Scott and Laura - secret sins

My wife and I had been seeking to draw closer to Yahweh for many years. We lived in one of those old 1940's houses in a quiet West Seattle neighborhood. We had a very good friend living with us, a man in his mid-40's renting a room at the front of the house. After having had some very poor experiences with people living with us in the past, we felt blessed to have him with us, and still to this day consider him the best renter we ever had.

Our son, age three at the time, had been having nightmares. We wanted these to stop, and we had prayed many times for him, and had always prayed with him before bed at night. We felt led to anoint the house and property with oil as a result of our prayers.

It was a warm, sunny Monday morning, about 10 o'clock, when we began preparing for it, immediately after praying that morning and feeling our heavenly Father speak to us to do so. We got a very large mixing bowl and put a pint or so of olive oil in it. We picked out a large wooden basting brush and headed out the door, all three of us together to begin. We were quite surprised at what we found.

Outside as we walked out, we saw someone at every house on the normally quite, apparently deserted neighborhood. There was even the sick old man down the street out to sit in the sun with his oxygen tank equipped wheelchair. We saw at least one person at each of the 20 houses on the block. We began with an audience.

We put great dollops of oil on every window and doorway on the exterior of the house, on all the property lines, at each corner. We anointed every detail of the roof, like vents, the chimney, any opening we could find. We anointed our car in the driveway. When we returned inside, we anointed the door to our renter's room. We hadn't told him a thing about this, as he had been gone to work at a construction site many hours earlier.

We put things away and felt good about it. We then went about our busy schedules.

Our son's nightmares ceased.

Our renter did not return before we went to bed the night we anointed our house. The next morning he still hadn't returned. And the next. About three days later I was awakened in the middle of the night by a noise, and went to investigate. Our renter had returned. Immediately he told me that for some reason he just couldn't live with us any longer and was moving out. I was shell-shocked. The next day we had a tearful farewell with our beloved renter.

Months passed, and we later heard from our former renter. He had been dabbling in certain sins and had to go get help to deal with it. It was then that we told him the story of anointing the house with oil. He thanked us for doing it, as it drove him to deal with some internal things, and he hadn't dreamed that his problems would impact our son as they had.

-Scott