My life as a New Age adherent

I have not been a Christian all my life. When I was a child I attended Sunday school and prayed the Lord’s Prayer every night. The second thing I did more like a superstitious act than an enquiry to God.

I had my first experience with the supernatural in my late teens. A couple of nights a dark and intimidating presence woke me up and rendered me scared and trembling under the quilt. After the third visit my mother retrieved her old Bible and advised me to lay it under my pillow. It actually worked.

In my mid-twenties I had become very interested in alternative medicine. I had read several books on the topic and I soon practiced some of the techniques described. Those who dared to lay their fate under my hands witnessed about pain and illnesses that disappeared after the treatment.

I continued to read and many of the authors introduced me to intriguing subjects such as healing, reincarnation, karma, out of body experiences, chakras and so on. A couple of years later I had warm hands with healing powers. People experienced a distinct heat from my hands that healed them from a variety of ailments. What a power!

My new faith infused in me an animosity against everything that was Christian, particularly how the Bible depicted Jesus and God, and the idea that Jesus was the only way to salvation and God seemed at that time both ludicrous and arrogant.

When I was 28 God began to make his presence known. He sent Christians in my direction and many of them began to pray for me. God now led me into a process where he disclosed, one by one, the ideas that I firmly believed in as lies.

Finally I gave in for my new friends never ending invitations to visit a Christian meeting. I left the premises rather shocked. Everything was alien to me and I had also faced a new force with which I had no prior experience – The Holy Spirit.

I now understood that there existed two spiritual regimes and I had to choose one of them. Admittedly, in the end I did not have much choice because God was very convincing.

That is how my Christian walk began. It has not always been an easy journey. I have been through periods of profound despair, of legalism and five years ago a depression that was terminated when God illuminated me on his grace, and I finally understood that the gospel really is good news.