By Nile Hosni –
As a Navy SEAL, Chadd Wright knew how to fight every kind of enemy and use every kind of weapon – until he faced off with a ghost.
“This barracks that we were staying in was inhabited by a demon. I was not a Christian,” Chad tells on a Resilient podcast. “Something hit my door and jolted me awake from sleep. In the middle of the night, I could hear voices echoing up and down the hallway. I was freaked out. We got to the point where we were not sleeping at night.”
How to deal with this adversary? he wondered. Chadd wound up calling a pastor of his brother, who was Christian. The pastor prayed through the cell phone. The ghosts went away.
“Okay, there is some power here,” he thought at the time. “I understand warfare and this was some sort of enemy or entity that I didn’t understand how to combat or how to fight against. This guy did it and he was praying in the name of Jesus.
“I got my hands on a Bible man because I’m no fool.”
Chadd Wright became a Christian. Today, he’s an ultra runner, motivational speaker and inspirational husband.
Raised in the backwoods of Georgia, Chadd sports a hillbilly beard (now that he’s out of the SEALs) and a hillbilly accent. Born in the Bible Belt, he knew about Christianity but didn’t pay too much attention to it.
Out of high school, he found out about the Navy SEALs and, wanting to do something and be someone, signed up. The first obstacle? He didn’t know how to swim and the SEALs were originally formed to swim underwater to place explosives on enemy ships.
Once he learned to swim, he entered the Navy and passed basic training with flying colors.
But before he could enter the advanced training of BUD/S, doctors found a pericardial cyst on his heart.
Under extreme duress, it could be a problem. It wasn’t enough of a problem for the Navy to operate, but it was too much of a problem for him to be admitted to BUD/S training.
Chadd was crushed, his hopes and dreams ground down to sand. He could take a desk job in the Navy or get out. He opted out.
To return home a failure in that small town was more than he could bear. Even though everybody told him not to do it, he went to the Roadhouse Cafe dressed in his Navy blues just to (try to) feel like a success.
After some weeks of depression and deliberation, he hatched a plan. With 100% support of his mother, Chadd submitted to an elective surgery to get the pericardial cyst fixed. There were no guarantees that the surgery would work. There were no guarantees that the Navy would give him a second chance.
The only guarantee was the humongous medical bill.
But this was his dream.
The surgery was a success, the recovery good and the Navy positive. On try #2, he made it through BUD/S.
It is the most gruelling soldier-building on the planet. BUD/S trains body, mind, emotions.
It does not train spirit.
BUD/S graduates win firefights, fistfights and fearfights. But they don’t win the battle against alcohol. In fact, drinking, womanizing and even drug use are considered par for the course to the most interesting man in the room.
And Chad fell into drinking. Lots of drinking. Along with the other stuff.
“I had no other purpose but to perform at work in some capacity and then to get off and go find different women to sleep with and get hammered drunk and act a fool,” Chadd says. “I didn’t realize where that was taking me. It was taking me to a bad place. On deployment, my sin followed me. I was showing up for work just in a haze and emotionally numb.”
But when the pastor prayed away the ghost (demon) in the barracks, Chadd got a Bible and began reading. He accepted Jesus all by himself.
“When I woke up the next morning, I was a completely different human being,” he says. “The Lord came into me and made me a new creation. Salvation is the greatest miracle you will ever witness on the face of the Earth.
“I was a hell-raiser. I was a violent person, but when Jesus came to live in me, he just completely changed me.”
He had married but saw his wife infrequently because of the nonstop deployments and trainings. When he came home from deployment in 2012, he realized she was spiraling out of control with drug use. (They got together when he was living loose and wild himself.)
“I realized that my wife is in the very late stages of drug addiction,” he says. “I am surprised that she did not die before I got home.”
Because of Jesus, his career was the SEALs was back on track. But if he deployed again, he was sure she would overdose. He walked into his commanding officer and asked to be assigned locally – a petition to which he acceded.
Chadd circled the house praying for her, and eventually she sought help in a rehabilitation center. Brooke received Jesus in 2013 and got baptized.
“Christ has loved us that’s how we’re supposed to love our wives, which is sacrificial love,” he says, referring to Ephesians 6. “As a husband, you are supposed to die for your wife.”
Today Chadd is a motivational speaker and ultra runner. He leads a ministry called 3 of 7 Project.
