It’s not just sitting in a pew. From New Age to Jesus: My Story.

No one ever really told me about Jesus.

I heard people make fun of Him growing up. I heard His name used casually, carelessly, sometimes even mockingly. I went to church on Easter Sundays. I attended Vacation Bible School a few times as a child, and once in middle school. But I did not understand who Jesus really was.

To be honest, I kind of rolled my eyes at it all.

I thought Christianity was church on Sundays. I thought it was knowing scriptures, tithing, dressing a certain way, acting perfect, and maybe saying a few prayers when life got hard. I did not understand that real faith is not a religious performance.

Real faith is the strongest asset a person can have in this life.

Stronger than reputation. Stronger than approval. Stronger than the opinions of any person on this earth.

When you truly belong to Christ, your confidence changes. The world’s approval loses its grip. You stop living to please everyone. You start wanting to please God.

And not because you are terrified of Him in some cold, religious way.

Because you love Him.

You do not want to sin because you care about Him. You do not want to disrespect someone you love. You begin to understand that obedience is not punishment. Obedience is love.

Some people give Christians a bad name. But honestly, I could say that about any group of people. Atheists. Religious people. Men. Women. Humanity as a whole. There are broken people everywhere.

But real Christianity is not about pretending to be better than people.

It is about knowing you desperately need Jesus.

It is about having a prayer life. It is about relationship. It is about surrender. It is about letting God change you from the inside out.

And when you first get curious about God, I believe the enemy starts sweating.

The Bible says in Ephesians 6:12 that we do not wrestle against flesh and blood. That means our real battle is not just with people, opinions, bad days, betrayal, temptation, anger, or stubborn hearts. There is a spiritual battle happening too.

Of course people make us angry. Of course we mess up. Of course we deal with our own hard hearts, attitudes, wounds, bad habits, and mistakes. But I also believe evil is real. I believe there are demonic spirits that work through darkness, destruction, manipulation, abuse, deception, and confusion.

When we come to Christ, we need to understand that we have to be equipped.

We need spiritual discernment. We need prayer. We need the Word of God. We need to understand that the enemy has studied humanity for a long time. Just like a football team studies the plays of its opponent to prepare its own strategy, we need to know how the enemy works.

Not because we are afraid.

Because we are not ignorant.

I have grown so much over the last year that it is almost unbelievable. Looking back, I think I always had a hunger for God, even when I did not know what to call it. I was always the kid asking why. I was curious about spiritual things from a young age.

But that curiosity did not always lead me toward God.

As a child, I remember checking out books about Wicca from the library. I watched shows like Bewitched and Sabrina the Teenage Witch and thought it would be amazing to have powers. Around 2015, I got deeper into the occult and New Age spirituality.

At the time, I still had Jesus “in my back pocket.” I said a few prayers. I probably would have assumed I was saved. But something else was pulling me in another direction.

I became fascinated with crystals. I remembered playing with an Ouija board as a kid and hearing scary stories about what happened to people who used them. I thought there was no way any of that was actually real.

I was wrong.

I got into New Age practices. I bought sage. I remember moving into my home and saging it from corner to corner, half hoping my neighbors would see me and think I was a witch so maybe they would be afraid of me.

That alone shows where my heart was. I was not operating from peace. I was operating from fear, control, and pride.

I signed up for classes to learn Reiki. My mom and I even went to see Sylvia Browne years ago, hoping she would give us a message from a loved one who had passed. But she was in a huge stadium, mentioned her book constantly, and we left disappointed.

Later, I found out about Sylvia Browne being on the Montell William’s show. She had told Amanda Berry’s mother (one of the three women rescued in Cleveland, Ohio after being kidnapped and missing for a decade) that Amanda was dead, but Amanda was later found alive. Her mother died before knowing her daughter was still alive.

That broke my heart. It also confirmed something for me.

False spiritual authority can destroy hope.

I got deeper into energy work. And I will be honest: I believe some of it worked. That is part of what made it so convincing.

I studied Reiki. I had my own studio in a downtown area where I used to live. I learned more levels of it. I did energy work on myself. I felt what seemed like energy moving through my body, I would describe it as a magnetic pull or like a cloud moving through my body. I even practiced from a distance on someone hundreds of miles away, and he said his shoulder pain felt better.

I was convinced.

But now I believe this: just because something works does not mean it is from God. And thinking back, when one gets attuned to Reiki, the master draws symbols on your hands and it has to be passed down, and it was definitely not of God. I was even told point blank that the Japanese lied to the American’s saying Jesus did it.

Second Corinthians 11:14 says Satan masquerades as an angel of light. That verse matters because darkness does not always look dark at first. Sometimes it looks peaceful. Sometimes it looks healing. Sometimes it looks like light, love, energy, intuition, empowerment, or ancient wisdom.

That is what makes deception dangerous.

New Age practices did not seem demonic to me at the time. I thought I was a “lightworker.” I thought I was helping people. I thought I was accessing something good. I was brainwashed into thinking I was using “life force energy” to heal people and balance their chakras.

Now I believe I was accessing the spiritual realm illegally.

If the power does not come from God, I do not want it. We are to bet all our chips on God rather than seeking outside knowledge or power through forbidden practices that further distances us from a loving relationship with God. I just truly did not know about all this before I was already deep into it.

During that time, I was also in a relationship with a very possessive man who became abusive. My children and I ended up in a domestic violence shelter. Around that same season, my Reiki teacher took a special interest in me. Not in a normal mentoring way. It became strange and controlling.

He talked about visions. He said he saw angels encamped around the shelter. One night, my son and I had terrible dreams, and I remember the rain being intense. The next morning, this teacher texted me early, asking how I felt.

It was weird, but I brushed it off.

He said he wanted to take me under his wing and teach me more about energy healing. But when I went to his studio, things became uncomfortable. He told me to undress because he was also going to do bodywork. He was a massage therapist, so I tried to rationalize it.

He noticed I was nervous. He moved my limbs in uncomfortable ways. He rubbed his knuckles hard into my skin. When I finally said it hurt, he laughed.

There were singing bowls, light therapy, and eventually he wanted me to participate in what I now understand was witchcraft. He told me to take a picture of my ex, put it in the freezer, and said my ex would never talk to me again. He called it an incantation, which is a spell.

I did it.

And my ex never spoke to me again.

At the time, I thought maybe it worked. Now, I understand I had participated in something I never should have touched.

When I began distancing myself from that teacher, things got stranger. I made excuses. I stopped answering calls. Then one Valentine’s Day, while I was waitressing at a local brewery, I saw him across the restaurant with his wife. We locked eyes, and he looked at me like he saw a ghost. I tried everything I could to take the long route from the bar service area to my tables just to not have to pass his table.

I soon after had a dream of a big, black, heavy snake on my back and I shot up out of bed startled awake, catching my breath.

Within days, I got off work early one day, went out the back door, and he was outside my job banging on a gong and yelling about serpents. Now, what was I going to do, call the police? I was absolutely terrified!

I cannot prove every spiritual thing that was happening. But I know what I experienced. I believe I had opened doors I did not understand.

After that season, my health declined dramatically. My mental health worsened. My sleep became terrible. I was diagnosed with several chronic health issues. I was trying to rebuild after another failed relationship, and everything in my life felt like it was falling apart.

Around 2018, I had a mental health episode and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

I want to be careful here because mental health matters, and I do believe in getting help. But I also know this: for me, the episodes I experienced had a deeply spiritual component. The fear, the darkness, the sense of being pursued by demons—it was not just emotional to me. It felt spiritual.

I personally believe getting involved in Reiki and occult practices opened me up to darkness. However, with that being said, I had been seeing aliens over me for years, and it was around that time while living with the abusive ex that I had sleep paralysis again, and I remember my grandma told me to tell the aliens in the name of Jesus to leave me alone and they have to listen. Well, I never saw them again, but that particular day I heard the loudest, most high pitched awful demonic screeches and screams in my ears. If anyone reading this has ever had sleep paralysis then you know, it is like your eyes are open and you’re awake but you are frozen and cannot move even a pinky with all of your might. So, in my mind I just merely thought, ‘in the name of Jesus leave me alone.’

It went completely silent. I woke up for a few seconds and fell back into it agaist my might and in my mind I said my address and ‘in the name of Jesus leave me alone.’ My hall light that was on flashed off and on again. I woke up. I don’t know if it really flashed off and on but it sure did to me. That’s when I knew all authority belonged to Jesus!

But still during that difficult time, everything failed miserably: my health, my relationships, my peace, my stability.

Then I saw a testimony from John Ramirez, a brother in Christ who had once been deeply involved in Satanism. His story moved me to tears. He described a supernatural encounter where Jesus saved him, and it shook me.

I remember another patient during that hospital stay saying he had tried to put a hex on me, but that I had a shield around me.

All I know is this: what I experienced during that time scared me so deeply that it changed my life.

When I got out of the hospital, I burned my Reiki materials. I threw out my crystals. I closed my shop. I repented. Three days later, I got baptized.

I was on fire for the Lord.

At the time, I wanted to be a preacher. Maybe some of that intensity was still connected to what I had just gone through. But even now, I still want to help save souls. I still want to serve the Kingdom. I will do whatever Jesus wants me to do.

Maybe everything happened for a reason. Maybe the veil had to be lifted for me to understand that the spiritual realm is real.

And I know now, without question, that the spiritual realm is more real than the physical one.

I also did not realize until recently how much wisdom is in the Bible. After I got out of the hospital, I read the New Testament within a few weeks. Then I started in Genesis, taking long, detailed notes. I made it through several books before life got in the way.

But I missed so much. Psalms. Proverbs. The deep wisdom. The practical correction. The warnings. The comfort. The truth.

Now I am learning more and more how important it is to take the Christian walk seriously.

To pick up your cross.

To crucify your flesh.

To follow Him.

That is why I have chosen celibacy. I am still working on my mouth after twenty-five years of sailor language, but I am a work in progress. We all should be.

To be a true Christian is not to hate people. It is not to look down on people. It is not to act superior.

A real Christian should have a loving and open heart toward people: gay, homeless, poor, broken, addicted, rejected, wounded, and everyone in between.

We were all made in the image and likeness of God. And people need to know that Jesus is not just for the clean, polished, church-raised, perfect-looking people.

Jesus is for the ones who know they need saving.

That is why spiritual warfare matters. That is why prayer matters. That is why surrender matters. That is why fear has to go.

First Peter 5:7 says to cast your anxieties on Him because He cares for you. And when God says to cast your cares on Him, He means it.

These earthly burdens were never always ours to carry alone.

We may lose some battles, but God has already won the war. We know how the story ends. And I want to be on the winning team.

But being on the winning team also means extending a hand to those who do not know Christ yet.

Because I did not know how fulfilling life could be with Jesus.

And even saying it that way feels too light.

It is all Jesus.

That is all I want.

I am so grateful to Him for saving me. For being there in my time of need. For listening when I talk to Him. For speaking in the still, quiet moments. For letting a song come on the radio at the exact time I needed to hear it. For sending encouragement when I felt alone.

Now I am also learning the power of words.

That old saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” is false. Words absolutely matter.

God created with words. He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Creation itself responded to the voice of God.

Proverbs 18:21 says death and life are in the power of the tongue. I wish I had learned that forty years earlier.

Now I am trying to speak life over myself. Over my purpose. Over my future. Over the people God has called me to reach. Over my future spouse, if that is God’s will. Over my destiny. Over my family. Over my healing.

I am still learning. I am still growing. I am still being corrected. But I know this:

To truly know Christ, and not just know about Him, is the greatest gift a person can receive.

God does what His Word says. His Word does not return void. Philippians 4:7 says the peace of God surpasses all understanding, and I can testify that this is true.

With everything I have been through—abusive partners, stalking, being hacked, being exploited, mental battles, health issues, loneliness—you would think I would not be able to sleep at night.

But because of my faith in the Lord, I know my life is in His hands.

That does not mean I never struggle. That does not mean I never feel lonely. I absolutely hope God brings me a spouse one day. I do not want to stay as lonesome as I currently feel.

But even if He is all I have, Jesus is still enough.

He is number one.

And with Him comes true peace.

It is an honor to be a child of God. It is an honor to be corrected by Him, loved by Him, protected by Him, and shaped by Him. I am excited to grow into the woman He is making me.

That is what a real relationship with Christ is like.

It is not a random Sunday sermon.

It is not religious image management.

It is not pretending to be perfect.

It is surrender.

It is warfare.

It is repentance.

It is peace.

It is love.

It is conviction.

It is being pulled out of darkness by the only One who had the authority to save you.

And once you truly meet Jesus, you do not want the counterfeit anymore.

You want the real thing. As Revelation 3:20 reveals, ‘Behold I stand at the door and knock. If any man hears my voice and opens the door, I will come into him, and I will sup with him, and him to me.’

That is an invitation from Jesus Himself for you with eyes to see and ears to hear to open that door and start building your personal relationship with him also. It will be the best thing you can ever do for yourself.