I remember calling pastors in the yellow pages. I really did this. I called churches in the yellow pages and asked them if I killed myself would I go to heaven or hell. Half of them told me heaven and half of them told me hell.
I was around nine or ten years old, one day I went with my mother out to South Knoxville to see some relatives. There was a baby in the room. We were together and there was a new baby there and they were passing the baby around. As soon as they passed that baby to me I felt like there was a cloak that came over me. I felt the presence of something that I had not felt before. With the presence came a thought. It was very troubling to me. The thought was just to throw that baby across the room. It so troubled me that I just handed the baby because I would never do anything like that. I remember maybe thirty or forty minutes later when we left, riding home with my mother in the car that day and I felt there was something not right.
It seems like there was a presence with me wherever I went from that time forward. I remember mowing the grass and I remember thoughts coming to me to stick my feet into the blades of the mower, crazy stuff like that. I remember the same thing trying to get me to drive my car into something to destroy it. This thing was trying to destroy me.
I kept it secret. It’s not one of those things you want to go around telling everybody what kind of thoughts you are having in your mind because they will think you are crazy. I was literally losing my mind. I pleaded with the doctors. They didn’t know what to do with me. They took me through months and months of testing, psychiatrists, psychologists. They used me like a guinea pig with antipsychotic drugs. They had me on so much Stelazine that I was a living walking dead person that had demonic thoughts going through my mind that would just honestly disturb anybody.
At that point, I wasn’t going to keep it a secret anymore. I decided to reach out for help and that’s why I went to the doctors. They brought my dad in and my poor father was dragging me around everywhere. We were just on a pursuit to get me fixed and nothing was working. The doctor looked at my dad and said, “Mr. McCarty, for his safety we just highly recommend committing him to the state hospital. Something rose in me that said, “That is not going to happen!”
I went out to a church. There was a guy there that saw me. His name was Barry. I wish I could see him to this day. Barry said, “Man, I have got to get you some help. You are not going to make it.” That night he made a phone call to a lady in Cleveland, Tennessee. I called him and said, “Barry, have you called her?” He said, “Yeah, she’s praying about it.” That was the longest fifteen minutes of my life. It was also the hardest night of my life because I knew the enemy, looking back now, he knew that if he didn’t stop me right there that he was getting ready to lose me.
That night, I will never forget, I have told my wife this many times, that it was the worst night of my life. I think he just threw everything he could at me. Barry came, got me and took me (it was probably twelve-thirty or one o’clock in the morning), brought me to Cleveland. He brought me to a lady that took me into her home. Now I was getting the Word into me. I was starting to get filled up with something that no man can take from me. Jesus said, “if you abide in me and my words abide in you that He and His Father would come and make their abode in you.”
I started seeing some progress, really amazing progress. You’ve got to remember that when I went to Cleveland I couldn’t even really carry on a conversation with anybody.
Here I am zooming forward. I finally got me a job at the local hospital as a pot washer. There were times when I would go in the bathroom and just have to pray. Again, you just don’t get delivered overnight. I didn’t. Some people do. This is my story. Mine happened as a progressive thing. It took years. It finally came to this one day. That thing that had come in me or come on me or whatever I felt it starting to rise. It’s like it had its own entity. It had its own, it was not me. It was cursing. It was like it had it’s own voice in there. It was cursing and it rose up out of me and it left. I believe that day the Holy Spirit said, “today’s it. It’s over with.” I don’t know what he did to burn that out of there but I promise you as God is my witness it was like the Lord lit a blow torch in my belly. I could just feel the burning and the righteousness of the Holy Spirit in my belly burning and that thing left. I wanted to laugh for three days. I knew, I knew, I knew I was free. I’m free brother. I know who I am in Christ. It can’t come back.
I can tell you this. I have a sound mind. I understand a lot of things that I am not going to say but when I see things that are going on out here in society I understand. If you pulled back the curtain and saw what was going on, how much of it’s spiritual, it would probably blow your mind to be honest with you.
Discussions