From The Darkness To His Light

This is possibly the most important piece of writing I will ever write. I have written remarkable poetry, chapter books as a child, and copious Facebook posts ruminating the meaning of life.

But this writing is different. I am not writing for my own fame, but for the glory of God. For my born again birthday this year, I am writing the story of how I came to know the creator of the whole universe. 

In my childhood, I had an inner spark. The spark that would somehow be the part of my being that would guide me to the truth in the future. I loved butterflies and caterpillars, and had a fascination with nature all before I was old enough to start school.

I hated to see someone chop down a tree or kill an animal. For several years I was obsessed with raising butterflies, and would marvel at their amazing transformation that they go through. The spark was there from a young age, but before I would find the truth, I would go down many wrong paths where I would  misunderstand God and life. 

Starting when I was about 6, I went to vacation bible school in the summer. Although I had fun singing, playing games, and eating snacks, I had no interest in learning about God. I did believe He existed, but wanted nothing to do with Him.

The idea of God always watching me creeped me out. I refused to pray at bible school, Sunday school, and family reunions. I would always make a scene, while everyone closed their eyes in prayer, I sat with my eyes open, thinking it was weird to talk to God.

My mom sometimes got angry with me for my rebellious habit. I did have a Sunday school teacher though, that did not force me to pray. I can remember one time my sisters told her that I was refusing to pray, and she just sweetly replied with, “Well the reason we pray is because we want to.” 

There was a phase in my youth where I wrote books about how much I hated God. I would write such blasphemous things, and I am too embarrassed to even mention the things I wrote in this writing. 

When I was about 9, I started looking into atheism. I found that were other theories of where the universe came from besides God creating it. I had heard of the big bang theory, and this convinced me that there was a genuine possibility that the universe could have came into existence without a divine creator.

It didn’t make me a complete atheist, but it did make me agnostic. I watched Christian verses atheist debates, and would google big questions like “Does God exist?” I decided that either God didn’t exist, or He did exist and I still didn’t want to follow Him. 

In 6th grade I watched near death experience videos. People would testify of temporarily dying and going to heaven or going to hell. Many would say that Jesus saved them out of hell, and they came back saying that Jesus is the only way to heaven.

Testimonies of atheists brought back from the dead to testify of eternal fire and brimstone, along with instantly realizing that Jesus and Satan are very real scared me so much. I did not want to go to hell. I became a quote on quote Christian out of fear. As a so called Christian I was still not interested in the things of the Lord.

Church bored me on the rare occasions that I went, and very rarely prayed. If I did, it would be a short, fear based prayer of something like, “Jesus, please don’t let me go to hell.” 

Through everything I have described in my story so far, I was often depressed. I always got left out at school and felt like no one cared about me. I didn’t have a “friend group”, and people bullied me. I got chosen last while picking partners for school activities and choosing teams in PE.

People wanted to mock the fact that no one liked me, so they would play a game where they would pretend to ask me out as a joke, or they would find someone else they didn’t like and jokingly tell me that person had a crush on me just to hurt my feelings.

I ended up getting a lot of boyfriends from other schools just to prove I was worthy of being loved. My social anxiety was so bad, sometimes I would walk through the hallway at school hiding my face. I thought of suicide, but remembering the hell near death experiences made me think twice. I feared death.

I was not scared of physically dying, but I was terrified of spiritually dying. I believed that if hell was, in fact real, and I went there I would never escape, so I did not take my life. It was too big of a risk.

I remained a so called Christian until I was in 8th grade. I became agnostic again after watching a short clip from the movie zeitgeist, which provided all the alleged evidence that the story of Jesus had been copied from pagan deities, and all of these different gods pointed back to the story of how the sun and stars move around in the sky.

This seemed so deep, and made perfect sense to me, but then how could I explain all the near death experience stories I had heard? Fear of damnation made it difficult for me to question Christianity. I continued to live with the fear based mindset. 

In the summer of 2016, I realized there was more to life than what meets the eye. Perhaps not the God of the bible, but there was definitely something more out there. Over the course of the next few years I would ask deep, deep questions within the universe regarding the divine and the meaning of life. I started getting into the new age.

The new age is basically a spiritual system that says we are gods and everything around us is god. In the new age movement,  I had my own mystical experiences and would experience things that I thought were of the divine. I would meditate and feel a sense of love and peace, use the law of attraction, believed everything to be God, wanted to learn yoga, used astrology, saw repeating numbers everywhere, and felt as if I was uniting with the universe.

I had a feeling deep in my soul that I was not of the world. Somehow I knew I had a purpose outside of the sick society. I couldn’t exactly put a finger on what it was, but I had a few different theories. One thing I believed was that I was an indigo child here to bring enlightenment to the brainwashed world, and I had a high vibration while society was stuck in the lower vibration. I also believed I might somehow have alien DNA because I was so unlike this world. I was a vegan, and saw veganism as a way to grow spiritually. Somehow it made me feel closer with animals, nature, and the universe itself. 

In my freshman year of high school, I wanted to leave school so badly. I begged my parents to let me homeschool, but they refused. Finally, one day, a situation came up where I was bullied so bad that the school let me do my schoolwork at home, although I was still not actually homeschooling because I still did the school’s homework, just at home. I got through the semester and finally I started actually homeschooling. I believed I had manifested the situation with the law of attraction. Homeschooling  led me to really seek truth. Homeschooling is not just academic, it can be spiritual if you allow it to be.

I think this is why so many Christians and new agers alike choose the homeschooling lifestyle for their children. For me it was being away from the school system that allowed me to really search for the truth in life. I had what I believed to be past life experiences and experiences with what I believed to be my higher self. Some spiritual experiences would leave me in tears, overwhelmed with a feeling of love.

My psychic powers were strong, and I could write nearly Shakespeare level poetry. My poetry would ask deep questions like “Who placed the stars in the sky?’ “What is beyond the sun and what is beyond the moon?” and would explain our value and how everything connected. I did not just write poetry but I also wrote essays and Facebook posts talking about deep topics. I can’t remember the exact words, but one of my posts said something like, “Being your true self is more important than following the crowd.

The sidewalk is popular but the nature trail is more beautiful.” I also talked about in another post how we force children to go to school and we use tough love on them and say we are preparing them for the real world, but in reality children are the ones already in the real world because of their pure heart.

I wrote one essay on unschooling, which is a type of homeschooling where people follow their heart, not the school system in learning. There are no forced classes and the desire to learn comes from within, not for grades. I wrote one similar paragraph on the true meaning of education. I wrote one paper about my close connection with nature, and one thing the paper emphasized on was my belief at the time that the life of life itself is to be your own authority.

I can not explain every topic I wrote about in this article, but I will emphasize that writing is an art. It is the language of the subconscious. My deep topics of writing choice shows how my subconscious was searching for God. 

At this point, my beliefs in Christianity went out the window. Although a small part of me still feared Christianity was true and I was headed to hell, I put these thoughts on a back shelf. When I believed in the God of the bible as a child, I had no real spiritual experiences, but as a new ager I could actually experience things.

Christianity seemed so unenlightening. I thought Christians were brainwashed by organized religion. I purposely twisted bible verses to fit my own worldview. Jesus, to me, was an ascended master sent from God the Father, who was the divine itself. Holy Spirit was the divine within each and every one of us that we can tap into.

Heaven was when we connected with god within, hell was when we were disconnected from the higher reality. I came to believe Christianity was an organized religion created to control us and keep us from having our own unique experiences of the divine and that all religions pointed back to the same thing somehow. 

I became deeply fascinated with eastern spiritualities, like hinduism, buddhism, and yoga. I thought eastern people, especially Indian and Nepali people were so spiritual and white people were brainwashed and disrespectful. I became deeply fascinated with Nepal and India. I learned some Nepalis language and always talked to Nepalis people online. I learned hindi (the most popular native language for Indians) and was always listening to hindi songs.

I ate Indian food often. One time my aunt bought me Indian food and then took me to an Indian grocery store. With all the Indian people there I felt so calm. It was a way I never felt around white people, especially Americans. I always had social anxiety with white people. I would get offended if someone called me a white person, and flattered when someone said I looked Indian or Nepalis.

My online Indian and Nepalis friends actually told me I looked like one of them often. One day my fascination with India got so strong I decided to take it to the next level. I had heard that in hindu tradition, people drink cow pee, (and on rare occasions even poop,) for healing.

I braided my hair Indian style, put on some bracelets like Indian girls wear, collected some cow poop, mixed it with Indian food spices, and made a video of myself eating it. I actually vomited but it was hilarious to watch. One night I had what I believed might have been a past life dream. I saw myself as an Indian, and I had a mother who really cared about me. 

Aside from being obsessed with India I was drawn to native Americans. In my childhood, I had a rich imagination, and would always fantasize about being a native American girl living in the wilderness and practically starving myself because I was too compassionate to kill an animal for food.

Although I imagined this long before I went vegan, I couldn’t imagine killing an animal myself. I only ate animals that had already been killed. When I was 14 or 15, I did past life regressions and according to my regressions I was a native American in a past life!

Because of my childhood fascination with native Americans, along with my unique, native American looking facial features, I believed it! I felt deep in my soul that it had to be true. Not only did I believe I was a native American reincarnated, I also believed I had many other past lives because I was such a deep thinker compared to most people my age.

I was constantly told how mature I was for my age, and I knew I was not like my peers. I had one close friend who I loved dearly and we had almost everything in common. Olivia was also a deep thinking teen, and we would talk for hours about meditation, numerology, the universe, veganism, homeschooling, and lots more of our spiritual beliefs. We understood each other on a level than we didn’t feel with other people. 

After being in the occult and new age world for over a year, I started to question it. In the back of my mind, I knew Christians believed the new age movement was satanic. After having demonic dreams for months, I became just a little bit more open to Christianity. I was far from ready to surrender my life to the Lord, but I did wonder if Christians were right about the new age.

I asked my beloved friend Marissa (who was a new ager turned Christian) for help. I asked her to tell me more about how satan can pretend to be God. She explained things to me. She told about her experiences in the occult and with demons pretending to be God. I told her about my satanic dreams and how demons would have sex with me and how in one dream I even went to hell. She herself had went to hell in one dream and Jesus saved her, and she saw herself as an old woman sitting on Jesus’s lap, the happiest she had ever been. She was in heaven in the throne room of God!

Marissa said some powerful words to me that I believed God predestined her to say to me. “You should go to Jesus. I used to think Christians were just brainwashed, but it’s actually VERY real.”  Her words were so powerful because I myself believed Christianity was just an organized religion created to control. Hearing that she once believed the same thing but now recognized how true it was really got my attention. I told Marissa that I kind of believed in Jesus because I had seen near death experience stories where people died and met Jesus, and came back to testify, but I want to know for SURE he’s real.” She suggested I pray to Jesus and ask Him to give me a sign.

I agreed to pray and a few weeks later I had a dream where I experienced the power of God. In the dream I knew that if I continued to live as my own god and believe I was divine, I would keep getting attacked by demons, but if I turned to Jesus He would set me free. I intuitively knew that I would experience freedom like never before!

The amazing part was at the time I did not realize this is exactly what the bible says in multiple verses.

I later learned that Jesus said “If you continue in my word, than you are my disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you FREE.” The bible says in another passage, 

“Whosoever commits sin is the servant of sin….  if the son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.” It also says, ‘where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”

Although unaware at the time of these bible verses, I still did know that the dream was a sign from God. When I woke up from the dream, I told Marissa about the dream and that I wanted to become Christian but was scared my new age friends would think I got brainwashed by the mass religion. She told me not to care what the new agers thought, and that Jesus wanted a relationship with me so He sent me that dream. 

On October 21st, 2017, I became a born again Christian. My life was changed forever, and I was in for a huge surprise when I made that decision.

That night I was filled with a peace, love, and joy that I had never known.

I was surprised when I experienced it because my whole life I believed Christianity was just a religion that people believe intellectually! Yet, now, in my own soul I was experiencing the power of God. My heart began to change immediately. I felt lighter and freer, like a burden had been lifted off that I didn’t even know I had before.

Jesus set me free of all my addictions that I could have never broken on my own! I stopped having demonic dreams, and stopped lucid dreaming. Before I met the Lord, I would lucid dream every night without even trying, but when I became Christian it was like that part of me that was making me have those dreams just left me.

I had a conviction that I needed to live a God pleasing life so with the help of the Lord, I stopped sinning thoughtlessly like I used to. Still to this day I can not sin without feeling convicted. In the new age movement, I did not believe in sin. I believed in right and wrong, but it was only my standard of right and wrong, not the moral standard that God has ordained from the beginning.

My desire to do new age practices left me when I found Jesus, and I realized all of the spiritual experiences I had outside of Christ were satanic deceptions. I felt like I had a new heart, was born again, and was a child of God now.

Nothing else mattered at that point. The love of Jesus was the most powerful thing I ever experienced. I knew He loved me like no one else has ever loved me. I had never experienced anything like it before, and I cried for hours. I knew that this was what I had been searching for my entire life! From my vivid childhood imagination, to my fascination with nature, to the hours I spent meditating, I had been such a seeker, and I knew that Jesus was who I was searching for my entire life! I could talk all day about the power of Jesus, but I will say that no one who experiences His power ever stays the same. No one who experiences it ever goes back to believing Christianity is just an organized religion based on fear! 

Written By Jenna Saunders