The story thus far: Timo and his friends, Leena, and Anneli experienced a frightening supernatural encounter during a Bible study in Leena’s apartment. Anneli later explained that she had once practiced spiritism and at times was still harassed by evil spirits. However, when she was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist church, the demonic attacks stopped. Timo was an engineering student also preparing to be baptized. One night he was awakened by an eerie presence telling him, “Don’t get baptized.”

The nighttime warning didn’t prevent Timo from being baptized, and he went on to become an Adventist pastor. But his experiences with the supernatural and suicide didn’t stop.

One day, he and several other Adventist pastors boarded a ferry for an overnight trip to a pastors’ conference in Sweden.

That night, he was restless. After unsuccessfully trying to fall sleep, he
felt a sudden urgency to pray.

Almost as soon as he started to pray, he heard demonic laughter. The dreadful sound was indescribable, something like a maniac laughing. Timo sensed something bad was happening, but he didn’t know what. He prayed for two hours.

At breakfast, an older pastor approached Timo.

“What was going on with you during the night?” he asked. “The Holy Spirit told me to pray for you.”

He had been woken in the middle of the night and prayed for Timo.

Then another pastor came to the breakfast table.

“You don’t know what happened to me last night,” he said. “I woke up and felt a huge urgency to go outside for some fresh air. When I reached the deck, I saw a man about to jump into the sea.”

The pastor coaxed the man back onto the deck and counseled him for an hour afterward not to kill himself.

When the three pastors compared the timing of their nighttime experiences, they realized that all three had occurred simultaneously.

Timo, now 45 and the communication director for the Adventist Church in Finland, sees the three encounters with suicide and the supernatural as evidence that the great controversy between Christ and Satan is very real.

“It is taking place all around us,” he said. “The encouraging thing is Jesus
has already won. We have nothing to fear. Even with these supernatural and terrifying events, Jesus still protects us. There is nothing the other side can do.”