My name is Michelle, I found Jesus through my spiritual journey through the New Age. It’s so weird when you look back at yourself before Jesus, for me, at least personally, it’s like, it really is a different person. It’s like telling somebody else’s story, that person really did die and I really was born again. One of the main beliefs of the New Age religion is that you yourself are a God, and that you can create your own reality. There is no good or bad, which is such a lie, there is! There’s bad and there’s sin and that’s why we need a Redeemer. It’s like, you know, everything’s just an experience because you’re going to reincarnate and your soul–you’re just looking for soul growth and you just have another chance if you die. There is no heaven there is no Hell, it just is. So God is in everything. We’re all one. God is in you and in me and in nature and in the clouds. It’s really kind of like a make your own religion type thing. Like there’s sort of a broad thing, but then you can kind of take a little Hinduism, a little Buddhism, a little bit of this a little bit of that. They are so open to this coexisting thing that they do believe in Jesus as a person, they believe in Jesus as a teacher. So I did, you know, believe in Jesus as–they’d call it an Ascended Master. But the thing is, the disconnect for me at that time, was believing that Jesus is the Son of God and was the son of God. It was hard for me to wrap my head around the miracles. But He was getting into me, I think of it like a corral. He was corralling me like this way and that way and narrowing my path down to where it was going to be directly to Him. 

So I met this guy at yoga, through yoga at the gym. And I was just like on a high; I just felt like finally my life was coming together. But during this time, we together dove deeper into the New Age and meditation and we went…We left the yoga at the gym because we wanted a deeper level of experience of yoga and started going to a yoga studio. It was way more spiritually led, more of like, really like a church. At the beginning of the year, they did a 40 day fast at this yoga studio. It was like, to be thankful for what you’re eating and kind of pray for it, but you had to go to yoga for 40 days in a row. They wanted you there every single day. It was during this time, during this 40 day fast at the yoga studio, I was drawn to this young woman. I just wanted to be friends with her and that was really strange of me. Not drawn to her in an attraction type way, just I wanted to be her friend. And it was Holy Spirit in her that I was drawn to. I was like, I need to get to know her. And it was funny because she was walking–she would walk into the bathroom and I was walking in and I would say stuff like, “I knew I was going to see you here today.” Which it turns out later, I found out that I have some prophetic gifting. But it was funny to me because she wasn’t weirded out by that at all. She was like, Oh, did you? Because God was speaking to her the whole time through this. 

So we exchanged numbers, and we tried to get together for like, secular activities for lunch or whatever, and it never worked out. And she was like, “Well, if you’re open to it, why don’t you come to my church on Saturday night? She and a group of her friends had started a church, a Christian Church. And I was like, “Yeah, I’d be open to that. Like, I just want to get to hang out with you and I’m okay with going to church.” And it was a Spirit filled Christian church. When I went in, they were listening to Christian music, which I had never heard before. Everybody was like praising God and jumping up and down and just like dancing and I was like…My spirit was jumping inside of me. My flesh was like, What is going on? Why is everyone so excited? This is so weird. They really are into this. And so I thought, This is strange, but I kind of like it. And then they called people up for prayer and they prayed for people, which you never see. I’ve never seen that before, where somebody actually wasn’t just like, “Oh, I’ll pray for you.” You came up there and they touched you and asked you what you needed and they prayed for you. And so I was like, hooked after that. I was like, I just kept going back. 

One of the times, my boyfriend at the time came with me, and it was very obvious immediately– he was not coming this direction with me. He was not into it. He had been hurt from the church growing up as a Baptist and he was not going to do it. We started fighting and he was the one who told me, “You know, you’re going to this Christian Church. Christians believe that Jesus is the Son of God. For you to be a Christian, you can’t just believe in God, you have to accept Jesus.” And I was kind of just like, “Okay, well, I don’t really see why that’s important. I don’t really see why that matters.” As I kept going, I started being more open to that idea, because I started seeing miracles for myself. 

During this time, I call it, “sick with sin;” they said I had an autoimmune disease, but they could never find anything that was wrong. I went to doctors, after doctors, after doctors, and they just, you know, they said, “Oh, well, you have inflammatory arthritis,” and I was in my early 20s. I was like, I can’t have arthritis, like that’s impossible. And then they were like, “Oh, you have carpal tunnel” or “you have fibromyalgia,” and they would just slap labels on it and wanted to put me on medication, which I was not into. But I was just physically ill all the time. And then every time I would get stressed out, I would get more sick and I would have chronic bronchitis or different issues. It’s horrible to be in pain. It’s horrible to be in pain and not have any answers and not have any way to feel any better. 

There was this one particular night that I was just, I was sick again. I was so down and so depressed. Honestly, I just felt like I wanted to die because it was this cycle that would not end. And so I just kind of prayed one of those prayers that, you know, people pray to God, even people who don’t really believe in God in their times of desperation. I was just like, “Lord, please reveal to me what this illness is.” I guess, I didn’t know at the time that I could ask Him to heal the illness, right? I just thought He needs to reveal to me what it is so that I can take the necessary steps or do whatever I can to feel better because I want to die. I do not want to feel like this anymore. Like, I was just sick, literally all the time and in pain. So then I just said my little prayer and wiped my tears and I was like, okay…and then what do you do? You pull up Facebook and scroll social media. Then a suggested post popped up and it was like, “Mystery illness?” And I was like, Yeah, I mean, I do have a mystery. So weird. So I clicked on it and I just was bawling and weeping, because He really did reveal to me what it was–what I had. 

The mystery illness is called Epstein Barr Virus. A lot of people in Western medicine, as far as I know, they, they don’t hear about it, or they don’t check for it or whatever. So I just read all this stuff, all my exact symptoms. And then at the bottom, there was a way to heal naturally through foods and supplements, which is what God’s given us on this earth, you know, different natural remedies. And so that’s what I did from then on out. I changed my diet, I changed my supplements…But for me, it was such a wow factor of like, I have been going to doctors and Western medicine for years, paying all this money to get tests done on my brain, tests done on carpal tunnel, EKGs on my heart; they tested everything and couldn’t find anything. I was even going to acupuncture, and doing all this yoga that I thought was supposed to make me feel better and finally, when the Lord pinpointed it and showed me what it was…it was like, I mean, He answered my prayer immediately. I prayed, opened Facebook, and then He gave me the answer through that. And so for me, that was like, a part of the solidifying of my walk, of like, okay, He’s real, and He’s listening, and He answers prayers. He cares about me, and He cares about me not feeling well and being sick and helping to heal me. 

Another really powerful part of the beginning, while I was going to that new church, I definitely was very codependent and that was one of my strongholds. The last stronghold to be broken off me, I feel like, was my dependency on relationships, dating relationships. So I was dating this new guy, after the other guy, and he said he was a Christian, and he said he was sober, and he wasn’t any of those things. I knew I had to break up with him because the Lord was telling me, like, just like, showing me, just revealing to me, this guy isn’t who he says he is. You need to leave this alone. And so this particular day at church, I was praying, and so I’m like, “Lord, what do You want me to do?” He spelled out, in my mind, “Break up!” I was like, “Wow, I’m gonna need some confirmation on that.” I was just feeling so defeated because really what was happening was that the guy was just stealing my energy and my attention away from my walk with the Lord. Then the pastor walks up to me, and he was like, “Michelle, I feel like the Lord just wants to encourage you. You really need to press into Him, because He has something special for you tonight.” I was thinking okay, and so I stood up and was just worshiping God and praying to God. I was like, Well, thank You for that encouragement. 

Then at the end of the prayer meeting, they always would do sort of like a call up for prayer. They did sort of like a circle and they would say, “If anyone needs healing or if anyone needs prayer, step into the circle and everyone, the body, will pray for you.” I was so hungry and desperate for the Lord. I had so many issues–I really did–that I was like, always asking for prayer and always stepping in for prayer. And I started to feel kind of too needy. Like, I’m always the one that steps in. I always want prayer, which I think it’s good now, to be hungry for the Lord and to want His blessings. So I was like, “Lord, if they call a second time, I will go. Because He was telling me, “Go! Go in! Go get the prayer.” And I had had a pain in my neck, because I also had scoliosis which caused a lot of my pain–which the Lord also healed at a later point in my walk. But really, I think the pain in my neck was metaphorical for two reasons: One, it was this guy that I was dating was a pain in my neck. And two, my stiff neck pride was not allowing it. I didn’t want to break up with him. I didn’t want to step into the circle to get prayer. So I did; I stepped in, and this lady, she came and prayed for me. 

It was my first kind of, sort of slain in the Spirit experience. I was resisting it and fighting it. And I sort of crumbled and fell to my knees. I was like, “Wow,” but I was resisting God. I finally gathered my courage and I stood up again. Then this lady comes and she goes–this was like my first experience with a word from the Lord–and she was like, “You’re having confusion about your relationship.” And I was just like, “Oh, oh my God.” I just started weeping and crying. She continued to pray over me and confirmed that I needed to leave that relationship. But as she prayed, I, I was so slain in the Spirit, that I not only fell down, I did a total 180. Like, was flown from facing her, to my back was facing her, and I fell forward onto the ground. I definitely was getting delivered of some things, and was like, hysterically crying and screaming and I just hear everybody around me praying in their spirit language and tongues. It was really the Spirit of God ministering to me as I’m laying on the floor in a puddle, weeping and being delivered. And it was uncomfortable. You know, if you’ve ever seen people slain in the Spirit, you’re kind of like, What is going on here? Why are they falling down? Like, I thought that maybe they’re just exaggerating a little bit. Maybe they’re, you know…maybe it’s an act of surrender that you do at will. I think that the Lord was like, I’ll show you My power. Ha ha. But I definitely, I definitely broke up with the guy after that. Ha ha. That was all the confirmation that I needed.

I wish that I could think of the you know–people have their salvation day written down. They know, I gave my life to the Lord on this day. But for me, it was really like I said, like a corralling process that happened, of narrowing it down. I think the ANSWERED PRAYER from God on what I was sick with, and then the word from the Lord through that lady, and being slain in the Spirit…It was like, no longer could God be the universe because God was personal now. Because the universe doesn’t answer specific prayers. The universe kind of just works in its own time. And so, for God to be speaking to me, answering my prayers, very specific prayers, I started realizing that God was a personal God. 

So I guess the reason I didn’t believe in the Bible to begin with is because I didn’t believe in the miraculous. I couldn’t believe that a man could walk on water. I couldn’t believe that a virgin could give birth, that someone could turn water to wine, because my mind just couldn’t be wrapped around the fact that something like that could happen until the Lord came into my life, and I experienced many miraculous things for myself.