The Exorcist Files - A Generational Curse Lifted: The Testimony of Tammy Comer

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

With so many requests for the testimony we decided to share it as a stand alone episode drop. Fair warning, this story might break your box. Tammy Comer wrestled with chronic illness for almo...st two decades until a strange set of events set in motion a climactic healing. Want more Exorcist Files Content? Subscribe to The Vault for exclusive deep dives into past cases and Ask Me Anything Episodes with Father Martins. SPONSORS OF TODAYS EPISODEFireBreaker Series-    A dramatic and epic adventure recounting the legend of George and the Dragon. A fun narrative podcast that is great for the family, starring Wizards of Waverly Place Star David Henrie.  Click here to listenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you crave more Exorcist Files content? Do you want to go deeper into theology and spiritual warfare? Well, you're going to want to subscribe to The Vault, our new premium subscriber program. The Vault is our way of ensuring we bring you content all year long. Subscribers will get access to exclusive once a month, Ask Me Anything episodes with Father Martins, where you can submit questions and vote on the ones you want him to answer most. You'll also get access to a very special case behind the case series,
Starting point is 00:00:27 where we relisten to past episodes and cases, and father reflects back on insights and anecdotes he just didn't have time to get into in the podcast. To subscribe, head on over to exorcistfiles.tv and sign up, or just click the link in the show notes. Again, that's exorcistfiles.tv to get access to the vault. Hello, Exorcist Files family. It's your dad-joking co-host, Ryan Bitha here,
Starting point is 00:00:58 bringing you a little special feed drop today. We've had a lot of people writing in and asking questions and sharing how inspired they were by Tammy Comer's testimony in the last episode of season one, A Taste of Honey, Part 3. Obviously, that was a very intense episode and certainly not suitable for all audiences. So we wanted to release her testimony as a standalone feature, so you could hear it and also share it with anyone who may need some encouragement. Fair warning. If you haven't heard the story, it may break your box a little bit. I know it did for me. We're so grateful for her trusting us with this story.
Starting point is 00:01:34 So without further ado, here's Tammy Comer's testimony of deliverance once again. As long as I can remember, I have walked with Jesus. I always hated the demonic. I never liked scary movies. I knew that dark stuff was real, but I'd kind of avoided anything that was dark. I was raised in a Christian family. My parents were both first-generation Christians. My dad was from Mexico City and my mom is Italian.
Starting point is 00:02:03 I watched both my siblings kind of go off the deep end in their teenage years and in that season of just will I walk with God or will I party and do all the things? Watching what that did to our family, I just decided, no, I want to walk with Jesus. I felt like I had a really authentic faith. I remember having like a Christian club that I started in first grade. So when I fell in love with John Mark, he was interesting to me. He was really thoughtful, super pure. He was the most godly man I'd ever met. When we dated, I befriended this homeless man and his name was Shadow.
Starting point is 00:02:45 And I said, I want to bring Shadow to church. But he was quite a dark character. John Mark picked me up in his Volkswagen bus, picked up Shadow, and took him to church. And I thought, this man loves Jesus. us and can love people who are far from him. For me, that was a sign of, I can partner with this man. We ended up getting married very young. I was 19. He was 21. Both virgins when we got married. After we got married, John Mark was like, I think I'm supposed to plant a church in Portland. And he was called in the ministry in Portland, Oregon for 20 years. Portland was great art,
Starting point is 00:03:24 good food, good drinks, amazing coffee, great place to walk outdoors, hiking, you bike everywhere, but just, man, a lot of sadness. It was a beautifully broken city. And we lived right in the city for most of it, ended up starting in a church. It kind of exploded. Over time, we got to see God do a bunch cool stuff and people were coming to Jesus. Our first son was born when I was 23. And it was shortly after that, that something in my body, we could just tell something wasn't quite right. Long story short, just started having struggles with chronic illness. I would call them flare-ups, you know, a lot of digestive things. Serious fatigue, severe brain issues to where I couldn't think, couldn't track. I couldn't remember whole conversations
Starting point is 00:04:17 when I was sick and had a lot of signs of early dementia. I would have blocks in my memory gone. It lasted about 10 years. I ended up going to a bunch of different doctors. I ended up with a couple different diagnoses depending on if it was Western medicine or a more naturopathic doctor. When I was five, I was bit by a tick. And then when I was 11, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. We didn't realize at the time that you could have lasting issues if you don't treat Lyme disease right away. But during those 10 years, we were like, oh, this is probably just Lyme resurgence of some sort that kind of flared up. But after about 10 years, there was this moment where I was doing some different therapies and something in my body just completely broke. At that point, I started to shake.
Starting point is 00:05:03 It was like I had Parkinson's. I lost a bunch of vision. My face started having spasms. I got a ton of weakness in my legs and was losing muscle. control in certain areas. I was having a crazy amount of neurological issues. This sent us on a journey to figure out what is going on. At its worst, we thought I was dying and the doctors were saying it looks like a brain tumor. Then it was spinal tumors and it was all these things that would kill you. And I think through dealing with chronic illness, I felt like I had come to peace with dying young.
Starting point is 00:05:37 I felt like I can die with dignity. I can feel really grateful for my children. By this time, I had three children. And when it got really bad, after a while, they stopped saying things that will kill you and it was more like things that will cripple you. And that was a lot more difficult to come to peace with because the implications of having to be taken care of was just so humbling and the opposite of everything I ever thought I would have to deal with. And I never was really mad at God for being sick. It didn't feel like it was his fault. It was just a little bit confusing. I eventually was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder on top of another neurological disorder. This particular one was primarily connected to your face. It was in the same family as Parkinson's.
Starting point is 00:06:29 It had a 50% chance of increasing in your lifetime. And if it decided to increase, it would become really hard to eat, really hard to kiss my husband, to talk to my kids. it would make me look very, very weird. This disorder made it so that your face was spasming so out of control that your tongue would be going in and out of your mouth, your lips up and down, your eyes squinting back and forth, super hard, your face completely contorting all over it, but you having zero control over it. And nothing is wrong with your brain. So you just know that you're hard to look at. And I thought, oh gosh, like how am I going to ever talk to my kids? That was harder to come to peace with. but it pushed me toward the need to do like the inner work around if I die young or if I'm crippled and have to be cared for by my husband and my children,
Starting point is 00:07:21 then I need to make sure that I'm not a burden while I still have agency over my body. In that space, I wouldn't say I came to peace with it, but I came to peace with the day. And if it flared up, I'll reorient and have to re-wrestle with God about that. I lived every day with spasms all the time and with an knowledge, that I probably would be crippled and die young. I ended up getting a phone call on my way to Whole Foods one day. It was my brother, and he just said, hey, I just found out the craziest thing.
Starting point is 00:07:52 You're not going to believe this, but it affects you. He went on to tell me that he'd been doing research on our family line, you know, recording stories, trying to just understand our family lineage. And this story had come up. My great-grandmother on my dad's side, who's lived in Mexico City, and I knew as a kid, she only spoke Spanish and she squeezed my cheeks so hard all the time.
Starting point is 00:08:15 She was into tarot cards and palm reading, like spiritualism stuff. She had fallen in love with a diplomat who was from Cuba, and they lived together in Mexico City, and they had eight children together, but they were never married. And apparently they had had a bunch of sickness, and I think they may have had a child die. my great-grandmother went to a fortune teller and said, tell us why we are sick and dying. The fortune teller said it's because there is a curse that's been placed on you in your bloodline, and it's from the man you live with wife. And up until this time, she had no idea that he was married.
Starting point is 00:09:00 And apparently he had left his wife in Cuba, left her at a mental institution. And she had hired either a witch or a shaman to put a curse on my great-grandmother that the first-born girl in every family down through your line will be cursed with terrible illness or early death. Now, what was so crazy about this was that about three years previously, we'd been going through a book where we did genograms, where you basically make a family tree and you're looking for patterns that happen in your family. And I told John Mark, look at my family tree. there is so much sickness and early death on my dad's side of the family in the women, specifically. It wasn't every single one. In hindsight, it was a firstborn girl of every family. It was four generations strong and it never skipped one generation. My great grandmother, her firstborn daughter, was my grandmother who died in her 60s and was sick for probably 10 or 20 years.
Starting point is 00:09:56 Her firstborn daughter is my aunt who is still alive and crippled and has had more surgeries than anybody have ever even heard of. Her first born daughter died in a car accident at 16. My brother's first born daughter was handicapped. She was actually born healthy and then became handicapped at one and died at eight or nine. I'm the first born daughter of my dad and there was just one cousin that it hadn't hit. But then I got a phone call saying that that particular cousin was just diagnosed with stage three or four throat cancer and she's just younger than me.
Starting point is 00:10:29 I'm 41. It was just very shocking. we were just not raised in any kind of church where we talked about this kind of stuff. We didn't even know this was a thing. What do you do about this? So I talked to John Mark. He was like, call Gary Breshears, one of his theology professors, who was a dear friend. I just called Gary and was like, Gary, is this even a thing?
Starting point is 00:10:50 Because I don't want to go somewhere and have a bunch of people put their hands on me. And like, I just have not into that at all. He was like, no, it's absolutely a thing. It has power. So you need to break it. So he connected us with somebody who did deliverance work. We fasted, we prayed, we got our community to fast and pray. And when I went to meet with this man, when they called me into the room, I was going up a staircase.
Starting point is 00:11:15 And as soon as I started coming toward the room, my face started spasming, the worst it ever had. I went through the doorway and my face was contorting out of control. One of my eyes were barely open. It was so weird and shocking. This man sat us down. He had me confess then. And then it was like breaking a legal contract. He just said, I call to attention the spirit that was called upon by Tammy Comer's grandmother.
Starting point is 00:11:40 And he went through and just was very specific. And then he's like, and repeat after me, by the power and authority of Jesus, blood, we break this curse. And it was when I repeated it that my whole face went totally calm. And it felt like there was this tight beanie on my head. I felt it like come off my head. then it was like I could think really clear. John Mark was watching and just said, what just happened?
Starting point is 00:12:07 I'm like, I don't know, but something. That was October 14th of 2020, and I have been totally healed ever since. I had never had occurred to me that I would get healed as a result of breaking that curse, but my healing was immediate, but also progressive because it had abdominal effect. I was still doing treatments and stuff,
Starting point is 00:12:30 but I was like all of a sudden I didn't need them. I was healing. And literally the mantra of my whole life since has just been, thank you, Jesus. The same Jesus that freed me, I got to know in suffering. And that is where I would say it is the most transformative work happened for me. And I feel so remarkably grateful. And I feel like people need to know that it wasn't my sense. sin that I bore the repercussions of. It was actually my great-grandmother's sin who was sleeping
Starting point is 00:13:06 with a man who was married and never married him and was playing in the cold. It's so cool that God gives man agency to choose whether we follow Jesus or we deny him, but that also includes our decision to choose even what we do with the brokenness we come in contact with. Obviously, not everybody gets healed. But there is this empowering kindness of God that our agency against evil can shift our whole life and people's lives as we engage on behalf of others. That's like kind of crazy. It has radically changed everything in my life. I would say my healing gave me a category for gratitude and a boldness, and then the extravagant kindness of God freeing me and feeling like God gave me a whole second chance at life. I'm so grateful. I just love God so much.
Starting point is 00:14:14 Today, Tammy is healthy, thriving, and she and her husband continue to minister and spread the word of God. We know the story brings up a lot of questions for many, but as Father is shared in many episodes. We don't know why God permits people to go through things like Tammy did. The answer to that question lies on the other side of eternity. And if you ask Tammy today, she will simply respond, she's just rejoicing to be healthy. And that's something all of us can celebrate. Thanks for listening, and we will see you for another episode very soon.

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