As I looked into his eyes, there rose up a different kind of brightness. It burned there, not unfamiliar to him for he had called it to himself and welcomed its warmth. I listened carefully to nuances and inflections and the words of his mouth. These were the words of his true heart really, and frightening because of that. These words were sired by a deceitful and dark father, a liar, a con, from a chasm of great depth.

I spoke nothing...unable to breathe...unable to quiet the pounding of the blood in my veins. I felt my heart would splinter into a million little pieces if I ventured into the fray with one so bent on hell and ruin. At the moment of this realization, I saw that he was like a sweaty animal rushing in a panic through darkened woods only to turn and find his stalker already upon him. There was an aroma of death on him, he had been mucking about in it, and the scent wafted cloyingly through the room.

As his words intensified, justified, battered and rammed against me, a stillness like mist, came rising to the surface of my internal landscape. With this stillness came only this; "Jesus," uttered in a safe pocket of my  heart. "Jesus." His agitation grew with his words of hate and doom, sounding like the death metal music he so highly esteemed. Profanity and a litany of questions were fired at me like newly sharpened daggers. He knew that I knew right then, right at that moment, that the unuttered name of Jesus held sway over his spewing vomitus. It was a defeat...and he had witnessed it right before his eyes.

A sound, like a thousand bat wings exiting the mouth of a cold cave, fluttered and tumbled and tripped from his clumsy tongue then. He was unable to continue. A look of surprise and then confusion crossed his face. One word, the very one word that means everything, whispered up my throat and across my teeth as he, spent and broken, walked out of my office."Jesus."

Today I firsthand witnessed the reality that is satan in our world (although I have had him dancing about my office before). The angry young man had absolutely no idea that I was a Christian. Something inside him told him to spit out that hatred and anger against something he had unconsciously sensed in me...JESUS! Every word he uttered, every thought he had, came from the bloated belly of the beast. But they were scattered, like leaves in a heavy autumn wind by a singular word, "Jesus!" What power in that NAME! JESUS!

c 11/09/2009 M. LaPointe