How I found my faith - Part 1

People who don't know me personally might think that I became a Christian because I was brought up to be one, or 'indoctrinated' by a church, or perhaps because I was mentally crushed and had nowhere else to turn.

It was actually quite a lengthy journey of personal discovery. At the age of 12 I was a committed atheist. I looked around at the teachers in my Christian school and felt sorry for them for their blindness; they *actually* believed that when they died they would find God and an afterlife! Poor people!

But I was aware of the occult. This same school was very haunted. My dad taught there and I stayed with him some evenings while he did his work, and we witnessed all kinds of phenomena. Sometimes we would hear people walking up and down the corridor in our classroom when we were the only ones in the building, or doors would bang randomly, or the taps would turn themselves on. My dad even met the resident ghost on one occasion when he challenged it to reveal itself. It was the ghost of an old woman, (I mean why wouldn't it be!)

So my imagination was being constantly fed by all these strange goings-on. I started to investigate more. By the age of 18 I ended up on the top of a hill, in the middle of nowhere, in the ruin of an old church, linking hands with three other college friends trying to summon up paranormal activity. Even my friend Paul - the biggest sceptic among us - was spooked by the sounds of clogged footsteps coming up the church path towards us. There was no one there, of course. We were very alone.

A good Christian friend of mine, Susan, was aware of what I was up to and was quite concerned. I, quite arrogantly, told her that I thought I knew better and that she was blind to this 'truth' I was uncovering.

That's when the ouija boards started. Blimey, we got pages and pages and pages of notes from our communications with 'spirits.' I was given information about my family history that even I didn't know until I went away and researched it. And they hook you do ouija boards. They become more and more addictive. And actually, we found, they get better and better at responding to you the more you use them.

And the more we used them, the more out of control they became. Finally - the very last time I ever touched one - the death threats came. Two demons calling themselves Baal and Belial came through saying they would kill us, and I was terrified.

Then I seemed to remember a book that Susan had given me, a sort of handbook to the truth about Spiritism that I had read about two chapters of and cast aside as Christian drivel. 'Spirits are really demons disguising themselves as dead friends and relatives,' was the general gist. And of course the Bible warns against all this stuff as well, and that Baal figure crops up quite a bit throughout the Old Testament. I didn't know any of that at this time. Anyone who had tried to tell me had been pushed away.

In my terror, I prayed for help. I felt that my life had been infiltrated and I needed protection, because I no longer felt safe, not even within the walls of my flat.

In trying to tempt me from God, the devil overreached himself and actually showed himself for what he was. My own personal experiences with the paranormal had brought me to the truth and the realisation that I had been seeking to contradict all along.