“So I have ghosts in my house.”
I looked over my microwaved Lean Cuisine meal, unconsciously raising my eyebrows toward Mischa. She was a skinny, attractive, late-twenties woman with dark black Cleopatra hair - a high school night teacher. I listened attentively as she extrapolated:
“Yeah, I haven't been able to sleep for the last week, because as soon as I turn the lights off, these....ghost things start showing up in my room. I put dragon's blood all over the room, but I don't know if it helped. I hope it does.”
At this, another teacher in the break room piped up. His name was Dale, a balding man in his late 50s with glasses and a well-aged, charming smile. He said, “Dragon's blood? What's that?”
“Yeah, are dragons real or something?” I added.
“No, it's a potion. I went to this like witchcraft shop and asked for it. It was really weird going in there. When I asked the lady across the counter for Dragon's Blood, she's like, 'ah, yur havin trouble with ghosts, are ya?' I was looking at her like she was weird, and it seemed like she thought I was pretty weird too.”
I could just imagine Mischa in that store with her skinny jeans and Egyptian hair cut, arms folded, staring at this little old lady.
“So she gave me the dragon's blood, and I'm like, 'thanks,' and got out of there. I poured that stuff all over my house...”
“Where, on like the carpet?” I asked.
“No, like on the doorframes and bedstand and stuff.”
I looked over at Dale, and he looked at me with his lips pushed together in a type of grimmace and his eyebrows raised flatly like two level platforms. “Are you serious?” he said, “Are you going insane or something?”
She began to answer, but I cut her off, “Nope, she's telling the truth, they're real.”
Dale just shook his head and went back to eating his food.
Later, after Mischa went back to class, Dale and I talked about it. He told me that he had been a Christian his whole life, but all of this was new to him. He said he'd heard about those types of things elsewhere, but said that “he never knew that kind of thing happened in Boise!”
I just smiled and shook my head. I had the trumpcard, but I didn't want to play it. I knew something that Dale had a sense of but Mischa had no idea about – those ghosts weren't ghosts at all, but demons. My heart was filled with compassion for her, as I knew that going up and telling her that wouldn't be very reassuring. She needed something real, something tangible, something that worked. The world is crying out for not only a God that's real, but also a God that is different than their parents' hateful, angry, judgmental, hair-trigger-temper idea of a loving Heavenly Father.