My Personal Journey to Hell and Back

For me to say that have have been through some changes in my life would be a great understatement. I never thought that I would be where I am at in my life, married with children, sober and clean, and I also have become what I hated the most… lets go back a few years and let me clarify on this.

I did not come from a close family, in fact I never had a relationship with my siblings except for my sister Dona, my other 2 sisters and my 2 brothers I have never related with (one of my brothers I never meet before he died in the mid 90’s). We all went our own ways. One sister converted to Judaism, one became a Christian, then there was me.

I came along very late in my parents’ life; it was hard for them to deal with having a baby in their late 40’s. My father worked nights and my mother went to school at night to be a nurse, after she was out of school, she worked nights for several years but even when she was home she was distant, and when dad was home I lived in fear of him and his fist.

Feeling like I was alone in the world at a early age left a hole in my life, when I reached my early teens I searched for ways to fill the hole. I was a ‘outsider’ in school and never had any close friends. Suicidal thoughts came weekly for me, during the relay hard times they came daily.

That is when I turned to witchcraft and paganism. I need to feel like I was in control. It gave me a sense of power that everyone in my school became scared of me, even some of the teachers would back down from me after they found out that I was in the occult. And it was that fear that keep them from picking on me anymore.

I started to meet other pagans and was invited to rituals and gatherings. I was welcomed in to there sub-cultured. I learned to embrace Satan and hate God as well as Christians and Jews. I had older pagans take me in as there child and I even called them mom and dad. They taught me how to lead a ritual, and become a pagan priest. They also taught me how to use drugs and home made alcohol (both of which I was already great fan of) in rituals. Finlay I thought I had family and friends that cared for me.

I quickly climbed up the pagan social ladder. I took a job running a occult book and supply store, I started holding public rituals, hosted a weekly pagan discussion group, and helped organize some of the largest pagan gatherings and festivals in America every year.

In just a few short years I was a big wig so to speak in the mid-west pagan community. I started to have people fly in from over seas to attend my festivals and gatherings. International pagan leaders and authors would come out to be guest speakers and teach classes for the festivals that I was organizing.

With all of this the hole in my life grew bigger, there for my hunger for power grew bigger, and my hatred towards God started to consume me. To feed all of this I started to train people on how to fight. I was ready for war on Christianity. I blamed all the problems in my life on Christians and I was determined to make them feel the way that I felt as a child… scared, and I did not care who got hurt along the way.

The covens (pagan version of a congregation) I belonged to mostly shared my distaste for God but did not share my extreme and radical ideals. Thats when I started to form my own coven, this gave me a bigger sense of power, and even a bigger hole in my life.

Of course all of my life I had people try to witness to me. This was never received well by me. The last thing I wanted to hear was that God loved me. Love was something that I held as a fallacy. I couldn’t love anyone, or even myself so how could I expect God to love me. I was convinced that if God was real that he had to hate me as much as I hated him.

About 5 years ago I meet a man at Wal-Mart wear I was working at the time, and we started to become friends. One day after work we were hanging out in the parking lot sitting on the tail gate of my truck and even though I don’t remember how the conversion started we started to talk about our religious beliefs.

I started to think to myself here we go, another lecture about brim stone and fire; but Glean never made me feel uncomfortable. He never told me that I was going to go to hell, he never told me I was following a foolish path, and he was never pushy or confrontational towards me; but he did share his believes with me. So I would talk to him about it and listen to what he had to say.

I wish I could tell you that he spoke with some great wisdom that opened my eyes and heart, or that he told me a story about how he was saved that made me realize that it was possible for me to be saved to, but I can’t. To be honest I cant remember a word he said about God, but it wasn’t his words that got to me. It was the passion that he spoke with, the love that you could see that he felt, and the concern for me that I saw in his eyes.

I didn’t accept Jesus that day. And about a week later Glean left Wal-Mart. However he did make me start to think about things in a different way. With in a month I had stopped leading rituals, and a month after that I had stop going to rituals. I had decided that I needed some time to sort things out. I had told my pagan friends that I was taking a vacation from leading a coven (which is common and wasn’t questioned on why).

A year after that conversation I was still working at Wal-Mart but I had transferred to over nights working on the floor maintenance crew and I had made the biggest decision in my life. In a small, dirty, and down right smelly mop closet that was coverd in mold and mildew in the back room of Wal-Mart I asked Jesus to come in to my life, and accepted Him as my savor.

I was living in a pagan house hold at the time, and when my roommates found out about my conversion they kicked me to the street and broke all my belongings, I still felt that I had made the right decision. God taught me first how to love myself, then others. He gave me the strength to start to forgive my parents and my former roommates.

Since then God has blessed me with a wonderful wife, a amazing son, and a child on the way. I’m not saying that my life is perfect by any means. I still face problems just like everyone else, I just don’t have to face them alone now, God is there to walk me and my family through what ever the world has to through at us.

Matthew 28:20

and teach them to obey everything I have commanded of you. And surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (today’s new international version).