In high school I hung out with the wrong crowd, this followed me out of high school and accompanied me for the 2 years following high school. These friends were kind, funny and wiccan. I loved them dearly. We spent a great deal of time together, we invested into each others lives and we bonded. During the time I was friends with them they were open about their wiccan practices, and while I never fully participated in their practices I also never avoided them. I truly did not know what I believed in. I was searching for a high being, a God, a connection and a faith. I knew that God existed, but only because I saw the demonic that accompanied my friends practices. I have heard many arguments that wiccan is not demonic, and that it is Earth worship, but that was never my experience.
My experience consisted of hiding in a bathroom because demons had chased my friends home from the cemetery where they were, for lack of a better term, playing around. It consisted of watching my best friend become possessed by a demon and try to choke herself. It consisted of seeing demons in my bedroom at night. Most of all it consisted of fear, evil, pain and sadness.
At the end of my friendship with them I had to terminate every connection with them. It was painful, gut wrenching and tear filled. I recognized that I could no longer live in this setting. My mind was incapable of existing in that place of fear for a longer term. I recognized the evil that existed in this world and was forced to sever connections that I had invested a great deal of myself into in order to attempt to free myself from some of the evil that had permeated me.
After all of this I found myself searching for something good, something to believe in, something eternal to invest in, something to hope in. It took many heartbreaks, what felt like oceans of tears, years of loneliness and hopelessness. After all of it I found God. Or rather I should say that He found me. I found everything that I had been searching for and so much more. I found faith, hope, love, forgiveness, redemption, strength, courage, joy, peace, grace and most of all God. I don't write this as a regurgitation of sermons I've heard, books I've read or conversations I've had. I write this out of personal experience.
I've lived the life of my own decisions and I found myself running in circles, chasing after smoke and mirrors. That life only lead me to confusion, pain, heartbreak and loneliness. I know am choosing to live my life for something more. This decision is slowly reshaping me from the inside out. It's altering my thoughts on right and wrong. It's also causing me to feel sadness over things that I never gave much thought to before.
It still amazes me how a single verse in the Bible can sum up my feelings at any given moment. Each day I read and discover something new, I find new verses that suit my thoughts and emotions of that moment and of that day.
Above all this verse captures what has changed within me, and the way I choose to I live my life from now to eternity:
I have been crucified with Christ [in Him I have shared His crucifixion]; it is no longer I who live, but Christ (the Messiah) lives in me; and the life I now live in the body I live by faith in (by adherence to and reliance on and complete trust in) the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.
Galatians 2:20
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=galatians%202&version=AMP
