From The Occult To Christ: This Is My Testimony
Growing up & early interest in God
I grew up an only child to unmarried parents who never stayed together. Definitely an accident. And it’s like I was born with a kind of existential angst I could never shake. I was constantly trying to figure out what I was here for and why I existed at all.
My introduction to the occult started at about five years old when my Mom taught me how to use an Ouija board. I remember her saying, “If you want to know it’s real Taiha, ask a question in your head, and it’ll give you the answer.” The only question I could think of at that point was, if Santa was real– clearly, I had doubts. So I asked in my head, and of course, it said ‘No.’
That early entry point gave me a taste for the occult and what was kept hidden from the masses (aka the kids I played with at recess.) I had a secret. I knew they were being lied to. And the way they seemed to pray to Santa like he was God always made me feel like something was terribly wrong with the world I was born into.
I remember sitting in elementary school classrooms anxiously anticipating when the teacher would say, ‘Alright kids, today we’re going to discuss why you exist.” But that moment never came. I even brought a bible for show and tell in third grade, but the teacher wouldn’t let me show it, or tell about it. Alright, note to self: school is no place for God. So I quickly realized that teachers, like all the adults around me, had no idea why we existed either, and that they were just as lost as I was. So, my draw toward divination grew because it was the only place I was getting answers to the kind of questions I had. I was thirsty for God but the world I was from wasn’t set up for that.
How & Why I Got into the New Age
As I got older, my thirst for purpose and meaning and to understand why I existed, only grew. I was constantly searching through dusty old bookstores, looking for some long-lost secret knowledge. But this only led me further down the rabbit hole of secret societies, freemasonry, and the plethora of hidden knowledge the elites were keeping.
All of this only fed my intrigue and by my mid to late 20’s, I was fully immersed in new-age occultism. I once had a woman at a psychic workshop tell me upon meeting me, as if it was an omen of the meaning of my life, the thing I’d been waiting for, finally, ‘You’re a white witch. You’re here to do good work.’
Not long after, I was professionally giving Tarot and Numerology readings and leading psychic development circles in my local community. I’ve been in rooms with students who wore capes and taught by teachers who had us stare into black mirrors. I’ve done blood magick, sex magick, candle magick. I was a devout divinationist, selling sin to the very women who came to me for help. By my early 30’s, I was working with women from all over the world who were doing similar work. I was never into drugs or alcohol, but I was an addict to the occult and hooked on spiritual narcotics.
The tension leading up to being saved
The year leading up to being saved was full of tension. Though my new-age business had been keeping me financially afloat for the last few years, I was always in the feast and famine cycle. My time in the occult was coming upon its expiry date and that’s when things really started to crumble.
I went completely broke and had to sell everything I owned. My car got repossessed – twice. I had to start getting groceries at the Nanaimo food bank, that’s definitely a humbling experience. But it had to happen. Because even though I didn’t have that much stuff, I had to give everything up, to finally see Jesus. I was actually so broke that my bank account got shut down for 6 months because I had so many NSF fees. God was doing a major clean sweep.
Though the facade of the new-age coaching industry I was in was certainly crumbling during this time, I wasn’t saved yet, and I was still trying to cling to my old identity. I’d look in the mirror and hear, “This is who you are. You’re a witch. It’s in your blood, you can’t escape it. Stop trying.” I clung to my identity as a witch as long as I could because I really believed I could mix my occult practices with Christianity. And I did for a while until I realized I couldn’t. Because as the Bible says, “You can’t drink from the cup of the Lord and from the cup of demons.”
But that’s exactly what the new age teaches, it’s a kind of spiritual buffet. It says you can take a bit from here and a bit from there, mix it all together, and make your own customized religion. But it makes a lot of promises it can’t keep. The new age teaches total self-absorption, that God, aka The Universe, is essentially your sugar daddy, but that YOU are ultimately here to save yourself. There are many gods and idols to worship, sexual sin is encouraged, and you’re stuck in a loop of ‘healing’ through constant energy work and moon ceremonies. And though there were definitely some highlights in my bible from my time in the occult, I was really just looking for confirmation to continue my beliefs.
Getting Saved
From all the years I’d spent in the new age, I was completely convinced that if I were ever going to understand this whole Jesus thing, it would have to be through some kind of supernatural ‘experience’ – But I was wrong. For me, it actually ended up being an intellectual process. A process of diligently studying His word. And the book He left for us. I didn’t need all the fluffy song and dance. I was starved for real food.
And so that’s how it started the day I was saved, by watching a YouTube video titled ‘Why I left Astrology’ cause the girl in the thumbnail looked like me. And it was for the first time, finally, that someone was able to cross the language barrier. She spoke my language and pointed out all the red flags I was starting to see myself but couldn’t yet articulate.
Among a million other dots that were connected from that one testimony, I realized that the ‘idol’ in my life was my bookshelf. Since I sold literally everything, the only thing I had left was my big occult book collection smack dab in the middle of my living room. Like a living Idol, I was worshipping. And I started to wonder who I could be, what new thoughts I could think of if all these books and all this information weren’t in my immediate vicinity. And “How might my life be different if I devoted even just one year to studying the bible the way I studied all these other books?”
I took every book off the shelf except for the bible and a handful of Christian books I had, and put them all in boxes, and moved them out of my living room. Now, I was quite literally sitting in an almost completely empty room. Which was, the straight and narrow, eye of the needle place, that Jesus could finally speak to me.
As the night went on, watching testimony after testimony of women like myself who had come from the new age, poking holes in every false doctrine and backing it up with scripture, the scales continued to fall from my eyes. One of the scriptures that hit me the most that night was from Timothy: That in the last days false teachers will creep into households and make captive gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of truth– and nothing had summed up my time in the new age more. In all these years of learning and research, I was still searching, yet to come to the Truth I was looking for.
The next scripture that stood out that night was Paul's warning to the Corinthians saying, “for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” In the new age, we called ourselves ‘light workers.’ And so I realized I’d spent my entire life up until that day serving Satan, and the reason it was so dangerous is that I actually thought it was God. But he was just using me. I realized how I’d held the Ouija board story as an idol itself. It was my first memory. It shaped me. But that was just him getting his hook in me young by giving me that little slice of truth I was seeking.
So, the culmination of last November 4th, the day I was saved. It was about 10 o'clock at night by this point, I’d spent the entire day watching testimonies, all the books and tarot cards were off the shelves, and I was sitting at my desk, after being led to read how Satan tempts Jesus in the desert. And specifically the way he twists scripture in order to try and get Jesus to worship him. Which is exactly what I’d experience in the new age. Within moments of me reading Satan’s name, ALL the power on the property went out, and a massive windstorm started circling around my house. “Okay, this is really happening.”
And so ‘the supernatural experiential’ part of being saved, didn’t actually happen until I was IN THE WORD. And I knew at that moment that the bible was true and that I was done with my old way of life. The following night, the spiritual attack came through a succession of nightmares where Satan had taken my voice. He definitely didn’t want me speaking out about this. I’d wake up heart racing, terrified, crying.
The next morning, I knew I needed to get the books and tarot cards out of the house immediately. Our friend Adam suggested to Aaron that we blow them up in a barrel, which, looking back, probably would have been a lot faster. But instead, we bought a garbage can and gasoline and brought them all down to a gravel pit to burn. Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to burn books before, but it takes a really long time. It took us a few hours just to get through twenty. But I still had a whole carload. By this time, it was dark and rainy and cold, so we packed up, drove to the gas station, found a dumpster, and threw everything away in a matter of minutes.
What I quickly learned as the days of being saved continued, reading the bible for hours every day, learning everything I could about what was in this book, was that all the magic I’d been looking for my whole life, was in the bible.
So– after almost a year of being saved, I can definitely say that I’m no longer in this perpetual search for Truth. And I honestly believe that ‘the secret knowledge’ that modern-day Babylon rulers have kept from us is, in fact, the bible. And that’s what I’ve discovered in finding Jesus. That He is the ultimate precision point of the vastness of God.
Scripture References:
“..having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away! For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.” — 2 Timothy 3:1-7
“For even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” — 2 Corinthians 11:14
“Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only you shall serve.’— Matthew 4:8-10