One way or another, I managed to get us to the city where we were staying that night without too much drama. The scary part is that I don’t remember most of the drive, until we arrived in the city and did about three loops around the main roundabout before we actually got on the street we wanted.   Don’t tell Joanna, though.  We will let her be blissfully innocent about the dangers of driving with a Mercy who is lost in the ether.

This particular house was an adventure unto itself. It wasn’t on the agenda as such, but God snuck it in there as a good learning experience in the art of spiritual discernment.  The house was in a line of storefronts, and may have been some kind of shop at one time.   Whatever it was at its origin, it had turned into an eclectic collection of hallways, stairs, rooms, and some very interesting nooks and crannies.  One of those particular nooks was a secret cubby in one of the stair steps.  If only I was a five-year old!  WHAT a fun place to explore.  You could get lost, and I nearly did a couple of times.  I never could find my way back from the main guest dining room to the bedroom.  And even though I am a whole lot older than five, I must admit I couldn’t resist one particularly interesting door in the dining room.

So, this was a decidedly unusual house. It was one of those places that perches on the edge of intriguingly odd and disturbingly odd.  It all depends on what the human community does with it.

Whoever lived there, or at least whoever decorated the place, was what I shall call a seeker. A big spirited person who was looking for anything and everything spiritual or out there or just plain weird.  This was not your standard issue “taste of country living”.  It didn’t take much spiritual discernment to notice the masks or the Buddha’s or the Egyptian pictures or any of the other spiritual icons strewed hither and yon.  There was no real rhyme or reason to any of the decorations.  Just a whole lot of spiritual stuff mixed in with totally random things like a stuffed fox and a stone plaque of a Mediterranean sailboat.

Now, I like curious places. They can spark your imagination.  I recently went to a curio shop in Utah and was captivated by a lot of the stuff they sold.  But there is a line that is easily crossed and the curious becomes dark and warped.  Looking at a house like the one we stayed in, I would not expect it to attract someone who expressed themselves conventionally.  It might be someone like me who could use it for righteous imaginative expression, but more likely someone whose inner world and journey matched the oddity of the house.

So, Joanna and I sat in the dining room that evening, nibbling on some dinner and taking in the environment around us. Or, rather, trying not to take in too much of it.  I don’t remember who brought up the topic first, but someone started us on what we felt in the house.  Joanna commented immediately on the air being heavy with incense and what that does to the spiritual atmosphere.  I commented that I was having trouble walking.  I would stagger like I was on a ship at sea.  We talked about that for a while until I could articulate that the energy and orientation of the place was really off, and that was why I was having trouble walking straight.  Wasn’t something I had experienced before, but now I have a bookmark for it, thanks to God’s careful planning!

That night we practiced the art of setting boundaries. We made it very clear that we had a legal right to be there, and our room was going to be a bastion of the light of God, thank you very much.  Then we both took a picture of the closet (literally) that was our bathroom and went to bed.  Well, I wrote some more in my journal and then went to bed.  Even a wonky house with wonky spiritual dynamics couldn’t dampen my high from the day.

We both slept pretty decently that night, which is saying something! But as we were getting ready to leave that morning, I noticed something was a bit off for Joanna.  She is far too much a road warrior for it to have been the micro-bathroom, so I knew it wasn’t that.  We had our breakfast and got packed up and headed out the door.  Once we were in the car, I ventured to ask how she was doing.  Sure enough, she wasn’t feeling her normal self and she wasn’t sure why.  Nothing had happened that she knew of.

Well … nothing had happened other than spending the night in a not-so-spiritually-nice place. So, we took care of it then and there.  We prayed and asked the Lord to disconnect and unplug us from the land, the house, the people and everything related to it.  Then we asked Him to clean us up, from head to toe, a good scrubbing to get all the slimy stuff off, and then closed out the prayer with blessings of HIS light on the owners and the guests and the land.  Boy, I would love to see that owner find God.  If he or she pursued Him with half the energy they were pursuing the other stuff, they would be one formidable force!

For Joanna, the difference was like night and day. She immediately felt the darkness lift and her mood improved considerably.  God gave us both a good lesson in discernment.  One of the most important things to remember is that the environment affects us and there are a whole lot of things we own as our own issue that may not be us at all.

I’d love to find a house like that someday and do it up right.