This is the story of someone who could have been your sister, daughter, or granddaughter—someone who grew up as a typical young American woman with all the bright hopes and expectations to which any young lady has a right. But she got caught in a trap, a trap laid carefully by an enemy she didn't know was there and certainly didn't know how to counter.

Our society is being used by this enemy to produce people like Laurie once was, people who are feeling discouraged and powerless, looking for meaning anywhere they can find it. Many Americans no longer believe in the invisible dark angels who populate Satan's kingdom and, therefore, we fall easy prey to them as they quietly take advantage of our attitudes and the structures of the society around us. We are morally and spiritually adrift, disillusioned with the satisfactions provided by the basic institutions of our society—science, government, business, education, our legal system, even church.

We are, therefore, sitting ducks for the enemy's schemes as he uses those around us to promise us the things we think we want: power, position, and whatever else will feed our self-interest.

As a member of this kind of society, Laurie Wallace was set up for just such promises. She was not a bad person. She was only looking for what she had been promised. And she became a victim produced by a society which offers few answers that work and even fewer that satisfy. She knew Christ, but her Christianity had become dull and lifeless and she had not been properly warned by her church about the enemy who, though sometimes he "roams around like a roaring lion" (I Peter 5:8), can also disguise himself as an "angel of light" (II Corinthians 11:14).

So Laurie, like many of her generation, wandered into dangerous places, looking for meaning, listening to promises, seeking enough power to attain goals she had been led to expect she deserved. And she, like too many of our young people, soon became caught in a web she could not see, serving a master she didn't even know was there.

Although she—part consciously, mostly unconsci­ously—chose against God, He never gave up on her. She had not completely lost her ability to discern right from wrong, so in her moment of triumph, just when by using the enemy's power she was accomplishing what she most wanted, she allowed herself to hear God's voice. But the enemy's evil web was strong and she was well tangled up in it. By drawing on the power of Satan's demons to get what she wanted, Laurie had given them an incredible amount of power over her, so it was literally a life-and-death struggle from that point on to work with God to extricate herself from their clutches. But she and God won.

Laurie's story has a happy ending. It points, however, to a very sad situation. The enemy who entrapped Laurie is still on the loose and our society is still producing unwitting victims by the thousands. Yet our churches, though endued with the power of Christ to defeat the Evil One, are still ignorant both of the enemy's devices and of how to rescue those still caught in his web.

May this volume be used by God to wake us up both to the problem and to the solution. Our sisters, daughters, brothers, and sons are too valuable, both to God and to us, for them to have to go through what Laurie went through.