Jamin Bradley

I was taught by the church that removing demons is easy. If you find one, you just tell it to go. I was told by trained exorcists that it was a little more complicated than that. If you find one, you must counsel the person to get it out. But then I found one, and all the rules fell apart. I made headway in the fight, but very, very slowly. Much of what I had been taught on the subject began to feel like “Christian spells”—that if I got people to say the right words, the demons would leave. Eventually, only one exorcism passage in the Bible was left to follow: “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.” In other words, I would have to seek God for answers. Once I did this, the answers came, but the process remained slow.

One night I went to bed feeling quite desperate about this slow situation when I found myself in the middle of the road in Jackson. It was a dream, but I couldn’t tell. It felt so real that I had convinced myself I had sleepwalked to this location. But then things got weird as the city became a musical. In Act 1, a man came onto the road and sang a ballad about God’s hope and love and how everything would be alright. In Act 2, some characters represented demons, and they sang as they engaged in a fight that they couldn’t really win because God would always stop their weapons before they became deadly. In Act 3, a crowd came together as we sang and celebrated victory over the demons. God had seen my desperation and given me hope, insight, and a future.

Something similar happened to Jacob. He was desperate, though it was his fault. He had cheated his brother too many times and now his brother wanted to kill him. He had to pack up and leave his family, and now he was alone with little more than a rock for a pillow. And it was there that God met him in a dream and prophesied hope over him. He would have a lot of learning to do, but his story wasn’t over.