All my life I’ve heard of black magic, witchcraft, and spellcasting. Storybooks and fairytales present it as gnarly old women in long black dresses who kidnap little children and turn people into toads. Hollywood presents it as a cute little suburban housewife with a purple-clad mother, charmed sisters and beautiful Celtic ladies living in groves of trees or as wizards, waving wands, wearing robes and speaking words of enchantment.  

Well, here’s what it really is—the words and the power they carry over us IF, I mean ONLY IF, we believe them. Words are made of sounds. Spelling consists of sounds that make words. Words have power. They have power to create and destroy. We can speak life or we can speak death. We can speak blessings or we can speak cursings. No one has power over us and nothing they say can have power over us, unless we believe what they say. King Solomon once said that the power of life and death are in the TONGUE and Jesus said, “Be it unto you AS YOU BELIEVE.” In another place Solomon talks about that as a “man thinks in his heart, so is he.” Again, words only have the power that we give them by choosing to believe them or not believe them.

Sure there are people who try to put hexes on others (seriously, I’ve known people who try to do such things), who get into sacrifices and the illusion that they really can control others, and they can, if you let them intimidate you with the words and the fear that those words carry.

The “hexes” and “curses” that the old people here in Appalachia used to talk about are really words and the power they carried were the fear that people had of those words. Now-a-days we have the media trying to put hexes and curses on us instead of an eccentric old lady in a cabin way up the holler. They feed us a steady diet of fear and anxiety. Ha! Even the doggone weather report is delivered with “drama” and “flare” and a pinch of fear. I mean, sure if there’s an F-5 tornado coming toward you that’s one thing but when you get an alert on your phone when it’s sunny and 55 that says, “A news station ALERT has arrived!” What’s up with that?

When we let someone speak something over us that goes against our spirits and we believe them, that’s witchcraft. When someone controls our feelings with their words, we’re under their spell. Anything that causes us to believe or feel we are less than what God, The Almighty Source and Creator, the Great I Am, says about us is witchcraft and that, my friends, is what I call dark magic. It’s spellcasting. When someone says you’re not smart enough, pretty enough, talented enough, when you’re not brave enough or strong enough and you believe them, you’re under a spell. When someone speaks fear into your life, whether it’s the media, or doctors, or scientists, or the government, or teachers, or professors, or lawyers, or judges, or a neighbor or your best friend or the preacher, or the chief of your tribe or your parents or your spouse or…ANYONE! The only power anyone in this world has over us, is the power we give them.

Recently, a relative did something very nice for me. He looked at me as said, “I can see how excited you are.” He was beaming. “Oh, it makes me feel so good that I can make you happy.”

I realized a strange truth. He wasn’t happy because I was happy. He was happy because he thought he had exercised the power to “make” me happy.  To “make” someone feel a certain way implies that we have control over them.

I replied, “Well, actually, you can’t make me happy. Nobody has that kind of power over me. I appreciate what you did for me, and I thank you for it, but I’m happy because I choose to be happy.”

He said, “If I can’t make you happy then I’m going to be awfully disappointed.”

I smiled and said, “I just mean that people look for happiness outside themselves but it isn’t outside of us.” He didn’t get it. Most people I know in real life don’t get it. They look at me kind of like he did and go, “Huh?” I didn’t get it either once upon a time in my life. I’m learning to get it more each day.

If we believe that someone or something outside of ourselves has the power to make us happy, then we will automatically believe they have the power to make us unhappy. The only way this is true is if we give it to them.

The story of the sisters, Corrie and Betsie ten Boom, comes to my mind. They were in a Nazi concentration camp because at a time when their neighbors were turning Jews in to the authorities, the ten Boom family was secretly refusing to comply with the government’s dictates and running an underground railroad to get Jews to freedom. The girls and their father got caught. The Nazis killed their dad, but even in the face of starvation, abuse, freezing temperatures, flea infestations and the direst circumstances imaginable, Betsie would say, “There is no pit so deep that HE is not deeper still,” and “the best is yet to be.” Her spirit was so unquenchable that she let many people in that camp to know a love that passes all human understanding, some of them, just days before they were killed or dropped dead for hunger or cold. Eventually, Betsie herself died in that camp and Corrie, alone, lived to see the end of Hitler’s regime, but the light her sister shone infected her and never left her. Betsie ten Boom was thrown in a dark hole and died there but not before shining a great light on everyone around her and that great light changed her sister forever. Corrie found her calling in life because Betsie refused to let anyone, or anything have power over her. She believed the light even in the darkest of all places.

Shortly before my dad made his transition out of this temporal world he said to me, “A lot of people say a lot of things about William Henry, but it don’t matter what people say about me. It just matters what God says and He says He loves me.”

I just now remembered a thing that I once heard the great teacher, Wayne Dyer, say, “there are no justified resentments.” When we blame another for our miseries, we allow them to have power over us, we allow them to cast a spell on us.  

I, also love the story of David and Goliath. All those strong soldiers couldn’t face that giant, only a teenage shepherd boy who was apparently on the scrawny side could do it and he could do it because he refused to let anyone cast a spell on him. His brothers and all the soldiers of the Israeli army were intimidated by the giant’s boastful words and all the men he had killed in the past, men who had lost courage and hope in the face of this adversary, but here was this kid who was unfazed by what the giant said, unfazed by what his brothers said (they ridiculed him), unfazed by what the king said (David, boy, you’re gonna get yourself killed.) No one’s opinion of him could shake his connection to the I Am, his God, within him. He believed he was more than able to take on a giant. He believed that he was victorious. He believed that there was the only difference in the giant and the bear that had attacked his sheep was that the giant came out every day, spouting out words, drilling fear into the hearts of people.

In the same way, we face giants every day and like David, like Betsie ten Boom, like my daddy, we have the secret to overcoming if we remember that whatever anyone says about us that tears us down is black magic, spellcasting. We have to be like Gandalf, a wizard of the light, and that is accomplished by speaking the TRUTH. I AM WORTHY. I AM HEALED. I AM LOVED. I AM VALUABLE. I AM NOT AFRIAD. I AM FREE. The Apostle Paul once asked what can separate us from the love of God? Nothing. Once we realized how valuable we are, how loved and appreciated and accepted we are, no words hold any power over us, unless we let them.