A Preliminary Glimpse

I grew up in church with memories of God speaking to me in an audible voice since the age of eighteen months. I saw and heard hidden things that people had done and had lied about. I saw things inside of people as if they were wearing it like a garment not realizing that no one else did. I dreamed dreams and told people about things that later would come true. I said things to people I had no idea why I said them and knew nothing about them before that point but they told me that they were true. I spent most of my life in church. I gave my life to God at the age of four, was called to the mission field when I was seven and baptized in the Holy Spirit when I was 13.

To most who knew me I was a little miss goody-two-shoes who didn’t lie, cuss, smoke, toke or drink and ran around with the Christians on whatever campus I was on and I was definitely a virgin. I was usually a favorite with the church leadership and was always involved with the youth group, was on the Bible quiz team and went on mission trips. Kids were always telling me that they wished that my mother was their mother.

And now we hit the ice plant and come to a grinding stop. The previous two paragraphs are true. However, they aren’t the full picture.

I spent most of my early life feeling like a fraud because I grew up in a family of witches who claimed to be Christian believers who went to church. They taught in Sunday school and were close friends with or worked with the church leadership. They could argue circles around you when it came to Bible references to prove their correct Christian beliefs in public and to support their actual ungodly practices in private.

I was the first born of the fourth generation since the witchcraft came from Sweden with my great grandfather who married into my mother’s family. I found out later that it was my job to renew my family to a higher level of demonic authority and ability and to open more doors of power into the evil realm. Instead I betrayed this and renewed our family to the older family heritage of revival from my sixth removed grandfather who was the attorney for John Wesley. He brought his own family up in revival and the ministry for many generations.

My childhood was relatively pleasant except for my older brother being given my first born position in the household when I was two and a half. All hell broke loose against me after I gave my life to Jesus.

I was standing in the hallway that connected the two sides of our farm house and was for the uncounted time trying to decipher one of my mother’s paintings. God spoke to me in an audible voice and told me “You are My child, You are My chosen and I have something very special for you to do.” I knew this person. He had been speaking trustworthy things to me since I was eighteen months old. He was my closest friend. Everything inside of me reached toward Him and agreed with Him.

This was prophetically confirmed in  2004 when a minister visiting the church we were in decided to use me as his example on how we would be more inclined to obey God if He were to speak to all of us in an audible voice. I was sitting there minding my own business when he suddenly said, “What if a ceiling tile were to fall out and this bright light were to shine around you,” waving his hands around me as he spoke, “and this audible voice were to say to you, ‘You are my daughter and I’m very proud of you and I have a special job for you to do. Wouldn’t that influence your obedience toward God?’” I answered “It did.” He blinked and shook his head and repeated the illustration and I repeated what I had said. At that point he went on with his teaching thinking I had misunderstood. A friend and I saw the golden light around me even though it wasn’t in the original altar call. I later explained to him that he had prophesied my original salvation. Poor guy didn’t know what he had stepped into.

After my salvation the open abuse started. My mother dropped me on an escalator later that year and left me there until we stepped off. This permanently damaged my knees so that they would go out on me without warning, freeze up or hurt a great deal until God healed them and demonstrated that in 1997. I worked in a women’s ministry and I was one of the small group leaders. As we were being introduced in the church that was sponsoring our first conference I found that I couldn’t walk up front since my feet wouldn’t move. A voice told me to drop to my knees and crawl. I still tried to walk to the front when a lady sitting on the aisle next to me told me that it would be better to crawl. I didn’t need to hear that a third time. I dropped to the floor and crawled to the front bringing the house down since they laughed so hard. But even more important I did what I’d not been able to do since I was four years old even though I do still have some of the scars.

I had always been given a beautiful princess costume to go trick or treating in, but the year I was saved my favorite go-to-church dress was given to my baby brother to wear as his Halloween costume along with my favorite scarf. Even though he was two and one half, my brother knew exactly what was happening and was delighted to deprive me of what I was told by our mother was not really mine to begin with and therefore I had no say in who got to wear it.

All through my childhood this pattern was repeated with my baby brother receiving preference over my basic rights and safety. When I was older my mother told me that my brother was smarter than I and was most likely more talented than I. One Christmas she wrapped an oil painting set labeled for me and then over wrapped it for my baby brother. We both knew what it was the instant he picked it up; we all had that gift for knowing. He knew that he had me, until he unwrapped it and found that it was really for me. She would punish me whenever he did something wrong claiming that if she punished him he would kill himself when I was the one who trying to kill myself.

One of the elders in our original church told me one day that when God made me He had made a mistake. He also said that when the line for gifts from God brought me up to receive mine they had run out.

I was sick a lot throughout my childhood. I had a lot of allergies, including eczema, all over my body. Both my parents refused to recognize it and punished me for scratching. When my brothers were sick my mother waited on them hand and foot, checked on them regularly and attended to their every need. When I was sick she kept me in my room and left me alone except for bringing me food. Years later I asked her why the difference in her treatment between me and my brothers and she said that it was because she had the gift of healing.

I tried to kill myself three times and each time I saw this huge hand in front of me stopping me. I heard God’s audible voice telling me that I didn’t have the right to kill myself since I wasn’t my own anymore because I had given myself to Him. The last time I tried, after He stopped me, He told me to go right ahead. He reminded me of this man who was notorious, in our area, for trying to kill himself by jumping off an overpass into traffic and shooting himself in the head. He survived to be gimpy the rest of his life. God told me that that would be what would happen to me. I stopped the attempts.

During this time my baby brother also tried to kill me four times. When I complained to my mother she punished me refusing to hear me. Usually my older brother rescued me but God showed me how to rescue myself the last time. I understand my baby brother still bears the scar from that incident.

Two or three years after my salvation my father had experimental back surgery in a teaching hospital. They weren’t very careful in their procedure and cut his spinal cord. This put him in a wheel chair the rest of his life. My parents fought a lot after that point.

Since my father was on disability the entire family was required to go in for counseling, which we did for about eight to nine years. We were graduated out when I was 16. During those years I witnessed my mother demanding a divorce from my father and hearing my therapist tell me when I was a teen that my problem wasn’t my baby brother who was trying to kill me but that it was my mother who was also her patient. I also discovered when I’d been moved to a therapy group of girls my own age that I wasn’t alone. I started to learn that I wasn’t the one at fault, that there were others who also had no control over their living situations and that their families were as strange as mine.

My parents divorced when I was eight years old. But they didn’t tell us of that fact until they were selling the farm and my mother was moving us to town when I was nine. They explained his previous absence as onsite training for a new career where we did visit him often. We expected him to return home when he was finished. My mother told me that it was God’s will that she divorced my father just as it was God’s will that she marry him.

My Life Before and after I walked out of Hell

My mother’s parents were a constant part of our lives. My mother was her daddy’s princess and according to him she could do no wrong. Their family dynamics were very complicated. It seems to me that my grandfather replaced his wife, my grandmother, with his daughter in his affections. Since I had some similarities to my grandmother and was her favorite grandchild I was definitely not his favorite person. Due to this I had the benefit of seeing the real person and not the person he wanted everyone else to see. He manipulated my grandmother into doing things for him. He would later tell everyone else that he had told her not to but that she insisted on disobeying him and doing it anyway. They would have huge fights over this because she knew what he would do. He would falsely accuse her again and getting the entire family to take his side against her.

My mother did a similar thing to me. She would constantly lecture me on being responsible for my financial obligations. So I would work on that. Then she’d continuously pressure me until she conned me into borrowing money from her to buy something and the minute I did she would be after me about how irresponsible I was to do that. She did this constantly until I paid her off, only to repeat the cycle. She labeled me as the family’s irresponsible one and the liar.

She was always telling me how I was too loud, too stupid, too plain, too big and definitely not related to her whenever we went in public. She often told me how I wasn’t keeping my mouth shut enough or being private enough even though my baby brother told all the secrets he was ever told. She ignored that.

My mother and my grandmother did not get along partly because they were different people and also because my grandmother didn’t treat my mother very well. But she did treat me well. My grandmother usually protected me from my mother. My mother corrected that when I was alone with her.

Despite their antagonism toward each other my mother practiced her mother’s witchcraft. She read our palms on a regular basis, encouraged us to read our horoscopes from the paper and taught us on different occult practices as well as telling us stories about how her grandfather practiced his witchcraft.

She encouraged us to read novels on witchcraft. A lot of the TV programs she required us to watch were on witchcraft, like the Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. I protested watching these shows and was told that I didn’t have to watch them. But that wasn’t very useful since I was required to be in the living room with the rest of the family and short of sitting behind a piece of furniture I was stuck with watching.

What I find interesting is that my grandfather being Catholic sent my mother to Catholic school. She spent my entire childhood telling me how much she hated Catholics even though she dearly loved her father. Yet, her mother was a witch who hauled us off to her psychic seminars, the Rosicrucian Museum where she was a member and to other occult things. She would even chase us all over the place with our full blown horoscopes, not the one or two paragraph things you find in the newspaper, but the multi-page one with the houses and the moons and the cusps and I don’t remember what else because I was too busy running away from it. She was always telling us how they would work whether we chose to follow them or not. Yet my mother thought very poorly of her mother.

Every night I went to bed with a flashlight and three or four partially read books. When the lights were turned out I would read under the covers until my mother came in and took the book. I would then take another one out from under the mattress where I’d hidden my spare books and would continue reading until I could not stay awake any longer. Then the demons chased me all night in nightmares. I was constantly finding myself at the top of a mountain or cliff and I was falling over into a bottomless pit with no one to help me, I was being chased by someone who was going to kill me and there was no one there to rescue me or I was falling into a dark void of a vortex never to return. I would wake up tightly wrapped in my blanket like a burrito. I often fell on the floor.

I had to share the same bedroom with my brothers from third grade until I was in the seventh grade because my mother refused to see that my baby brother was doing a peeping tom on me because I had developed. She also refused to see that I needed the proper undergarments since I was flopping through all of my clothing. Going to school was embarrassing for me.

We were all given an equal vote in the bedroom and my brothers often ganged up on me and voted me out of the room. Many family fights were over my having nowhere to change my clothing because I wasn’t allowed to use my mother’s room nor any of the public rooms which included the bathroom. But I was still required to change because we were going somewhere and I had to go with the rest of the family.

My father had to go after my mother to get her to move the bedrooms around so that my brothers were in her old bedroom and she and I were in the same bedroom.

At this point she brought out the diets and told me that I needed to lose weight. Before she constantly forced me to eat more than I could eat, piling my plates high with food and requiring that I had to finish everything before I could eat anything else, and I don’t mean just for that one meal. The same food followed me from meal to meal until I found a way to get rid of what I couldn’t eat. My baby brother called me elephant and whale when I was actually skinny and my mother ignored him. He chased me through the house and tormented me. My older brother kept telling me to get out of the middle of the fights like he did. But even when I ran to my room and shut the door my baby brother would smash the door in and go after me. He also had a favorite game where he would give me something then loudly accuse me of stealing it from him. No one believed me. At some point I stopped accepting anything from him so he found other things to use against me.

I once asked him why he was doing this to me. His answer was that he was getting even. When I asked what it was he was getting even for he couldn’t answer me.

When we were still on the farm he liked to torment the baby animals and to kill them. He tried to get me to do it with him but I found it horrifying.

There were those that I went to church and to school with who tried to either kill me or have me killed or beat up and I either rescued myself or my older brother rescued me.

My mother would slap my face telling me get the look of pain off my face until she dislocated my jaw and damaged my hearing.

I learned to laugh at home and out in public to hide my pain because it saved my life to do so. I learned to be the joke so that others forgot about their original intent to hurt me and laughed instead. I still find humor to be a very useful tool in telling a story or in teaching. It can be a powerful tool in dealing with difficult situations.

This was a time when I was actually doing better than when I was younger because I had the therapy group to support me and I was on the Bible quiz team at church where the youth leader and the pastors were supportive of me and I had teachers in Junior High who were willing to help me with my studies. Even the attendance officer hired me to watch her husband who had Parkinson’s although I was in detention at least two times a week. My baby brother would deliberately lock himself in the bathroom just before I had to leave to walk the hour it would take to get to school. He would stay in there just long enough to make sure that I would be late to school. His school was closer so he was never late.

After my parent’s divorce and my mother had moved us into town she went back to school to become a nurse. She got a job in a private medical practice which was run by two brothers who were family doctors as well as elders in a church. Since we had been thrown out of our original church due to my mother’s divorce from my father we started going to this church.

For the first time in my life I had friends in the therapy group who also went to school with me and friends at church in the Bible Quiz team. My mother was also seeing a local business man who went to the same church and we were included in things with his family. Then as things got more serious between them my mother told this man that it was God’s will that they marry.

This man left town for a while and came back with a new wife. My mother was speechless. She took us out of church and quit her job putting us on welfare and commodities telling us that it was God’s will. She spent the days with her face turned to the wall of her bedroom and was in a deep depression that transferred to me.

During that time I was in high school and had been graduated out of the therapy group. High school was very tough for me because although my brothers were allowed friends whom they could invite to our home and go do things with, I was not allowed to invite any friends home. I was expected to go to school and to work and to stay home shut in my room. My mother really didn’t care if I went to school but she did care whether I went to work ever since she had insisted that I start working at the age of twelve she took away the benefit of my Social Security supplemental income that my brothers and I received due to my father’s permanent disability. I had to buy my own clothing and take care of my own expenses. I had lost my entire support system during this time.

I spent my days after school and work lying in my bed staring up at the ceiling while I stared down from the ceiling at myself lying on the bed starring up at the ceiling. I also had this hard presence in my mouth which I could bite down on but couldn’t see or touch. I called it the feeling of hardness. My nights were wall to wall nightmares similar to the ones I had before plus seductive ones. During the day and at night God would hold me tightly in His arms telling me that it would be alright.

A year later when I was seventeen I got my driver’s license. I also fell down the steps of the front porch spraining my left thumb. I had to overcompensate with my right hand reinjuring a sport injury I had sustained in junior high when I damaged my tailbone. The result knocked my back out which caused painful scoliosis. My ankle also sustained a hairline fracture in intramural field hockey when a team mate cut right in front of me, taking the ball from me. I stepped on her ankle because I didn’t have time to stop. I continued to play when I should have gone out of the game and ended up causing an injury which took years to heal.

After I got my driver’s license I asked my mother if I could go back to church since I could drive myself. After I got her agreement I went back to the church we left but I didn’t see that personal encounter in their eyes that I had experienced. I kept looking through other local churches.

During my senior year I replaced my government class with piano in the first semester. When my injury got worse due to the type of work I was doing I couldn’t work and go to school due to the pain.  I went to work because my mother insisted that I keep that a priority, missing a lot of the final semester. Although I had more than enough credits to finish, due to going to summer school every year since third grade, I didn’t have that one required class.

Even though two of my teachers begged me not to drop out of school, my school counselor insisted that I do so and take classes at night with little grannies. My mother just wanted me to work and to keep the SSI coming in. I Dropped out of school and went to night school. I couldn’t deal with classes with the older crowd plus I was required to take two classes instead of the one. I’d have to take a year instead of a semester to finish. I dropped out.

To keep the SSI my mother required that I attend school, so I went to the local community college even though all I wanted to do was not be in school for a while. I developed a bad habit of dropping out about half way through the term. I became the kind of person who couldn’t be depended upon to keep her word. It got to the point that I couldn’t finish anything I started even though I’d had A’s and B’s in junior high and was on the school paper. In high school I had mainly B’s with some A’s and belonged to a couple of clubs until we left church when I was sixteen.

In the year after I left high school I went from a size 12 to a size 26. I went from being an outgoing though quiet person, due to my mother’s insistence that I not reveal to anyone what was going on in our family, to a person who just wanted to stop existing. I hid from people out of fear of being physically hurt.

No matter how badly my mother treated me, our birthdays were usually very special days where we were treated special, until my eighteenth birthday. From that day through to two weeks after my nineteenth birthday it was ‘let’s really make Paula’s life hell’ year.

Anytime my mother and I disagreed about anything she would become more violent toward me. One time we were disagreeing about something and she won the argument by reaching out and tearing a ten inch long bloody gash in my arm with her fingernail. That scar finally disappeared around 2000. Another time, we disagreed, she turned and threw a big spoon at me, hitting me in the face and just missing my left eye. It cut the corner of my eye and went through my eyebrow. She went back to what she was doing as if nothing had happened. The corner scar is hard to see and the eyebrow scar finally disappeared in the early 2000s.

Two weeks after my nineteenth birthday I don’t even know what was said. I just know that she literally flew through the air, off of the couch where she had been sitting, and landed on me. She ripped my hair out, tore up my face and basically hit whatever she could reach. I abruptly threw up my arm to protect my face from her attack accidently shoving her aside. She totally came unglued and pounded me while screaming how dare I hit her.

I decided that the day that I hit my mother was the day that I moved out. When she wasn’t around I immediately took out the paper and found an ad for a Christian girls’ house advertising for renters. The next day when my mother sent me on errands I went to this house and contracted with them to rent a room from them.

When I got home I told my mother. She screamed at me about how dare I go behind her back and do this personal thing for myself on her time, with her car. But I stood my ground and told her that she had two weeks and I would be gone. I moved out in two weeks.

While I was in this girl’s house I hooked up with a campus Christian group at the local university. I church hopped with them for a while until I found a Christian coffee house in town which was a result of the ongoing revival at the time.

This encounter began the turnaround of my life. I saw in these peoples’ eyes the personal encounter with Jesus that I had experienced. Through them I was delivered of the spirit of suicide and depression and the beginning of the healing of the migraines that had plagued me ever since we had moved into town when I was nine. It was also the beginning of the healing of my back which took several years.

One Sunday I went to church with the others I worked with at the coffee house. It was a Pentecostal church, the very first one I had ever gone to in my entire life. The church I had grown up in was the non-instrumental Church of Christ and the one we later attended was the Nazarene Church. Neither had prepared me for this. I was in a state of shock. But God said to me that wasn’t this where I had seen the love and I answered that it was. Then He told me that I needed to suspend my judgment.

After the service a woman whom I’d never seen before came up to me and told me to take astrology seriously and that it was no laughing matter. I knew it wasn’t just about the astrology but about everything I had been exposed to. She had no way of knowing in the human realm about this because it wasn’t something I talked about to anyone. But the minute I heard this I knew it was of God and immediately renounced it as she was telling me that I needed to do so.

Through this church I met a sister church in the revival. It was about four hours from us and I ended up moving there. There I met the people who became my unofficial foster parents who called me their unofficially adopted daughter. They were also my pastors. My foster mother saw me as soon as I walked in and she stood before me and told me that I was a child without a family. They taught me that I was worth loving, a worthy person and that I could do anything. They taught me that I had wings and could fly as a person of God. My foster mother was constantly telling me that I could do things that I’d never even dreamed of doing before or had failed at in the past. I did everything because she told me that I could.

My foster mother told me one day that what I needed to do would be the hardest and most unnatural thing to do.  She said that I was going to have to do it to become the person that God had called me to be even if I didn’t understand it. I had no clue what she meant and it took me about twenty years to begin to understand what she had meant. I had to come out of the witchcraft that I had been born into and taught as being straight from God. I had to learn what it truly meant to serve God cleanly and without shadow.

Even though I never truly embraced the witchcraft of my family I really didn’t renounce it either until that encounter with that woman in the church. I didn’t know that I needed to.  And even then I still had the generational curse and flowed in and out of the Holy Spirit and the familiar spirit because I had no clue of the differences. I needed to learn to discern the difference and to understand that they weren’t the same thing. I also didn’t see anything wrong with reading novels that weren’t hard core witchcraft, but were sympathetic toward it or watching science fiction movies or programs. But as I healed and slowly came out of the mess that was my life I began to see the difference.

I never embraced the spirit of divination along with the full embracing of the familiar spirit like my mother. She considers herself to be an oracle of God although she doesn’t use that word. She just tells me that God is mad at me or that it is God’s will and that there is no other choice, when she makes statements about what she considers to be God’s will for my life and I don’t fall down and worship her wisdom.  Neither did I desire to do spells or follow a spirit guide or chase down psychic phenomena or any of the other things that my grandmother did. But I still had to learn how to clean the witchcraft out of my life because I had been born into it and raised in it and instructed in it. Whether I liked it or not it was a reality in my life until I could shut all of the doors. And for someone who primarily didn’t practice there were a lot of them.

In the 90’s a woman gave me a book about how this woman came out of witchcraft and how hard and long it was for her to do it. I thought that it was amazing what a difficult time she had and how I just couldn’t relate. A few months later it hit me between the eyes that this was me. This was why so much of my life had been such a hell and why it still continued to hurt so much even after so many years after I had left my family in the early 70’s.

It’s similar to being molested or being raped and being the victim of attempted rape. I’ve had all happen to me so I do know that they do the same damage to you. There is no difference in how they affect or hurt the person involved. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise either doesn’t know what they are talking about or has seriously dangerous motives in giving you the misinformation. Being born into and raised in witchcraft does the same damage as actively choosing it and walking in it. Both cases need to be renounced because being in witchcraft is a marriage to the death.

When I meet or hear ‘former’ witches and they haven’t included renouncing in their testimony I start examining their fruit. What kind of feet do they attach to their words? Do their actions agree with what they are saying? I had to learn to do this since I grew up in a family who was expert in living dual lives in plain sight I was so confused about what is righteous and what just appears to be so. A lot of believers are sitting ducks when it comes to the witchcraft that has infiltrated our society because the church doesn’t usually teach on this even though it is often mentioned in the Bible.

From my experience in trying to speak about it with fellow believers, many of them are in denial, are afraid or have been miss-taught by witches who claim to be their elders.

In the early 90’s I asked God if I was ever going to come out of the hell I had been born in and was still going through. He told me that it was training for where He was sending me. He said that many of those whom He was sending me to had gone through worse than I. I was reminded of this famous Christian family talk show. The founder is a psychologist and he shared the steps of coming out of abuse. If I had not already come through most of those steps I would have rejected what he said because his words rang false. He never had an abused day in his life. But what he was teaching was true.

I realized that in order to help bring others out of what I’d gone through they had to hear and read the genuine experience from me in order to trust me enough to listen and to reach for help. This was the beginning of my coming out of that dark tunnel of the soul. I found out that it was alright to hurt and that hurt can actually be strong and redeeming.

Even though I was dealing with the abuse and the witchcraft parts of my life I still wasn’t dealing with my health problems. Not long after this incident God told me that if I didn’t do something I was going to die in the corner that I’d allowed myself to be painted in. A lifetime of bowing to illness was taking its toll. It is true that my back, migraines, eyesight and eczema had been healed in the 70’s but due to medical malpractice in the 80’s I was deprived of a lifesaving medicine. I was unable to reverse the diagnosis.

Due to this I lost three babies, went through premature menopause at the age of 40, had frequent bronchitis, a final stage gall bladder attack (which was healed with all-night prayer), energy fluctuations from hugging the floor to hanging from the ceiling and year round flu attack. I was also lactose intolerant and had allergies. My immune system had broken down and my legs were badly infected and swollen over double their normal size. My choice was to stay home and die or go to the church where the pastor had been refusing to pray for me for over two years. He told me to my face that I was out of church due to my bad attitude and not because I was sick or afflicted.

I got crutches and went to church. The pastor had to either start praying for me or explain why he had been refusing to do so for over two years. He kept praying for me until he forgot how much he disliked me and asked God to heal me of everything. God did. Within a month everything completely turned around. Around this time I’d also asked God when the spiritual attacks were going to stop being aimed at me. He told me that my only choice was to be under the attacks or to be on top of them. I prefer to be on top-, thank you very much, which means I had to learn the difference between victim and victor.

It’s in the ending. I’m either a victim or a victor. It all depends upon where I am (I’m) in the picture. When I take the I’m out of the center of the picture my life comes into focus and it is no longer out of place.

I read some of Kenneth Hagin’s books on his own healing and his successful resistance to further health attacks. He said that he was never sick again after he was brought out of his death bed. I wondered about the symptoms which another of his books explained. I learned and practice this and it does work. The symptoms may come and knock very loudly on my door but if I don’t open the door and don’t let them in they don’t own me anymore. I still go about my days doing what I need to do no longer side lined by the symptoms that turn into full blown attacks since they’re no longer able to get through that door. No one knows because I don’t open my mouth to give the enemy any credit, which would then increase his stolen authority in my life and in the lives of those around me. For example, if someone were to tell lies about you and your family would you repeat them as if they were a fact? No, you would ignore them. The symptoms are the same thing, an invitation to accept the enemy’s lies about your welfare.

We began our ministry in the early 90’s. I went on the road with it in the mid 90’s taking our son with me. During this time, the mother of friends of ours was killed in a drunken driver crash on her way home from teaching Sunday school. A week or two later God took me to Heaven. I saw this woman with my two foster grandmothers who had died in the 80’s. Next to them was my biological grandmother the witch who had died in 1975. The entire family except for me had consigned her to hell. They were all surrounded by a golden light and they were dancing the wildest and most joyful can can that I had ever seen. I often do a painting of this experience and give it away.

After this point God started showing me that while my grandmother was hauling me everywhere with her that He was storing up things to help bring her to Him. The last time I saw her on earth was round two months before she died when she came to see me and shocked me with her appearance. She said that her spirit guide was telling her how to drown out her allergies with the foods that caused her problems. She gained more than twenty pounds in about two months. She spent two days dying from liver failure. God used my example in those two days to bring her to Him although I didn’t know this at the time. All I can say is never say ‘never’, because you just never know.

I did go back to school and got both my high school equivalency and college degree in Fine Art by taking an extra government class. This helped me to break the cycle of failure over my life, to learn more about who I am as a person and prepared me to walk our ministry with a pursuit for excellence.

I took the weight back off down past the size 12 I was in high school to the current size 10 and have maintained that since the mid 80’s. I’m in better condition than I was then, which enables me to walk the many miles I walk on my trips. I’ve been healed from head to toe of all the things that were holding me back including my ears and my jaw so that I can go anywhere God sends me. I was also delivered of the generational curse that I was born with that had been twisting some of my words of testimony and was limiting their effectiveness.

We always had animals in our home, farm animals and pets. We also bred and showed dogs. My mother continued that after I left.

A year after my son was born I cut all ties with my mother because she was trying to break up my family and it was tearing me apart inside. Around that time, my father also disowned me for the second time. He had already disinherited me.

The next year God started talking to me about how my mother always treated the animals a lot better than she did us and who was she banging around now that we were gone. Then I got a huge package of newspaper clippings from her friend about how she had been arrested for felony animal abuse. She had been taping her doggie’s mouths shut and taping their little paws so they couldn’t rip the tape off their mouths.

Her family contacted me and asked me to write a friend of the court letter on her behalf. I told them that they wouldn’t want me to do that because if I did the court would throw away the key due to all the abuse she had done to us. They were shocked. She was convicted and put in the state penitentiary for ninety days and depending upon which day she wrote to me she was either in solitary confinement for all that time or she pioneered a church gathering right there in the prison.

Her family came to me and begged me to reconnect with her and they promised that I could do it the way I chose. To this day it is still the same. I have an unlisted phone number which she doesn’t have and a post office box which she can write to and get a response from me.

Right now she isn’t responding to my letters or packages because she is mad at me again. The last time it was two years before she reconnected with me. That time was over my refusal to give her my phone number and this time was over a box of chocolates which she insisted on sending to me.

My older brother helped me to get back into our father’s good graces after my college graduation. During this time my brother also told me that it was true that I had to take all of the physical abuse in the family but that he had to watch it happen.

The second time I was disowned my older brother was the one to engineer it so that he would be our father’s only child. He also used the situation to pit my mother against me. When I was disowned the second time I took a good look at the situation and saw that every time I came into their presence I had to prove that I was worthy of being considered a second rate family member, maybe. So I didn’t argue with their verdict. I turned around and created my own life separate from them

My father reconnected with me the last year of his life and we wrote back and forth. His letters were basically about things like the weather with no answers to any of my questions or comments.

My life is still not pain free. But it has shifted from my pain to God’s pain and the pain of others. That is very powerful. I have learned to use that pain to do what the Bible calls great exploits. I’ve learned that as a believer my focus and goal is to do God’s bidding no matter how painful or difficult it can be and that being pain free and easy to do was never a part of the package that God has for us. I have learned to help others to see how they too can come out of the nightmare tunnel that witchcraft and rebellion puts you into.

Freed From Hell

As a believer who had come out of a family mired in witchcraft and out of churches that didn’t teach anything on dealing with spiritual warfare or witchcraft I figured that I’d just serve God my entire life as a cursed person. I know, you think how ignorant can you be? But how many believers do you think are out there who attend church faithfully, serve God and haven’t a clue about spiritual warfare? There are more than you would like to think. (My understanding of spiritual warfare: We don’t accept the enemy’s lies on ANY area of our lives but resist them and expose them to the light by the renewing of our lives and the conforming to God’s ways through the word of God. We then become the people that God keeps telling us that we are through the dreams and visions He gives us. It’s also by sharing our witness of how God brought us out of hell and by showing it in our lives by what we do in obedience to God and in service to others through Him.)

It’s easy to bypass spiritual warfare when you are in a church that doesn’t believe in the devil enough to teach how to deal with him and often sees God more of a social convention than the most supreme and powerful individual in all eternity. But I’m very thankful that God sent me on a journey to teach me the vital importance of spiritual warfare and the need to be aware of how the enemy of our very lives operates. Because of that I am free to serve God without the curses and other baggage I had inherited from my family and the generations before them.

I spent so many years listening to others give their testimony and I honestly thought that I had no testimony because mine was so different and so opposite of everyone else’s. But I’ve learned that if you are alive and you have cheated the enemy of a victory by choosing God’s choices then you have a testimony worth giving. It is one of the most powerful weapons of warfare that you have to defeat the enemy and to help show others the way out of their own hell.

The world works so hard at making every kind of witchcraft to appear family friendly, harmless and attractive. One of the ways it does that is by putting out some really hardcore witchcraft out there to repulse you and then sneaks right under your guard with some ‘friendly’ ‘harmless’ seeming witchcraft that because they seem like the underdog or the unlikely hero by unusual methods, as likable and soft and sweet that you opt for him because he’s not nearly as bad as the other that he really can’t be all that bad. But it’s all the same just like fear appears to be the lesser of the two evils when compared to anger. But they are equally dangerous and destructive. The enemy sets up this scenario inviting us to choose the lesser of the two evils. But what seems to be the lesser evil is equally evil as what appears to be the big huge evil. They’re just performing a good demon, bad demon routine on you to confuse the issue and to get you off of steering clear of them. And the truth is we don’t have to settle for
the lesser of two evils. We can choose neither because we really don’t need to, even though the enemy tries to make us think that we have no choice.

There is a reason why the Bible compares sin to witchcraft. There is absolutely nothing redeeming or wonderful about any part of witchcraft and there is no minor or major witchcraft. It’s all the same and reflects its origin. It’s dirty, ugly, destructive, sick, deceptive, perverted, confused and very dangerous. There is no safe place in witchcraft whether you actually practice it, were born into it, do it for a socially fun thing to do or if you’re just along for the ride.

I’ve heard of people who have gone to hell and returned and I’ve heard of other people who have gone to Heaven. God has taken me to Heaven several times but He has never taken me to hell and I once asked Him why He didn’t. He said that I didn’t need to be impressed and besides He had brought me out of hell. That is the best reason for having nothing to do with witchcraft because that is where it will take you, here on earth as well as after you leave here. I know because I was there and now I’m not and I definitely prefer the view from here than from there.