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Angela H. - From Darkness to Light…
I grew up in a nominal Christian home; we were Christian by name but not in reality! Both my parents were brought up in a church that taught a works based salvation that nullified the cross of Christ. (You do your best every day, Jesus makes up the rest and then maybe you end up in heaven when you die).
Church was boring, all the services were in the ancient language which I understood nothing of, all I knew was my mom dressed me in my best clothes every Sunday, we went to a building where bearded men sang weird songs, we stood up and sat down all throughout the service, got bored to tears and went back home.
That was my “church” experience growing up. My school was also affiliated with this “church” so these teachings were rooted in all the lessons. I was constantly stuck on a performance based treadmill. I could never be good enough for God.
There came a point in my life where I started questioning my beliefs, I must have been around 12 years old. I had so many questions and so little answers. Needless to say the “priest” couldn’t answer my questions, he didn’t even encourage my questions, in fact I was rebuked quite sternly on several occasions “HOW DARE YOU QUESTION GOD?!!!”
Because of all this, my view of God was of a great big whip in the sky waiting for me to mess up so I could get a good beating. A very commonly used phrase to children by adults (if they fell down and injured themselves or were misbehaving and got hurt somehow) was “See! God punished you!” It seemed to me that God was only in the punishing business. He demanded perfection, He knew I couldn’t deliver it, and He enjoyed watching me suffer.
For this reason I made up my mind that “I hated the Christian God”. As the Bible says, everybody knows that there is a God! I just knew inside that this wasn’t the real God! How could he be? He was horrible! And the people who represented him were judgmental and horrible to me.
I went on my own naive quest to find answers. This made me end up in a “Tao Center” a few blocks away from my house. I was welcomed with open arms and smiles; I had never experienced such acceptance from a community before. These people weren’t interested in my performance; they just wanted to know Angela. Who I was, what I liked, what I disliked, what my favorite color was and what my dreams were for the future. They were lovely!
I was the youngest of the pack. I was just 14 years old and the rest were in their 30’s, 40’s even 60’s some of them! There weren’t many of us but we were like a family unit. Everyone cared about each other’s emotional well being (or so I thought) and because I was the youngest I was seen as a child prodigy of the “spiritual realm” I was seen as a “seeker for truth”.
During this time, due to many complications in my life I spiraled into a deep depression that I couldn’t seem to shake off. I wrote many poems. One of which I will share just so you can see my frame of mind at the time:
Fear of the Unknown
I’m still a little girl in your eyes,
How would you feel if I said I feel older than 50?
The bruises I bear cannot be seen through my sticker smile.
Funny how I come across as joyful to you,
That means my goal was reached, my roadblocks were proper.
I’m obese from feeding my thoughts,
My heart is trapped in cement from all this pain.
The unknown has touched me, though it’s still not well known by my head
My heart knows him well, yet not so.
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I shared some of my poems with my spiritual leader; she had come to be like my spiritual mother. She was a teacher of yoga, transcendental meditation among other eastern philosophies. She had studied in India and Thailand. She wrote an encouraging note to me, to help shake off my depression and continue seeking for truth:
“My Heart sings to read such words of
Wisdom and foresight in one of your years.
Powerful words that cut and heal.
That string the visions of a better
World still.
Into the strongest of threads.
Not crafted of cotton not made of silk,
But of courage and pain in the moonglows
wane.
A gift to those who truths meaning seek.
These words that thread the seekers
Missing part, can only be held
By those who speak from the heart.
Seeing ones mission?
The worlds illusions to shed
Are your words of wisest strongest thread.
All love,
M-----.”
Even though everyone around me tried to encourage me and convince me that life was beautiful, it didn’t work. Even through I knew in my head there were people in this world who loved me, I never FELT loved. I never felt whole. I never felt complete. I was always “jolted back to reality” right after any “spiritual experience” I would have!
At fifteen years old due to my many hours at the Tao Center I had cultivated an amazing concentration span. I could sit and meditate for four hours, travel into the unseen realms and see things. Yet every single time the feeling of euphoria would instantly vanish and what felt like a dark cloud would appear over my head.
I began being fearful of everything and anything, and I started sensing weird things around me constantly. Transcendental meditation taught that “the truth is on the inside of you” and if an individual could reach a state of mindlessness where his or her mind was completely blank he or she could hear the truth from within, that would set them free.
The only “truth” I was seeing within was DARKNESS, GROSS DARKNESS! Now I know why…”all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God! Romans3:23” “In my flesh dwells no good thing Romans7:18” The darkness I was sensing was my own wretchedness my own evil self, There was no TRUTH within me! Just deception!
Yoga let me down it didn’t deliver answers or any form of truth, Tai-Chi-Chi Gong let me down, Buddha let me down, he had some interesting view points and “Advice” but it felt like he was giving advice on how to breathe when my neck was hanging in a noose.
Nobody had answers,
I was in despair.
My depression was getting worse by the day, smiling had become a thing of the distant past, I was only in my teens yet I felt so old, worn out and used. I felt dead inside and out. Life was horrible.
In the summer of 2004 at the age of 18 I found myself on the brink of suicide. I was too scared to live and too scared to die. I knew inside (due to all the experiences I had had with the spiritual realm) that there indeed was a spirit world; the side I had seen was dark and twisted. I didn’t want to end up there and be tortured for all eternity. I didn’t quite believe in the concept of heaven or hell. I didn’t know what I believed in. All I knew was I wanted out.
A friend of mine had lent me a tape, a transcendental meditation tape. She knew I was going through a really rough time, she did what she thought best and lent me a tape that would help calm me down. At this point I was having heart palpitations and panic attacks on a daily basis. At some point I would even get four or five panic attacks in a day!
My one lingering longing question in life had always been “Is the Bible really the WORD OF GOD?” because it if it is…I WILL GIVE MY LIFE FOR IT! But if it really was real I wanted GOD to tell me and not people.
Needless to say I had lost all faith in humans by this point. Every one seemed to have his or her opinion on everything, my brain had turned into a tossed salad of void words and blank emotions swimming around endlessly trying hard to stop but unable to.
This was it, the moment of Truth, the REAL moment of TRUTH. If God was real, He was going to show himself to me and get me out of this misery and pathetic excuse for an existence. If God wasn’t real and didn’t show himself to me…I was going to die.
I cried out to God, I still wasn’t sure if He really was real, I cried out with everything in me. “God…please…if you are really real…really really real…please God show yourself to me LORD please make it obvious to me that you are real, that you exist!”
I was so sick emotionally and spiritually that I could no longer breathe, I could no longer see a reason for existing and taking up space. I loathed myself and I loathed my life.
I got my friend’s meditation tape and told God, “If you’re real…please speak to me through this!”
(Needless to say at the time I did not know that the “New Age” world was the world of satan and God did not approve of occult practices…I knew evil forces existed but I was very ignorant about them and how they functioned.)
So I placed the tape in the tape player lied down on the floor and eagerly kept my eyes ears and heart open to hear from God. It was like lying down on an operation table for a life threatening surgery…if it succeeded I would live and be happy…if it failed…I would die and be gone forever.
After a few minutes, the lady’s voice who was guiding the meditation said “now you will see the spirit guide who will change your life FOREVER” right then! I saw an AMAZINGLY bright light, even though my eyes were shut and I was inside, in my bedroom, the light was so piercing I had to squeeze my eyes to make them even more shut if possible I had never and still to this day never have seen a light so bright, white and piercing and pure! As soon as I saw that light I KNEW that light was GOD and I KNEW that it was JESUS (at this point in my life I still did not know who Jesus was, all I knew of him was that “he was a nice guy who lived a bunch of years ago…)
I also saw an outline of a face, not a face as such but only an outline. I saw what seemed like flowing long hair on fire and also eyes of fire, there were no eyes instead they looked like pure flames of fire.
This is all I saw and I KNEW it was Jesus. He also came to my heart took hold of it and put what it seemed like a tap and opened the tap and a gush of disgusting green fluid washed out of my heart, I didn’t know what was going on I just knew it felt good, and pure and lovely unlike anything else I had experienced in my life.
The lady’s voice also said “your spirit guide will now show you your life’s mission and work” right then I saw myself standing in front of a small crowd of people in what seemed like and right next to me on my right side was standing Jesus again, I KNEW He was there but I just couldn’t turn around and look at Him because His presence was so awesome and so majestic I couldn’t bring myself to look at something so powerful I knew if I did or even could I would fall flat on my face. I was wearing a purple dress (purple has always been my favorite color) and had a smile on my face and I was talking to these people about Jesus! I was so calm and so pure! (I NEVER had done any public speaking in my life, I was the kid who sat at the back of the classroom and chewed her nails till they would bleed, I looked at the floor when someone spoke to me and twitched nervously all the time…this was a different Angela I was seeing in this vision! An opposite of the real me! Everything I always dreamed of being but never somehow could be!)
I didn’t see what Jesus had to do with this whole vision so once I got out of the meditation I journalled all this down and wrote
“I’m here to do Jesus work? Heal the world type of work? Dunno…”
I knew nothing about ministry! My image of Christianity was what I had grown up with, bearded men in a building! And some random ladies in ancient clothes who carried acoustic guitars and wore sandals and sang weird songs…
I decided to pick up my little Gideon’s bible I figured “Jesus is in the bible so maybe God is going to speak to me through the Bible if He is real!” I was flicking through the pages and I came across Revelation 19:12
“His eyes were like a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns….”
Right then…I dropped the Bible from my hands I was in such awe at the tangible presence of God in my room! I had asked God to show me if His word was truth and He just had! Right there! In front of my eyes! I had never in my life read the book of Revelation before! Neither had I heard that “HIS EYES ARE AS FLAMES OF FIRE!”
GOD IS REAL! THE BIBLE IS HIS HOLY WORD! I’M NOT GOING TO DIE!!!
I began weeping and ended up wailing, I finally understood, by the Spirit of God what the cross was for.
I finally understood that it wasn’t the Roman soldiers who had nailed Jesus to the Cross; it was my own sin and wretchedness…
I finally understood that in all my years of rebellion and occult practices, I was spitting in His face yet He was still loving me and wooing me in…Even though I was a wretch He still wanted me!! He wanted me for Himself!
Nobody had ever wanted me as a friend; everyone had used me for their purposes! Nobody’s motive so far had been pure, JESUS was PURE! HE WAS HOLY! HE WAS RIGHTEOUS! AND HE WANTED ME!!!
That broke me into a million little pieces, unspeakable joy, inner unreleased pain, years of emotional abuse all came out of me as I started wailing in my room asking Jesus to please forgive me and wash away my sins. All I knew was I had finally found the reason to living.
It was like taking a long breath after being underwater for so many years, those first few breaths felt so good! I felt like a new born baby! I didn’t even know the term “being born again”!!!
In two months it will be five years that I experienced Jesus come into my heart and wash away my sins. I have never looked back.
The work He begun in me that day, He has been faithful to continue day in and day out.
The road has not been easy; my healing process from emotional and other forms of abuse has taken years to overcome. But God has and is continuing to restore the years of my life that the enemy had stolen with his lies. His joy has never left me regardless of my circumstances.
His word is now my life. Anything He says in His word is TRUTH to me and anything contrary to what He says in His word is lies to me.
Jesus said that if we abide in HIM and HIS WORDS abide in us, we would know the TRUTH and the TRUTH would set us free, and that certainly has been the case with me.
Jesus IS the WAY the TRUTH and the LIFE. No other method or form of religion can get us to the Father. The way to Father God is only through Christ Jesus. His death burial and resurrection.
You see, what Jesus was doing on the cross was, He was putting all of your sins, all of my sins, and the sins of the whole world upon Himself so that He would suffer and die in our place.
God is a just God and He MUST punish sin! He loved you so much to send HIS pure and HOLY SON to the slaughter. Jesus, who had never known sin BECAME SIN in your place so that you may be set free from eternal punishment, and not only that so that you may enjoy “eternal life!” eternal life means KNOWING GOD.
I’ve known many people in my life, but none can compare to my wonderful counselor, Savior and healer Jesus Christ. He is my rock. I am far from perfect and I still make mistakes but HIS WORD has been and still continues to be a LAMP unto my feet and LIGHT unto my path.
If you feel lost and you have tried all religions in the world I want to let you know that God desires a RELATIONSHIP with you that is real and personal.
No other man can take away your sins; your good works cannot take away your sins either! Your sins need to be washed away by the perfect blood of the Lamb.
It is not by accident that you have read this today…God is speaking to you. What happened to me was not only special for me…God has NO FAVORITES! He views all the same. If you truly seek for truth you WILL find it. JESUS IS THE TRUTH!
And the WORD is JESUS (book of John)
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