so i'm really glad you're here because we're going to have a great
conversation about the topics that were covered on that, but from a biblical worldview,
and a lot of things that probably were cut out of that podcast. But you and I were just talking
before we started the show about the resistance to this conversation that we both have felt
along the way. I want to hear what maybe you have felt, but I will say today, anything that
schedule-wise could have gone wrong was going wrong. And
It's in the, I'm grateful that as I'm mature, I have, spiritually, I have eyes to see and ears to hear the attack.
I had a prophetic word prayed over me a couple years ago that I would have eyes to hear, or eyes to see, ears to hear the attack before it comes.
Often I see and hear during the attack.
And today I felt that way.
I felt like
there was a lot of things that was disrupting my mind
on trying to focus on the conversation you are going to have
and in the moment I just, I recognized that this is
a spiritual attack, this is a spiritual warfare and it told me that
whatever conversation we're going to have today was going to be worthwhile
having and you had some, I guess, similar resistances or what?
Boy, I sure did.
And, you know, I've done a lot of these.
I can't think of one offhand, Tony, where I felt the extent of kind of spiritual opposition that I have felt through the whole process here.
I mean, through the travel and through details.
And then even, you know, look, the attacks in our mind.
We've all gone through life and we have histories.
We have histories, you know, before coming to faith.
We have things the enemy wants to throw in our face.
You know, the pride and conscience.
condemnation are kind of the two big focal points.
You look at Revelation 12 when Satan's cast down from heaven.
Part of the rejoicing is the one who condemn them day and night before the throne is cast down.
And so when I'm getting, you know, just out of nowhere, recollections of things or people I heard or things I wish I could undo, when those increase in frequency, you just sense in your spirits an effort to distract you because we know those things are forgiven.
Yeah.
But the fact that they want to replay in our minds and all, I've just noticed an awful lot of
that before this meeting today.
And I mean, these things that go back, some of them like over 40 years ago, over 50 years
ago.
That's not natural.
All of a sudden, the rapid fire popping into your head, I can totally see that.
And you even mentioned about even when you were landing here, this is something that I've talked
about on the show before.
Two people have brought it up to me.
well, several actually. So are you familiar with Kim Walker Smith? She's a worship leader.
Not offhand. She was here and she told me that, you know, because she's toured all over the place, over the world.
And she said she's sure she's driven through here on a tour bus at times, but coming in here, this is the first time she's ever driven from Nashville to here on her own.
And she definitely felt like this, as she entered this region, there was an oppression.
And then my friend Joseph Zee and his wife, Heather, were here.
And I recorded with Heather.
And when we were at dinner, they mentioned to me about when they were landing the plane,
he felt like there was just like this heavy darkness over this region.
And then there's been several other, like Dr. Laura Sanger,
her and I actually went into the local area and prayed over areas.
But it's interesting because when I'm,
moved here, I was on a retreat mission. I was in Philadelphia, and it was just a really bad
situation culturally there. And I thought, you know what, I always liked the hills of Tennessee.
I'm moving my family to Tennessee. It's conservative. It's God-fearing people. It's going to be
great. It's going to be like a Bible retreat, you know. And I get here, and it was far from it.
You know, like there's conservative people here, but I think, I think because it's known as the Bible Belt, I think we often feel like, okay, so we're spiritually safe there.
But I think in reality, when you say this kind of gets into our conversation, when you're talking about the supernatural realm and warfare, where there's a large collection of God's people, there's going to be warfare there because that's where the war is at,
hand. And so those dots started clicking with me on some of the things that I was experiencing
here. And then I found out that there's a lot of ancient old witchcraft that's here still.
And I don't know, I don't have any kind of, I don't know, ancient old entities name or anything,
but I just, from what I've gathered, there's something very old here.
Yeah. And, you know, superficially Christian places and sometimes have religious spirits
that the skies that sound similar to things that we might talk about. And these things do tend to get
recycled. Like, I spent a long time in India on a rotary scholarship, you know, early in my life.
And I had just become a Christian, but I sort of did a deep dive into Hinduism and their
beliefs and their Vedic writings and all. And then learned a lot there because I was there
three, almost four months. And when I was first to,
exposed to new age beliefs. I was surprised how much overlap there was with just kind of classical
Hinduism. So again, these things tend to recycle. And sometimes they're deliberately vague.
Like I must have asked, I probably asked two dozen, you know, Brahmins, the Hindu priestly cast,
like, what happens when you're done with the cycle of reincarnation? When you get consumed into the
fire were sparks. Are you yourself anymore? And, uh,
I think the answer I got almost every time was, we don't know.
There was a tendency to feel like they ceased to exist.
They lost their individuality.
And I would say to them, look, as a Christian, I believe when I'm united with God finally in that place, I'm not lost.
There's more of me.
The fullness of who God made me to be now is in existence for eternity.
I said, candidly, I find what you're saying kind of depressing.
you're working towards oblivion.
And they were kind of not.
And very often they would say,
you know, that's interesting.
I'm to think about that.
It's really not an appealing end.
So you have religious spirits.
What's the best counterfeits?
The ones that are closest to the actual product, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think the word counterfeit probably will come up a lot in this conversation at times.
So I feel like,
I don't want to jump the gun as far as this, what I'm about to bring, but I'm going to do it anyways,
and hopefully don't go too far down the rabbit hole too quickly. But actually what we'll do is this.
I want to start off from the beginning. So your book, Decoding Cody, can you let people know
how this all kind of came about? Because it seems like for me, on the outside looking in,
at what the world would say is random, it's kind of divine. Because I feel like,
your background,
uh,
being working in law,
you have a unique,
uh,
qualifications to be able to present this case to the world in a way where,
um,
it,
as much as possible can subdue doubting as to what's really actually happening here.
Right.
And,
you know,
I,
the Lord spoke to me about something coming.
And then I heard prophetically some of a few times from strangers about this coming.
And then numerous of a,
a good number of the people with autism,
who, some of whom are interviewed in the book,
had words for me as well.
Some saying, you know you heard from the Holy Spirit.
He was supposed to write this.
You're supposed to be a voice for us.
Wow.
And talking about the spiritual opposition
that would come with it.
So it was, I've never had a book write itself so quickly.
You know, a lot of times the writing process,
you sit, you go through something, you read it, you don't care for it.
It was like almost first draft stuff was just coming out.
So that's when you're really flowing with the Holy Spirit.
They really try to compress it.
The first thing, I think this is so important,
was learning that people with what we call non-speaking autism,
and that's their preferred term.
They say non-speaking rather than non-verbal,
pardon me, because they're often able to speak
or say a few words or fragments of sentences,
but you might meet somebody with autism.
You'll see the rocking motion.
significantly into autism spectrum disorder, ASD for short, and they might repeat a word back to you.
And they're, you know, again, they're, they might be obsessing on a certain type of motion or something like that.
But their speech is not reliable. It was a shock for me to learn that formerly they were diagnosed as being sort of mentally not intact.
They were shown kid videos. And I heard many people say, gosh,
I thought my child initially had like the, you know, the mental level of a six-year-old.
And that's a prejudice we have.
We should be assuming competence for all people.
If someone's in a coma, we're told, talk to them.
You don't know what's getting through.
If, you know, if somebody met Stephen Hawking later in his life with ALS and had never heard of him and never met him,
they might go over and say, hi, how are you?
and he'd be unable to reply, and he might try to tap a few keys with a finger.
Imagine somebody looking, thinking, oh, isn't that too bad?
You know, he's not really there mentally.
It's nice to meet you, Steve, while Hawking is thinking about black holes and mysteries of the universe.
And we had clues about this in what we call Savant Syndrome.
If you remember the movie Rain Man with Dustin Hoffman.
Yes. Sometimes people well in the autism spectrum have pretty,
Did just memory or they have incredible mathematical skills.
I've met people on the spectrum who speak with difficulty, but I could ask them was 1,412 times 638 and bang, the answer comes right out.
Cody, who's the subject of the book, never forgets dates.
The character of Dustin Hoffman in that movie was based on a real-life character who was given a Bible, I think, at the age of six, and read it once and had the entire Bible memorized.
So we have clues, people with what we sometimes refer to as higher functioning autism.
You know, Mary, have families.
I've talked to dozens of those people who know right to me and say,
Joe, I have higher functioning autism.
I'm able to speak.
I wrestle with these kinds of things.
And they can do, there's all kinds of achievements.
So Elon Musk is joke that he's probably on the spectrum.
So sometimes it's just a degree of brain wiring or something.
or how our brains see things or interact with the physical world, these individuals who are
significantly into the autism spectrum lose, almost lose touch with their bodies. They sometimes
don't have a sense of their limbs. They have trouble making eye contact. They're highly empathetic.
I'm generalizing. Everybody is different, but these are trends that are common. They have difficulty
with emotions.
They may get, I may be talking to Cody and he has an intense emotion and he can't handle it.
And he gets up, he's not even able to spell at that point.
He has to walk around a room and do exercises.
He might be yelling and things.
But Cody, you know, I learned that once Cody started spelling and spelling is simply,
the thoughts are locked inside.
They're incredibly frustrated.
But some people are able to get, usually it's a board.
Sometimes it's a keyboard.
It's got letters of the alphabet.
They can train their body, Tony, that they'll start pointing to letters at first with difficulty.
But then they'll start spelling out really complex words.
If people want to get a better feel for it and what it looks like, there's a documentary called Spellers, the movie.
It's free on YouTube.
And you can see people spelling.
And I've seen hundreds and hundreds of sessions now and heard stories.
And this is now so.
accepted and developed. There are universities admitting students. The University of California,
Berkeley, is admitting students with autism who are not speaking, but communicate through,
they call it AAD. It's alternative augmented AAC, pardon me, communication. So they're in there,
but they can't, the person can't get out. So person after person I've met, oh, I'm so glad now I can
communicate this way. They used to show me Barney videos. I hated them. You know, Cody's loves history and
politics and sports. And he's particularly interested in World War II. We talk about World War II.
That's from Elmo videos. My favorite is Elsa and my church. Elsa went from the kid videos to telling us,
I love chemistry and math. I've memorized the periodic table in chemistry. I'd like to study the brain.
She's gone through all of her high school courses up to pre-calculus and all the science classes available.
She's looking now to see what might happen with college.
But again, previously, they were being treated like intellectually, being treated like children.
So an important theme of the book is always assumed competence.
And as well, we formed a nonprofit to address this better and provide parents and families with resources.
called Hidden Gifts Ministries.
The way I would put it, Tony, is I feel like there's a stairway.
And I keep taking another step up.
From the ground level, the first step was, oh, my goodness, they're in there, and they're intelligent.
The next step up, the surprise went to shock when I found out that all the ones I was meeting
see the spiritual world.
And we're asking me, do you believe that I see angels?
I see demons.
I see them fight.
then they started telling me about seeing Jesus, how they have regular conversations with them.
You know, some of them will say to me, yeah, we talk all the time, but I'd rather keep that personal with him.
He's talking about my life.
So now all of a sudden the next step up, oh, there's these spiritual revelations.
The step after that was, they are a spiritual resource for us.
The insights that they have on Scripture, the prophetic insights,
they have are astonishing. And now there's been kind of an inversion in my mind. You know,
it's like, you know, 1st Corinthians 1, 27, God chose the foolish things of the world to confound
the wise. And you see that the love that Jesus has for children, you know, in Luke chapter 10,
is a scene where the disciples come back. And they say, and Jesus has given them authority to cast out
serpents and scorpions, demonic spirits.
And the 70 or 72, depending
which translation you're reading, come back
and they say, wow, even the spirits are subject to us.
And Jesus says, I saw Satan fall like lightning
from heaven. But he adds this. He says, don't rejoice in that.
Rejoice instead that your names are written in heaven.
He's telling them, I think, keep a perspective here.
You can have an unhealthy focus on
demons. Yes. You know, C.S. Lewis says in the introduction to the screw tape letters,
the two mistakes, and I'm paraphrasing a little bit, the two mistakes, the equal and opposite
mistakes we make about, pardon me, he calls them the devils, are to either not believe they
exist at all, or to believe and have unhealthy interest in them. So there's Jesus saying,
don't, you know, you have the power to deal with them as those situations arise. Be,
heaven focused, be kingdom focused. And then this sometimes gets lost contextually.
Then the account says, and in the same hour. And the construction of the Greek means that's linked
to what was just said. So there's Jesus telling them to rejoice about that, to keep the perspective
on demons. He's giving them all these insights. It says, in the same hour, he rejoiced in the spirit.
And the Greek is almost as effusive over the top rejoicing.
There's no place in scripture that records Jesus laughing.
This might get the closest to it.
It's the kind of word you can't do without a big smile on your face.
I mean, a picture somebody's just lost and rapturous in worship.
In the same hour, he's rejoicing in the spirit.
And what is he so happy about?
What is he saying?
What's linked to that?
And he says, I thank you, Father, that you have consistent.
conceal these things from those who are wise and those who are given understanding, and you've
revealed them to children. And I love that because we're dealing with children's the paradoxical
ways of God and view or those who have childlike faith. It's like they're seeing things.
There are people who are seers or ministries. There are people who are able to see in that
dimension. I've had some experiences. I don't have anything remotely like a seer gift. But
they live with this dementia.
I think there's reasons for it.
I absolutely think there's reasons for it.
We'll get into that for sure.
So you said the other kids in your church,
and so if I understand this correctly,
is Cody in your church?
Yes.
And so there's other kids like Cody in your church.
We have a large special needs ministry,
one of the largest in the Phoenix Valley.
We typically minister to about 80 families on a weekend.
Really?
Then when we do Night to Shine, which is a Tim Tebow Foundation event, we might have 15 to 1,800 people on the campus between the families, the parents are there, the kids are there, the escorts are there, they have karaoke, you know, and it's a wonderful event.
My favorite part of is I love going where we serve the parents a meal and just waiting on the parents and serving them.
Their lives are such a challenge.
Yeah.
You know, they can't go out in public often.
If their kids yell or they get dirty looks and all, I've just changed everything.
I was last week, I was somewhere.
There were parents who was a restaurant and they had their child who obviously had autism.
And we were outside waiting, you know, for our seat.
And I just went over to them and I said, you know what?
I just want to say I'm a pastor to a local church.
You guys are great parents.
You're doing a great job.
The mother teared up and all.
because they don't hear those things.
They're used to the kid yells and people give them dirty looks and all that.
There's a kind of repentance that's needed here.
And I mean in the right sense of the Greek word metanoia, a change in thinking.
We act differently because we think differently.
We stop seeing those situations as inconveniences or disruptions to our schedule or plans.
And we start seeing what God has built in for those families and what he's called those parents to do.
We want to value them.
And now in the great surprise, it turns out that they are seeing things for us and sharing profound truths.
I mean, they've seen things about me.
Colors around.
Some of them see oras and colors and describe what's happening to you based on what they see.
They've prophetically seen events that are going to happen before they happen.
Cody saw Jesus take his grandmother into heaven when she did.
died and he was in the other room and described the years later spelling. So I mean, the world's
upside down. I would say from our perspective, actually, it's, I think, getting right side up
because God's perspective is the only right one. It's so funny you say those words because
some of the strong talking points on this show stem from some pop culture stuff. Are you familiar
to the show of Stranger Things? Yeah, yeah. So they talk about the upside down and the right side
up being this realm. And it's kind of where I want to go with this a little bit because
the hill, the kids that are going to the hill, is Cody the only one in your church that goes to
the hill or are there other kids that go to the hill as well?
There's a number of them.
Really? That are in your church. Yes.
Wow. So how did that all unfold as far as the discovery of the hill? Because this is something
that if anybody doesn't know what I'm talking about, they're thinking, okay, well, the kids are
going and hanging out in a local neighborhood hill. No, we're talking about they're going somewhere
else where they're not bound by their handicapped physical limitations with their body.
And it's, you're better that you'd be better than to describe what's going on than myself.
But like, how did that whole, how did that discovery happen? And what are some of the things
these kids are telling you about it? Yeah. And this really gets you into the realm of what is
the spirit. Like I'm fascinated
that people who have written books on
NDEs, near-death experiences,
talk about
cases where somebody is born blind.
So they have literally
never seen in their life.
And when they have their near-death experience,
they're able to see.
And they describe a room, but they have
sight for the first time.
So there's something about the fullness
of the person, the spirit of the person.
And a new body
that we get, 1 Corinthians 15,
is a little bit of a tease talking about it's it's i don't think we get this by i think this body
perishes it's not meant for eternity but there's something similar about the spiritual bodies we're
almost getting into some of that there's a spiritual presence that's more body like than we think
we're not this kind of ethereal thing floating around and paul gives you know hints about that in the
new testament as well so it first came up when um as i got more into this world i really
realize, oh my goodness, okay, initially it was four two young men, two young women in the church
who were seeing all these things. And then I said, this has to be happening elsewhere. And as I
looked, I met Tani Cullen, her book, Josiah's Fire, was kind of a pioneering book on this.
I met other people who wrote books about their kids. I got introduced to parents support groups
where they were saying, our kids talk about seeing angels. We don't know what to do. So I was trying to
more or less pastor those groups, be a theological resource for them.
Often these young men and women want prayer.
They don't always understand what they see correctly.
That's an interesting point.
There are concerns about discernment of spirits.
They are emphatic with me.
And again, I've met so many of them now.
They'll say, hey, I'm a normal 17, 18, 25-year-old.
I have the same temptations you do.
don't look at me that way.
They see things, but they wrestle with the same things that anybody would, even if their body, you know, is fighting them when they try to express it.
So we were on a call with Cody, and we set up a call with two other young men close in age to him, one little older, the other little younger, all of whom were spelling.
And spelling again is picture the way they spell is they use a board about the size of your laptop.
screen. It's got letters on it as a delete key. It has a place to indicate at the end of a
sentence and numbers. It's a kind of laborious process. When I record the conversations and what they
said, you might read it in a page or two, Tony. That might have been the product of 40 minutes of
work. Wow. So they'll, they can cut new neural paths and point to letters. And as they do,
they're using big words.
They're polysyllabic.
There's complex thoughts and all that.
So at the end of that session,
one of the young men,
whom I've never met in person,
he was spelling with his mom,
and Cody had somebody helping him with the board.
And there was a third.
There was another young man.
One young man said to Cody,
you should join us on the hill tonight.
First reference I ever heard.
Cody replied something, I've got the exact comments in the book,
something along the lines of,
it's hard to go there and then return to my body with its chains.
Oh, man.
His parents and I are going like this.
So the next spelling session,
we're with a woman in the church who's a facilitator who helps him out.
And at the end of his lesson,
and he asked me to come,
and I'll often go and pray with him.
The end of the lesson, I said, Cody, you mentioned the Hill in that conversation.
Can you say anything about that?
And he spelled out, ask, and he named the spelling facilitator.
Ask her, she's been there.
Well, I looked over at her.
I saw the color literally drain out of her face.
And she was almost shaking a little bit.
And she's sort of not, I'm full board charismatic, all my crew.
Christian life. She was not quite so, but open. Are we talking about Marissa? Yeah, Marissa, right. That's the name
I give her in the book. Okay, so yeah, I've noticed you changed a lot of names. Yeah, yeah, well, only her name.
Okay. Yeah, yeah, she preferred not to be identified. Gotcha. So the, um, uh, Marissa then went on to say
she had a dream of vision. She couldn't even describe it. It was about 10 years earlier. And she said,
I, I, it was so clear. There was a hillside had graham.
And Jesus was sitting on it and looking at me and smiling.
And I was overwhelmed by the love.
I could see he knew everything about me.
It was so overpowering.
She said, I prayed for years to go back or have that vision or whatever it was again and
it's never happened.
And then without any further prompting, Cody spelled out,
the children you saw that all had autism.
She went,
That's right.
There were children all over the place.
They've since told me, Tony, that when I ask how many kids are there, it's thousands.
But then they'll say there's no limit.
It's not a physical limit like you would have in this world.
It's not an earthly dimension.
So as many can be there as they want.
By the way, some have told me not in my church that occasionally people show up who shouldn't be there.
And they've said, when they come, we ignore them.
They come through rituals.
So sometimes there's another subject.
You might be getting into astral projection or people who are trying to.
I've heard people who are not believers say, oh, I've been to the hill.
But the Christians here, and they are Christians, they talk about Jesus.
He's the only of salvation.
He's the gift of the Father for the forgiveness of sins, believe in him and the resurrection.
They are like bonafide, orthodox little-o Christians on every point, but sometimes people show up who shouldn't be there.
So we're still trying to figure what the hill is, but they go there and they speak to each other and they'll use the word they speak.
Some people might say telepathically, you have the telepathy tapes.
They ordinarily don't describe it that way.
they just say, we don't have to use words and our physical bodies don't fight us.
We just know and we speak to each other in our minds the way Jesus speaks to us or the way angels speak to us.
Angels say a lot.
Quite a few of them have told me that angels are very talkative, but they're not always allowed to say what angels say.
So then the next day, there was a young man coming in named Matthew, who also profiled in the book.
And his mom said, oh, he'd like you to come in. He has questions. And he wanted prayer also. He wanted to talk about incense that day because they smell incense in the spiritual dimension. We'll get there eventually. And at the end of it, I asked Matthew, by the way, have you been to the hill? And he thought for a moment and he spelled out for me, yes, I'm not ready to talk about it. Ask Marissa. She's been there.
So, Marissa. Second confirmation.
Yeah, yeah, you know, a day later.
Wow.
They all know that she's been there.
Now I've met more who are able to talk and two interesting things about that before I get to the fact that there seems to be multiple hills.
Two interesting things, there are things there that they will not talk about.
One has said to me there's a code.
We can't talk about certain things.
I asked another one recently on a, you know, I was meeting online about.
the hill. He said something like, I took an oath not to talk about the structure of it. There are things
that they can't talk about. They seem like they're evasive, but they get, they're not allowed to,
but there are things that's like rules set by God in their perspective? It seems to be the case.
They haven't said the source of the oath, but they know their things they're not supposed to
talk about. Okay. But there are things that they can talk about. So what a number of them have told me is
everything on the hill worships God. Every blade.
of grass on the hill is alive in some unique way and worshiping God.
The one woman told me and she's high functioning,
has high functioning autism that she's only been to the hill a few times.
And she said, Joe, the rocks, they worship God.
Well, you think where Jesus said, you know, if these were silent, the rocks would cry out.
Everything in some sense has, I hate using a word like life.
Everything responds to God.
and a number of them have emphasized the flowers on the hill.
The flowers have some colors we've seen on earth, some colors we've not seen on earth.
That's a difficult concept, right?
How could you look at a color and say, oh, I've never seen that color before, right?
And Elsa gave me more details on it.
Again, I went into this somewhat in the book that the flowers have a unique smell,
a smell of creative energy, and they have something to do with it.
with people, and there's intercession and teaching on the hill. They don't just go there to,
you know, hang out with their friends. They go there because they are taught by Jesus. They get
assignments. They are interceding for the world. Mind-blowing. So they're going from people we wrote
off, let's show them, you know, Barney cartoons, to they're on these special assignments. And I'll
just end that with this thought. When I got invited on the telepathy tapes, some of the,
somebody who I knew and had met said, oh, this woman is doing this, you know, this series,
this podcast called The Telepathy Tape, She'd Like to Speak to You.
So I prayed about it.
I went on.
I felt like, let me give the spiritual perspective.
She's not a Christian.
Now, and she's a very, very talented filmmaker.
I have a lot of respect for her.
Her goal was not to present the gospel or a Christian story.
When I told her about the Hill, I thought, oh, she's going to love this.
This is unique.
This might be a new one for her.
When I appeared in episode 7, she was laughing.
And she said, here's Joe telling me about the Hill.
Like, this is something new.
Little did you know, I've heard it from hundreds of kids.
I've interviewed from around the world.
And she's got all these details about the Hill.
The thing is, as far as she knew, they go there to be with their friends.
And she's documented cases of, you know, Billy and Atlanta says, my friend Charlie is in Denver.
And then somebody has tracked it down and they find Charlie in Denver who says, oh, my friend Billy is in Atlanta.
They go, they have relationships.
They talk.
So this is what you're saying is it's been confirmed that, you know, this communication on the hill is happening with real people in this world.
Yes.
And there's wild stuff.
and some of it I'm still processing
and some of them not quite ready to
talk about publicly, but you know, I recently
met Zahari and his mom and she sent me
a lot of his writings. Zahari was
born, put in an orphanage
as a young boy, an orphanage in
I want to say Bulgaria.
He has, you know, he's
non-speaking autism and he's
blind. He's legally blind.
He had a terrible upbringing
until he was adopted.
I don't recall he might have been 12 or so.
And he's a loving
family in the U.S.
And Zahari is madly in love
with Elsa from my church, and Elsa's
madly in love with Zahari.
And they meet, and they
love to hang out. Others have told
me together on the hill.
I've seen them together once.
They've been together a few times when the families were
together. I was speaking at a conference in Orlando,
and both moms came and brought
the kids. And they just wanted to
sit there and hold hands,
and they have difficulty in
Zahari's case, he's blind.
But they were so eager to get to each other and hold hands.
But apparently they are together all the time on the hill.
That's beautiful.
But it's not the telepity takes makes it sound like, oh, it's a spiritual dimension of some sort.
It might get a new agey type of spin.
I've heard now for many, many of these, many more than I was able to talk to and write about in the book that,
Jesus is the center of the hill.
There's angels all over.
There's teaching, instruction, intercession for this world, and other things that they're not able
or allowed to talk about.
Wow.
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beds in the world. Some exclusions apply. See site for details. I have so many things going through
my brain. I hope I can remember it all because I forgot to take my medicine this morning.
I just visited a doctor for ADHD and it's helped a lot actually. He put me on the stuff. I told
I said, I can't have a change who I am. It has to help me focus without changing who I am.
My youngest son's doing the same thing. It helps them a lot with the focus. Yeah, it's incredible.
But if you're not focused on the take it in the morning, then you have this. So you've mentioned
several things here. Multiple hills. The fact that I don't know if when you said multiple hills,
you're suggesting that there could be a counterfeit going on.
And I don't know if you've ever considered the thought of that.
And I don't know if through other people's testimonies,
do they have experiences where it's a hill-like atmosphere,
but it's not Jesus there.
But I bring all this up because for years now,
I have been talking, I don't have the proper verbiage for this stuff.
But autistic children, this is the first conversation I've ever had.
about this. I have been in communication with people who are not autistic and found themselves
in places. Because when you said that people who aren't autistic find themselves there and stuff,
and you even mentioned the word ritual, I believe that there is a counterfeit that happens
in many different aspects of God's creation. You look at Genesis 4, Genesis 6, Genesis 6, with a
Nephilim and the idea that there was a counterfeit of creation there. I think the enemy often is
looking to counterfeit what God has created. And so if there is this place that we're calling the
hill where these autistic kids are being brought to by God, which is another question in itself.
So try to remember all the other questions here. But is God bringing them there or are they choosing
to go there? It sounds like they choose. Oh, oh, you're hitting a lot of
topics here. I know, I know. I'm just word vomiting real quick and then we'll just sift through this.
I have been for a couple years now calling, because I don't have proper verbiage. I know there's
the third heaven and I suggest this being the first heaven and maybe Daniel 10, the spiritual
warfare you see unfolding in Daniel 10 being in the second heaven. And then there's this other concept.
I don't know if it can marry to Second Heaven
or if it's something completely different,
which I feel like the hill
might even fit this more where I call it a bridge.
It's like, I don't know what else to call it,
but it just seems like it's a bridge
between two different locations.
And it's, to me, hearing about the hill
sounds like that could be similar to that.
But I know I've talked to people
who have found themselves
on what I would call a bridge,
walking through tunnel systems and having interactions with what I would say would be
small G gods, demonic entities, fallen angels, and recruitment for service.
And so when you're talking about Jesus teaching these kids and giving them assignment,
and I'm talking about counterfeit, it's nothing new to me.
It would be just the enemy seeing what God, having knowledge and understanding,
understanding what God does and creating a counterfeit for their own purposes.
So I said a lot there, and I'm sorry if I took it down to me.
No, that's right. Let me try to unpack it.
I mean, there's so many great questions. And let me start by saying, there's so much of this I don't know.
I remember when I was, you know, in my law practice back in New York, there was a time I was
litigating cases for Christian Bible clubs. There were efforts to close them down in schools.
And I handled exactly two cases at one point.
And the New York State School district attorneys started inviting me to their conferences.
And they said, oh, you're the expert.
We want you to come on panels when we talk about this.
And I said, I'm not an expert.
I've only handled two cases in this area.
And they said, that's two more than anybody else.
Wow.
So I thought, all right.
So let me say, I'm just offering my opinion on things.
And I try to be careful and I'm not sure of things.
I feel like I've entered a house and I'm in a room and I'm looking around the room.
And I keep becoming aware of there's other rooms.
And there's many more of them than I know.
So all I can do is give you my best guess or my best approximation.
Take the multiple hills first.
I've gotten hints from a number of people that there are multiple hills.
I have met people with Down syndrome and some of down syndrome and autism.
And some of the non-speaking Down syndrome people are also spelling.
And I was with one not that long ago who spelled out to me, oh, I know about where Cody goes.
I go to the hill, a different hill where a lot of us have Down syndrome.
That was the first time I had any clue that there might be more than one hill.
Now, this is the next thing.
I've met a good number of people with their higher functioning autism.
They're able to speak.
But they'll, you know, I was just emailing with somebody literally last night.
And she was explaining, I have intense spiritual awareness of things.
I'm empathetic.
I know how people are feeling.
Another one told me I don't see that in the dimension the way they do,
but occasionally I'll see the air kind of ripple and I'll know that there's some kind of spiritual activity there.
I can tell by how I feel, whether it's good or evil.
In fact, that particular person, we were on Zoom call.
At the end, I prayed for her.
And she lifted her head with a big smile and she said, do you see it?
And I said, no, I don't see anything.
She said right next to me, it's very intensity.
Air is distorting and all that.
So, I mean, what do we even make of these things?
So there's many different experiences.
I have a kind of working theory that the more severe the autism is the deeper one is into the spectrum.
In every case is very individualized.
The deeper they are in it, the more they seem to lose contact with their body, the less control
they have. And it could be that with loss of the ability to control the body, the filter that we
would have that helps us to interact with the spirit, with the physical world. We have to get dressed
and drive a car and pick up things and control our bodies. And we use fine motor coordination to
speak and things. It could be that as they lose that control, there's somewhat of that filter that
kind of diminishes and it gives them clearer access to that dimension.
It's interesting.
I've heard from a number of professors, a few scientists, and they're fascinated by this,
and they're saying to me, we, and this, you know, when they start talking about quantum mechanics
and interaction of particles that are, that seem to be unrelated, but affecting each other at great
distances, that's very nice.
You know, how about that?
Cool story.
They're trying to come up with physical or sort of energy-based explanations for what could be happening.
So it's fascinating.
So it seems like there's multiple hills and also that there's places in addition to the hills.
I've met a number of people with higher functioning autism who say, I've never been to the hill.
But I've been a place where there's beautiful golden vegetation.
and I can see mountains and I can see a river.
One woman who told me she's a seer,
and again, this is subject to all these people being credible.
I try to evaluate that, and there are ways that I do that.
I won't go into too much detail on that.
But this woman said to me, when I meet with Jesus,
I go to a place and there's columns like Roman Greek columns.
And it's a beautiful place, and there are flowers,
and everything is worshipping God.
And I'm aware that there's hills over there.
And occasionally the people with autism will say to me,
we're aware that the city, the center of everything,
is over that way.
You know, and so that leads to this question,
what is the hill?
A few theologians have asked me,
do I think it could be the second heaven?
The traditional understanding of Jews at the time Paul is right,
going into the third heaven is the first heaven is basically the earth, but in the earth,
we have interaction with that dimension. Angels appear, but it's happening more here.
The third heaven, there seems to be consensus. That's where the throne room of God is.
So when John is, you know, writing Revelation, and in chapters four and five, he's describing the scene in heaven and the angels worshipping, or Daniel,
in chapter 7 describing a similar scene, that seems to be the third heaven.
The second heaven, the most common theological explanation you get is it's kind of the
atmosphere or something.
This doesn't seem to fit exactly that.
So just as a default, what I call it is it's a suburb of heaven.
Okay.
That heaven, the heavenly realms seems to be much, much larger than anybody knows.
Look, this heavenly city in Revelation, at the end of Revelation, is something like a cube,
1,400 miles in every direction.
And there's a restored earth in addition to it.
Or a new earth.
So it could be that there's dimensions to this that we're not comprehending.
And, you know, I've known people who had NDE's near-death experiences who described the same golden field.
that I've seen seers tell me about or people on, you know, with with ASD, autism spectrum disorder, ASD, describing having seen this place or having been with Jesus.
I talk about my friend Brooke Brown, who has a significant cerebral palsy.
It's not autism.
She's been in a wheelchair all of her life.
I included chapters about her because she's important on the subject of always assuming.
incompetence. And Brooke, because she has difficulty with speech, says all of her life,
you can understand her at times, but all of her life, she said, people come to me. And when I
don't answer in a way they can understand, they start talking to me like a child. Hi. Brooke is an
honors graduate of Arizona State University. She was a graduation speaker to the standing ovation.
She's an author.
She's written multiple books.
She's done theater.
She's brilliant.
She's trapped in her body.
I included her because she's had regular visions of Jesus,
including a place that's hill-like,
where she and Jesus, they dance.
It's this total joy, and she's free,
and her body's not affected by, like, her earthly body.
So there's these kind of compensations for people.
it might not be just autism.
It could be, and I make the case for it in the book,
that people under difficult circumstances
are sometimes given a particular grace
or something like Stephen in Acts chapter 7
is about to be killed,
and people are starting to pick up the stones.
And as the process is unfolding,
he looks up and he says,
I see the heavens opening,
and Jesus standing at the right hand of,
the throne. You know, you'll find instances where somebody's comforted by an angel or even Jesus
himself at some critical time. So I think there's some of that happening too. I don't think there's
a counterfeit hill. I'm trying to work back to this, but I think you make a really important point,
and that is the devil does counterfeit everything good. So we get this. This is kind of, you know,
basic theology 101. He can't create anything. Right.
But evil by its nature is taking something that God created for good and distorting it.
So, you know, you could think of anything.
The heavens declare the glory of our God.
The stars were given to help us with understanding and signs.
There's going to be signs, according to Matthew 24, in the heavens before Jesus returns.
The three magi.
Well, there may be more than three.
saw, knew the time from studying the stars. But the enemy has taken what's real and perverted it
into astrology where it becomes now cultic or occultic. Give me your birthday in the time and I'll do your
chart and your whole future is here. Yeah. And that has so distorted what God intended in
creation for good to tell us something about himself that we kind of
rightly shy away from it.
But it's a shame you don't want to give anything up that God has given us for good.
So, you know, God gives us sexual relations.
So my theology would be he created that.
The model is Adam and Eve as sex isn't a bad thing.
It's a good thing.
And my theology would say he created it for one man, one woman in the context of a faithful monogamous lifelong relationship.
And there's an intimacy in there that gets closer to understanding the intimacy with God, the oneness with God.
Paul say in Ephesians 5 that the church is the bride of Christ.
I think in a way there's some hints for us that God gives us in even physical relationships.
But the perversion of it becomes lust.
It becomes you objectify a person.
They're there for your pleasure or something.
So the good things get distorted.
I don't think the hill falls into that category for this reason.
I don't think Satan can create a hill.
Everything on the hill worships God.
And anybody if ever talked to who talks about the hill says that.
He's not going to create people, pardon me.
He's not going to create an environment where everything is worshiping God.
You know, we learn the thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy.
He is a liar.
And countless of the people I've talked to with autism tell me, demons lie to us.
They tell us we're not loved.
The ones who have, you know, there's been prayer for them, you know,
the ones who have given like exorcism, you know, they'll say,
the demons say to them, oh, I'm going to be back. I'm not done with you and things.
And we're always saying, no, when you had that deliverance, that doesn't have the right to come back.
And they'll say to me, that's right. They lie all the time. They tell me I'm not loved by God.
They'll tell me people hate me, you know, and things. So we get, I mean, there's just purest sense of
evil. It's distorting every good relationship, you know, God's nature is love. First John 4,
seven and eight that culminates in, you know, belovedless, love one another, loves of God,
everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The culmination of that is because God is love.
And his very nature and being, everything about him is love. Every speller I've met,
whom I asked to describe Jesus, starts by saying he is love. That's their first description.
So we'll maybe get back to that, just to finish the thought here on the count.
counterfeits. I don't think Satan can ever create that or that experience. When they're there
and there's this atmosphere of love, very similar you're listening to us who have studied NDEs,
how they describe when they see Jesus, or even when they're free of their body and their spirit is now
in the fullness of what God created. There's this peace. There's this total joy. There's this, you know,
Hebrews talks about we should labor to enter that peace.
When they see Jesus, they say, there's no condemnation, there's no guilt.
They realize they're so thoroughly, completely loved by God.
There's no condemnation, you know, as Paul is going to say in Romans,
the people I meet with autism who have these experiences say the same kinds of things.
So in that sense, I don't think there's a satanic imitation.
where I think it gets tricky is, and I haven't heard enough of this yet that I feel comfortable
forming a thought. I have some theories that some further along. I'm waiting for more confirmation.
A number of them have said to me, sometimes a person shows up on the hill who doesn't belong there
and we ignore them because they go to meet with Jesus and get work assignments. They speak to each other.
There's relationships. And now we're there.
this might get really blurry is it could be that they are doing new age kind of rituals,
some form of astral projection, their spirit is separating from their body.
And I think on the telepathy tapes in the second season,
there was somebody featured who's not a Christian who claims I'm able to go to the hill.
I don't doubt that that could be happening.
But if that's happening, they're an intruder.
They're an interloper, whatever the right word is.
Because the autistic kids that you've been communicating with have told you that they have seen people who don't belong there.
A few of them have said that.
Okay.
So this isn't.
But it's an exception.
It's not the rule like the hills.
And if they're on the hill, Jesus is the center of the hill.
I mean, all attention is there, right?
All attention's there.
The worship of Jesus.
the knowledge that he, you know, died on the cross and was resurrected and he paid the price for our sins.
That's the theme of the hill with all of them.
Is there any acknowledgement that there is somebody that doesn't belong there from Jesus or the angels?
Did they ever mention that?
Nobody's ever mentioned that to me.
So, because I hear what you're saying.
And maybe you're, I'm just going to elaborate more and we're just going to let the conversation unfold.
because when you're describing the counterfeit idea,
maybe another way for me to define what I'm thinking
is mirroring or a hijacking of an idea.
You kind of earlier in the conversation referenced the idea
of going into a house and always discovering there's more rooms.
My thought maybe, to use that analogy, would be,
is it possible that the enemy could know
that there's a room down the hall that is taken,
to create its own little thing,
whatever that could be,
knowing of what God's creation is,
trying to create a mirror image,
a hijacking of an idea.
When I said counterfeit,
I wasn't in my mind thinking
when I said that a hill
where autistic kids are coming to
and Satan pretending to be Jesus.
My thought is that Satan has his own,
and when I say Satan, I'm also talking.
And Dick and Purist and Angel
of light. Exactly. And
in the form of counterfeiting.
And there's this
agenda at play
by this darkness,
this enemy, this
hierarchy, Heiser talks about
Psalm 82.
And the activity
within the ranks,
we'll call it militaristically,
could they
be creating something that they already
know exists, but in their own
version of it? Of course, anything.
is possible. I would be skeptical that's the case. My guess would be that when when the satan,
the hot satan in particular, the adversary appears in heaven that he's under the strictest of
restraints. I would base that. Some of Michael Heiser stuff gets into that. He's an inferior
Elohim. And when you see like in Job 1 and 2, when it was a day the sons of God, the angelical
order is appearing when the satan, the Hasatan is among them. You can see hints in the conversation.
You know, all right, you can have access to Joe, but you can't take his life. You, you know,
there are handcuffs. There are handcuffs. There are, and even there, you can see God's total
awareness. The first question God asks, Satan in that encounter is, you know,
where have you been?
And he says, oh, wandering to and fro around the earth.
God never asked questions because, you know, he doesn't know the answer.
If I said to you, Tony, where were you last night?
I'm asking because I want to know where you were.
When God asks, where have you been, he's asking a question to highlight something going on.
And Satan is evasive, and that's why God says, and this is interesting.
We always translate this, right?
Most translations say, have you considered my servant Job?
The literal Hebrew is, have you set your heart on my servant Job?
And a lot of early translators just said considered,
but considered has to have the context of who's doing the looking.
If there was a lion crouts looking at an antelope,
if I said to that lion, have you considered that antelope?
the nature of the lion tells me what considering the anthelope means, what it's thinking about.
Because immediately Satan responds to God, well, is it any wonder I can't have access to him?
You've hedged to him.
What God's highlighting is you have been going after him.
So there's significant restraints.
It seems to me hard to imagine.
In an admittedly, incredible area, we're speculating all kinds of.
things, it seems hard for me to imagine that there is a, that there's a counterfeit hill,
even one where Satan appears.
I think it's more likely that the enemy's strategy instead would be to help encourage some
people to go there, even if they're at a distance and they can't really be a part of it and
come back and then try to degrade what's happening at the hill.
what the young men and women with autism are telling me about the plan of God, what God's intending, how they're interceding, to come back and give a new age spin so you can have the hill or, I think a closer analogy might be, you know, in my time in India, when I would talk to Hindus, and I would try to argue about the primacy of Jesus and that he's the only way of salvation.
him, they would say to me, but I don't understand it. We have, you know, Krishna and Rama,
why can't we say he's God incarnate, but he's just one of many? Like, why do you have to be so
insistent he's the only one? So there's again a clever counterfeit in my view of it, that we'd rather,
okay, we can't get around him being God, but if we make him like one of many others, we can dilute the
concepts of sin, repentance, the forgiveness of sin, eternity, judgment. We get away from that.
And then it becomes more about a process of, oh, we're having multiple lives. If I do a little
better, I'll come back as something else and I'll keep working my way toward, you know, eventually,
you know, Nirvana. To me, it feels more like that kind of counterfeit. But again, who knows
in the end? Yeah, I mean, when you're talking about this, so you mentioned earlier suburb of heaven
And so I think that's probably a good landing spot to distinguish where my mind was because
when I'm talking about, and just as this is natural, because I'm not saying that I don't think,
I mean, I'm new to this, you know, as far as the hill goes. But my default thinking was
the hill being a bridge and less of a suburb of heaven. So if it is a suburb of heaven and it is
heaven, I could totally see much more how it's hard for Satan to operate freely there.
However, if there was, if there is a, a bridge like Jacob's ladder, right? So like theoretical,
this, like you got here, heaven, ladder, right? So like if the, if, and that's just a very
simplistic way, but if there is this bridge bridging of sorts, is that under the,
the umbrella of heaven? Or is that on the,
outside of heaven. And if it is on the outside of heaven, what kind of chicanery could Satan and his
minions be involved in? Great, great questions. So Jacob's vision, Jacob's ladder, he sees the angels
ascending and descending. So if that's kind of the order of things that angels are getting assignments
into some kind of a portal, if you want to put that way, if the satan appears among them,
he probably accesses the same portal to your point.
You know, that's the access where that class of being gets, you know, gets into before the throne.
So, you know, there's some of that.
But the thing, though, that I can't get past is that everything there, they've told me, everything worships God.
Every plant.
The animals, there's animals.
the animals seem to have intelligence or awareness.
I didn't even know what to do with that.
Once upon a time I was taught in the early days,
well, animals don't go to heaven because they have a soul but not a spirit and all that.
And I now have completely changed in my thinking that, I think, you know,
the fact that Natalie was Jesus returning a white horse.
We're all on white horses, if you read Revelation.
19.
So why are we limiting God there about animals in heaven?
So I think the point of it is everything is worshipping and everything is in the right
order.
Nothing is out of order.
It's hard for me to picture Satan being able to go into that environment and create something
where everything is.
I think maybe this is a way to think of it.
and boy, I'm not going to have the exact references here now at the tip of my fingers,
but when Moses goes to Pharaoh in the book of Exodus,
and he says, you know, the God of Israel says, let my people go.
And Moses is starting, you know, with signs and plagues on Egypt.
He makes frogs appear.
And the magicians are able to make frogs appear.
Initially, he throws down his rod and they throw down their rods and they become snakes.
they were able to do some interesting stuff.
But at one point, there's a plague where the, like the dust, the dirt is alive.
It becomes like, you know, lice like insects.
And when Farrow looks to his guys like, okay, you know, do your thing there, make the river blood, like you did all that other stuff.
They shrug.
They go, we can't do this one.
This one's the finger of God because they can't create life.
Yeah.
So that's the point where the deceptions fall off.
So I think if the order of the thing is as God has designed it, the enemy can't come there and commandeer that.
I think the enemy can try to deceive people from it would be my interpretation of it.
But again, who knows?
Yeah.
This is like so much in my wheelhouse of contemplation.
I can't tell you how many times I just think about this stuff.
So let's talk about the people who don't belong there for a second because this might
actually go into some of the other stuff that you've learned with Cody and stuff.
And this is just all this is me thinking out loud.
I'm not willing to even say myself, like, I'm landing on this is how it is kind of thing
at all.
But is it possible?
and I think you did mention the word ritual at some point when you were describing this as a possibility.
Is it possible that, this is me speaking, not you, those people could be, for lack of better terms, spies on the hill.
Meaning, could there be a situation where the enemy can't be in the presence of God like a human could be?
but needs to wants to know what Christ is relaying to these beautiful minds as assignment goes.
And I say this because there is a, so in the book several times you've referenced how,
almost in question form, is there a reason why there, that these kids,
there's so many of these kids getting this, this information now, is it meant for a time as now,
Well, outside of that, there are a lot of people who are claiming to be getting these downloads
from other entities that now, 2026, this year, there's going to be some divine things happening,
like ancient gods returning. And they have things that they bring into the table as their
proofs. Like, they'll be summoning these orbs out in the middle of over the ocean and just
recently one of them filmed in 4K the orb and the orb actually had numbers on and they're
suggesting it's the date that this is all going to happen and this this ancient goddess hathor
is going to come and claim divinity as the holy spirit this year and so it's like when we're
talking about counterfeits and things is it possible that the people who don't belong there are
going there through asprojection rituals and whether they know it or not they're bringing back
information that the enemy is taking and using to create its own counterfeit for what it now knows
God's plans are doing for such a time as this. That's me speaking, not you. I'm just throwing that out
on the table, and I'm going to let you take it, pastor. You know, I could predict every day Jesus is
returning tomorrow, and eventually I'd be right. Sure, right. If I lived an infinite number of days,
I guess I've lived through way too many predictions, calculations, the raptures, this date, this is this, this is that.
I mean, I've probably been through more than 20, 25 of them.
And, you know, if you look at church history, there have been a lot of times these things happen.
There have been, you know, the year 1,000, Europe basically closed down.
It was a big round, scary number.
It must mean Jesus is coming.
And you find stories of, you know, this city, this false prophet said this and did that.
And that was common.
You recall after, you know, Jesus has resurrected when the apostles had dragged in, the advice of Gamalio.
They said, put them outside for a minute.
Let's talk about this.
Okay, remember, and he cites a few people.
This one claimed to be something led people.
He died and nothing came of it.
This one claimed to be somebody and died and nothing came of it.
So it was happening even back then.
And Jesus warns about that, you know, there'd be false Christ and all that.
I think the challenge now is with the Internet.
Anybody can go on YouTube and talk about a vision.
And I don't credit those.
I mean, for the heck of it to just be aware of what's happening,
I'll now and then monitor some of those just to see.
and then when, you know, this one had a near-death experience
and something's going to happen on this day and this and that,
and they just don't happen.
You, I think, I just think we have to be super cautious with that,
maybe because I've seen so many of those.
So the internet just now increases the number of those
where we can have information overload
and be running from one to another.
So my caution lights immediately go on.
But I get it's a fascinating thing to speculate about.
So let me just say this, because what I just shared, the date on that orb wasn't them saying God was going to return.
It was them saying that the ancient goddess Hathor was coming to claim herself as the Holy Spirit.
the people who are saying this believe that Hathor is the Holy Spirit, which obviously I don't believe.
But that's where that came from.
And I just wanted you to know that I wasn't date setting.
No, no, no, I was drifting into dates.
I didn't know that you weren't.
But I was thinking of people who might be listening and they might extend what you're saying into,
oh, that video that I saw, you know.
I was thinking more for...
Gotcha. Okay.
I was...
I didn't communicate.
No, no, no.
No, I know you're very solid.
I know you're not going to...
That was my preemptively...
Yeah.
Helping listeners in case they're, you know,
so they're sort of drifting there.
Yeah.
It's just...
All this stuff is so fascinating to me,
and it's what we were talking about
earlier before we started recording.
And I think we probably agree on this.
I mean, certainly because your mind
has been probably blown numerous.
times with all this. Like the supernatural realm is just so far more complex than what we can fathom.
I'm over here trying to figure out logistics of it. And that's not even getting you in the
door of it, you know? Right. It's just, it's wild. And for me, I think it's, as a Christian,
it's my job to explore how the Lord made creation.
Like, and not how, but like, what are the facets of creation?
Because the more I come to understand his creation, the more I'm going to come to understand
him.
And that's my job always, but certainly on this side of eternity.
Because the more I draw closer to him, the more connected I am, the more I can accomplish
his will and goals for my life.
And I also believe that once we're on the other side of eternity,
we're going to have exposure to God.
But I still wonder if we're actually going to be able to even then fathom the infinite
the infiniteness of his nature and creation.
We'll be learning it through eternity.
Forever.
Like it's just going to be a constant turning of the page,
revealing a new chapter.
that just never ends.
You're in a unique space and I love it.
I love, you know, what you do and you do it really well and responsibly.
And that is the church for too long avoided any question that was difficult about the Nephlem or this or that.
You know, the fault was, oh, no means the sons of Seth married, you know, and all that.
And I think that they didn't do justice to the text because a clear reading of the text would be these were fallen angels, you know.
So I think because we have.
avoided it, you're now filling that space and you're willing to answer those questions.
And yet we all get, we want this to be grounded on scripture.
So we can speculate, it's just important that the speculation is consistent with that.
It reminds me of an old joke.
I'm a friend of my telling me I was in his church.
And there was a preacher getting up.
He was a guest preacher.
And he said, okay.
He said, today, I want to go.
way back. And he said there was a woman in the front row and she had her handkerchief out and she was my
Amen corner. I'm going to go back. Go back, brother. And I want to go back before Abraham.
I want to go back before Moses. Go back. I want to go back before Abraham. Go back, brother. I want to go back.
You know, before Adam. Go back. I want to go back before God. Come forward, brother. Come forward.
So we want to, you know, we always want to be responsible, but I love that we can ask those questions and have those discussions, you know.
Yeah.
And I love that we're finally getting to those after kind of pushing them away, sort of like the subject.
And we don't want to talk about that at the dinner table.
You know, we're getting to those questions now.
Yeah, I'm fortunate to be sitting in a unique physician where just, I think God designed certain people to be.
be in this timeline, you know, in history.
And I...
But can I add something? Because I think you were touching on something really important.
Please.
I really think we are in a unique time where God is communicating in unique ways.
We know the gospel has to be preached to all nations, right?
And the idea of nations, ethnos, would be more like ethnic groupings, not so much political as we think of them now.
and, you know, how is that going to happen?
And by the way, artificial intelligence learning language is to hold another separate subject on that.
Okay, we started.
Right, right.
But I'm seeing overlap between the way Jesus appears and what he's saying and how it's being understood
between what the young people I'm meeting or saying about Jesus in eternity and what God's doing in the world with the NDE's.
It's a lot of commonality and also with how Jesus is appearing to Muslims in dreams and visions.
And this is being verified.
I did it on my own podcast.
I had a Muslim guest who said, I'm seeing it all over.
There was one fellow who researched it and got a PhD from University of Chicago who's an academic.
I think his book was A Wind in the House of Islam where he went to, he identified.
different regions of Islam, because they're very different.
Islam and Indonesia is quite different from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia to Iran.
And these things are being reported everywhere.
So it's almost as if God is stepping up, one person described it to me as, it seems like
God's taking away the perceived neutral territory where it's out there and people are being
forced to decide.
And at the same time, God is stepping it up.
I think you're right.
I think the deceptions are stepping up as well.
So to what extent are the deceptions making incursions into the near-death experiences
or into the, you know, what's happening with autism?
I'm curious to meet people with autism who don't come from Christian families.
Now, this is interesting.
I've asked this a lot.
You know, how can we believe these kids, aren't they going to church?
Their parents are taking them to church, and they hear sermons on angels and demons,
and so now they're just filling in the detail.
Would that we heard more sermons on angels and demons, right?
That's not the case.
A lot of the families I'm meeting, the parents are saying to me, yeah, we didn't go to church.
you know, I was raised non-practicing Catholic or Methodist,
and suddenly my kids telling me about angels and demons,
and we thought, uh-oh, we better be looking into the stuff,
you know, because things are happening here.
So it's not being planted, and they've got insights
that are not going to be typical.
You know, I love, you know, part of Elsa's story is in my church.
Our father came to see me a nice guy, John.
and he said, boy, I'm trying to process this, Joe.
He said, I'm not really a Christian, but I can see she sees things.
She knows things.
She's warning of things.
And I had the great privilege to lead him to faith in Christ.
It was interesting.
He got home.
And as he walked in the house, Elsa spelled for her mom.
Jesus is inside dad.
He's going to be with us in heaven.
Wow.
Without his saying a word about anything.
And then John said to me,
Elsa keeps warning me about ice.
Be careful.
You're going to slip on ice.
You get seriously hurt.
Be careful.
Be careful.
Now, we don't get a lot of ice in Phoenix.
We have mild winters.
He was on a business trip in the Midwest shortly after that.
And he texted me from a hospital to say, you're not going to believe this.
I was going back to my hotel.
There was black ice.
I didn't see it.
Bang.
I went down.
I fractured my hip.
They're putting hardware in.
just what she was warning me.
They see these things.
He even sent me pictures of the x-rays.
So they see these things.
This is not just, oh, they're repeating stories.
They're prophetic.
There's a story I recount about Cody, for example,
that when his grandmother was dying,
he was a little boy.
And they already knew he had autism.
His mother, Cody's grandmother,
was in the room with her mom watching.
The breathing was getting shallower.
You know, if you've been in that,
in room. I've had that happen a number of times in my life. You're there for the breathing stops,
and you know the person's gone. His mom, Glory, a good friend of mine, said when I realized
she's gone, like right after that, Cody ran in the room and he started jumping up and down,
excited, bye, bye, Grandma, see you in heaven, Grandma, see you in heaven. And years later,
when Cody was spelling.
Cody, we asked Cody, do you remember when that happened, when grandma died?
He put in the date.
Again, a phenomenal memory for dates.
What did you see that day?
I saw Jesus come for, it wasn't even in the room.
I saw Jesus come for grandma.
Grandma was so happy.
He took her with him.
And Mom, you were so sad.
You didn't realize because you couldn't see what was happening.
but you're going to see grandma again in heaven when we get there.
So there's all these kinds of insights, and they're not just general.
When I was working on the book, I sent his mom, Glory, a portion of the manuscript at one point.
They were on vacation in a hotel room.
And Cody's in another part of the room, and Glory, his mom is reading the book.
And as she's reading, Cody suddenly speaks up and says,
Elisha, Elisha.
She thinks, that's strange.
You know, why would he say that?
Goes back to the book.
And the next thing in the book is I'm writing about,
I'm addressing the question for people who I'm trying to help along,
who are asking questions about this as a biblical.
Okay, angels appear all the time.
They come with messages.
And sometimes you have one person who could see them and another who can't.
I'm telling the story of Elisha.
and his servant, and they're in the city of Dothan,
and the servants is freaking out because the enemy troops are there.
Elisha says, Lord, you know, open his eyes.
There's many more with us than them, opens eyes, let him see.
And the servants, sees the hillside is covered with angelic beings, chariots of fire.
That was the very next thing that she read.
She went, oh, my goodness, and he just said Elisha.
So the next spelling session, she asked him,
why did you say Elisha?
And he said,
Jesus told me that you were reading about Elisha and angels.
And I want you to know that I really do see angels.
So these things happen all the time.
I was spelling with another young man and his mom on a Zoom call.
And toward the end of it, he started spelling something.
And his mother said to me, Joe, he wants to say this to you.
Jesus is telling him that you're supposed to train pastors and ministers and how to understand this.
I've been around this a long time over four decades.
Plenty of Holy Spirit moments, you know, overpowering presence of God.
The United got saved in 1978.
The presence I was by myself in a room.
The presence of God came in so strong.
I couldn't get up off the floor.
I mean, I've seen a number of things.
never had a Jesus said. And I went home that night and I was, you know, just praying and I thought,
Lord, like, was that actually you? And his mom emailed me a little after that and said, he said to tell you,
yes, it was. And so this is the world, this is the world that I'm in. Now, these are not just ordinary,
oh yeah, people can know things like that. They are aware of things. I've had many times the spellers will come
over the course of a day or two in my own church.
And they'll say, there's four angels in the room today.
And here's where they are.
And here's why they're there.
And remember, they don't speak.
They don't own phones.
They can't text each other.
But they'll come in and see and know the same things, the same days.
Now I've heard many of them describe Jesus.
And I think it's so powerful that every one of them without exception,
when I ask, what does Jesus look like?
We'll start by saying, he looks like love.
He is God's love for us.
Then if I ask them, can you give me a physical description?
Average height, dark, like Mediterranean,
dark, like Mediterranean skin medium, dark beard.
They'll all talk about holes in his hands.
And that's afterward because their mind,
are wired in a certain way that when I asked them describe Jesus, they want to go to the essence of who he is. So this is the world that we're in. I've tried, but I spent a lot of time in the book, Tony, talking about why should we even believe this? I went into trial lawyer mode and I said, okay, I'm not skeptical of spiritual gifts or see or that those things happen. I'm skeptical of should we believe this as ought to. I'm, I'm skeptical of, should we believe this, is ought to be. I'm not skeptical of, I'm not skeptical of spiritual gifts or see, or that those things happen. I'm
tainting this in some way? Are they telling stories for attention? You know, are they
hoping to profit off the book? Do they believe what they're saying, but are they imagining
it because of the autism? I went through the whole series, cross-examining it in my mind and
researching it the way I would cross-examining somebody on a witness stand. You know,
I always use this example. My cousin Vinnie, you know, where he's
cross-examining.
With these instant grits, does water boil faster on your, right?
That guy thought only a short time had gone by, but a bias kicked in his mind and it was 20 minutes.
So, you know, there were things he didn't account for.
Trial lawyers look for those kinds of details.
Does somebody stand to gain something?
Does autism cause hallucinations?
It doesn't.
or people with autism unusual in any way,
it turns out, and I cite a few of the sources,
they tend to be more honest
than the population at large.
Some studies have said
they lack some of the subtle social cues
that make you a better liar
and they're not as interested in lying.
That doesn't mean they can't lie.
But in general, as a population,
you'll find lots of academic authorities saying
they're less likely to be liars.
Some people might lie for money.
It's less of an issue for them
because if they have non-speaking autism,
their cases are not considered legally competent,
meaning they can't apply for a credit card
or write a check or, you know,
if there's money for them from their parents,
it's in a special needs trust.
People in the audience who deal with this
will understand that.
And not just autism,
are people who are not considered legally competent,
might they be lying for attention?
As a people group, that's less suspect
because as you go through the commonly recognized symptoms of autism,
they're more drawn to routine.
They don't like loud noises.
They're often wearing headphones.
Cody often has headphones on and many others,
because sometimes their hearing is very acute.
They don't like unwanted stimulation.
They like ritual and routine.
You go through the typical symptoms,
and they're less typical of a person who's saying,
oh, look at me over here.
Everybody come and listen to me and show me you're listening.
the kinds of typical reasons people lie become less likely in their case.
So you see these things over and over and over.
And then they have spiritual insights, not only on the hill and insights about what God's doing in the world.
They're talking about the spiritual realm.
They're talking about angels speaking.
They're talking about all kinds of things.
they describe angels and demons fighting.
They describe the weapons that they use,
including weapons that don't exist on Earth.
We got to go there.
We have to go there because I told you
I wanted to talk about that.
I'm glad you brought it up.
First, let me just say,
I'm glad you tackled that in the book,
but I think the majority of people
as they read the book will,
I would think, maybe I'm wrong.
have less and less of an inclination of their lying.
Just because, like, you can only go so far with that,
even on the fact, just taking it all the way back to the beginning
when you first learned about the hill,
how you learned about the hill.
They'd all have to be in on it.
And in the book, you really do a good job of drawing out the fact
that a sustained lie is next to impossible for one of these kids.
And that's my quoting experts.
I'm not an expert in the field.
I just hunted around the internet.
I looked at academic studies, and I did my best to fairly summarize it.
Somebody can always come up and say, oh, there's a study here or there.
But I was looking at people who had no bias and weren't writing for any particular purpose
and research of decades.
And as I said, I did my best to honestly or fairly is a better word, summarize it.
And again, you'll have academic debate.
I just felt like because spelling took a hit.
in the early days. There were about 40 or so negative studies on a form of spelling called
facilitated communication where the facilitator had his or her hand on the hand of the person's
spelling. And that's obviously potentially problematic because even though they were doing it
to help the person feel the hand, if you're watching this happen and somebody's holding
the hand, how do you know whose hand is guiding it? Sure. So the,
The newer, the forms of spelling that I think are more common now,
like spelling to communicate it and other forms of it,
there's strict no touch.
And the questions are non-leading questions.
I go into that in the book as well to not suggest the answers.
And you can see from the dialogues,
or if you go on a, like the Spellers' movie,
it's a free documentary on YouTube.
Watch, you'll see it.
Why are, you know, why are universities admitting them now?
But the old negatives die hard.
I'll see comments sometimes.
Oh, don't you know spelling was disproved ages ago?
No, no.
You're so far behind.
It's terrible.
Or like, you know, one criticism was, oh, well, the spelling facilitator is
subtly moving the board to help them get to the letter.
University of Virginia's Department of Psychiatry,
God bless him as a leader in this.
And they said, let's tackle that one.
This is one of many examples.
They said, let's track eye movement and hand movement.
And if the eye movement precedes the hand movement to the letter, it shows it's voluntary.
And they did the tests and they did multiple people.
And they showed conclusively the eye goes to the letter first and then the hand follows.
And they said, there's nothing to this.
And I'm spending some time on it because there might be some people listening who say, wait a minute, I've heard about this. That stuff was disproven.
There was more than there was about 40 negative studies in the 90s. There's well more than 100 positive studies beginning after 2000 from UVA, Syracuse University, Boston University, UC Berkeley.
I think even Cambridge and England is in on it where they're saying, oh my goodness, we underestimated what's inside.
people with autism. They're not only mentally intact that we've been doing a disservice. They have
greater language understanding and skills than we ever knew. One of the first things every parent
asked when their kids start spelling is, when did they learn the alphabet? They've never been to school.
They're self-taught. They're self-taught. We live in print-rich environments. Look around the studio.
There's words everywhere. And they're often very strong.
smart and the parents are shocked when they start spelling and they're spelling big words,
you know, and getting into complex themes as they get more open and are able.
A lot of times they start with lessons.
It's a slow process for many.
You have to be patient with it.
I just think it's important because I think it's terrible that some people just repeat and say,
oh, they shouldn't be spelling.
It's disproven.
let's keep them on the old therapies like ABA and keep them medicated and that's the right way to do it.
Well, you have billion dollar industries, Tony, invested in the old ways.
Is it possible that people don't want to be thinking beyond this?
Or even the people who have complained and said, well, they obviously can't be anything to this because they see angels.
And we all know that doesn't exist.
I'll tell them, guess what?
We have read Gallup, Pose and others.
About three quarters of the American population believes angels exist.
When you start by importing an anti-supernatural bias, you're actually illogical.
Angels don't exist.
They're talking about angels, therefore they're not accurate.
Let's go to your first premise there.
Angels don't exist and kind of nail that down a little bit.
your anti-supernatural bias is just illogical.
I went on a little riff on this because I felt like you may have people in your audience who feel like,
I want to hear that more before I go to somebody, their kid has autism, they were told don't go near spelling.
I think God is revealing more of this, both to reveal who they are for us to see them and respect them as image bearers of God to assume competence.
And then maybe even in this divine reciprocity, this surprise, to find out they are a provision for us.
And they're seeing and telling us things that we didn't expect.
The word that keeps popping in my mind as you're describing is superior because there are certain aspects of these children and these autistic people that they have superior qualities than what we have.
And so we like, well, maybe even qualities is a wrong word.
maybe insights insights but but they're divinely given right so like god meeting with them on
jesus meeting with them on the hill they're gaining insights that we don't have the privilege of
gaining and and and they're being for whatever god chose this this the methodology they're being
given the message they're becoming the messengers uh and it's it's it's wild so um i want to
before we go because i think i know where you were going i want to
Backtrack to what you said earlier because I do want to hit this the the weaponry side of things.
And can I just say something quickly before?
Sure.
I promise.
Because I think that this is so important.
There's common questions.
If I do a sequel someday, I'm going to address the common questions.
One is, wait, they're talking to Jesus.
Why aren't they healed?
It comes up surprisingly frequently.
And sort of the more people lean into.
faith sort of everybody should be healed, even getting into, I think, things that I would really
caution people like, oh, if you're not healed, you have a lack of faith.
Yeah, that's probably.
You know, we want to, you know, Paul talks about, you know, his thorn in the flesh.
And I asked three times and my grace is sufficient for you.
My powers made perfect in weakness.
Or even in Galatians, he talks about, you saw my affliction.
you would have torn your eyes out for me.
You know, there's an apocryphal account of Paul in a book, I think, called Thecla.
Okay, it's not, it's not canon.
We don't, it's sort of a way we would approach the book of Enoch.
Sure.
But it gives a description of Paul as kind of bent over, broken bones, healed, you know, crooked.
Well, he was stoned.
Yeah, it was like, you know, he looked beat up.
So that gets into the question of the, you know,
the whole mysterious, why does God allow anything?
You know, when Moses is designated by God to go and he says,
but my speech is I'm slow of speech, whether it was a stutter or whatever.
You know, theologians struggle this one.
God says to Moses, who is it that makes man's mouth dumb or eyes blind or not only Cody,
but others have said to me,
if my autism can glorify God in a greater way,
I would choose not to be healed.
So I think you get into mysteries.
It's not as simple as, oh, why aren't they all healed?
This can't be accurate.
So again, I try to, there's about 10 or so common questions.
That was one.
And now we'll get to, we'll get to.
Well, yeah, no, I actually, I was trying to look it up,
but I can't find it because I wrote this down a little bit ago.
maybe a couple weeks ago.
And so I'm not going to say it because often I get these,
I believe Holy Spirit speaking to me moments and I write down what he's saying.
And then I reword it over and over again until the words are reading in a sense of the beauty
that I'm feeling from the Lord.
Yeah.
You know, because oftentimes I don't have the words right away.
But I'll say this to the healing because
everybody knows what my family is going through right now.
And this is for me and my family,
not the families for the autistic children.
But Christ didn't even have to offer a salvation.
That was a free gift.
And so who am I or who is my wife
who is dealing with a sickness
to look into the eyes of grace and demand more
when our salvation itself
was the gift and it was given for free.
So when we're dealing with
the limitations of this creation,
it's all part of a package deal in my mind.
And I don't get to choose this struggle
that I go through in life,
just like you don't.
Right.
And so I believe that the families that have these children should feel blessed, that God has saw enough of them to say,
I'm choosing you to have this child because this child is so precious.
Right.
And you are uniquely qualified to handle this environment.
And we've had kids say that to their parents that you were chosen for me by God.
because of the way you love me.
It's beautiful.
Yeah.
It's beautiful.
And I get the sense that there is what we see as random in life has all a divine orchestration to it.
And so that's kind of where I come in where I just, I want to, as best as I can in my life,
I'm not the one dealing with cancer right now, but I am married to her.
in my life, I want to, whatever suffering I'm going through, I want to do it with the utmost joy in the Lord as possible in the moment.
Because if I just keep my faith rooted in, you gave me this gift that is offering me the get out of jail free card of all eternity.
I don't even deserve that.
That's a great perspective.
You know what I'm saying?
And the challenge is faith seems to be a critical part of without faith, it's impossible to please God.
You find times with healing where Jesus will say your faith has made you well and all that.
And the struggle we have as Christians is the times it's faith in the person of God.
You know, Hebrews, those who, you must believe that God is, he's a rewarder of those who diligently seek him.
with sometimes the concept of faith that creeps in is anything that I ask for is going to happen
and I shouldn't doubt it.
Well, I mean, Jesus himself and the guards as Father, if it's possible, let this cup pass
for me, but if not, thy will be done.
So I think it's just not so easy to pattern this one way or another like, oh, you didn't
have enough of this or do more of that or, you know, why does Jesus never heal people the same way
twice. Sometimes he speaks, he touches, he spits, he kills in stages, you know. It's one of those
mysteries and all, but yeah, I didn't mean to get off on the train. You're fine. You're fine.
Because what you just says to him is comical to me because I have a goofy sense of humor,
I suppose at times, but like that story where he's healing the man that's blind and he's like,
I see trees. In my mind, I just, I see Jesus like, hmm, that's not right. Let's go back for a second
around. But so the the supernatural aspects of this, the angels, the demons, the kids are seeing,
they're having interactions with both of them. And there's warfare that they're relaying to you.
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, my goodness, I, you were talking about the mountain. And they were describing
the, like there's a mountain of angels, but there's also the idea of mountain of demons. And we see that
played out in Mark 5, the Legion. And it's like, again, going back to what we said earlier,
there's a far more complex nature to the supernatural realm than what we have traditionally understood.
And then you were talking about the weaponry. So I guess walk us through some of this stuff
as far as what the kids are seeing. Let me ask you this. How intimate is these experience when it
comes to seeing angels and demons. I mean, I know Cody, you actually walked him through a deliverance
at one point. So it seems like these children themselves, in a sense, are a battlefield.
There's a uniqueness to him that the enemy is trying to inhibit as well. And we say children,
some of them now, mid-20s, even late 20s. Sure, Cody's in his 20s now, right? Right, right.
So the older I get, the more they'll call children. Yeah, so, um,
A couple of general things on that.
So angels are very comforting.
Demons are quite distressing to see.
And they don't always see them the same way.
Some of them see features on angels.
Others just see light.
Some see light and maybe an outline of a person.
Demons primarily, they see darkness, but they're aware of them.
and the demons are just totally outright,
evil, dark, hateful, vicious.
They really just want to steal, kill, and destroy.
And they've seen the warfare between them.
Cody's described it as at times it's like they're wrestling.
It's like they're going at it physically.
And they use weapons.
I think one of the, he said there was some weapons
that he's never seen before.
One of the weapons he described one time
was something like a tomahawk.
He said the stronger one,
I don't understand the context
of this, the stronger one wins.
I don't know if there's a time.
Usually if angels and demons are fighting
and people are praying, the angels win, period.
But it may be a time that somebody's giving
into the demon or they're
making the choice and they're, in a sense,
empowering the demon or something.
I don't know.
That's kind of a complex area.
I'd rather not speculate on that.
But they do say the angels are stronger.
They're large.
They're sometimes very large.
And again, they can have different appearances.
But the angels are very comforting.
They are always worshipping.
This is an interesting question I've asked about
you know, if people ask angels to respond or fight for them, do they do that?
And a few of them have said to me, only if we pray and ask Jesus.
So there's sometimes a theology like I have the ability to command angels.
According to them, no, you don't directly.
But they say when you pray and you ask Jesus, he'll dispatch them.
Wow. And they all say that prayer helps much more than you know. Don't give up on prayer,
that in spiritual warfare, prayer is powerful. The times they'll say this prayer was powerful,
you believed when you prayed. And that really has a lot of impact. And then there are times
if God wants to protect somebody, there's something happening. I've seen them say,
this room is filled with angels, too many to count,
and demons are trying to get through to somebody,
and God won't allow it.
Because God in his sovereignty,
if God says, my hands on Tony today,
Tony's going to get to this place.
There's no number of demons in the world
that can stop you from being there.
God will dispatch as many angels as possible
to make sure that that happens.
So there's the interplay of your will
and you're working with God,
and then God's side,
sovereignty and he wants that thing done, he's using the exercise of your will to accomplish what
he's determined to happen. The angels are making sure that that happens. Some of them have referred
to mountains. When we've asked, they usually say that just means a lot. But there are times
they'll say there are many, many angels, more than you can imagine. And you get hints of that.
You see it in Revelation, you see it in Daniel, where they'll say, you know, 10,000's time
10,000s and thousands time thousands.
Some translations would just say multitudes.
But that gets you into hundreds of millions.
I think that that's not meant to be so much literal as it is.
So many, I can't even describe them.
So there's this fantastic angelic order.
It seems to be much more complex than we understand.
We're humans, so we oversimplify.
Like we like to create categories.
Oh, if you're good and you follow God, you're an angel, you're bad.
you're a demon. I mean, I've met people who just matter-factly say, well, demons are fallen
angels. I don't know that that's the case. Some may be there's theories that they're, that they're
fallen angels, that they may be spirits of a pre-ademic race, and that they're the, you know,
descendants of Nephilim, the ones that crave the bodies. They may be some combination of all the
above. So I think it's it's not wise to speculate, oh, this is what they are. End of conversation.
People like Michael Heiser have given us more insights on the concept of the council and things
like that. The only thing I'm sure of is this, that the setup is much, much more complex
than what we think. There are territorial spirits. We get hints of that. The prince of Persia,
the prince of Greece. Yes.
You know, there are times that we see, you know, when Jude says that when Michael, the archangel,
who's, boy, if there's one angelic dude, you don't want to mess with, it's Michael, right?
That when he's sent to get the body of Moses and Satan is disputing with him, he said,
Michael didn't bring railing accusations.
He just said, the Lord rebuke you.
And he took Moses with him for God's purposes.
So there's much more to it than we know, but they see those wrestlings and fighting.
Cody has said to me that sometimes it's like a physical wrestling match.
But when God dispatches angels and has decided someone's going to be protected in some way,
the angels prevail.
Because people should never make the mistake of thinking of Satan as an opposite to God.
You know, this is not Star Wars with two equal forces fighting.
You know, there's one God, there's supreme.
And, you know, in Revelation, when it's time to dispatch with Satan,
God sends one angel to grab him and chain him until the great white throne judgment.
So, you know, he's a finite being and all.
But they have insights on this warfare, but they do say.
say, pray, pray, pray. They emphasize that. If I could extract one thing from them that you want
people to hear is pray and keep praying. And you see how often Jesus not only emphasizes prayer,
but repeated prayer, don't give up. You know, the guy who's gone to bed is not going to let you
in, but because of the constant knocking, you're going to wear.
him out, you know, or the unjust judge, he's going, he says, oh, this woman's going to make me crazy,
I'll give her justice because she's wearing me out. And Jesus says, okay, God's not an unjust judge.
If the unjust judge is motivated that way, how much more is God motivated for his children?
But you always find those things are in a kind of imperative and continuous sort of tense.
keep asking, keep knocking, keep, it's like, because God's about relationship.
If prayer was ritualistic and if I say it three times I get what I want, then that's all people would do.
God doesn't want you or me for a ritual, you know, you get hints of that through all the Bible.
Have I asked for the blood of bulls and ghosts?
I want the sacrifice of a broken and contrite heart.
you know, Israel misunderstood that.
What God wants is Tony.
He wants Tony with him every day in dependency in that intimate relationship,
where you are every day with him, interceding for your wife, praying, pouring out yourself to him.
The relationship is the key thing with God.
And that's the thing that Jesus tries to show us over and over.
Ritual is the enemy of relationship.
the idea that we're going to get somewhere because we've prayed a certain type of prayer, a certain way, a certain number of times.
To me, that's antithetical to what the scripture is talking about.
God wants something much more precious to us.
He wants you and you.
He wants every child of his walking in intimacy and fellowship with him.
My quiet times in the morning time, I just sit now.
I have a longer time of just being with the Lord, just live.
listening, just telling him what I'm thinking about for the day. They'll all tell me. Jesus loves
just listening to them. I'll ask Cody and others often, what do you talk to when you're with Jesus?
He likes to listen to me. I pour out my heart. I tell him everything that's going on. I see his love.
I see his interest in every part of my life the same way we think of our children. We're interested in
everything. We want them, you know, we want, we want them to be in our lives. We want that,
that relational kind of, and it changes over time. But, but, um, the role that we have with
children. But that's really what he's about. You know, this, this prayer conversation is, is huge.
and I had a small revelation a couple years ago.
I was preaching my first sermon at church.
I had never done this before, and I was terrified because it's different than podcasting.
And in my mind, it holds more weight, you know.
It just does.
And I didn't want to disrespect the pulpit and all that stuff, you know.
and that morning
I had to come back in here from home
because I forgot my razor here
because I had to shave my head before our church
starting as I'm going to be preaching.
You don't want the shadow on top of it.
And I come in here
and as I was getting ready to leave the house,
I knew what I was preaching.
I knew the scripture we were going to be doing Daniel 10.
I was going to be talking about spiritual warfare
because I figured it might as well do
what I'm more familiar with.
I wasn't going to try to step outside the box too much for my first sermon.
And so I get in my truck and I get on YouTube and I just typed in Daniel 10,
spiritual warfare. I wanted to see what other people had said about it. And the Holy Spirit said,
don't do that. And I was like, okay. And so I just drove in silence to the studio here.
And I don't remember if it was on the way here, the way back. I think it was on the way back.
I think I was almost home. And I was just praying about it and thinking.
And trying to think about the logistics of how Daniel 10 plays out.
Because you see, in my mind, there's other areas in scripture where you see spiritual warfare playing out.
But the way it plays out in Daniel 10 is so vivid.
And the complexity is like you actually see the warfare happening amongst these entities.
You have angels and you have the Prince of Persia and Greece.
And, you know, I was going to be talking about all this stuff.
And I forget what my question was, but I remember the answer.
I was wondering why or how.
And the Holy Spirit just said, because I designed it that way.
And when I was thinking, because I was thinking about prayer.
And I just realized that through God, I believe, just as much as he created everything around us,
create the breath in our lungs. He created the structure for how our society works, how the scriptures
were going to be assembled. He also structured and created and designed how spiritual warfare was
going to be conducted. It's not something that just happened. And he's like, oh, this is default.
So I guess this is what we're going to do. I mean, I believe that the Lord knew before he created the earth,
that he was going to send his son on a rescue mission.
Like, I think the scriptures and revelation
talking about the book of life being at the foundations of the earth
depicts that, which is beautiful.
So when you're thinking about spiritual warfare
and how prayer plays into it,
I believe that, and this is why I said on that Sunday morning,
that it's been designed for our active participation.
And like blinders came off my eyes that morning,
and I saw, and Daniel, tonight I pulled it up here,
I'm going to read it.
the logistics of how this played out. So you have Daniel who is going to be seeking for answers,
and he starts praying. And when the angel comes to him and starts speaking to him,
the way it logistically is laid out, I think is extremely important. So Daniel 10,
verse 12, then he said, don't be afraid, Daniel, since the first day you began to pray for understanding
and to humble yourself before God, before your God,
your request has been heard in heaven.
So we have Daniel praying.
The request transcends realms, heavens, to the Lord's ears.
He hears the request, which is going on what you were saying with the kids.
They were saying how pray to Jesus and he'll direct the angels, right?
And then it says, I have come in answer to your prayer.
But for 21 days, the spirit prince of the kingdom of Persia,
have blocked my way.
Well, isn't it?
It didn't, the conflict didn't exist until Daniel started praying.
Wow.
What a great insight.
If Daniel didn't start praying and participating and seeking the revelation,
there wouldn't have been no need for the conflict.
The conflict, the spiritual warfare that we see play out in this chapter only happened
because God designed it so that Daniel would start praying first and
that would activate everything else.
And it has to be activated.
In order for the answer to come to Daniel, Daniel needs to submit the request.
The angel needs to be told by God to go and answer that request.
And that's where the interception tries to take place.
And that's what we're talking about with prayer.
It's like it is so important.
And I don't know if I can even fathom how intertwined our petitions
to God is to what is happening around us in the spiritual realm. And I think that's why I find it so
beautiful with what these kids and adults now are relaying to you in these sessions and Marissa and
others, their parents, they're able to draw out in the spelling what is actually happening
in the supernatural. Because we don't have the eyes to see it physically.
Some have, like you said about the seers, spiritualize to see, but most of us don't.
And this is an open door of my mind to access that.
They even smell when it's happening.
Talk about that, the incense, because that's part of...
Yeah, one of the spells of my church, not Cody, one day asked me to come in.
He wants a prayer for something.
And then out of nowhere, he asked me about incense.
Can you tell me about incense?
And why does it smell stronger when angels are fighting for us?
And I went, now I had just wrapped my mind around the idea that they see and the hear and the spiritual world.
So why should I have been surprised by, I don't know, by smell?
And I started thinking, all right, let me think about this.
Well, there's feel when they're in that realm.
You look at, for example, Ezekiel and John in Revelation, they both get handed a scroll.
holding a scroll that's feel.
They're both told to eat the scroll and it's sweet in their mouth.
There's taste.
So if you have sight, hearing, touch, taste, why would smell be unusual?
Yeah.
And so it just seems the senses are engaged.
And Matthew said to me, the name of the incense was, and he spelled out something like
Amaranth. And I afterward looked it up online. And it is a type of incense. I've got a monastery
somewhere where they make it and they claim it's close to what biblical incense was. But Cody has told
me that there's all different types of incense. And a number of them have said there's clearly
smell and it's stronger when we're praying and angels are interceding for us. And then
it hit me, wait a minute. Okay, so Revelation, both chapter five and chapter eight, you have the
prayers of the saints represented as incense. In fact, we're told expressly, the incense rising up
before the throne is the prayers of the saints. And the bowls are administered by angels.
So I'm thinking, oh my goodness, so this kind of connects it. There's that picture. And even incense has
always been a critical part of the picture. Going back to the tabernacle and then the temple,
you know, you had the Holy of Holies with the Ark of the Covenant. You had, you know,
the table of showbread. You had the menorah, the candlestick. You also had an incense table.
And the incense table was up against the curtain, but inside the holy place. But when writers talk
about it, like in Hebrews, they associate it with the Holy of Holies. Not the Holy Place, but the
Holy of Holies. So why did they associate that? What was the significance of the incense? And I think
that's because the incense has always been the picture of the prayer. So the high priest couldn't
physically walk into the Holy of Holies except one day of the year, but by putting it right at
the point where the Holy of Holies was, it was creating the picture of the
incense, the prayers are constantly rising up before God, before the throne. So it was
after what I thought, wow, now it makes much more sense and how amazing that they smell incense
and that that's an aspect of it. They also smell, smelled like the flowers and the hill have
smells. So they see all these things. There's some things, by the way, that they experience,
that they won't talk about. There's kind of like they're. It's kind of like
there's a code at the hill or an oath or however they describe it.
There are certain things that they don't want to talk about.
One of the most common answers Cody will give when people ask questions is,
don't ask me, you need to pray and ask God to read your Bible and trust him.
Wow.
And I find that answer wonderfully refreshing and assuring because Cody has said to me,
we're not like, this is not the word he used, but the idea was we're not oracles.
We're not vending machines.
Yes.
Come to us and we're going to tell you, God wants you praying to him.
He wants you to have that relationship with him.
Cody, in fact, thinks that every one of us has the ability to see into the spiritual world
that what happens is we lose it, that we don't function in it.
so maybe we have times in our life.
And every Christian I've met, if I said, even if they're not charismatic,
if I said, okay, have you ever had, you knew something, the phone rang, you knew who it was?
I've never met a person to say, no, I've never had that.
Every one of them says, well, if you must know, they become like Nicodemus at night.
They drop the voice, well, there was this time, you know.
When I was a kid.
And there were amazing stories.
I mean, a friend of mine who is a very, well,
well-known, high, high-selling author,
you know, not expressly charismatic when, you know,
he was reading the manuscript.
He said, oh, there was a time I was a kid.
I was playing and I bang my head on the floor.
And the next thing I knew, my body was down there and I was up above it.
And it was me.
And I'm looking down.
And I knew that was my body on the floor.
People have had these experiences.
I forget the percentage of people who have had near-death experiences.
but it was like surprisingly high.
Like it might be like six or seven percent or I'm not positive of that number.
That's pretty high.
But they, yeah.
And so everybody has had them.
And Cody feels like we lose the ability to engage it because we're so,
we need to interact with a physical world.
And because our culture, Western civilization is sort of anti, it has a,
materialist bias. The woman who created the telepathy tapes doesn't have a spiritual goal,
but she has an anti-materialist view that she's attacking. So it's an important first step for her,
and she's aware of other cultures don't have that bias. They live with the idea of a spirit
world and interacting with. And again, I've seen that many places around the world. They're not
surprised by it. We tend to think of it as anti-intellectual. And not always. I mean, I've,
you know, friends with brilliant scientists and devout believers and say this, it's all real. And I ask
other scientists, why are you so irrational against the concept of a spiritual dimension, especially
with what we know about theoretical physics and all? So I think what happens was when people
experience it, they don't know what to do with it. So they, they
kind of file it away, you don't have a way to grasp it, and then they just don't return to it,
because we've got categories of a physical world. I have a feeling if we were more open to it
and we were praying and more open and more receptive, we'd hear about it more often. The more I
try to spend time with God in listening, not just talking, the more I'll hear something that's unique,
that's revolutionary.
You know, I mean, I wish I heard God more than I do.
There are times that I think God wants us to just trust him and press in,
but there are times it's revolutionary.
You know, when our second child was born,
my wife had a really difficult delivery.
Her entire blood system was, you know, replaced.
And they put her in an artificial coma.
They debated doing a hysterectomy.
which fortunately from my youngest son didn't happen.
And she went through a terrible time.
And after it was done, she was home.
She was in terrible pain.
She had this horrible back pain.
She couldn't get up off the couch.
And we pray every day.
That's just been the habit since we started dating.
And I was leaving for work that morning, one morning.
And she started crying.
And she said, oh, I'm so upset.
What's wrong?
I can't do anything.
You go and you work all day.
You come home.
You bathe the kids.
You do this.
You do that.
And I can't help.
I can't do anything.
And I, you know, what can you do?
I said, it's all right.
We'll get through it.
I didn't know what it was, how severe it was or what was going to happen.
And we, I started praying for her.
And it was kind of a generic.
A Lord, touch foul, heal her.
And I heard clearly, clearly.
I mean, louder than audible in my spirit.
Don't pray for it.
Rebuke it.
I had no theology of rebuking a back injury.
I don't even know that I understood what that meant in that moment.
But I heard it so clearly.
I just looked over at my wife and it was like whatever this was became almost tangible.
And I just said, that's it.
I got angry.
I said, that's it.
I've had it with you.
In Jesus name, I rebuke you.
You get out of my wife and never return.
And she felt this hot.
flash run down her spine and she was healed on the spot. She got up and was twisting her back.
Wow. 90% healed by the time I got home the end of the day, she was 100% healed, including old back
injuries that she had. Now, trust me, that led me to the process of trying to rebuke every illness
when I prayed for people. And it didn't work. All right. So there's not a formula. What was key was hearing from the
Holy Spirit in that moment. This is what you need to do for that injury. And we want to get the
mind of God for that. And the times that's happened, the Holy Spirit's give me an insight on how to
handle a situation with a person or prompted me to forgive someone that I was holding onto something
that wasn't realizing. Because demons really play in this country more so, you know, when you're in
India, they have a lot of access points. Common access points, and I kind of went into this in the book
too, here are hatred, unforgiveness. Why is Jesus so emphatic about forgiveness? Extreme fear.
I mean, those are places, even for believers, of where demons can oppress and torment or interfere
or affect the thoughts of believers. People have said, oh, well, give me chapter.
in verse for that. Okay, here's one. When Jesus tells the apostles that he's going to suffer
and die and be raised from the dead, Peter takes him aside, like, let me straighten this guy out.
You're like, you got to, whatever he said, you got to quit talking that way. The men are going
to misunderstand. I know it's spiritual. And the text indicates that Jesus physically turned his
back to him. He didn't say, get behind me, Peter. He said, get thee behind me.
Satan, Satan, you're an offense. You're listening to the things of man and not the things of God.
So just in those times, we could be believers and saved and everything else, but those times that we
give in to the spirit of the world, we respond with anger, we respond with hatred, we're not
quick to forgive, we don't let our peace and gentleness be known to all people. We manifest, you know,
the works of the flesh instead of the fruit of the spirit in Galatians.
Those are times we're giving them access to our mind and how we're going to respond to things.
You know, it was Martin Luther who said,
I'm not responsible if a bird lands on my head,
but I am if I let it build a nest there.
So there's that kind of dynamic as well.
And to as much as possible, just be walking with God, have the awareness.
He is walking with us every moment.
of every day, you know.
I mean, I have a story about that, but I want to respect the time here.
Oh, you're fine. You're fine.
Let us, let's bring this in with, because I think this is a good way to end it.
The children.
And your question throughout the book that I've read so far that I told you, I think I'm on
a chapter 18, I almost said episode 18, podcaster.
But this idea of why now, is there a reason why this is being discovered now?
And to build on that question, because I had a question along with that when you proposed it,
why is there a rise in autism in today's world compared to past decades and generations?
And is there a reason, a spiritual reason for it, where we live.
look at it as a physical handcuffing and a problem when spiritually God's like, oh, no, I'm doing
something here. And I would say, you know, God works through the sins and the mistakes and the errors of
humans and the world's ways. He's, you know, he's taking, you know, what did Joseph say to his
brothers? You meant it for evil. But God, right, God used it for good.
So he's always using, he's using people's bad choices.
He's, you know, God's will is not going to be frustrated.
The choice of the person might be different.
The person who had the opportunity to obey God and do something
maybe won't be used by God because he or she refused to obey.
But God's always working through those things.
So why are we seeing more autism?
the the numbers are up some people say it is because we're diagnosing it better that that's probably a
factor i don't know that that explains at all some people attribute it to the increase in vaccination
you know regimens i don't have a formed opinion that i
could defend, you know, defend on that. I've had people argue it to me strenuously. I can't reach a point
that I feel sure enough because I just don't know. But I think, you know, there could be other
reasons for it. There could be environmental conditions and all of that. God will use all those
things for his purposes. It's interesting. You read that conversation before no man knows the day
of the hour. That means no man knows the day of the hour. And you can't get around it by saying,
okay, but I can know the minute and the week. No, no, it doesn't work that way. But we are told
to be aware of seasons. Jesus does say, I believe it's in Luke 21, or it might be Matthew 24,
when you see all these things come to pass, lift up your head because your redemption is drawing near.
He even likens it to the sign of a fig tree and it's budding.
So I think it could be that we can have an awareness of seasons.
And it does feel to me like there's an acceleration in the world.
There's times maybe people felt this before.
But there seems to be something happening and that God is, again, speaking in unique ways.
and maybe he did some of these things before to a lesser degree.
You know, I mean, Muslims or Hindus I've heard as well have had visions or dreams of Jesus.
Why is it more frequent now?
Why is it that we're hearing more of these cases of autism,
they're becoming more prominent, more people are writing books about it?
There's probably a dozen books out there of people talking about their kid.
and giving, you know, aspects of stories.
You know, one of the spellers I've gotten to know sent me a book with maybe two dozen stories of young men and women with autism.
And as you read their stories, I've met him.
I haven't met any of the others in the book.
Story after story.
They talk about Jesus appearing to me and seeing angels.
It's like it's getting out.
And as it gets out, it's going to force people to,
start making decisions. Do I believe that God is doing something here? Why the near-death
experience is more popular? Why are all these things happening? I think we could be in a time
when God is narrowing what people perceive to be neutral ground. You and I know there's no
neutral ground. You've either accepted Christ or you haven't. But there's an illusion for people like,
well I'm in the middle, I'm not sure, I'm waiting, I'm watching.
It's like that illusion of neutrality is being eroded from both ends.
It's like evil is more overt and open.
You can have events now, you can have sporting events or you can have, you know,
televised events where there's, you know, there's occult representations or what was the,
what was the event?
Was it
it wasn't OBEs, it wasn't the Academy Awards?
I forget now where there was an actual
kind of people dressing up like witches
and
like a music award?
Yeah, it might have been,
it was a musical award, right, right?
Yeah, there's several of those.
So I'm not sure what you're going.
So there's a number of them.
So the Super Bowl and the point,
well, right, of course, the Super Bowl,
to the point is those things happen.
Yeah.
There's not a horrified game.
In society, if that had happened back in the 40s or 50s or even, you know, the 60s, the station would have been barraged.
You know, people dropping, you know, dropping them and all kinds of concepts.
It's like evil can openly parade now.
Yes.
It's it's less ashamed to do so.
So it just seems like both sides are being more open.
what they believe is more manifesting more.
There just seems to be less space for people to claim some kind of neutrality.
And I think what God's revealing through not just kids with autism, but others,
with other kinds of special needs, the stories are getting more and more common now,
that this is just part of that trend.
So I sometimes in my spirit feel like we could be approaching something like that.
Wow.
Yeah, I definitely feel like there's a removing of the gray, right?
It's just going to be, it's becoming more and more clear black and white.
There's less of a bleed between the gray and the white and the gray and the black.
It's just, it is what it is.
The cards are being put on the table, and it's removing any thought of, well, let me just see.
It's like, no, these are your choices.
The bets are being called.
Yeah.
You've got to lay down your cards.
It is what it is, you know.
I think this was a fantastic conversation, and I really hope that people enjoyed it.
I hope that they benefited from it and picks up some things.
People can definitely check out Decoding Cody, and where can they get that at?
Yeah, it's available anywhere that, you know, books are sold, Amazon Barnes & Open, all that.
It's also available on a ministry website.
If people want to reach out, best ways to get me are Instagram if you're on that.
I'm on Instagram at Pastor Joe in Franco.
If you write to me, I'll answer you.
It may take time.
It's a high volume of mail.
Or a lot of people are writing us on the ministry we set up.
We set up a nonprofit.
Everybody's got a book.
That book is the property of the nonprofit.
What comes in from that goes to Hidden Gifts Ministry.
And that's available at hiddengiftsministry.org.
We are putting free resources for families.
We're now in the process of creating videos for families in crisis, marriage help, help with siblings, the questions people ask when they get the diagnosis, the difficult stages.
And Cody's parents went through this, like smearing feces and screaming in public and all those things.
We really want to give people hope and understanding it to see every child as an image bearer of God to keep.
Assuming competency.
It's really important.
You talk to your kids like they understand even if they don't seem to be.
And there's a lot that I purposely put in on that.
So if people go to hiddengiftsministry.org, they can also write to us there.
They'll see some resources.
We've already started posting.
We've had a lot of churches reach out to say, we're inspired.
We want to start a special needs ministry.
the woman who started our special needs ministry with just Cody going back over 20 years ago
will help you get set up with resources.
Johnny and Friends has got great resources.
We want to get the word out for people.
If people are just writing, tell me more about spelling, where can I hear more?
Where can I get a board?
We've got a spelling board.
We've got places you can find that on the website.
Matt and Glory, Cody's parents answer.
a lot of those. If people have
unique questions for me, or they want to tell me
stories, I'll love those.
Just again, be patient. I'll get
back to you. They can email me
there as well.
And so that's a good way to do.
But the books are available anywhere,
or if they go on the website,
they can ask for one. We'll send one
from the ministry.
Or there's a suggested donation, but whatever
people, if you can't afford one,
go on the ministry and website,
we'll send you one for whatever,
you want to, whatever you think you can give.
We want to get the information out to people.
We're concerned with people hearing more kids meeting their,
pardon me, parents meeting their children, learning who they are.
I mean, I've met now so many families.
And when they finally meet their kids and I was in a room that long ago
where a 10-year-old boy is getting spelling breakthroughs,
He's getting more effective.
He's starting to get open.
He can save things.
And I was in with him when his father went in for the first time,
and his mom was there.
And he typed out on the keyboard,
Dad, I love you.
And that's the first time the father heard that in 10 years of life.
And we all cry a lot.
The father cries, the mother cries.
I cry with them.
There's such emotion when parents meet.
kids. And even if they're 15, 20, and older, a lot of times the parents have recriminations,
like, oh, I never know he was in there. These young men and women are remarkably forgiven.
They say, you didn't know we were in there. Don't, please, don't be angry with yourself.
Let's just get to know each other now. So that's our goal. That's what we're trying to do through
the ministry. That's awesome. That's really cool. I don't know if this is possible, Jack,
but maybe we can look into it.
I know you can set up
fundraisers on YouTube,
and if we can figure out,
because I don't think we've ever set one up,
if we can figure out as fundraiser on YouTube
to set up for the nonprofit,
we could do that.
That's a big ask,
and I'll just say,
one of the things that we're doing
is we're scholarshiping families
who can't afford spelling
because it's not covered by insurance.
So we've identified a few spelling facilitators.
We obviously need many more.
We want to maybe scholarship, some people who want to get trained if they'll agree to do free work.
But if there are families and they say we'd like to learn or study, we just can't fit it.
It's not in our budget.
Our goal, and we got approval from IRS to do this, is to scholarship as many families as we can to get them over that where the kids get spelling to the point.
the parents are now able to do it.
They don't have to be paying the facilitator.
You know, you kind of work it more into the fabric of the family.
So, I mean, if you're able to do something like that, I'd want to dedicate that to that.
Awesome.
There's not, it's not going to overhead.
Nobody gets a salary in the nonprofit.
That's, you know.
Yeah.
That's our goal.
Yeah.
And if we can figure that out in help in any way with that stuff, I mean, I think it's worthwhile.
I mean, I have been dramatically impacted by this conversation in the book.
And so I just hope that people out there watching and listening are equally dramatically impacted.
So thank you for joining me.
Well, thanks.
And thank you for the great work that you do.
And your willingness to get into these subjects and give people a platform to talk about some of these things.
So blessings, it's been great to be with you.
Thank you.
Told their minds were locked away
But heaven hears a different sound and calls them by their name
Chains may hold the body still
But spirit runs so free
There's a higher ground they walk upon where
They're who they're meant to be
If we could see with heaven's eyes pass what the wind
Light and love upon the hill
On the hill
Where the light breaks through
Darkness standing tall
conquer death and great the world could never
