Satan's Layers: A Wanderer's Journey Back to the Lord

By Neal Frandsen

Satan's layers is like the smoke detector in the house. You really don't think about it until it goes off. Satan is a clever architect in trying to keep us from knowing and serving God. He consistently and methodically places layers of sin upon us in such a manner that years can go by before we notice just how much of an effect he has had in leading us astray. This book is the smoke detector hopefully sending a very loud alert to you that Satan is very busy placing those layers on your soul every day and it will not place your physical life in jeopardy, or perhaps could, but will place your eternal life with Jesus in jeopardy. So, react to the alarm and take measures to be safe. Satan's Layers tells of one Christian's journey away from, and back to, the Lord and hopes that his journey helps you start your journey back to the Lord as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098028824

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Satan's Layers

A Wanderer's Journey Back to the Lord

Neal A. Frandsen

Copyright © 2020 by Neal A. Frandsen

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Introduction

Oh Lord, my God, these layers are so heavy! My coat of sin is not a coat that I want to wear any longer. It has not kept me warm or safe. It hasn’t provided me comfort when I was lonely or sad. It hasn’t earned me compliments from my family, friends, or the people I work with. I’ll tell you what it has brought me. Depression, loneliness, futile anger, gossip mongering, jealousy, lust, and temptation, and that is only just a small microcosm of the despair the layers of sin have brought me (Ps. 38:4–6),

Lord Jesus, Jesus Christ my Father. Jesus Christ my Savior. It is you and only you that can work through me and shed these layers. These layers of sin that Satan has put upon me day after day, month after month, and year after year. But what Satan has placed, you, Lord, can remove. For you are most high and you are most loving and you are most forgiving. Please know my heart, my blessed Jesus. Know that I am ready in my heart to take the journey to shed the layers put there by Satan, aided and abetted by me.

I ask, Lord, to be with me while I take that journey, but that it be not only me that embarks upon this journey. I pray, sweet and forgiving Jesus, that others read how Satan has placed the layers on my shoulders and in my heart and the journey that led me to you, away from you, and back in your loving arms again. Lord, shed my layers!

When you read this book, it may not be what you are expecting in a Christian-based book. It is written in the manner of what people really go through before they know Jesus Christ and their struggles while knowing him. I may be direct in the way I tell of my journey, but I’m hoping it is one that will connect with people and help them understand that a journey with the Lord may not always be easy but it is one worth every second of any struggle.

For the sake of keeping friends and family members lives private, I have changed their names.

Chapter 1

God Who?

Growing up in my family in West Virginia, I knew there must be a God because every time my Dad got mad, he referenced God always followed by a word that began with a D. The truth be told, I never even thought about God being the Creator of our universe, the reason for my being, the compass of my life. I just thought God was another cuss word in my dad’s proficient profane vocabulary. Don’t get me wrong about my dad; he didn’t cuss incessantly, but he did cuss every day, and God always seemed to be his favorite cuss word when he as angry.

I grew up in a family with a mom and dad, two older sisters, and an older brother. My mom and dad never divorced, but we will talk about that later. My oldest sister, Jill, was three years older than me; my brother Tom, two years; and my sister Kimberly was one year older, which, of course, makes me the baby of the family. They might disagree, but it didn’t seem like I was treated like the baby by any means.

My father was raised in Iowa on a farm with two other brothers and two other sisters. He was raised by a hardworking, tough-in-spirit father who didn’t hesitate and hitting his kids with anything he could get his hands on if he was angry. He wanted his boys to be tough and strong, not afraid of hard work and not afraid of anyone else. That was the same way my dad raised my brother and me, but not on a farm but rather a house in Vienna, West Virginia.

My mother was raised in Hogsett, West Virginia. Like my dad, she was raised on a farm, but they grew tobacco and my dad grew corn. She had three sisters and a brother. Both of my parents’ parents never divorced.

I was told that my dad’s mother knew of God but didn’t attend church, and his father didn’t believe in God and never attended church. My mom was raised in a family that attended church every Sunday. As a matter of fact, her sister received an award for never missing a service for over thirty years. My mom’s attendance wasn’t as stellar.

When my dad, Joe, got out of the Army back in 1953, he followed a friend of his to West Virginia where his friend was raised. He went to work at a grocery store in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where he met a beautiful young woman who worked there. The woman, of course, was my mom, Rayla. He was rebuffed by her at first, but through determination and a love letter, he won her over and they were married a year later. What my mom didn’t know was that was the beginning of her journey away from Jesus. The same reason that you will read later was the beginning of my journey away from Jesus and the first layer that Satan placed upon me.

It wasn’t long after my mom and dad got married that they started having children. I don’t know for certain because it was never discussed with me how much my mom believed in God or how strong her faith was. What I do know is that once she fell in love with my dad, who did not believe in God at all, her journey away from Jesus began and she never found her way back.

God was so far from our family that I passed a Catholic church on my walk to elementary school every morning and I had no idea what it was. I just knew it had pretty windows. I also knew that man who ran the building lived in a big brick house across the street. It wasn’t until the later grades that I found out what it was. I also know that I cannot recall, not even one time, where God was discussed in our house with the exception to the reference my dad made when he was angry. I never saw a religious channel on TV, never went to church, and not until my teen years did I have a friend who mentioned God. Of course, I saw Westerns on TV that people went to church. Clint Eastwood saved a family that would have burned up in a church and fashioned a wood cross in the movie The Outlaw Josey Wales when the Red Legs killed his family. However, I couldn’t relate to what was going on and had no clue what all of that meant. I knew somewhere in my heart that when Clint put all his body weight on that Cross that it meant something, but what? I felt something in me, but I didn’t understand and spent little time thinking about what those feelings were about.

We would go to visit my grandmother Bessie on my mom’s side deep in the mountains of West Virginia. They lived on a big house on top of a hill with no indoor plumbing, and the smell of the wood burning stove was something I looked forward to smelling. My dad really didn’t like going there. He didn’t like my grandfather Joe who had one eye poked out with a pitchfork from a fight with his brother. My grandfather hardly ever spoke and just sat in a chair by the stove and smoked his own rolled cigarettes. That is something they shared. My dad was a smoker, and I remember them rolling cigarettes together and then sitting down smoking without speaking to one another. My mom usually was in the kitchen with her mom making a huge country dinner for us, which usually consisted of some runny mashed potatoes and one of the chickens my grandmother killed out in the yard.

Even though my grandmother and my mom’s sister, Oria, went to church every Sunday, whenever we would visit, God was still never talked about. I’m not sure if it was because they knew my dad was a nonbeliever or it was just not something they did. I do remember though a small 8 × 10 picture of Jesus hanging on the wall. The iconic one of Jesus that used to be hanging in most homes back then where he is kind of looking off toward something. Once, I asked my mom who that man was in the picture and she said, That’s Jesus. I then asked who Jesus was and she replied, Jesus is God, and then walked off. That was the end of that conversation.

That conversation left me a bit confused because I knew from watching my Saturday morning movies that the god Poseidon had something to do with the sea, and there was also Zeus and Venus, so if that man was God, he looked nothing like any of them. So, I concluded he must have been just another God, but God who? The god of what? It didn’t matter really to me at the time because by the time we drove back to Vienna, which was little over two hours from Hogsett, I had already forgotten about the man in the picture.

My early part of my childhood was really pretty normal where I would play basketball, build roads in the corner of my yard with my yellow Tonka truck, and I really loved playing with my toys in my room, which I had to share with my brother, Tom. I would take hours to lay out an extensive battle plan between my army soldiers and cowboys versus the Indians and the dinosaurs. After I strategically placed each toy just in the right spot, it was only then that the battle could commence. As I was doing this, Tom would barely open the bedroom door and peek in and then shut it. A little while later, he would do the same thing. I knew what he was up to because I had been through it many times before. He was waiting until I got further along in setting up my battle, which normally span from one wall to another, and then he would come in and kick over all the toys that I just spent two hours or so setting up.

That was one of two parts of my childhood that wasn’t normal. My brother Tom was the first and how vicious we fought. You hear stories of how two brothers fought with each other, which usually consisted of one maybe pushing the other or maybe a punch or two. Whenever Tom would kick over my battle, the fight was on. When I say fight, I mean a fight filled with so much violence it was a miracle we didn’t kill each other, and there were a couple of times where we came close. We would try to poke each other’s eyes out, bite each other, pick up whatever we could get our hands on, and swing for the fences at each other’s heads. The walls would shake from us bouncing off them because we made sure to use every inch of the bedroom to unleash as much pain on each other as we could.

The fights seemed like they lasted for hours but only lasted about five minutes before we would hear my dad stomping through his bedroom, which was adjacent to ours, fling open his door and then ours. He would grab the first one of us he could get his hands on and throw us up against the wall and then stomp on us whenever we hit the floor. The one who wasn’t getting the stomping was quickly trying to find a spot to position us to minimize the impact of my dad’s blows, but it really didn’t matter. The thunder of his discipline was to be feared. Once we both were thoroughly smashed like mashed potatoes, he would return to his room.

Now to show you how smart my brother and I were, sometimes we were so angry at each other that we couldn’t wait for my dad to leave so we could get pick up the fight where we left off and then the brawl resumed. This angered my dad even more, so if we weren’t bruised and battered enough already, my dad made sure the second chapter of education dished out had even more pages in it. That usually did the trick. Between beating on each other a couple of times and then get beat by my dad a couple of times pretty much did the trick, and my brother would go back to whatever it was he was doing before he decided to spark my ire. This even happened every Sunday for years and every Saturday, several evenings, and most of the time when my brother and I were near each other. Even though we knew that another fatherly tutorial was going to come at the end of it. That just toughened us up even more and conditioned us for the next round.

The other thing that wasn’t normal in my childhood was the bully, Matt. Despite that Tom and I were busy trying to exterminate one another, I was relatively happy. That all changed when I was in the middle of the second grade. One day I was walking home from Greenmont Elementary just up the street. I was with one of my friends, Mark, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around, all I saw was a big fist heading for my face. Not only was it heading for my face, it came in for a landing straight down the runway. It knocked me down flat on the concrete. It was Matt who I didn’t know much of who he was. Matt then jumped on top of me and proceeded to punch me repeatedly in the face until I was practically unconscious. When he was tired, he got up and laughed and then walked off. I walked home dazed and confused on what just happened. What did I ever do to him and why did he select me? I had never spoken to him before and our paths, as far as I knew, never crossed until then.

When I went to school the next day with my two black eyes, I found out that Matt was the school bully and supposedly the toughest kid in school. Now remember, this was West Virginia in 1970. If you got beat up in a fight, you were a laughingstock for a while and considered a little light in the loafers. The day when I returned, this kid Elroy, whom I did know of, came up to me and said he wanted to fight. He had heard what Matt had done to me and figured I was easy pickings. Well, Matt had surprised me and from the beating he gave me instilled within me a deep fear of him, but that didn’t mean I was foreign to fighting. After all, Tom had made sure he gave me practice at it several times a week. Elroy was from a poor family and he wasn’t a bright kid at all. He struggled in school, had poor hygiene, and used profanity like an artist. I accepted his challenge and met him after school that day. I made short work of Elroy and thought I made it clear to him that even though Matt used me for a punching bag that I wasn’t going to be Elroy’s punching bag.

After dismounting off Elroy’s chest, I proceeded to walk home, now close to that building with the pretty windows and there was Matt. My eyes got so big when I saw him standing there that I thought they were going to pop out of my head. Matt had a smile on his face and looked at me as though I was a T-bone steak fresh off the grill. It was only a matter of moments before Matt was adding another hue to the colors that already painted my eyes from the day before.

Of course, I told my mom and dad when I got home the first day and I told them again on the second day. After getting yelled at for fighting the first day and again on the second, I figured it wasn’t worth mentioning if it happened again.

Did I mention that Elroy wasn’t too smart? He was about as smart as my brother and I on Sunday mornings when my dad had to exercise his stomping routine on us whenever Tom wanted to spar. So, now on the third day, I was walking home from school and I just make the first turn right at the top of the small incline and there was Matt. This time, I put up my fist and tried my best to defend myself, but in the forefront of my mind was a tremendous fear from what he had done to me the two days before. That fear consumed me, and I seemed almost powerless to ward off the onslaught of punches that Matt delivered. Not much of a fight the first day, the second, and now the third. After Matt walked gleefully off down the street, I picked myself up and started to walk home, which meant I had to walk past Elroy’s house. When I got in front of Elroy’s house, there he stood with a kid named Mark, a different Mark from my friend Mark. However, this Mark would also later become my friend. Anyway, Elroy didn’t learn from the day before and he proceeded to challenge me to a fight. Full of embarrassment and rage from what Matt just did to me for the third time, I didn’t even reply in words. Just with my fists. Again, I made short work of Elroy and thought that would put an end to his stupidity. No, he was even more stupid than I had thought.

This day routine of a fight with Elroy and with Matt lasted every day from the middle of the second grade to the middle of the sixth. People were confused because they weren’t sure if I was a wimp from what Matt was doing or I was tough from what I did to Elroy. Naturally, that meant that the occasional kid who wanted to find out the answer to that puzzle would want to fight me. Some of those fights I won and some I lost. Paul and Ben I lost to, but I can’t remember losing any others, other than daily to Matt. I was so terrified of Matt that I would spend time on the weekends making tunnels in the bushes of some unsuspecting people’s yards so I could dive into them in case Matt would find me. So, times I would take the back way home, sometimes the normal way, sometimes the long way, and sometimes the middle way. No matter what way I used each day after school, Matt would seem to find a way to locate me and would beat the daylights out of me. I later learned that he had beat up other boys and used them as rats to run and tell me what route I was using to try to make it home. I would even go as far as jumping in the Ohio River and swim downstream to Fifty-First Street and then cut through the field to the back of my house. That didn’t work either because if I didn’t use one of my routes, Matt would just wait in that field and it was target practice again.

Sure, I repeatedly told my mom and my dad. My dad just thought I was a wimp and kept advising me