That winter he didn't want to be alone in his room so his mother put a mattress in his room and slept on the floor next to his bed.  He was seeing horrible visions like people being killed and tortured.  He even saw the opening to what looked like the abyss and felt like his soul was being drawn to it.  He did not tell his parents of this.

     He also complained of seeing a dark spot when he looked out of his right eye and wondered whether something was wrong with his vision.  He felt pressure inside of his eyeball as well.  Everything looked out-of-focus with his eye, as if everything looked crinkled up.  He was very worried about his eyesight but unwilling to go to a doctor to see what was wrong.  In the meantime his father was facing losing the vision in his left eye.

    Alex sought out local Christian help.  He comes from a Portuguese background so he found a nice little Portuguese Christian church to attend in his area.  I accompanied him in order for him to meet the pastor in person.  He poured his heart out to the Portuguese Pastor and that Pastor told him he'd call him every single day to check up on him.

    I really think that the Pastor cared but finally this man realized that he wasn't able to help Alex.  It happened when he asked the pastor, "Do you believe in miracles?"  The man then said that miracles weren't for today.  Alex was very baffled because he needed a miracle.  Then this pastor referred Alex to his wife who then told him to go see a Psychologist.  He'd already been down that route and it lead to nowhere.

     Meanwhile he was prescribed by a doctor something called Benzodiazepines (Ativan-anxiolitic) for sleep.  He took those pills and started to get addicted.  They were to calm anxiety.  But, when the effects wore off he got twice as much anxiety than he started with.  This led to panic attacks.  The panic attacks became worse and worse.  At one point he was calling me on the phone every half an hour with panic attacks for weeks upon weeks.  I could barely take the stress of handling him.

     I remembered that he had made a Christian friend in Canada who was a black lady named Armalee that I had gotten to know a little bit over the summer.  So I called her and asked her to help me out by calling Alex to pray with him to stop these panic attacks.  I am pretty stable, but at one point I was on the verge of starting to get panic attacks myself!

    One time when I went for a visit that winter he gave me a bunch of pills to throw away.  He said that he had planned to kill himself with those pills by overdose but he gave them to me so that he would not do it.  He finally got so fed up with those pils that he went off them all together after that although he felt in pain and sick from the withdrawls.

    Alex seemed to hang on by a thread every day.  I kept trying to turn over every rock to find him help.  I then found a unique Psychologist to help Alex over the phone.  I was searching the Internet looking for help and came across a web site that talked about deliverance from Schizophrenia.  It was the testimony of a man named James Stacey of schizophreniadefeated.com.

    On his web site they recommended a few people, so I wrote to them.  One of the men recommended was a man named Dan Logan.  He was a Christian Psychologist and professor but, he personally believed in deliverance!  How often do you find that?  This man volunteered to counsel Alex over the phone once a week or whenever I was desperate enough to call him and we arranged a three-way call.  Dan Logan was very cautious though and never prayed to cast any demons out of Alex over the phone saying that it really should be done in person.  He wasn't a pastor, but a fellow Christian with the right know-how.  He talked to Alex on his level, related to him as a father would to a hurting little boy, and then he had the proper spiritual knowledge to help Alex and battled for him leading him in prayer.

    One thing in particular he prayed about was to break the curse of Alex losing his vision within his right eye.  He said that it stemmed from a generational curse which usually occurs to an abusive or angry man who is supposed to be the leader of the family.  He gave us the reference of -

     Zechariah 11:17  Woe to the idol shepherd that leaveth the flock!  The sword shall be upon his arm, and upon his right eye:  his arm shall be clean dried up, and his right eye shall be utterly darkened.

    Alex's eyesight actually started to improve after this and within the following month he was no longer seeing the dark spot.  It gave him some hope that other things could get better too.  It wasn't in-person help but it was enough to get him by.  This really helped Alex get through the winter.  But at winter's end Alex's father and Dan Logan had a stroke in the same week!  Yeah, very strange isn't it?

​

Press here for next Chapter - Double Rainbow