The Unplanned Exorcist: Chat with Abe Hepler, Pastor/Author/Speaker/Martial Artist/Deliverance Minister

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
As I started coming to campus. There there's a retention
pond on our property here, and man, the very first
night that I came on to campus, it felt like
as I drove past this retention pod, it felt like
there was something dark in the retention pond watching me.
I don't know how else to describe it other than

(00:22):
as I'm driving past this retention pod, man, something is
looking at me and it's creepy. You can feel it.
A handful of weeks into that process, maybe ten days,
I pull on the campus one night, as I'm climbing
out of my car, I felt just a weird pain
in my hip. And I walk into the building and
I'm man, it was just something wasn't right in my hip.

(00:44):
So he comes up to my office and walks in
and says, what's going on, man? So I just tell
him I got this weird pain in my hip. It's
been here for a few days now. And he, like
I had said, they attended the church that I pastored.
I knew them both for a number of year. I
knew both very well. But he said, Hey, this is
gonna maybe feel weird coming from me. But the passagen

(01:06):
of Pesians that talks about putting on the full armor
of God. It talks about the devil shoots flaming arrows,
and he said, hey, I believe those are real, and
I believe you have one in your hip. I think
something shot you with an arrow and it's in your hip.
And I said, oh, okay, man, what do I do

(01:27):
about that? And he said, I'll just take it out.
And I said, okay, dude, take it out like And
it's not that I didn't believe him. That's a pretty
fantastical thing to have somebody say to you, right man.
So he walks around, that's his hand on my shoulder
and sit in my chair in my desk. He sets

(01:48):
his hand on my shoulder and prays, and then he
leans toward my right hip and makes an extracting motion.
He grabs something and pulls it like this, and as
he did, all all of the pain in my right
hit came out as he pulled his hand back.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
This is the Cross Files podcast. Brilliantly blending enlightenment and engagement,
This thought provoking show explores ancient and modern topics through
a biblical lens, offering listeners a fresh perspective on historical mysteries,
spiritual encounters and current events with a focus on the supernatural.
Your hosts, Michael and Jerry bring a unique, insightful viewpoint,

(02:31):
encouraging listeners to embrace the spiritual significance behind the veil.
Join them on a fascinating journey to broaden your horizons
and uncover the supernatural aspects of life.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
Welcome to the cross Files Podcast. Before we dive in,
we'd like to let you know that the views and
opinions expressed by our guests are their own and do
not necessarily reflect those of the Cross Files podcast, its
hosts or our affiliates. Iom we invite a variety of
perspectives to spark thought provoking conversations and encourage our listeners

(03:13):
to engage with the content critically and thoughtfully. Our mission
is to explore supernatural and biblical topics from a faith
based perspective, but we believe it's up to you to
discern and seek your own understanding. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 4 (03:27):
Welcome to the cross Files Podcast formally known as The
Stranger Clock Podcast.

Speaker 5 (03:31):
I'm your host.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Jerry and I'm Michael.

Speaker 4 (03:35):
We have the pleasure and honor of having our awesome
guest here tonight. Abe Heppler welcome Ebe. How are you?

Speaker 1 (03:42):
Thank you so much? I'm great tonight, doing.

Speaker 5 (03:44):
Great, wonderful.

Speaker 4 (03:46):
Abe has previously been on Blurric Creatures interviewed by Nadan Luke,
and that was a very interesting and fun episode in
which Aid talks about his supernatural supertual warfare experiences.

Speaker 5 (03:58):
Abe tell us about yourself, tells you back story.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah, absolutely, like you said, my name's Abe Heflert. I
became a follower of Christ at about twelve years old.
I grew up in church, a great family, came from
a great family. My parents took all of us to
church every Sunday, so I was always in it. But
made a decision to follow Christ at twelve, and pretty rapidly,

(04:22):
I think they became really important to me and pretty
real to me. I feel like that it was just
something that became a very natural part of life for me,
and quickly, within six or seven months, I had heard
a missionary at church talk about Haiti and the work
they were doing in Haitian just really felt like that
was something I was supposed to do. So I went
to my mom and dad and said, Hey, I feel

(04:43):
like I'm supposed to go on a mission trip to
Haiti a twelve year old right. My parents were like,
there's no way you were going to let you do that,
and then they did. So they ended up giving in
and assended me to Haiti on this mission trip. And
Haiti was really my first experien aperience with things that
I didn't even know existed at twelve years old. We

(05:04):
were up in the mountains. There were you could hear
voodoo drums from the place we were staying in at nighttime.
We were part of a small church a revival in
this town, and I saw some stuff during that revival
that I didn't even know was possible. Some people were
getting healed, and there were experiences that I was having
that growing up in the Presbyterian Church that I was in,

(05:27):
those things weren't even discussed, so like it had a
crash course in spiritual reality at twelve years old in Haiti,
but Man, after that, I attended a public high school
and continued to be a part of youth group, attended
some youth conferences. As seventeen years old, I made a
commitment to full time ministry at a youth conference one summer,

(05:48):
and then Man that sort of led to ultimately a
ministry track where I spent a few years playing music professionally,
traveling and doing the Christian music circuit, and then from
there I landed at Grace College. I studied Biblical studies
at Grace College of Biblical Studies major, but I was
very interested in the languages of the Bible, and so

(06:10):
I have a Hebrew minor. I have almost completed a
master's degree in exegetical studies, which is just a fancy
way to say the Biblical languages. So I have almost
have a master's degree in Agent, Greek and HV group.
I had done almost all the class work, and then

(06:31):
my wife gave birth to our twins who are now
seventeen years old. And then in the last seventeen years,
I never made it back to the seminary to finish
those last few classes. But maybe someday we'll see. But man,
so yeah, so college degree in Biblical studies. Spent quite
a bit of time studying in seminary, and then I

(06:54):
became a pastor and I did old time pastoral work
for about twenty two years. A little over twenty two
year years. I worked for three different churches as a
worship pastor and executive pastor, a teaching pastor, bounced through
a couple of different jobs across those three different organizations.
I did some church planting. One of those three churches

(07:15):
was a church that my wife and I, along with
a couple other families planted. Man So, lots of ministry experience.
But then the couple other things that are unique in
my story are I studied martial arts in high school.
I studied traditional Japanese martial arts, and then picked that
back up in my early thirties and spent most of
my thirties studying Japanese martial arts. I've been to Japan

(07:38):
a few times to train, and that actually kind of
connects to my story because I ended up in my
mid thirties, I ended up taking a couple trips to
Thailand where I did some undercover work with an organization
that was doing anti human trafficking work fighting child sex
slavery in Asia, and so I did some undercover work

(08:01):
with them. We can get into some of those stories
later if you guys are interested in that too, But
but yeah, so, man So, that's that's some of my background. Yep.

Speaker 6 (08:12):
We were literally just having a martial arts demonstration twenty
minutes ago in the next room with our team. They're
just doing we were mockingly doing taiji chin and then my.

Speaker 7 (08:23):
Partner is running up to me. Just if somebody comes
up to you like this and is what we do?
But I knew I took iko. Yeah, what an interesting alignment.

Speaker 6 (08:35):
That's a lot. I don't know, Jerrelyn, what should we
ask first? There's there's so much to to dig out here.

Speaker 5 (08:41):
I had and ask a question, Abe.

Speaker 4 (08:44):
That is amazing that you have such a rich and
very background and you were like quote unquote baptized by fire,
so to speak, in these supernatural experiences, very very young age.
I do recall that you had mentioned that when you
were in Japan that there was some sort of it
didy that visited you, that was that wore one of

(09:05):
those oni masks that the Japanese typically war isn't the
same thing as a kabuki mask.

Speaker 5 (09:11):
Is that correct?

Speaker 1 (09:12):
They're similar, They're similar. So the there's a very ancient
Japanese tradition and the idea is that these martial artists
would go into the mountains of Japan and then get
trained by these supernatural beings. And so the Japanese actually
they have all the the samurai wore these really crazy

(09:34):
intense masks. It's part of their armor. And then as
you're walking around Japan, they have these masks just hanging
places that are depictions of these beings that these martial
artists claim to encounter. And the martial art that I
studied Man was founded in the twelve and thirteen hundred hundreds,

(09:54):
so seven or eight hundred years ago now, but even
as recent Judo in the early nineteen hundreds. The guys
who founded Judo claims to have learned their martial arts
from these creatures in the mountains. The story that I
think you're that I think you're thinking of when I
had an experience when my twins were very young, just
a handful of months old. I was getting ready to

(10:17):
preach a sermon series in our church. Our church was
relatively big. Our town's only about twenty five thousand people,
but the church that I was working in was almost
thirty six hundred, so it was huge for the town
that we were in. It was my first opportunity to
preach an entire series in that church. I got tapped
on the shoulder, which was cool. But while I was

(10:39):
prepping for that series, I started having these nightmares of
what The only way I could describe it now would
be to tell you I started seeing demons come through
the wall in our kids room while I was sleepy.
And I don't really know whether or not that experience
was real, if it was really happening. I just know

(11:01):
that every time I would fall asleep, I would see
these things, and I and I described I've described it
in the past. Their faces were very similar to those masks,
those only masks in Japan, and it was weird. The
things I was seeing in my dreams were literally just
two arms pulling open a hole in the wall and
then crawling into the kid's room over their cribs. And

(11:25):
it got to the point where that happened to me
so many nights in a row that I was doing
a four week series at church, but I spent about
six weeks sleeping on the floor in the twins bedroom
because I couldn't figure out if what I was seeing
was real if it was just in my head. But
either way, I was nervous enough about it that I
was going to be in that space with them. Yeah,

(11:46):
but yeah, so man, that I was certainly early in
my twenties or I'm sorry, I apologize early in my thirties.
That was what a pretty intense experience. But I had another.
I had another eurience, supernatural experience when I was prepping
for my first sermon ever. Man, it was the Saturday

(12:07):
night before I was supposed to teach, and I woke
up to just a huge, black cloaked figure standing in
the doorway of my wife and i's bedroom. That happened.
I was in my mid twenties when that happened. That
was one of the first moments where I think, after
the whole experience was over, where I was like, holy cow,

(12:28):
there's there's something very real that you can't normally see
if that's happening around us. But this figure took up
the entire door, the entire whatever seven and a half
foot or eight foot doorway, and I that moment was
one of also one of my first experiences with I

(12:49):
think sleep paralysis is really the only way to talk
about it. But I opened my eyes, I see this
being standing in this creature standing there, and I couldn't move,
I couldn't speak. I was just throw in. So I
wasn't asleep. I'm at least I'm relatively confident I wasn't asleep,
but I laid there for a few minutes. I managed

(13:09):
to get out the word Jesus, and at the name
of Jesus, this thing that was in the door just dissolved,
kind of it. It looked almost as if it was
just fading into the floor. And then I was man,
I could move, and I just sat right up in
bed and started praying. But yeah, so those two experiences

(13:30):
weren't that far apart, but they were a couple pretty
pretty profound experiences for me in terms of, man, I
think I'm seeing something that I don't normally see. But
even as a kid, I mentioned I grew up in
a Christian home with great parents and a brother and

(13:51):
a sister who were also Christ's followers, and my older
brother had some experiences when we were very young with
kind of toys around his bedroom on their own, and
I didn't As a kid, I didn't really know any
more than mom threw some toys away to think. Pretty
quickly after I started I became a follower of Christ.

(14:14):
I saw some shadow figures in the hallway at mom
and Dad's house, and the next day I shared that
with my mom and we didn't really discuss it, but certainly.
I think what what I remember from that experience is
that mom went through the house. She threw away some
movies that she thought maybe we shouldn't have been just
lead some stuff out. But there were some of those

(14:36):
kind of experiences as a kid as well for us.
When I was in college, I had the opportunity to
attend to Neil Anderson seminar. I don't know if you
guys are familiar with Neil Anderson. He wrote a book I.

Speaker 5 (14:48):
Am, huh, I remember.

Speaker 4 (14:49):
I think I even had that book, or I do
remember seeing it at the Christian bookstore, and I think
I may have even read it.

Speaker 5 (14:57):
But it's been like twenty thirty years. It's an amazing book.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
Yeah. So he wrote a book called The Bondage Breaker,
which was I read it. He wrote a follow up
book too. I've read them both. But one of my
college and seminary professors took a handful of US students
to a three day Neil Anderson seminar. He was coming
to Indiana. I'm from northern Indiana. He was coming to
Indiana and not far from us, and so he just

(15:23):
grabbed a handful of us. This particular professor had spent
a number of years as a missionary, done a lot
of work in Africa, so he had seen a lot
of pretty crazy things in comparison to what we typically
encounter in the States, and so he just grabbed I
think there were five or six of us college students
that when we spent three days going through this Neil
Anderson seminar, and at the time, at least from my perspective,

(15:48):
Neil Anderson was really one of the only guys you know,
corporately across Christianity who was really in this world at
least well known in the kind of the more conservative
Christian circles. So I had an opportunity to spend some
time studying under Neil Anderson a long time ago. But
for the most part, I had a very traditional nineties

(16:12):
two thousand's early two thousand seminary education, which essentially was, hey,
we study the Bible as a piece of literature, and
we tackle the Bible scientifically, and man, if you start
to encounter these crazy, weird spiritual things, we don't really
talk about that. Here. I had lapped with the guys

(16:32):
at Blurry Creatures Are. My seminary education certainly was two
hours on demonology in one class that was it, And
essentially what they said was, man, if you encounter something weird,
it's probably just a demon, cast it out and move on.
That was the entire entirety of the interesting.

Speaker 5 (16:53):
So it is interesting.

Speaker 4 (16:53):
That's what third of Jesus ministry is to cast out demons,
heal the sick, raise the dead.

Speaker 5 (16:59):
And you hardly.

Speaker 4 (17:00):
See, definitely hardly ever see the second and third people
raising from the dead list there in another country, or
people getting healed. Actually I have seen vicariously people getting
healed and delivered of demons and what have you. So
the first two some Pentecostal, Charismatic or Presbyterian or Baptist
church just do that and drive out demons. But it's

(17:20):
definitely not something that they even talk about during the service.
So a lot of people that are demadically oppressed or
even buzz ask go into service. They go into service
and they leave. They go into service and they leave,
and they don't know why they're having a hard time
praying to the Lord or reading the Bible, or they
don't know why they're hearing voices or whatever.

Speaker 1 (17:38):
We just released a book. I just released a book
called Light in the Darkness, and it's Essentially, the idea is,
how do I reclaim a biblical view of who I
am and then the ways that who I am actually
impacts the world around us. That's the basic premise. But
one of the things that I do think is fascinating

(17:59):
about it is we talk a little bit about this
idea of I say we I talk a little bit
in the book about this idea of our responsibility to
tackle even things we can't see in the spiritual realm.
And that's part of what it means for us to
be light in the darkness, right, is to speak into
this realm that even sometimes you can't see, but it is.

(18:22):
The casting out of demons is one of the only
miracles that Jesus did over and over again that you
don't find anywhere in the Old Testament text. It's began
with Jesus, but then he says over and over again,
as you go, cast out demons. And one of the
things that's fascinating to me is in the language he
uses when he says drive out demons. He's using imperative language.

(18:47):
He's commanding you must drive out demons as you do
your ministry in the world. It's just interesting that the
language isn't hey, you might do this sometimes. No, it's
this is a part of who you should be in
your world.

Speaker 6 (19:03):
But amen, So you were talking about your mother getting
rid of stuff in the house and seeing things thrown away.
Is I'm just curious your opinion on that. Do you
feel like there's demons that can be attached to, say,
like action figures, rock music CDs, DVDs, Yes, this type
of thing.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Is that. That's a great question. I think the answer
is definitely yes. I think spirits can be attached to
physical things. I probably take a pretty conservative stance on
what you can and can't own. And what I mean

(19:44):
is I probably am not throwing away movies unless the
Holy Spirit directly grabs my heart and says that thing
can't be in your house. But I did have an experience.
But if you guys don't mind, I'll just I'll elaborate
on by telling stories and.

Speaker 5 (20:01):
Please absolutely.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
That I had an experience where a neighbor called me
and just said, man, we got we're having some kind
of strange stuff happened in our house. And the kind
of strange stuff they were talking about was their house
had been struck by lightning, which was unusual in our neighborhood.
But so their house had been struck by lightning. After

(20:26):
that happened, they started having like TVs turned on and
off by themselves. They were having just some weird stuff.
But they attributed all of that to maybe there's some
electric issues in the home. But in addition to that,
some other strange things started happening. They watched a candle
light and then go out while they're just sitting and

(20:47):
there living in this candle big nights and then gets
blows out or whatever. They watched that happen with no
one lighting the candle. They had a son who was
my son's age. My son actually spent the night at
their house once and lots sometimes. But one of the
times he did that, he shared with me later that
they had a deer head mounted in their den and

(21:08):
he watched this deer head look around the room. And
my son's not want to make something like that up.
That's just that it would be out of character for
him to tell stories like that. But they the young
man who lived in their home, like their son, was
seeing out his bedroom window at night. He was seeing

(21:29):
Native Americans kind of dancing in their yard. And so
all these things combined that. The neighbor reached out to
me and just said, man, we've heard prayed through some
spaces when people were having weird things happen. Would you
come pray through our house? And so I did. So
I went over. And I'm not an expert in exorcism.

(21:49):
I certainly not my profession, right, but there have been
a handful of times where people called and said, man,
we need some help, and when that happens, I've tried
to help them. So I went to the house. And
typically what I do is I just walk through the
home and pray through each room and just hope the
spirit's gonna tap me on the shoulder if I encounter

(22:11):
something that we need to address. And so I went
in their house. We prayed through the their upstairs, we
prayed through the main floor of their home, and I
didn't have any weird feeling or didn't feel like I
was pointing to anything. So we were going. The final
place we were going was their basement, and their basement
was in the process of being remodeled, and so the

(22:35):
only lights in the basement were these two sets of
construction lights, and so we got the construction lights on
and as we walked downstairs. The first thing I noticed
was that the room was unusually cold, right, So we
walked in. I'm like, gosh, it's really cold down here.
And then they the way the house was built, they

(22:55):
had a concrete hallway that ran the length of the home.
It was like it would have been directly under their
front porch. So this entire concrete hallway that just had
one door to go in and out of, and they
were using that hallway as like a storage area. So
we come down the stairs. It's you know, I'm like, man,
it's really cold down here. As we round the corner,

(23:17):
as we start moving toward that door, I started to
feel uneasy. And then the breaker slipped and all the
lights in the basement went out, and so we got yeah,
that's true. That was creepy. So we get to the
breaker box, We get the breaker flip and the lights
turned back on. But as we kept moving closer to

(23:40):
that door, I just felt worse and worse. We walked
into that space and I said to the woman who
owned the home and said, ma'am, I don't know exactly
what to tell you other than if I had to guess,
there's something in this storage area. That shouldn't be here,
And if I were you, the first thing I would
do is clear this stuff out. You might be looking

(24:02):
for a Ouiji board or I gave them a couple
other suggestions of things that might be down there that
But a few days later she called me back and
her husband had spent some time in the military, and
while he was in the military, he had been stationed
in Haiti, and he had brought back a handful of
very kind of specific voodoo items that he had purchased

(24:24):
as souvenirs. Those things were tucked in a box in
that back hallway, and so they she was going through that,
she found those things and then got rid of them,
and that had a pretty immediate impact on kind of
what they were experiencing in the home. So yeah, so
I think, at least experientially, I've had some things happen

(24:48):
where it certainly feels like there are spirits connected to
these items. But my starting point would probably never be, oh, man,
you've got some action figures, some he Man action figures
or whatever on the shelf, and you should you should
just automatically throw those out.

Speaker 6 (25:07):
That's probably not my starting point. So being spirit led,
I appreciate that. What about just playing horror movies, rock
music and your experience just normal everyday things. People just
letting social media run their life and have you and
add to that, have you noticed an uptick and just

(25:28):
people getting weird, like with the amount of engagement with
artificial intelligence and just overdoing it with the Internet. And
it's just I was in Asia for twenty years and
I came back and I have never been in America
with cell phones and the place is like full of drugs, crime,

(25:48):
just demoniacts everywhere. It's a different country than when I left.
What are your opinions, sir?

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Yeah. I think one of the things that is has
been interesting from my kind of perspective is I think
the people in America, man, it's the normal, everyday peak.
Guys like you and me experienced a level of trauma
during the COVID season of twenty twenty that I don't

(26:17):
think we've recovered from yet. And I think that's I
think that's true in lots of ways. I think one
of the things that seems to have happened to people
is they got forced to slow down, and lots of
people actually like that. I've had lots of conversations with
people who were like, Man, I wasn't leaving the house

(26:39):
twelve hours a day. We were so busy, and now
we're less busy, and I think having to re engage
the world the way we were before that has created
a level of stress for people that they number one
don't recognize and number two don't know how to process.
And you're watching, certainly, man, social media interactions are horrible,

(27:04):
like all of these things they spiked in twenty twenty,
and we're still living with the ramifications of that. I
certainly think there's a spiritual component to all of that.
I'm also not entirely sure how to tell you what
I think that is, other than it has felt like

(27:25):
what the world experienced in twenty twenty had a spiritual
component to it that we also haven't really figured out
how to address, and in lots of circles, I think
we haven't even tried. Just oh, Man, there was this
crisis that happened and we all survived it and moved on.

Speaker 4 (27:43):
Right, Abe, could you tell us about your experience in Highland?
And I believe that you had spoken about how you
had assisted or were part of the Cuba trafficking rescuing
efforts in Asia. Could you tell us about that or
just yeah, sure, experiences that you had in Thailand.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
So the story that connected me to human trafficking is bizarre.
But I was, like I said, I'd spent a bunch
of time studying martial arts. I was pretty into kind
of the tactical world. Now I've been out of that
for a handful of years, but I was pretty into
that stuff in my thirties. And I was on the

(28:23):
phone one day with an old friend of mine who
is a drummer. He played in bands, and he was
traveling the country playing in bands, and he and I
were just talking and I just said, in passing, I'm
still trying to figure out how God is going to
use this passion I have at the stage of my
life for these martial arts and all this tactical stuff.

(28:44):
And he said, gosh, we were at a festival like
two weeks ago, and there's this organization that rescues kids
from sex slave from the sex trade in Asia. You
should call them. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's man,
that seems cool. That sounds like a cool thing. I
hadn't even really heard much about human trafficking before that,

(29:07):
but so I climb online and look up this organization
that he had been telling me about it, and it
looked like a great organization. It is the name of
the organization is Destiny Rescue. Actually, they do incredible work
there in a handful of countries now and rest in
kids are awesome. But so I look up Destiny Rescue.
They're based out of Australia, but they had a US office,

(29:31):
like a home office in the States that was fifteen
minutes from my house. I discovered the OZZ. I was crazy,
I'm looking for a phone number on this website. Right,
I find their phone number and it's local to me.
I was like, that's crazy. So I called these guys
and man, literally twenty four hours later, within twenty four hours,

(29:53):
I was sitting in their office having a conversation with
the guy who was running their United States ministry. And
so we jumped in to partner with Destiny Rescue. And
I ran a small business for a handful of years.
We were we did a bunch of stuff through the
small business where we were connecting donors to Destiny Rescue
and selling items and donating the funds to that organization.

(30:16):
And but so one of the things that the United
States CEO of Destiny Rescue said, was you man, we
got to get you on the ground over there. I
was pastoring a church at the time that had about
a thousand people in it, and obviously he saw the
value of man, if I get the pastor of this
church connected to this big maybe you be a partner
with this church. And it was a great play for him, frankly,

(30:36):
but so I did. Within a matter of months, I
think twelve weeks later or something, I was on the
ground in Thailand the first time, and I went with
a group of people that were just going over to
do support missionary work. They were playing games with the
kids and taking in supplies and all the kinds of
stuff you do on a pretty typical mission trip. And
so we land on the ground in Thailand, and within

(30:58):
I don't know, a couple of days of being in Thailand,
we had seen a lot of kind of we'd done
the touristy things where we also hit a handful of
the places where human trafficking is pretty intense. It's about
four days into that trip. Three days into that trip
we find ourselves being introduced to the guy who founded
Destiny Rescue and so his name's Tony, and I just

(31:21):
said to Tony that afternoon, man, I'd really love the
opportunity to do some undercover work with you guys. And
he laughed and patted me on the shoulder and said, look,
we don't take tourists on these kinds of experiences, and
I said, man, I completely understand. But the guy who
led our trip caught him a little later that day
and just said, hey, listen, Abe's got a pretty extensive background.

(31:44):
It's unusual, but it's unique enough that I think if
you wanted him to give this guy an experience, you
could take him out with one of your teams and
he'd be fine. And so they caught me the next
morning and said, hey, we're going to stick you at
a team tonight, like you're gonna get a chance to
go out. That story gets crazy. So what ultimately what

(32:05):
happened was Tony, who's the founder of this entire organization
and the head of their undercover operations. Those two guys
took me out that night, and their intention was I think,
I don't want to put words in their mouth, but
looking back, they were like, man, this guy's a pastor,
probably has some influence in the state. He could be

(32:26):
a good support for us. We'll just take him out
and drag him around and show him some stuff and
it'll be fine. We won't end up anywhere or do
anything crazy. We went out and from ten pm until
I don't know, one thirty am or something, we bounced
around for in a couple of bars. And for your
audience who's not really familiar with how this works. In
the big cities in Thailand, almost all the bars you

(32:49):
walk into are also brothels. And so you step into
this bar and they partner you with a young lady
and man sit next to you while you drink or
she'll do. You know, you can leave and do whatever
you want. Whatever you'll pay for is the limit. And
so we just bounced through a couple of these bars,

(33:12):
and they were just in there, laughing and kind of
meeting these people. And now they were to what I
didn't know what the time was. They were going to
places they'd never been before. They were just scouting, right,
But they were just giving me a chance to see it.
The evening wraps up.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
It did.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
I got to watch how all this worked and got
to see them meet these kids and talk to kids
and build some relationships and so we're heading they're heading
back to the hotel to drop me off, where the
three of us are each on motorcycles. So we're I'm
following them. We're heading back to the hotel, and one
of them waves at the other two of us and
points to a parking lot. And it was a hotel

(33:49):
parking lot with clearly like a bar on the ground floor,
Like you could see the entrance to the bar from
from the road, but there was this row of girls.
And the best way to describe it is there was
this row of girls were in prom dresses out front
of this bar. And so he waves us in and
we pull into this place, and so he says, hey,
we didn't even know there was a bar in this hotel.

(34:10):
We're just going to go in and check it out.
So the three of us pop off our of our
bikes and we walk up to the front door, and
they're communicating and tie and they just say, hey, we'd
love to go in. And so these two guys open
the door. They open the door into a pitch black
hallway that's just a set of stairs descending down. And

(34:32):
I've picked up pretty quickly that those two guys got
really uncomfortable very fast. So that was the bizarre starting point. Oh,
these guys don't seem like this is normal. I didn't
know enough to know it wasn't normal. But Thailand also
has some laws. I'm trying to be a little bit careful.

(34:54):
I don't want to say anything that would be inappropriate
for your listeners, but Thailand has lows. Okay, So Thailand
has very specific laws about what females can wear while
they're dancing in a club, and one of those things,
very specifically is you can't be nude. There's no nudity
in bars and Thailand. But as we attend the stairs,

(35:18):
we walk into what is essentially again and it was
essentially a strip club. So there were a whole bunch
of dancers that were topless, and these two guys I'm
with were both immediately this is not good. But we
had been followed down the stairs by a couple of
pretty big guys and they look around and assess the

(35:38):
situation and then say, hey, do you have any rooms
that aren't in this kind of main bar area that
we could go into? And they did so they had
these karaoke rooms. So the three of us rent a
karaoke room, so we go into this space, and as
we sit down, they brought in ten girls or something
into this little karaoke room. And again the conversation's happening

(36:01):
in tie. I didn't speak any tie, but they literally
said to the three of us, hey, pick which girl
you want. So each of the three of us choose
a girl out of this line, and then that girl
comes and sits next to us. And essentially it's the
same thing I describe. If you order a drink, they
go get your drink and bring it back to you,
and and they just spend the night sitting next to you.

(36:23):
And then the reality is, if you decided to you
could certainly say, hey, I want to take her upstairs
into the hotel, and then you paper their time. And
so we spent about an hour and a half there,
and I'm watching these two guys just dump money like
they're buying drinks. We're not drinking. They're buying drinks for

(36:44):
the girls that are that nobody's drinking. They we probably
only spend one hundred and fifty US dollars, but for
an hour and a half in a tie bar, that's
an infane amount of money. And they told me later
we were just trying to get us out of there safely,
like that's all because there was So the next day
we spent some time in that place. They spent a
bunch of money, and then we're like, hey, we're going

(37:05):
to take off, and as they're in a conversation with
the guy who rented us this little room, it was
pretty clear that they thought we were going to do
more than we were going to do. And the guys
slipped our way out of there. We ped up the stairs,
get back on our bikes, and they dropped me off
of my hotel. But the next day, late that the
next afternoon, their director of undercover operations caught me and

(37:27):
just said, Hey, I just want to let you know
what happened was here were all of the things that
were unusual about that last place we went, and so
we've done a little research today. That bar that we
went into last was a was is owned by the
Russian mafia, and so they were doing things in there
that don't normally happen in ty brothels. And the thing

(37:50):
that is cool about that is several years later, working
with local l enforcement, they got that place shut down.

Speaker 5 (37:56):
Oh coo, the priest did, but.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
It were eat it was a crazy first experience, right
like got thrown to the wolves. And then but based
on how that evening went, the next day, Man, I'm
in a conversation with their director of operations and he
just said, Hey, anytime you want to come back and
do undercover work with us, you're welcome, man, come back.
And really there was only about three month or four

(38:21):
month gap between my first trip and my second trip
because I Man, I came home fired up. This organization
does incredible work. They go into these into these brothels
and build relationships with these kids. So Man, they'll spend
an entire evening just sitting next to this girl and
asking her questions, tell me about where you're from, tell

(38:42):
me what do you like to do, and they just
get get these these young girls comfortable with them, and
they don't do anything inappropriate. All the stuff that these
kids are used to experiencing sitting next to a guy
in a bar isn't happening. And so they'll go back
a few times to continue to build this their relationship
with these young ladies. And then one of the things

(39:04):
that you can do with Thailand is you can actually
rent time during the day and so as a tourist.
Lots of guys will go over as tourists and say, hey,
I want this young lady on my arm. I want
to take her to the beach, and I want to
go shopping, and I just want her with me all day.
So you pay for their time and then but so
what this organization was doing was they would start to
build a relationship with this young lady and get her

(39:26):
comfortable with them, and then they would pay for them
to spend an entire day outside of the brothel with them.
And as soon as they get them away, they say, hey, look,
you have a choice, Like, you don't have to keep
doing what you're doing. We can give you a place
to live, we can get you a high school education.

(39:46):
Destiny Rescue runs out a handful of opportunities. They learn
to make jewelry, they have a hairdressing school, like, they
have all of these trades that these young girls have
learned so wonderful. So they get these kids out of
that environment and then say, hey, look, we can give
you a better life if you want to choose it.
And lots of times the girls say yes. And so

(40:08):
then if they do, you just never go back to
the brothel, right, They just take these kids, get them
to a safe house, and they'll get them into a
new life. And so I ended up about three or
four months later back in Thailand on the first trip
that I got to go where my primary role was
going to be doing undercover rescue work. And so I
spent nine or ten days that trip in Thailand doing
a handful of undercover rescue operations with them. Oh yeah, so.

Speaker 5 (40:33):
You are the real deal. That's awesome.

Speaker 4 (40:39):
It's funny how we will watch these different movies that
are based they're fictional, but they're based in truth, like
Taken and the human trafficking with.

Speaker 5 (40:49):
Mirris or whatever, and we look up to these heroes.

Speaker 4 (40:51):
We're like, gosh, I wonder if there's actual, real people
that do this, And so we're talking to a real
person who's a real hero to help these girls or
do the facilitation of it.

Speaker 1 (41:03):
There.

Speaker 4 (41:03):
Uh, and that's awesome. That's an amazing door. The Lord
is open for you.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
Yeah, it was an incredible experience. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
So.

Speaker 1 (41:13):
Then we at the time, my wife and I had
five year old twins, and then we have another daughter
as well, and so my last trip to Thailand actually
was just a couple months before our youngest daughter was born,
and we understood kind of the risk that was associated
with that sort of line of work. But at the

(41:34):
time I was like, man, this is the only thing
I'm ever going to do for the rest of my life.
Business was the coolest thing ever. But when we found
out that she was pregnant with our youngest, she said, hey,
you might want to reconsider the level of risk that
you're taking. You have a daughter you haven't met yet,
and man, so I that was what shifted for me.
I stopped making trips, but we'd engaged the organization at

(41:57):
a pretty high level, trying to raise funds and make
sure that work neighboring.

Speaker 6 (42:02):
I know a lot of human trafficking takes place in America.
When I moved to the Big Island, immediately bumped into
people that were trafficked. I've been to Bangkok and I've
seen the dark hallways of China, Japan, Tokyo, and Taipei
where I lived. But coming back to the States, I noticed, Man,
it's like everywhere you just meet people that, oh, your

(42:23):
ex husband's under an investigation for child grooming, or this
church is caught in hanky panky, or this place based
on your experience. Do you think do you see a
strategy that people could maybe pray into or find teams
that could be doing the American equivalent of what you
engaged in Thailand even in our little towns here.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
Yes, that's a great question. One of the things that
I think is interesting is you can watch human trafficking awareness.
It spikes every year, ironically enough, in January and February.
In the next couple of marks the super Bowl in
the United States. They say, is this the number one
human trafficking event of the year. Every year in the US,

(43:10):
whatever city the super Bowl is in, they're dragging kids
from all over the country to that city for the
men who are flying into and to experience that event.
And you'll see over the next handful of weeks at
least we typically do we see a spike in awareness
and the tactics you can use like pay They'll be

(43:31):
paying attention to kids that seem like they shouldn't be
with the adult therewith and those sorts of things. There
are a couple of organizations that do work in the US.
One of them is Underground Operation Underground Railroad oh U
are Man. They're another incredible human trafficking organization that's working
here in the States, and they do international work as well.

(43:54):
But it's been a little while, seven or eight months
probably since I looked at their website, But the last
time I was on there, we're still doing had focused
work happening in the US too, but so they would
at least have some resources that people could tap into. Yeah,
Operation Underground Railroad I think is the website, Operation Underground Railroad. Okay,

(44:16):
thank you so much.

Speaker 6 (44:17):
So maybe people can absolutely pray about getting involved in
any way possible. It's you have so many different spheres
of your life and your journey and just so it's
hard to pin you down, sir. You're so multi talented
and God is investing in so many areas. It's really
an honor to talk to you here in face.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Thank you. Yeah, it's I have landed. Currently, I spend
my days running an organization that works with youth who
have experienced pretty significant trauma. That's where I am now.
I'm the vice president of this particular organization, and we
work with kids who have been core ordered into residential

(44:57):
placement in the state of Indiana, and so we get
an opportunity to every day to show up and engage
with kids who've had a pretty pretty tough upbringing and
pretty tough experiences, and man, over the course of the
time they're in our care, we do get the chance
to share the Gospel with them and try to direct
them to faith as well as healing from the trauma
they've experienced. So that's the thing I'm doing now. Ironically enough,

(45:19):
I have a handful of kind of the spiritual experiences
that I think we thought we were going to talk
about when we started this conversation. Here I'm actually sitting
in my office at work. But so here on this stampus.
Ironically enough, the wall behind me, the shelving, our boys
built all that stuff. They decorated my office for me.

(45:39):
But so when I came to the organization that I
work for now, I came in as their faith director.
So we have about seven hundred employees stretched across the
state of Indiana, and they were looking for someone to
come in and pastor their staff. So that was the
job I took, and I was here for about a
year when the CEO approached me and just said, man,

(46:02):
I would really like for you to consider moving into
our residential service as arena. And he did that because
of my spiritual background, and he was looking for kind
of a spiritual leader who could come into this space
and not only handle sort of the business of it,
but also tackle the spiritual leadership of it as well. Okay,
but so I transitioned into residential services from this kind

(46:23):
of faith and culture director position. But within days of
getting to this campus and starting to work on this campus,
I had the therapists approaching me that were sharing with
me stories of what they were experiencing here. And they
were pretty crazy. They if they would work in our
offices at night, doors would open and close by themselves.

(46:47):
They would hear people running up and down the hall
when there was no one here. Just crazy, crazy experiences.
But man, we run a campus that's full of kids
who have experienced pretty signific abuse and traumas. I do
think you had asked earlier, Michael about the idea of
can spirits attach themselves to things? I certainly think spirits

(47:09):
can attach themselves to people, and lots of times they
do that through trauma. So we're bringing the poison to
our campus from all over the state of Indiana who
have had these really tough experiences, very traumatic experiences. And
so and they come here to try to get some
therapeutic support and healing, and they're bringing whatever has attached

(47:31):
itself to them with them. As I came into this job,
I came into a campus that was definitely having some
pretty intense spiritual stuff happen the I have a handful
of stories I'm more than happy to share. But certainly
the good case of all of that is, over the
last four years that I've been here doing this, the

(47:54):
number of those experiences, how often they happen, is dramatically decreased.
It's pretty rare for us to have those things and
happen now. I don't and I certainly don't take credit
for that other than I came in and got a
group of people praying and looking for ways that we
could engage the spiritual fight that people seemed to be
ignoring before that. I really want to hear the stories, sir.

Speaker 6 (48:17):
I just I also want to just as a disclaimer
from my own perspective and my own life, coming from
all the drama and chaos and just the it's just
the author of confusion. God isn't giving us of fear
or confusion. So as much as these stories are to
grab your at tension everybody, and let you know, the
supernatural is real. God isn't wanting us to live in

(48:39):
this life. Was like the enemy. He's a big drama queen.
And you can see that with what happened this morning,
with Syria and World War three, and world War three
is always happening. It's aliens and just to get the
anointing of God going, we don't live in fear at all.
That's a sin. Ye, it's a sin to live in fear.

(49:02):
And with that being said, tell us your scariest story, sir, Man.
I was as I came to campus, I was.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
I made a decision right out of the gate that
I was going to show up every day for My
plan was three weeks. I was going to be here
for every ship for three weeks. So I was coming
in and working a couple hours, then going home, and
then coming back up on the next ship and working
a few hours and going home. And the reason that

(49:30):
matters is because over the course of those that first
month that I was here, I was on campus in
the middle of the night every night, and Man, in
addition to having staff share with me, Man, here are
some of the things that we're experiencing that are creepy
doors opening and closing and hearing people or whatever. I
also started to hear the stories of the kids who

(49:51):
were coming in and the things they were doing. So
there was a young man who I didn't meet. He
was here a while before I was, but but he
came in and one night he had managed to break
his glasses and then cut himself, and then he drew
a giant pentagram on the floor of his bedroom in
his own blood and was at least telling staff that

(50:15):
he was praying to Satan, and like these were things
that they were experiencing pretty regularly. And so I came
into this environment that was already pretty charged spiritually just
because of the work that we do. But then there
were also some of these kids who were intentionally calling
things in And as I started coming to campus, there

(50:39):
there's a retention pond on our property here, and man,
the very first night that I came on to campus,
it felt like as I drove past this retention poond,
it felt like there was something dark in the retention
pond watching me. I don't know how else to describe
it other than as I'm driving past this retention pond, man,

(51:00):
something is looking at me, and it's creepy. You can
steal it. And so I just tucked to that in
the back of my mind. Man, there's something here that
we're gonna have to deal with. And then man, I'm
showing up every day, engaging kids and staff and getting
a feel for the place. And as I was doing that,
a handful of weeks into that process, may maybe ten days,

(51:23):
I pull on the campus one night. As I'm climbing
out of my car, I felt just a weird pain
in my hip. And I walked into the building and
I'm man, it was just something wasn't right in my hip.
I was driving a big SUV at the time, and
so I did what I was gonna do here that night,
and I came back out and climbed back in my car,
and climbing into the suv was painful. Oh, man, I

(51:46):
must have tweaked something. But I'd spent I was SHEMI
athletics in my thirties. I was a runner and I
was definitely studying martial arts for most of those years,
and I'd never really had any hip problems, but this
pain was unusual. So I drive home. That's two or
three in the morning. I drive home. When I wake
up the next morning to come back into work, I
couldn't walk up the stairs in our house like I

(52:08):
was having severe pain in my right hip. And I
lived that way for four or five days. I'm I'm
navigating the world, but I'm limping. I can't walk up
and downstairs. I'm having trouble getting in and out of
my car right just so slear pain in my hip.
So a few days after this had been happening, I
got a phone call from from a lady who attended

(52:31):
one of the churches that I'd pastored. Her husband actually
worked for us at the time. He was working with
our boys here on campus. And she just called and said, hey,
the Lord laid you on my heart. Is there anything
I can pray for you about? And we just said, yeah,
I've got this pain in my hip. I don't it's
causing me a lot of problems. I don't you know,

(52:52):
if you'd pray for me, that'd be great. And she
said to me, hey, my husband's at work right now.
You need to go find him. And I said, okay.
So I hang up the phone with her and I
called this guy and I just said, hey, man, your
wife just called me said, she, you know, asked if
there's anything pray for me about. I shared with her
that I had this pain in my head. She said,

(53:13):
to call you. He said, man, I'll be right there.
Excuse me. So he comes up to my office and
walks in and says, what's going on, man? So I
just tell him I got this weird pain in my hip.
It's been here for a few days now. And he,
like I had said, They attended the church that I pastored.
I knew them both for a number of years. I
knew both very well. But he said, hey, this is

(53:35):
gonna maybe feel weird coming from me. But the passagen
Ofphesians that talks about putting on the full armor of God,
it talks about the devil shoots flaming arrows. And he said, hey,
I believe those are real, and I believe you have
one in your hip. Something shot you with an arrow
and it's in your hip. And I said, oh, okay, man,

(53:59):
what do I do about that? And he said, I'll
just take it out. And I said, okay, dude, take
it out. Like And it's not that I didn't believe him.
That's a pretty fantastical thing to have somebody say to
you right, man. So he walks around, that's his hand
on my shoulder and sit in my chair in my desk.

(54:20):
He sets his hand on my shoulder and prays, and
then he leans toward my right pip and makes an
extracting motion. He grabs something and pulls it like this,
and as he did, all of the pain in my
right hip came out. As he pulled his hand back.
I was and he actually he said to me, hey,

(54:43):
do you know which direction west is? And I said, yeah,
it's that way. And he throws this thing he's holding
to the west. I don't know why that was just
he said later, Yeah, I just usually throw those things
to the west. Okay. He turns around. He walks out
of my office to go back to his life like normal,
and I'm stunned. I called my wife and just said,

(55:03):
you will never believe what just happened to me. I
love guys like that. That's so great, isn't the Lord
so creative? Oh? Man? Incredibly, But it certainly was a
lesson for me in not even at forty and forty
probably forty keys forty four at the time. Man, there's
still so much that I don't know about the unseen

(55:26):
realm and the things that are happening in this world
around us. And man, so I'm now I can walk again.
I don't really pain in my hip, but I'm still
on this same rotation of still coming in third ship
and checking on things. And so a few nights later,
as I'm driving into campus, I'm waking up in the
middle of the night, which I don't enjoy, and I'm

(55:47):
driving fifteen minutes from my house to campus. And so
I was always playing worship music in the car on
those trips and just trying to pray my way in
and out of campus on those evenings. And so a
few days actually it was days three or four days later,
I'm driving to campus in the middle of the night.
I had an experience where I heard Crystal Clear in

(56:10):
my car. The Lord said to me, claim legal ownership
of this property. I didn't know what that meant. I'd
never never really even heard those words before. And I
literally said what And then I heard it audibly heard
it a second time, claim legal ownership of this property.

(56:32):
And so I just said, man, Lord, I think maybe
you're talking to me, but I don't know exactly what
this means. But I claim legal ownership of this property.
And when the name of Jesus and by the power
of your blood, I claimed legal ownership of this property.
Do with that whatever you need to do with that, Lord,
And that night, as I pulled onto campus, I had

(56:54):
it was the first time since I started working here
that I didn't experience the darkness in the retention pond
that I felt every time I drove I pulled on
to campus. Man, one of the things that I think
was unique for me about that experience was I didn't know.
In the last year and a half or so, I've
done quite a bit of reading about exorcism. I've studied

(57:15):
exorcism from the Protestant perspective and the Catholic perspective of
read a handful of books and had a chance to
talk to a handful of people. But at the time,
I didn't realize that there was this very legal set
of rules that the spiritual world functions by. I didn't
know that was true. I think I understand that a
little better now than I did then too. But Man,

(57:37):
certainly God knew that there was this very legal set
of rules that kind of impact the spiritual realm. And
so it's really interesting to look back and just realize, Okay,
I'll claim legal ownership of this property. And in doing so,
I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know what
the impact was going to be. But God did, and

(58:00):
he used that experience to say, Man, here's one of
the ways that the spiritual realm works. And man, I'm
telling you what to do. You trust me. And as
I did, it had an immediate impact on the spiritual
environment that we were working in, which was amazing, fascinating.

Speaker 5 (58:20):
Very fascinating.

Speaker 4 (58:21):
When I heard that story on LRIC Creatures and I thought,
oh my gosh, I wonder what kind of spiritual entity
was in that retention pond. Yeah, you don't know if
the Lord knows, of course, but we don't know for
the most part if that was a demon or could
that have been a.

Speaker 5 (58:40):
Fallen angel or what have you.

Speaker 4 (58:42):
And I have heard from deliverance ministers that there are
quote unquote taken to leave it marine's spirits, and they
were citing some reasons why they thought that they believed
that they are not only spirits at the air because
obviously and the enemy is the prince of the power
of the air, but also there are spirits in the

(59:03):
deep in water. Don't ask me how or why they
think that or whatever, But I think there might be
some credibility or merit to that.

Speaker 5 (59:10):
What do you think?

Speaker 1 (59:12):
Yeah, I do, And I think at the time, a
number of years ago. I don't know if you guys
are familiar with the guy by the name of Chuck Missler. Yes, sure, so.
I studied a lot of doctor Missler's writings and his teachings,
and back in the day when you listen to stuff
on audio tape, I listened to a lot of his
tapes with CDs. But he actually mentioned at one point,

(59:36):
he just mentioned a book in passing, and the name
of the book was Devil's Demons and the Return of
the Nephelo. Okay, which is man. That was certainly not
the stuff I was reading in seminary, but it caught
my attention. I ended up getting my hands on that book.
And in that book, two Christians spent a bunch of

(59:57):
time with a Jewish rabbi, and while they were together,
they were studying the ideas of spiritual beings in the
Old Testament, and this Jewish rabbi essentially elaborated for them. Yeah,
there's actually two things. There's these these fallen angels. But
then in addition to these fallen angels, there's another being
named in the language of the Old Testament, and it's

(01:00:19):
what we would refer to as a demon, and so
they essentially labeled them. There's these fallen angels, and we
would call them devils, or you know, the text would
call them devils. And then there's these other kind of
evil spiritual beings that texts would refer to its demons.
And they very clearly articulated that these demons were the

(01:00:39):
souls of Nephelum who had been killed, but the soul
had nowhere to go. It's this kind of half breed,
hybrid creature that was a mix between an angel and
a human. And so because that had nowhere to go,
they were just trapped here on earth. And so there
was this second kind of being. Up to that point.
Up until I read that book, my only understanding was
what I had learned and say, which was, man, if

(01:01:01):
you have any kind of encounter, it's just it's a demon,
and you call it a demon and you cast it
out and move on. But that was the first time
I read something where someone outlined, man, there's two specific
kinds of beings. And one of the things that I
think it's interesting about that is is we find Jesus
make indirectly make the same claim. He's in an interaction

(01:01:24):
with his disciples and they say, Man, Jesus, we've been
trying to cast this thing out and it won't go away.
And Jesus looks at them and says, the reason is
because this kind only leaves with prayer and fasting. Well,
man insinuated in the statement is there's more than one kind, right,
There's some kind of spirit that his disciples could just
walk up to and say leave in the name of Jesus.

(01:01:46):
That it did, and then there was this other kind
of spirit that the only way to get it to
listen was was going to require that the probably the
best way from my perspective to talk about it, it was
going to require a more direct connection between the person
who was doing the casting out and the divine right. Okay,
so this kind will leave when you just tell it to,

(01:02:06):
but this kind takes a special connection between you and God.
Like you need to pray, you need to fast, you
need to be spiritually connected in a way that's a
little more intense. To have the the necessary authority and
the spiritual realms probably the right way to get that
language out there. And so I do think that what

(01:02:29):
we've encountered here on campus a lot I've encountered in
some other experiences. I think I've run into both of
those things. I think the thing that's flipping off lights
and in the basement of my friend's house, and I
think that's probably in the language we're using, that's probably
a demon. I do think that what I was experiencing

(01:02:50):
in the retention pond here on our campus was probably
a devil in that language or fallen angel who had
claimed this territory, which was why the only way that
we were going to impact it was to leverage a
legal set of spiritual rules that I didn't understand at
the time, but God did and told us what to do,
and we did it, and you move on. But fascinating

(01:03:15):
I mentioned when we were communicating back and forth, there
were a couple of stories I didn't even get to
when I was talking on the Blurry Creatures podcast. One
of those was may have just mentioned it in passing,
but on the shelves behind me. My diploma is sitting
on one of the shelves, and one afternoon I was
in my office with a guy and we were actually
having a conversation about this very thing, and the diploma

(01:03:40):
that was sitting on the shelf in my office. It
sits there all the time, it's pretty secure. It got
thrown across the room. That weird experience to watch like it.
It hits the ground six or seven feet from the shell.
All the glass shatters, look at each other. That's interesting.
Then started cleaning up. Asked, but that was the crazy experience.

(01:04:02):
But I believe it. Man back a number of years ago,
I was while I was pastoring one of the churches
here in town. I was learning and studying spiritual disciplines.
I was pretty new in the world of spiritual disciplines
at the time, and I had been practicing small windows

(01:04:24):
of time where we were taking like a vow of silence,
and so I was using silence as a spiritual discipline,
which pretty common. It's not that's not me being creative.
I was just doing what these people who had gone
before me said, we're good practices and twenty minutes or
something like that. Nothing crazy. But I had this idea
that I thought, man, it would be really cool to
do a silent retreat that would be awesome, but man,

(01:04:47):
to not embark in this thing on my own. I
grabbed three of the guys that I worked with and
I was like, man, we should do a silent retreat.
They're like, yeah, that'd be cool. And so we planned
this three day silent retreat at a church camp that's
just a handful of miles from our town where we
do church. We were doing church camp there every summer,
so it was a place we knew really well. We

(01:05:07):
knew the people who ran it. We called them and said, hey,
would you be cool this fall if we came up
for a couple of days and did a three day
spiritual retreat there? And they said, yeah, sure, you men,
you can have the run of the place. There won't
be anybody else around to come on up. And this
campground is actually situated in between a handful of lakes,
so it's on a lake, but then there are a
few more lakes around, and several of those lakes are

(01:05:30):
pretty big. Northern Indiana is actually famous for its lakes
and they are tourist places. People own cabins and whatever.
One of the guys who was going with us was
engaged to a young lady whose parents owned a cabin
on one of the lakes of just literally just a
couple minutes from this campground where we were going to
do this silent retreat. But her parents cabin was a

(01:05:52):
lot nicer than the cabins we were going to sleep it.
And so he had said, Hey, you know what, I
bet I could get us into my future in laws
cabin for the week. So we were like, yeah, let's
let's do that. We organized it. So we go for
this three day silent retreat and we went to this
cab this cabin on the lake to start. We dropped
all our stuff off and got everything arranged, and it's,

(01:06:13):
I don't know how to say this nicely, it's a
hassle to do a three day silent retreat with some
guys because you can't talk. Man, everything's got to be played.
We had planned who was doing what meal and who
was We get to the cabin and we lay all
this stuff out and then we go to this campground
and have our first day of our silent retreat. And
so that evening, I don't know, five point thirty or
six or something, we meet back at the car and

(01:06:34):
we drive back to this cabin that we're staying and man,
we made a fire out on the lake. It was
a beautiful ball night. It was really cool first day experience, right,
And we all go into this cabin to go to sleep.
And a piece of the story that's probably important is
the at the on the lake side of this cabin,

(01:06:56):
there's like a living room that's the entire wit of
the house. And then as you move away from the lake,
you go from a living room into an open concept kitchen,
and along the side of the open concept kitchen is
a hallway that leads you to just a few bedrooms.
It's one big rectangle essentially, but living room on the front, kitchen,

(01:07:19):
open concept kitchen off the living room, and then this
hallway with a couple bedrooms in it. Two of our
guys were sleeping in those two bedrooms in the back hallway,
and two of us were on couches in the living room.
I'm on a couch in the living room, and about midnight,
one of the rooms that one of our buddies are
sleeping in, the door opens and then slam shut. So

(01:07:42):
we all wake up to this door slamming shut. And
now we're not supposed to be talking, right, So guy
the other guy on the couch sits up and looks
at me and I look at him. We're like, yeah,
that was weird, Like what dude, you're it's the middle
of the night, while you slamming the door. The guy's
sleeping in the room and within it. Just a couple
minutes that had happened a second time. Only the second

(01:08:03):
time I watched the door open and slam shut with
nobody there. The second time that happened, the two guys
who were sleeping in the two rooms came walking out
into the living room and one of them was like,
we're going to talk about this, right, that's weird. What's
going on? And we were just like, gosh, man, I

(01:08:23):
don't know these A few minutes later, at this point,
there's just been a door open and closed twice, which
was certainly weird. But these two guys go back to
their bedrooms and they're they're going back to sleep, and
I had just an overwhelming sense that there was something
standing in the hallway at the door to the kitchen.

(01:08:46):
No it's not really a door because it's open concept,
but right between the counter and the waters, I couldn't
see anything. I just knew there was something there. And
I know that's weird. I don't have a better way
to explain it. But man, these guys go back to
their rooms. We're all trying to fall back asleep. All
of us are a little wigged out at this point.
And I'm the only one of us who's having this

(01:09:07):
weird to my knowledge, who's having this weird. And there
is something standing in this hallway, and so these these
guys go back. They go back to we're all trying
to go back to sleep, and the bathroom door opens
and slams, and there's no one in the bathroom. So
she's two guys come barreling out of their two rooms.
And now there's four thirty year old men huddled in

(01:09:28):
a circle on the floor of this living room. Okay,
I guess we're all sleeping together on the couches tonight. Well,
we're supposed to be taking a valve of silence, right,
that's the whole point. But it's not really. They're really
testing that, man, So we get up the next morning. Man,
this isn't it's not just the collection of random guys.
Like one of these guys was an elder at our church.

(01:09:50):
He has spent a few years running a one hundred
million dollar business, Like these are are guys that you
wouldn't run into very often and be like, Oh, that
guy's gonna have a cool ghost story. But so we
get up the next morning and this guy in particular says,
we're not leaving until we talk about what the heck
happened last night, Like what is going on? And so

(01:10:11):
I said, man, I felt like last night, after we
had these experiences, I felt like there was something standing
in the kitchen. But this is this is detail is
going to seem random, but it matters. So the guy
who's fiance's parents own this house, he says to me
the kitchen, and I said, yeah, like the kitchen, but

(01:10:34):
like I had already explained from my perspective, was standing
like at the doorway of this kitchen in the hallway.
And then I said, yeah, I felt like it was standing
in the kitchen, and his entire demeanor changed. He got
flipped in and he was like, yeah, whatever, man, if
you thought it was in the kitchen, you didn't experience
anything last night, which was just weird. The way you
handle it was just bizarre and strange. So we decide

(01:10:55):
we're going to do our second day of our silent retreat.
We were all like, we'll just see what happened to
the this. We go back to the campground, we do.
It's the second day of this thing. We come back
that night, and as soon as we get back to
the cabin, one of the guys was like, man, we
need to have another conversation. I'm not ready to go
to sleep in the place. Nobody wanted to rebuke the demons,

(01:11:17):
like these guys, it's crazy as this is. We hadn't yet.
We're all Christians, no one had made a decision to
do that thing yet. And man, so but the guy
who's fiance's family owned the cabin, he's just being real
weird about it, Like really, man, you guys don't even
know what's going on here, and you haven't seen anything.

(01:11:38):
You just had some doors. Just go to sleep. And
I finally finally just got in his face and I
was like, dude, what is your I'm telling you I
felt something in the hallway last night watching us, And
he goes, wait a minute, the hallway. I said, yeah,
the hallway, man, And he was like, you said it
was the kitchen. I said, it was standing like whatever

(01:11:58):
I felt was standing right out by the kitchen in
the hallway and he goes. I didn't really want to
say anything, but the family thinks there's a ghost of
a little boy that lives in his house. And he
runs up and down the hallway and he opens and
closes the doors here. And you didn't think that was
an important thing to tell us before we came to

(01:12:21):
Juis to be treat cabins. But man, Yeah, the short
ending to the story is, I was like, we're not
going to do this for another night, and spn I
grab these three guys and we go stand in the
middle of this hallway, we pray, and we man in
the name of Jesus, whatever it's here, I command to
leave that thing. Yeah. So we managed to get through

(01:12:43):
the next couple of nights leaping just fine. But but certainly, man,
in my early thirties, that was a pretty bizarre experience.
Like doors, we actually saw some doors open and close
and and it was another moment for me where where
it I would certainly not describe myself as a seer.

(01:13:05):
I've talked to some people who feel like they can
see things in the spiritual and that's certainly has not
been my experience. I mentioned hearing this voice in the
car while I was driving. I don't that's not normal
for me. I think I have a pretty decent prayer life.
It's not normal for me to hear audibly someone speak
to me. Well, i'd brag, that's pretty weird. But certainly

(01:13:26):
there have been a handful of moments where it is
felt like I've been able to discern pretty clearly that
something was with us that shouldn't be with us, right,
And man, I don't think that's anything unique or special
about me. Just man, God is God's tapping me on
the shoulder sometimes saying, Hey, here's something to pay attention

(01:13:47):
to here. And certainly that night in that cabin was
one of those things. It felt like I could identify
there was something evil in the space and where it was,
and then man, by the grace of God, had the
ability to call on the blood of Jesus to cleanse
that space. And so the guys that but blurry creatures

(01:14:08):
nicknamed me the accidental exorcist. And that certainly how it
feels right like I never to have any of these
experiences and and would certainly be fine if I never
had another. But but I've just seemed to stumble into
a handful of these experiences. And one of the other
things that I'll say too is I know there are

(01:14:30):
people who have these experiences and call on the name
of Jesus and it doesn't seem to solve the problem.
That hasn't been the experience I've had and over man
a few dozen of these stories, every opportunity I've had
to engage in this capacity, and the name of Jesus

(01:14:51):
has the power to drive out whatever we've encountered. Amen.

Speaker 5 (01:14:56):
Absolutely, Abe.

Speaker 4 (01:14:57):
I wanted to ask you about something and sure when
I heard this story when you were with Dayton Luke
Blurry Creatures, I sketched my head like cush When I
had done the same thing, I didn't have this like
a demonic experience when I did the same thing that
you had countered. And I'll give you some context, and

(01:15:17):
I think it has to do with intention. I think
this is what I here. I'll just give you a context.
So basically, when you were telling the story of when
you were at a home and you felt like when
you were walking the grounds of the home and then
there was you felt nauseous when you were by this
little girl's bedroom and there was like a pet cemetery

(01:15:38):
outside the bedroom, and then I was kin sketch my
head like cush. I know that in my prayer house
with when I lived with my dad, there was in
the backyard was definitely a pet cemetery for sure, because
I'd had to had different pets, dye what have you,
and I would like out there as a ten year
old girl or twelve year old girl, like digging the
grave for this rabbit or bird or cat or dog

(01:15:59):
or whatever that unfortunately untimely end.

Speaker 5 (01:16:01):
But I didn't have any.

Speaker 4 (01:16:02):
Of course I loved them, but I didn't have a
sole attachment to them that makes any sense or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:16:07):
Yeah, it wasn't like that.

Speaker 5 (01:16:08):
I I don't know. Maybe it has to do with
intention or whatever.

Speaker 4 (01:16:11):
So what why do you think that this that there
was like a demonic presence as a result of this
little girl's pet cemetery versus or home that Yes, there
were some demotic things that occurred, but not due to
our pet cemetery in the backyard. In fact, when I
when I went back there, I didn't fill anything necessarily demonic.

Speaker 5 (01:16:28):
Although there was.

Speaker 4 (01:16:29):
A situation when I was twelve and I had a
bunch of girlfriends come over and they stayed in a
tent and they said, Jerry, we got to tell you
about this game that we played cold light as a feather,
stiff as a board.

Speaker 1 (01:16:38):
Did I go?

Speaker 4 (01:16:39):
And there were some girls that slept in the house,
some girls that slept in the tent, and the girls
that slept in the tent that they did the levitation ceremony.
You know, that's tolely occult to get demonic light as
an other stiff as a board, and unlike it's a
bunch of hogwash. I was twelve, I wasn't saved, and
I didn't believe in the supernatural, and and I just
put that if there was anything in our home that
might have been an entry door that was one of
the ants. Was that occult e cerevity that was innocently

(01:17:03):
played by naive girls in eighty five or whatever. So anyway,
I'm sorry for interrupting, but could you tell us about
that maybe the reason why there was the demonic regarding
the pet cemetery. It's okay in the very pets, obviously,
but let's tell us about your thoughts about that.

Speaker 1 (01:17:21):
Yes, man, For the first thing I'll do is I'll
unwine this story a little bit and then I'll try
to do my best to answer what you're asking. But
we had some friends who their very young daughter, she
was or or so at the time, was she was
having horrible nightmares, very vivid nightmares about things that she
probably shouldn't have known about, let alone been dreaming about.

(01:17:43):
And so yeah, they attended the church house pastoring and
they just called and said, Man, our daughters having these nightmares.
Would you come pray with her? And I said, sure,
would you like me to pray through the house too?
And they were like these two And so I went
over and we walked through the house and prayed through
all the space, and I prayed with their daughter, prayed
in her room. But I didn't really sense anything. And

(01:18:06):
I know that might sound weird, but that is my
typical approach. Is like what we've already talked about. I'm
just walking through the home and praying and hoping the
Holy Spirit's going to tap me on the shoulder if
there's something I should be paying attention to. And so
we prayed through the inside of the home, and then
because I didn't really sense anything, I just said, hey,

(01:18:28):
can we prayed around your house too? And so we
did a loop around their house, and as we came
to their landscaping, right outside this little girl's bedroom window,
I just had this overwhelming sense that something was wrong.
So I said to the guy who owned the home, man,
I think there's something in your landscaping. Like, I know

(01:18:50):
that's weird, but it seems like there's something in your landscaping.
And we prayed together there and but they ended up
I don't know if this is this maybe says how
crazy the people around me are. But he ended up
digging up that section of landscaping. And the story gets
a little more bizarre than that. Man. When I was

(01:19:11):
with the guys from Blurred Creatures, we didn't have time
to dig much into the specifics, but they hired a
landscaper to come in and help, and that guy was
a friend of mine. The landscaper, I'm gonna I mentioned
our town's twenty five thousand people. I went to high
school with everyone here. It's a pretty small town and
it's a pretty small community. So the guy who was
doing the landscaping with a friend of mine. But so

(01:19:34):
they pulled the landscaping out and I said on Blurry
Creatures there was a pet cemetery there and that's probably
the wrong way to explain it, because what they dug
up were twenty five or thirty animal sets of animal
carcasses or bones or whatever the description is. And and

(01:19:54):
it certainly didn't seem to them like what they were
pulling out of the ground was, oh, man, like my
dog died, and so I wrapped it in a blanket
that it loved them, and I put it in the bag,
and then I buried that. That wasn't what they found.
What they found was, man, this mass grave of animal remains.

(01:20:16):
And the reason I mentioned the landscaper, who was also
a friend of mine, was he and I bumped into
each other a few weeks later and he said, man,
because I had connected them, I connected the landscaper to
this family. And he said, man, that family that you
connected me too. And I went over and did some
work in there lands, and I was like yeah, And
he said, you know, I had a crazy thing happened

(01:20:37):
to me while I was there. And I was like, oh, really,
what's that? I said, I was the first thing he
did was he showed up and he mowed their yard
and he said, as I was mowing the yard, there
were in these bushes along there there were these bushes
along the house, and he said, abe, I swear to you,
something was like leaning out around these bushes watching me mow.

(01:20:58):
He said, I could feel it. I double over my
shoulder when my back was to it. I felt, really
where he's just this crazy thing. And then he was like,
and we started digging these bushes that we find all
these dead animals, okay, And I was like, yeah, okay.
So even the guy who was just showed up to
mow the yard and do some landscaping work was like,
whatever is wrong is really wrong, and it's wrong right there.

Speaker 6 (01:21:19):
I think they were like animal sacrifices, maybe like some
witchcraft thing, like that's.

Speaker 5 (01:21:25):
What it sounds like.

Speaker 1 (01:21:26):
Yeah, at the very least, I think I could probably
go a couple of different ways. I'm sorry that this
is maybe odd, but either either someone was intentionally killing
those animals in a way that was traumatic, yeah, or

(01:21:50):
it was witchcraft or sacrificial in some way, so I
don't necessarily know that. My one of the things that's
challenging for me is I've had this handful of very specific,
intense spiritual experiences, but I still process that through a

(01:22:16):
pretty conservative, feminary educated mind. And so I find myself
lots of times in a place where like you say, gosh, man,
I don't mean you. Someone would say, gosh, maybe this
was witchcraft. Maybe someone was intentionally casting a spell in
their yard, and the rational side of my brain goes,

(01:22:39):
really like, people are really do Now, I know there
are people out there that do that, right, I'm not
dismissing that, but so that's why I'm almost hedging my
response by saying, maybe that's possible that someone was doing this.
It's also possible that there are people in our world
who are just interested in creating trauma, and it doesn't

(01:23:02):
matter if that's in humans or with animals. I work
with kids literally every day. I work with teenage boys,
lots of whom have done terrible things to animals. It's
as possible that maybe a kid lived in that house
who was killing all the neighborhood cats or strangling all
the goods and just throwing their body in a hold.

Speaker 5 (01:23:23):
Yeah, it's a possibility.

Speaker 1 (01:23:25):
Yeah. One of the things that I do think is
interesting is everyone that kind of messes around. It is
probably the wrong way to say it, but everyone who's
engaged in this world of spiritual warfare and exorcism agrees
that if there's bloodshed in an area, like in a
specific area of land, there's almost always spiritual things connected

(01:23:49):
to that later. Right. So a good example. I lived
about an hour from the city of Fort Wayne in Indiana,
and oh I used to live there, No way. Yeah. Man,
there's a place in Fort Wayne where several rivers meet
and it's called Headwater Park. Yeah, familiar with that, but.

Speaker 6 (01:24:09):
The River's Festival. My dad was the con that's exactly
right of the Fort Wayne Philharmonics. So we did music
festivals and I was a kid back then. But do
you think about it often very nostalgically?

Speaker 1 (01:24:20):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, so man, to not wreck any of
that for you, No, I know. It's a total drug town,
total weirdocrafts. And at Headwaters Park where these three rivers meet,
the guy that the city of Fort Wayne is named
after was Anthony Wayne. He was a general in the military,
the United States military, and he was responsible to remove

(01:24:43):
the Native Americans who lived in that area. And he's
actually his nickname is Matt Anthony. They actually call him
Mad Anthony. The basketball team at Fort Wayne is the
mad Ants, named after this guy. But the reason they
refer to him as Mad Anthony is because he had
convinced this man very large group of Native Americans to

(01:25:07):
switch sides of the river. All of these people walk
out into the river at Headwater Park where these three
rivers meet, and as all these these Native Americans are
in the river, Man Anthony Wayne unleashes his military and
they literally kill all of these people as they're crossing
the river. Oh. The reason I mentioned that is because

(01:25:27):
there's this big apartment complex right there at Headwater Park,
and people in that apartment complex have horrible spiritual experiences
very regularly. It's the passers I passored in for Waye
for a while, and the pastors in four Wayne all know,
if you get a call from somebody in there, like hey,
I live in this apartment complex, they're probably actually experiencing

(01:25:50):
something pretty crazy. Right. But that's just a really easy
example of man bloodshed directly connects to do some kind
of long term spiritual issue with the land. The thing
I think that's interesting about that is as God is
outlining sacrifices for the nation of Israel in the Old Testament,
one of the things that Heat says several times is

(01:26:13):
you are not to consume blood. You don't eat it
because the life is in the blood. Yes, it's a
really fascinating to think about. Okay, So from a spiritual perspective,
the thing that keeps us alive is our blood. We
know that scientifically true, now, right man, God made this

(01:26:35):
declaration to the nation of Israel. You don't eat they
you know, kosher meat has all the blood drained out
of it. The reason that's true is because they're not
supposed to eat blood, and they're not supposed to eat
blood because the thing God says over and over again
is the life is in the blood. Right, So it's certainly,
at least in my head, it's a pretty easy connect
to go. Okay, God declares the life is in the blood,

(01:26:57):
and when there's bloodshed on land, that land gets connected
to whatever happened to the life of that being in
a way that at least draws in the spiritual realm,
the evil spiritual realm. I don't know how all of
that works, but those things are definitely connected. And so, man,

(01:27:19):
so believe to draw all of that back to the
question you asked me, it certainly feels like it would
be possible for someone to create a traumatic death even
of an animal, and man, as you do, as you
shed this thing's blood, or as this blood is seep

(01:27:39):
into the ground, like you create a spiritual and evil,
spiritual focal point. Yes, And in my head, that's what
happened to that little girl's room, right, whatever, whether it
was witchcraft or some neighborhood kid just killing animals and
dumping their bodies into a hole out outside his house. Man,

(01:28:01):
as the blood of whatever that being was kind of
leached into the ground and created a spiritual focal point
for the enemy.

Speaker 4 (01:28:08):
I was even thinking that we don't know how long
animal bones can stay intact in the ground. It could
it be obviously within a few years, but could it
have lasted could bones last hundreds of years, thousands of years?
And obviously people have dug up dragon or dinosaur bones

(01:28:29):
and what have you, and they're still intact and they're
thousands of years old and some millions. Anyway, that's a
whole other rabbit hole to go down. But anyway, back
to this subject, I was thinking it possibly it could
be Santaia that maybe even though in the last maybe
fifty years or however long the house has been built,
we don't know if there was any type of Native

(01:28:51):
American ceremonies that that could have evolved sacrificing lots of animals. Obviously,
that's century that there would be some sort of Native
American sort of ceremony, or it could be something similar
to some sort of pagan ceremony where they're killing lots
of animals. But then again that may not be the case.
It could be like you said, some kid or some
adult causing trauma and shedding their blood and what have you. Okay,

(01:29:13):
So that has definitely answered my question. For sure, dogs
and cats and birds and bunnies died what have you,
due to natural causes or maybe another animal had hurt them.
Where I had a favorite dog, Racy, and a German
shepherd had bit his ear and it was an infection
and we had to put him down or whatever, and
so we buried him in the backyard.

Speaker 5 (01:29:34):
But I guess if it's from an animal to an animal.

Speaker 4 (01:29:36):
That necessarily doesn't draw the spiritual world, but from a
human to an animal, or definitely human to a human
for sure, and we don't know is what has happened
in the ground, like where we live, where we work
or whatever. Even roads that we drive on or whatever.
I did hear of the story of a friend of
mine he lived in a quote hanted house end quote

(01:29:56):
in such that there was a suicide that took place
in the basement in the in the thirties or something
or twenties and thirties, and every occupant after that experienced
some sort of demonic harassment that took the form of
the man that committed suicide. Because a question at that
point is we could cut another rabbit hole. So is
it the actual spirit of the person I e. A

(01:30:17):
ghost or is it a spirit that's masqueraded, a demonic
spirit of masquerading itself as that person. We perhaps it's both.
It could be a demonic spirit masquerading as that person,
or it could be the actual person. But I tend
to believe what the scriptures state for disappointment for a
person that I want and then to face the judgment
either to heave it or health. I know that in
a lot of people that may disagree with me, and

(01:30:39):
that's fine, But at this point it's all speculative unless
we unless, of course, were Jesus and the Holy Spirit
of the Father.

Speaker 1 (01:30:44):
But we're not.

Speaker 4 (01:30:45):
But and I note that Michael has had some experiences
with ghosts in Asia and what have you. And oh,
one last question before we have to sign off here,
I'm sorry, is so when you saw those demonic spirits
in Japan with the ony masks.

Speaker 5 (01:30:58):
Or whatever, do you feel like.

Speaker 4 (01:31:02):
And by the way, I just wanted to give you
hats off for learning Japanese martial arts, and I think
that is awesome, But I never have learned karani, your
koku or anything like that, so I just have to
keep you major hats off. And that's here another hero
in that respect. But do you think that some of
the practices and philosophies attached to martial arts and may
have opened the door at that point to maybe some

(01:31:26):
of these Japanese demons or whatever. Not as an indict,
definitely not as an adment.

Speaker 1 (01:31:32):
I don't hear you saying it that way, okay, And
to be honesty, I've never really thought about it like that.
One of the things that I think is is interesting.
There's a Japanese book. The English title of it is
The Demon's Sermon on the Martial Arts In Japanese. It's
not quite so scary that the Japanese title is like

(01:31:55):
something like the Spirit's Sermon on the martial arts something
like that. But I I had read that book mostly
because of the shocking title. I was like, I wonder
what this is all about. But the author, actually the
guy who not the author, the guy who translated it
from Japanese into English, does an intro, and in the
intro he do this fascinating thing where he talks about

(01:32:18):
he tells these stories of all these ancient Japanese martial
arts where these men would go into the mountains and
then they would come back with, you know, in two
or three months with an entire fighting system, having learned
an entire fighting system being alone in the mountains, which
is crazy, right, how it worked, how the world works.

(01:32:41):
But all these guys would come back and say, yeah,
I encountered this being in the mountains, and they taught me.
These spiritual beings taught me how to fight, and then
they would come back and teach. But interesting, the thing
that this guy said in his intro was essentially he
makes the argument that mountains are the word he uses
as liminal. The mountains are a liminal place. It's this

(01:33:03):
place where the physical realm and the spiritual realm overlap.
The thing that's interesting about that idea is we find
that in the scriptures over and over again, Moses encounters
God on a mountain, man mount Thaiani's fired des Sands.
The Old Testament, every time they describe someone going up

(01:33:26):
or someone going down, it always has a spiritual element
to it. And I know that sounds extreme, but I mean
what I just said, right, David goes down into the
valley to fight the Philistines. Samson goes down into the
valley to fight the Philistines. The nation of Israel goes
down into Egypt into slavery, and they go up out
of slavery into Israel. Right now, there's this up and

(01:33:48):
down language all the time, and that stays true even
when you get to the New Testament, when you get
to Jesus. Jesus teaches his sermon on the mountain. The
passage in Matthew opens with so he went up on
a mountain inside and sat down, And literally the text
is calling to mind Moses going up onto the mountain
and Elijah going up onto the mountain to confront the

(01:34:09):
profits available. So there's but the scriptures allude to this
idea that you go up into these spaces where the
spiritual and the physical sort of meat, and it was
at least interesting in my head because of that sort
of biblical background to watch someone of definitely not my

(01:34:30):
faith system talk about this idea of there are these
places where the spiritual and the physical kind of interact,
and that happened to all of these martial artists in
the mountains of Japan. Now I realized that has nothing
to do with the question you asked me, but it's
certainly interesting. And then but I think, I think the
thing that's interesting at least is by the time I

(01:34:54):
was having those experience where I have that experience of
these dreams where I'm watching these things come through the
world all of my kid's bedroom. At that at that
point in my life, I knew all of the history
of these martial arts from Japan, and I believe that
at least some of them were demons teaching people how

(01:35:15):
to fight. In fact, the book of the Book of
Enoch tells us that but in the beginning, the watchers
did this, They came down and taught to humanity. And
so I don't know. It certainly didn't look like these
creatures were wearing a mask. It looked like that was
their face. But what I don't know is if that's

(01:35:40):
how my mind was just interpreting this nightmare and so
it put a face that I already thought was demonic
onto this thing I was seeing in my dream, or
if what I was seeing was real, and it just
so happens that the tradition in Japan managed to capture
the actual physical station. Manifestation is the great word either way.

(01:36:09):
Manifestation of what these guys were encountering in the mountains fascinating.

Speaker 6 (01:36:17):
Yeah, I live in the I've been living in mountains
for the last twenty years, Japan, Taiwan, Big Island, Hawaii, Honolulu,
and now the Smoky Mountains, and I can tell you
there is something about these mountains liminal. I'm going to
definitely use that. Let me just issue my final statement
for you, sir, because I've learned so much tonight. I'm

(01:36:39):
sure our audience is just reeling with all this information
data in these stories and to boil it down to
join the human trafficking that very physical experience that you
engage with all these supernatural poulture geist sounding things. I
just want to add what we're doing in our kind
of para circles is finding out there's a supernatural element

(01:37:02):
when it comes to Satanic ritual abuse of children, I
guess we could good animals, and that's where the devil
is trying to step in, and we need to pray
and bring healing to those people. I don't really understand
how it all works, but it's very sophisticated and very dark.
So all fear, stay close to Jesus.

Speaker 1 (01:37:24):
Thank you so much. Hey, thank you guys so much
for having me. I appreciate it so much. I've had
a great idea to share with you guys. Absolutely, if
it's okay, I'll just say, man, the book is called
Light in the Darkness. Light in the Darkness, you can
grab it on Amazon, hard back, paperback, ebook, however you read.
You can grab that thing on Amazon.

Speaker 5 (01:37:45):
But I'll just check it out.

Speaker 4 (01:37:47):
Light in the Darkness by Abraham heblerch And you're an author,
a pastor, and a Japanese martial artists and a previous
human traffic rescuer. You've got a lot of has going
on there that's amazing. A bravo to you, brother, Thank
you so much, Abe for your time with us. Michael
and I really appreciate that you shared your stories and

(01:38:10):
the greater general overview of the meeting behind these stories,
and that it's rooted in spiritual warfare, and that your
greater is God within us then the spirits that are
in the world.

Speaker 5 (01:38:23):
I'm so glad that.

Speaker 4 (01:38:24):
You have found the solution to these dark spiritual entities
in the name above all names that will cast those
out in Jesus' names.

Speaker 5 (01:38:32):
That's awesome.

Speaker 4 (01:38:33):
It was a delight, honor, blessing and a pleasure to
talk to you.

Speaker 1 (01:38:37):
Abe.

Speaker 4 (01:38:37):
So glad that we're able to connect after all these months,
and so thank you so much. Abe, Thank you so
much for watching or listening to us on the cross
Files podcast.

Speaker 6 (01:38:46):
I'm half of your host Jerry and I'm Michael and
don't forget. You can check out you have an Instagram
as well. I do people get yeah, half its just
Abe Heppler. I'm sorry Heppler Heppler or h E. P
l E r Abe Heppler. So people can follow you
great and I forget to get the book Light in

(01:39:06):
the Darkness and follow crossfiles dot org and Strangeclock dot
com and donate to us and join the revolution. God
bless you guys. And the Facebook group. We have a
Facebook group, Yes.

Speaker 4 (01:39:17):
Strange of Clock podcast friends group, and Abe is a
part of that. We're honored of bless to have him
as a guest in there too. So anyway, well, thank
you so much for listening or watching The Cross Fills
podcast and hope you have a great morning, afternoon, or
evening whenever you listener watched this bay the cross be
with you.

Speaker 2 (01:40:02):
I have.

Speaker 1 (01:40:08):
Invitat a I don't. I

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