I Hated Going to Church

Hi!! This is my testimony. I used to be a Satanist before I returned my life to Christ.

I grew up in a Christian household but as a grew into a pre-teen to teenager, I started to really hate my devoted Christian parents, and I hated going to church. Most of all I hated God because I figured that he didn’t love me and that I wasn’t one of his elect because I never felt anything regarding him or Jesus or anything.

Sure, I knew the stories and about Jesus and as a kid I would sing and pray. In any case, I decided “if God hates me, then I’ll hate him back.” I began HATING going to church, but my parents still made me go every week. Sometimes I would get so mad I would put my Bible on the ground and stomp on it and kick it in the back seat of my Mom’s van.

I started listening to Satanic metal bands when I was about 13. I really liked Slipknot and my favorite line was “if you’re 555 I’m 666” and I put it on all my social media bios and things.

When I started high school, I met a group of people who were all into witchcraft and the darker aspects. Being around these people made me feel more open about my hatred of Christianity and made me want to pursue witchcraft and things too. Just regular witchcraft (like the stones and candles and incense and stuff) wasn’t enough for me though, and I got into Satanism.

All the while in my heart I was terrified of God, and I had this persisting fear of Hell and being left behind in the rapture. But I chalked it up to “religious trauma syndrome” so as to put a label on it and make it fit the reality I wanted.

I got into smoking when I was like 15 and stopped a year later when I started having lots of medical issues, mental and physical. It led me to an awful episode of depersonalization-derealization disorder and panic attacks etc. etc. which was very humbling, and I started to push aside the whole Satanism stuff. I was still angry at God and Christians. But over that year (my junior year) the anger and hatred started to dissolve. I wasn’t necessarily interested in Christ, but I wasn’t going around denouncing Him and being awful to His followers.

The summer of that year my pastor began to teach classes about apostasy. This caught my attention, and it scared the hell out of me! I spent two or three months in mental and spiritual agony, convinced that I had damned myself to hell and that there was absolutely NO redemption for me and NO way out, no matter how much I repented and sobbed and begged.

I spent every day in a deep deep depression, viewing my life as meaningless and desperate for a way to go back and erase all the stuff I did. I looked around at the church members, and my parents who were filled with God and I was so jealous. I was so sad and I just wanted to be like them.

One day in late August I was washing dishes and my brother was talking to me and then I just had this strange thought that was like “all you need is to believe” and at that very moment, something weird happened; I can’t explain it. It was like my ears popped and my vision “zoomed out” and my body felt different, and I had a really foreign sense of joy. I was startled and totally forgot my brother was talking to me.

The feeling left me shortly, but I was very curious about it. This was a Friday night. I spent that night and the next day praying to God that if I was saved, or if I will be saved, that he would somehow just tell me straight-up through the pastor during church that Sunday. For the past month or two he was studying the verses in Hebrews that were like “for someone who has once been enlightened, etc. etc. it is impossible to restore them to repentance”. But that Sunday, he read the next verse, it went something like “but in your case, beloved, we feel sure of better things, things belonging to righteousness” and I just broke down SOBBING like uggllyyy sobbing.

Went home, opened my Bible and it happened to be the parable of the 1 lost sheep and then the parable of the Prodigal son. Since then, I have been following the Word of God and my life is utterly changed and I’m not even close to the same person as I was. I am writing this to say that you are not too far gone, and sometimes God needs to scare the ever-loving **** out of you to get your attention!!!