Beyond Doubt: A Supernatural Journey to WAR Against Broken Hearts

By Martha Rich

The most devastating and humbling reality a parent can experience is the death of a child. After Martha Rich's mother-in-law passed away in the late afternoon and her teenage son, William, failed to arrive home for the planning of his grandmother's memorial service, she knew something wasn't right. When the police rang Martha's doorbell at 2:30 a.m. to inform the family that William had died instantly in a head-on collision, she became aware of a presence of energy so close to her that her scalp tingled. The spirit of her son is the switch that turned this story on, and she is the circuit that carries it, but the real power lies in the miracle of life without end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644586648

Book preview

Chapter 1

Broken Wings

The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and the other begins.

—Edgar Allen Poe

Sunday, October 13, 1996

We had slept in later than usual. My husband, Bill, was ready to go out for breakfast. While waiting for me to finish dressing, he watched the local news. The top story of the morning was about the thousands of pilgrims that were flocking to a site in Conyers, Georgia, where it was claimed that miracles were taking place on the thirteenth of each month. The news reporter was comparing the current story with Our Lady of Fatima where on October 13, 1917, a miracle took place in Fatima, Portugal. (To read the web-history about Our Lady of Fatima and the Miracle, go to:

http://www.medjugorjeusa.org/lourdes.htm

I mention to Bill that I would still like to go visit the local site. I had talked before about going, but Bill was never interested in driving the sixty miles and certainly not when the masses of people would be there. He and I viewed those kinds of things quite differently. Bill was a straightforward personality type, firmly believing that mysterious things have a logical explanation. And besides, we’re not Catholics, he said. Why do you want to go?

The discussion continued as we drove to the restaurant. Bill finally conceded that denominational belief had little to do with faith and miracles. He added, Nothing like that has ever happened to me and until it does I remain skeptical.

I was thinking to myself that surly he remembers what we had lived through just three short years earlier. I began to think back with gratitude at how we had miraculously endured and survived a brush with the dark side.

The following is an introduction to our nineteen-year-old son, William, and the events during the two to three years prior to October 13, 1996:

William, also called Will, was the youngest of our six children. He had turned down our invitation to join us for breakfast on that morning of October 13. Will, his Dad and his older brother, Brian, had almost completed the restorations on his vintage Camaro, and he was anxious to show it off. He had already made plans to meet up with friends at a ballpark. William also knew that afterward we would go to the nursing home to visit his grandmother. William had always been tender-hearted. His eighty-nine-year-old grandmother’s health was swiftly declining, and it bothered him to see her so frail. He knew that it was only a matter of time before we would make the journey to Arizona to deliver her remains for burial next to Grandpa.

Although William was handsome, intelligent, and well liked, he was also emotionally fragile. He isolated himself much of the time. Yet acceptance by his peers was important to him. He would literally give a friend the shirt off his back if the friend liked his shirt better than his own. Once he even got into trouble with the authorities for going to the aid of a friend in a dubious situation. William always insisted that he had to stand by a friend. On several occasions, kids that were running away or had gotten into trouble found their way to our house because they felt they could trust William. Fortunately, those situations resolved themselves without serious consequences.

Prior to Will’s sixteenth birthday, we vacationed in Washington, D.C. William was compassionate and generous. The thing that most impressed him was the vast population of homeless people living around our nation’s capital. It disturbed him to see people rummaging through trash for food, but he was more bewildered that the majority of tourist and business people did not seem to notice. He ended up giving his spending money to the street people.

It wasn’t until after Will’s sixteenth birthday that I began to see changes in him that were beyond anything that I could ever have imagined. He became paranoid and obsessed with death and dying as an alternative to a mundane life. Once I actually observed William when I presumed he was hearing voices. I attempted to get him to talk about what he was experiencing, but he was unyielding. You won’t believe it, he firmly judged.

As a registered nurse, I recognized the signs of a possible disorder so I had him admitted to a hospital for medical and psychological evaluation. There were no medical disorders found, and the psychiatrist dismissed him with a diagnosis of atypical depression. As it turned out that was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

William began to speak about the dark side as if it were an individual. We eventually learned that he had been introduced to a satanic cult. Two nineteen-year-old acquaintances that he met at the mall influenced William. More disturbing was the fact that an adult from an upscale neighborhood, the father of one of those young men, sponsored the occult and gave William a satanic bible. William’s curiosity and fragile personality caused him to be especially vulnerable. He saw or experienced something truly frightening, but he revealed very little to me about the occult. He would say, "Mom, you don’t want to