By the time our son was about a year old, he occasionally exhibited troubling behavior. After falling asleep in his crib at night, he would wildly cry out. Physically, he appeared fine, but when I tried to pick him up to comfort him, he would crawl backward in fright and spend several minutes cowering and crying. We would stay with him and tenderly help him awake from this apparent night terror. These moments were very unlike our son during normal waking hours, when he was a happy, sweet-tempered child.
One night when an episode was taking place, I left our son with his father and went to another room to pray. As I reached out to our Father-Mother God, Jesus’ wonderful healing of a child afflicted with an aggressive difficulty came to mind. The child’s father described the difficulty this way: “Lo, a spirit taketh him, and he suddenly crieth out; and it teareth him . . . and bruising him hardly departeth from him” (Luke 9:39).
The father had asked Jesus’ disciples to cast the “spirit” out, but they could not. So Jesus “rebuked the unclean spirit, and healed the child, and delivered him again to his father” (verse 42).
