Waiting for Asthma

I've been thinking about the past quite a bit lately. Several days ago I went through a few breathing tests to help determine if I have asthma. (Next month I will see the doctor and, hopefully, get a definitive answer either way.)

Mom's asthma was pretty bad in the late 80's and early 90's. I remember her and Dad talking a lot about her breathing and the various medications she took for it. At one point, I even remember Mom telling us that she was having trouble breathing because we were following God and that made the people on Satan's side very angry. I don't know if this is something my parents said or if it was made up by my imagination  in order to comprehend why Mom was sick, but for a time I believed that she had asthma because a witch had put a spell on her.

Oddly enough, this belief didn't frighten me. I don't remember being worried about the rest of us being en-spelled. It was simply part of life as I knew it.

What did unsettle me, though, was the Charismatic prohibition against any sort of secular media that talked about the supernatural or magic.  I believed that a) witches were real, b) they had real, often dark, powers, and c) one of them had once put some sort of spell on my mother. This was my reality. And while one could talk about these things in a church setting, it was _not_ ok to read a fictional story or watch a fantasy movie in which this exact scenario took place. Even though no one was actually harmed in the latter while someone very dear to me was most definitely harmed in former.

I could not understand why one would fear words written on a page, or actors repeating lines from a script on a stage or in front of a camera. I was 7, 8 ,9, but I knew the difference between a story that was made up in someone's head and a story about real people, real events.

This contradiction led me to my first (small) act of rebellion against what I had been taught. I will share that story in my next post. :)