I Don't Want to Die! I don't Want to Die by being Hung with a Rope!

I was falsely accused. A sheriff was out to get me and out to get me he did. He did everything he could to get me under his control. He lied. He lied so much it became truth to him and those he served. I was arrested and put under his authority. He did not stop there he wanted me dead. He convinced the people of the town I deserved death and so they agreed. A few people didn’t believe this sheriff and fought for my freedom, relentlessly. I could see their compassion in their eyes but oh, this sheriff was far too powerful or so he thought.

It was decided, I would have death by hanging and he was 'kind enough' to come in and tell me what exactly would happen, both he and his deputies. However, I did not fear I trusted Father to help me for I knew the truth and I knew no matter what, my God would come through for me.

I was falsely accused and the people believed the accusations. It broke my heart because I would no longer get to see the people who cared so much for me and fought so hard for my freedom. Vileness and despair was forever seething from this sheriff about me.

They brought out the gallows but it was different from a full-sized gallows. I had to stand on a dark wooden bench AND somehow get hung. The deputies were all laughing and going on about how horrible this death would be for me but I trusted Father to save me or give me strength to see Him reveal Himself through the hanging, whether by saving me or simply giving me courage to endure the rope and situation. The deputies were telling me that my eyes would pop out and if I didn’t want that to happen I needed to close my eyes really tight which would hold my eyes in my sockets, so I held them tight.

All of a sudden, I felt something so surreal, I could sense what was happening but it didn’t seem like it was. I had been hung and left dangling on the rope, still alive. I could hear what was going on around me. I wouldn’t die. I thought I was dead and my spirit was experiencing life around me, but it was actually my body experiencing everything, yet I was not dead.

I wasn’t moving so they thought I was dead and released me to the coroner. They took me down from the rope and laid me on the floor for the coroner to come and take care of me. I could still smell, hear, and feel but I was so still. I thought, “It has happened, I am now dead,” for when I was falling from being hung, I could feel the pressure of the rope around my neck. I could feel pain shooting through my body and I could sense I was not breathing. However, I still felt alive but in a different place, a hazy, yet spiritual-type of place where I could even see what was going on around me without my eyes being open.

There was friend who stayed with me to the end along with the deputies. The coroner said death by asphyxiation/hanging, but I was still alive. I was still in my body even though I was in a slump lying on the floor. The coroner took me for my autopsy. As we entered the autopsy room, the others there were finishing up with a burn victim. As the victim was being moved, one of the doctors came over to see me all slumped on the floor. I was not placed on a lovely clean cot, I had been dragged there and left in a pile because the sheriff had convinced most on his force that I was the worst of offenders, yet he never would say the charges against me aloud. It was amazing to me that people would believe him without any actual crimes stated.

I kept thinking to myself, “I am alive, I am alive, and they have to know I am alive before they start cutting me open and thereby really killing me.” As they were moving the burn victim from the table it was on to another place, the doctor was looking at me and I forced my eyes open just a sliver. The doctor nearly fell backwards with fright, alarming the people who were moving the burn victim. They dropped the burn victim to the floor and the entire body split to chunks in a three-foot area from where it fell.

“Good,” I thought, “they saw me; they knew I was still alive and surely they would help me”. This was not the case, for the sheriff had been successful at turning their minds against me as well. An immediate phone call was placed to the sheriff and he arrived quickly. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, spewing out his disbelief and anger. He spoke rashly with vile words of death to me. You see, there was absolutely nothing else he could legally do to me now, death by hanging was my sentence, but I could only be hung once. He was fuming and pacing trying to figure out what could be done. He determined he would take my body and put me in an old abandoned barn and let me rot there until death took me.

That is exactly what he did. He found an abandoned barn and threw me in the center of it with no covering, no blankets, nothing. He left me there to die an awful, slow, painful death. It felt like death was coming every day for I had nothing to neither eat nor drink. No one came to care for me for he had placed me there in secret. I could barely move and so I didn’t. I breathed shallow breaths all the while with my mind I thanked Jesus for keeping me alive. For that is what I was – alive.

I wasn’t in a surreal place any longer I was in my actual body not on the outside looking in. When hanging it was as though I had been allowed to see everything that was going on with minimal pain and only a sense of what was really happening. It was as though I could see without opening my eyes, as if I was in a daydream, but a real daydream.

I saw with my own eyes slightly cracked open the barn walls with small slots just big enough to allow the golden sunshine come in and warm me as I lay on the hay in the middle of the barn. It felt and seemed as though all the spaces between the wallboards were casting sunlight upon me. I was so weak and frail. I couldn’t move. It seemed like days on end and no one was around to check on me, for dead I was.

Somehow though, my friend found me. He scooped me up in his arms and took me to a secret place where he could tend to my severe wounds and needs. He didn’t talk to me but I could feel the love, gentleness, compassion and warmth flowing from him right into me just by him being in the same room with me and then even more so when he touched me. 

I had lain so long on my right side in the barn, pain started to overcome me. Being in this man’s presence, I began to feel pain, true overwhelming pain, I hadn’t felt before. I was in agony but not the kind of pain that I would cry out for death to take me. The suffering from this pain was the kind I knew I had to feel and sense in order to recover. I was beginning to feel for real, I was no longer just sensing my surroundings from the outside looking in I was seeing my surroundings and feeling them, seeing and experiencing them from the inside out. I was healing. I was being made whole.

I began to sit and move in ways I hadn’t moved in so long, it seemed like an eternity since my limbs were utilized. Slowly and methodically, I started to use them. My friend told me the sheriff was dead which was hard for me to believe. My friend also told me the sheriff had died in his old age. Reality hit me hard for I finally became aware that I had been suffering in that barn for years and years, then into the care of my friend for years as well.

I was happy to hear the sheriff was dead but my friend reassured me that the original deputies and new deputies were still around and knew my story. I needed to move far away from their grasp. My friend shared with another friend that he had found me and had been taking care of me for some time but that it was time for me to relocate and begin a new life.

They had to stuff me in the trunk of a car for there were roadblocks and checkpoints when leaving that area. We were stopped at one of the checkpoints and the officers opened the trunk and I got out but it was as though they couldn’t see me. We got the ok to leave, so I tucked myself back in the trunk and we set off for my new life.

We arrived at my new home and were reacquainted with friends of old who had longed to see me. I was not the same in body or spirit for what I had gone through had changed me inside and out as well as outside in, but people still knew me. I hadn’t yet seen my face and had wondered if my eyes or eye had popped out. I also wondered if I was really seeing or only imagining seeing things, as I wanted, for my senses had become so heightened during this tumultuous time.

I looked into the mirror, my face had been totally changed, and I was no longer the same neither on the outside nor on the inside. I wasn’t what some would call ugly but I was different. I looked like I had lived a hard life, bumped and bruised, but alive. The left side of my face was swelled and it seemed my cheekbone was higher as well as my eye. "How could I not look different from all I had gone through, all the torture and harsh punishment I received," I asked myself. I was seeing myself for the first time, far from anything the world would consider lovely, but I saw one who had been marred and mauled by an onslaught of attacks from vicious people. There was nothing lovely about me; I was very plain, very peaceful.

Days grew into weeks and I found myself becoming antsy and even short with my friends who were caring and watching out for me. They warned me to be careful for I was getting to a dangerous point of no return in thinking to highly of myself. I would go about the house saturating myself in the ‘pretties’ that were there just for me. Once they told me though, I became devastated. I started grasping at everything in the house, everything I thought to be of great value. I didn’t want to be who I was becoming, so I cried out, while clinging to the curtains screaming, “Jesus, I don’t want to be this way. Forgive me, heal me, and take me from myself." I called to Him and He answered.

You see, He had been with me all along. He was the one Who saw me being falsely accused. He was the one Who found me in the barn. His friend was Holy Spirit Who was right beside Him healing, comforting, forming, and caring for me. The other friends who came to visit me were all the beautiful aspects of Jesus, God and Holy Spirit.

This dear friends, was the dream I woke from this morning. I believe Holy Spirit kept prompting me to get up. Get up I did and started typing. 

Who/what are the ''sheriff's'' in your life? How about the deputies? 

Are you in a situation so deep that it seems you are dead, but really you are just barely hanging on with little breath?