She was asking me what I thought it was. I was kind of busy, so I asked a few questions like, “When did it first appear?” She thought a moment and replied, “The last time we killed roosters. These roosters were a nuisance, killing the chickens and causing problems, so I just killed them and offered them up as a sacrifice to whoever.”

An alarm bell went off in my spirit. For one thing, it was October and very close to Halloween. I told her that Satanist offer sacrifices, and especially at this time of the year. By offering the sacrifice to “whoever”, she had invited, as many people unknowingly do, the wrong spirit into her life. I explained how Jesus died and shed his blood to protect us from Satan, and that when we offered a blood sacrifice of any kind, we were negating the blood of Jesus and saying it was not enough. Also, we gave up the protection provided by the blood of Jesus, and the enemy was able to come into our lives to cause problems. I went on to say that the devil walks about as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, and when we unknowingly do things like that, we open a door for him to enter our lives. She said, “That’s it, that’s what it sounded like, a lion!”

That might be the end of the story, but it isn’t. On the way home from work that Friday, I was able to think, and I remembered how a week or two before, I had walked out of my home and the hair on my neck stood up. I had the weirdest feeling something was watching me, and as I looked into the woods surrounding my home, I thought, “Something’s out there”. For a moment, I was afraid. But then I remembered the blood of Jesus, what it did for me, and I refused to be afraid. I used the name of Jesus and commanded it to leave, then thought no more about it. I knew it could not harm me because I was protected. It was such a passing thing that it had slipped my mind.

However, it may have backed off into the woods and hung around a few more days, even though it had lost any power to harm me or my family, because I heard it too. My husband heard it. We even discussed it, and I asked him what it was. We’ve lived in the woods all our lives, and he’s very good at recognizing sounds, but he didn’t know what that one was. And something else was the way our cats acted. They spend a lot of time inside, but always go outside to do their business. But they wouldn’t go outside. They would stand in the door when it was opened, then run back inside. Or if they made it as far as the screen porch, they would stare at the woods, then run back inside. My husband finally went outside with them. They did what they needed to do and came straight back in. This continued for a day or two, then stopped.

Now back to my co-worker. She lives about two miles through the woods from me. A lot of questions come up. Did it leave me and go to her? Was it just because she lived close by? Or did it know our association through work? There are a lot of things in this life that we may never have answered.

Something similar has happened to me before. Read “The Cartoon Creature” to learn more. The cats knew then too.

The next day my mom called me and said, “I’ve got something to tell you”. And I said, “I know, the cat died”. She couldn’t believe I already knew!

Then several years later, it happened again when my stepfather died. He had died in an automobile accident and my mother was having a hard time. This roadrunner spoke the same message the first one had: I’m still very much alive, be happy.

And again very recently. This time I didn’t know the person had died because I was on vacation. And actually, they hadn’t died yet, they were in a coma. I saw two roadrunners on that trip and both times wondered who had died. When I returned to work after the break, the person in the coma died, and I remembered the roadrunners.

Now I won’t even begin to infer the meaning of this, but there’s something about seeing a roadrunner that has to cheer you up. And as a warning, it isn’t a very scary thing. All I can say is, when I see a roadrunner, someone has died. The roadrunner was a very comforting thing, a reassurance that life goes on.

But about a week later, it happened again except this time I saw the creature running around and around my house like it was looking for a way in. I could have excused it away as another dream or bad lasagna except for one thing: The cat on my bed started growling and the cat outside started clawing to get in. That made me wonder, if the animals sensed it, something about it was real.

And then one morning going to work I had a fit of road rage. Someone got right on my bumper with their lights shining into my mirrors. They followed me like that until I changed lanes (which I couldn’t do before because of all the traffic). Once they passed me, I got really angry and began tailgating them. I did this for several miles and then I kind of came to myself. That was completely out of character for me. Road rage was something I had worked on and overcame several years earlier. Where had that come from?

So I got to asking myself questions: What did this series of events mean? Were they related? And this is what came to my mind: Lately I’d been spending some time on a pagan website, visiting at their forum. I’d been having some talks with one of them about Christianity that were getting rather heated. He did not like Christians and talked about all the things that were wrong with the Christian religion. And he was correct on some points, there has been much damage done over the years in the name of all religions, Christianity included. While I could not dispute his claims, I did my best to explain what true Christianity is supposed to be, and all I could say to him was that I was much better at living it than explaining it.

So how are these two events related? This is what I think: I said I was good at living the Christian life. That creature was something sinister, a spiritual being. It was running around my house looking for a way in. He was looking for something wrong in my Christian life that would allow him in to attack, a chink in my armor, an opening in my wall of protection. He looked friendly, like a familiar cartoon character from my childhood, but actually, he was the wolf in the Red Riding Hood story, seeking to destroy me. Although the conversation I was having with the young man had the outward appearance of a friendly exchange, in actuality it was anything but friendly. His attacks against me were so violent; the other pagans had to intervene. I then examined my motives, why was I visiting their forum? And I won’t go into the reasons, but I will say they were all self-serving. I was clearly in the wrong because I was out for me.

Because my motives were wrong, because I was out for what I could get from the relationship, the negative spirits I had been associating with had attached themselves to me. What you give your attention to is what you become. I had been spending more time with the pagans than with my God and in so doing, had opened a door for the enemy to come in.

I quickly corrected the situation by stopping the visits to that website and asking God to forgive me for my wrong motives. The cartoon creature has not returned.

Fast forward 3 or 4 years, and I had moved to a different state. I was lying in bed one night, just settling in, and I felt something jump up onto my bed. It reminded me of how it felt when my cat Tiger used to jump up on my bed. I couldn’t see anything, and I felt pretty scared. I laid very still and asked, “Are you my cat Tiger? If you are, touch my leg.” I felt a touch on my leg. I was very surprised, I didn’t really expect that, but I relaxed and went to sleep.