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« on: January 22, 2023, 05:42:37 PM »
Hi all! My name is Morgan, I am 37 year old follower of Christ who was converted and ushered into the family of our Lord and Savior on Sept. 12th 2020. I know many people had a rough go in 2020, but that tumultuous year was the most standout time in my entire existence, bringing salvation, light of Christ’s love and redemption into my wretched existence. A bit on my background and upbringing to paint a picture of where I come from and how I saw life...
I was raised a middle daughter of three girls, both parents worked incessantly (40+ hours a week, easily!) and my father’s mama, my Nana, lived with us since well before I was born. We were raised according to Nana’s religion, Catholic, and attended mass every Sunday in a CA Mission built in 1797. My sisters and I were the first female aler servers at this ‘church’ and this became an odd point of pride in our family and a bone of contention with the visiting bishops, priests and Monseigneurs that would come to the Mission De San Juan Bautista to proceed over the services (no girls allowed!).
As a kiddo, I had a number of interesting and even frightening experiences in that old building... Spiritual warfare and demonic attacks in my opinion. I will post more on those later, but suffice it to say, I never felt comfortable or safe in this place, and saw my mother, who was raised a staunch Pentecostal-cum-Charismatic battling to have her ego stroked in her role as an “Eucharistic minister” and Lector there.
We were presided over by a homosexual priest who used members of this church as pawns in his social hierarchy games within the congregation, pitting members against members for gossip leverage and petty in-fighting. As a child, I this felt this sinful, destructive and confusing atmosphere affect me, as even the alter server-children were used in the family-against-family, dichotomous dynamic, where back biting and egos abounded. Eventually, I stopped alter serving and attending church all together. I felt adrift and disconnected, bored and lost. My parents were (and in my truly honest, loving and humble assessment) are still LOST.
As I matured into my late teens, I thought to myself- “If this is what church/ Christianity/ God looks like, I don’t want any part of it”. I lumped my broken and flawed experiences of all I had seen and felt from the Catholic ‘church’ and the abuse I suffered at the hands of my mother, as the only possible outcome of a “God-centered religion” and ran as far and hard in the other direction as possible. I wanted control, power over my own life and to escape the narcissistic control my mother flexed over her daughters. Her lack of empathy, abuse suffered in her own childhood, and broken relationship with her own mother, ended up alienating her away from her own daughters. Then add to that, the fact that she felt we loved Nana more...
Nana, while considering herself Catholic, was a different breed of woman- God fearing, truly old school, considerate of God’s will before her own and always present with tough but unconditional love, made the juxtaposition of our mother’s unhappiness and need for control through tyranny, even more sharp in it’s sting.
My father was a man in a home of all women, often gone working or hunting, playing basketball or baseball, or in the garage wood working or carving wooden decoys (He competes in art decoy carving competitions at a world level and so was deeply involved/absorbed. Both parents felt very far away from me emotionally. I was diagnosed with type one diabetes at age 9 and was treated as though I would shatter to pieces if I wasn’t held under strict control of my parent’s stringent rules-
rules enforced out of anger, in fear of losing me or harm occurring, yet no actual sincere involvement in my health aside from taking me to doctor appointments where my mother would be defensive and think she knew better than the physicians & then yelling when I messed up as a kid struggling with a life altering, chronic illness. I was often “grounded” to ensure they could keep me home or from going out to play or sleep over at anyone’s home, so as to assuage their worry but not connect with me at all.
As kiddos, we were to be seen, not heard, and we were often “prayed” over in my parent’s beliefs of getting rid of illness, righting what they disdained in our attitudes, or “exorcising demons” out of us, while my mother proclaimed to have “healing hands”, speak in tongues or pronounce fresh prophecies after “hearing a word directly from the Lord”.
All of this power seeking and ego driven “sorcery” led me and my younger sister to eventually become interested in witchcraft, divination, tarot cards and all sorts of dark, small minded modalities- essentially rejecting all notions of what we thought “god” was and trying to establish some sense of order by our own means. We hid this from our parents, thinking we were being connected to nature spirits, powers of “goddess energy” and the like. We would attend local wiccan coven meetings together after moving away from our family and living together in Seattle. I made alters to the elements, nature and aspects of spirituality read about in pagan traditions. I did only one spell in my time of “practicing the craft” to bind a roommate whom was terrorizing me, justifying it as “grey/neutral magic to balance out the negative energy” she brought into the home with drugs and rage. ( I have since been given a repentant and deeply sorrowful understanding on how far gone I was and have asked to be forgiven over my sins and blasphemous living, praise God!).
Back then, I did yoga, tried astral travel, prided myself on my “open mindedness”/weirdness/free spirit, took psychedelic drugs occasionally; bought book after book on witchcraft of all kinds; I was convinced I was part of a long line of witches as my mother’s name is Diana and my sister, Tara, was another goddess from Hindu belief while thinking I was some “reincarnated form of Morgan Le Fey”. (I know, I was detestable! I can hardly type this without cringing at my old self).
I saw my mother practicing her own form of divination through her Charas-mania “church” groups where women would meet to discern images and words inside of envelopes to develop their “spiritual gifts” and prophesy words over one another, painting on canvases the visions “God gave them” and participating in the Bethel church of Redding’s SOZO groups. My whole life was steeped in lies, wickedness and lack of true discernment in any way, shape or form. We were all deluded, thinking we were correct and the others were wrong in their beliefs.
Eventually in 2016, I moved back to CA to assist in providing hospice care for Nana, now 92, who was dying from kidney failure. She and I had so much time to simply sit and connect, talk and share our beliefs with one another. She had long since stopped attending Catholic mass, instead preferring to read her Bible, pray and meditate on her life and the blessings of the Lord.
I watched her descend into a stupor towards the end of her time on earth and eventually saw her lose her ability to maintain lucidity. She watched things we couldn’t see, going from a sweet, intelligent and mindful patient in bed to a stark, stricken woman seeing things not of this world. At one point she started speaking after she had had not for a few days & awoke from a coma like state where she was repeating over and over “No! No, NO NO, NO!” to whomever she was looking at in the corner of the room. I sincerely think God knew her, saw her heart and gave her the opportunity of repent and deny the Catholic doctrines she was raised on and accept Christ before she passed shortly thereafter. If this is not what happened, I accept that, but living with this woman, I know she ascribed to following the Lord over man’s doctrines wholeheartedly.
In 2020, I was floundering in life, always angry, irate at everything and always feeling like others around me were annoying and small minded.
To distract myself and feel “better” I had been volunteering my time to assist a blind family friend in learning how to use her new smart phone and during those visits she would minister her beliefs of the Lord to me. God was softening my hard-heart during this time... a week later. on my father’s birthday, while trying to complete a video I wanted to make him and present to our family, I was having difficulty after difficulty, issue after issue, in getting everything to pan out the way I desired. I decided to take a break and go get coffee in town and refresh myself. While I drove, I turned on a random video suggested to me on YouTube that was “calming” due to the cadence of an older gentleman’s English accent, “unintentional ASMR” it was called- and heard this man speaking on Christ and being raised Christian in the English countryside as a boy.
As I drove, feeling angry at traffic, annoyed at the late summer heat and feeling cagey, the Lord graciously broke my heart open and nudged my mind open to His Will. In an instant I realized that as smart as I always felt, as “open minded” as I regarded myself, I had never considered a way to truly know God beyond the broken, small minded ideas I held for my whole life. I saw how I cut off an entire world of spirituality and possibility, holding onto only my own stupid “rationality”, halting any healing I sought and blocking any knowing of the love of God in my own selfishness. God put upon my mind and heart a deep sorrow for how limiting and foolish I had lived. How disingenuous and blind I was!
I started praying immediately as I drove, at first for the Lord to come into my life, into my heart, to fill me with His Spirit- a broken and honest prayer in needing a Father, a parental relationship and TRUE saving that I couldn’t get and didn’t have from any earthly relationship. I see now how I was still praying out of selfishness, but in that moment, it turned into repentance; an overwhelming sense of sorrow (and even a welcoming of/at that sorrow!), happiness in the clarity of seeing how wretched I was and still am in needing Christ, a Savior- THE SAVIOR, in my life.
As I drove, the traffic around me cleared, the lights were all green, others ushered me ahead of them at four-way stops and the weight of my anger and resentment to everything and everyone cleared. I wouldn’t have believed it if it wasn’t happening to me in that moment.
Once I got home, I sat outside on my balcony and wept and prayed and marveled at the graciousness and loving kindness of God as He gave me His vision of myself in His truth- the awareness of how sick I was, how desperately I needed Him & like a tidal wave, I felt crushed and adored all at once in how low I was in reality, yet how saved in that moment by no longer wanting sin, witchcraft, fallen world lies and the ways of the enemy in this broken system of man. I was washed clean over and over with renewed clarity on the multitude of sins I needed forgiveness in, seeing I the unending line of choices I made against my Creator, and I was plastered to the floor with tears and mourning over how much life I had wasted in chasing empty and selfish means to feel better in my life. I saw choice after choice I had willfully made to put distance and enmity between myself and God.
After that weekend, I shared with the Christian woman I was assisting, what had happened. She rejoiced and danced and hugged me, urging me to share with my family what had transpired. I shared with my dad, then my mother, (whom flatly stated she “knew already because she can sense these things from God”), & then called my older sister and told her as well. The joy and love from the other “believers” in my immediate family was lovely and fun to experience after feeling their standoffishness and always being the “black sheep” in their midst, yet it was short lived.
Now, to be perfectly honest, I was reborn yet not out of the woods. I was swept into the their beliefs as they tried to teach me and show me what they thought of as a ‘proper’ walk with the Lord. My father was a stoic and hands off Christian, attending church when he wasn’t working or hunting, tithing and listening to sermons, never opening a bible, doing the bare minimum only to wanna get home quickly after the services to relax most of the day and watch sports or movies for hours before having to get ready for the next work week. My mother was zealous for all kinds of zany and satanic, dogmatic beliefs in her new age Christianity modalities and I felt something was amiss.
I stopped attending their church building with them to find my own, soon realizing that there was no place I felt really led by any other groups or congregation in true bible preaching, discernment or grounded doctrines. I went to Presbyterian churches only to find they had “Scripture Yoga” classes, “The Chosen” watch-parties, alter calls and pagan holiday traditions- I was even hired immediately at this church as their Children’s’ Ministry Director, a clear red flag as they new full well I had only recently turned to the Lord! I flitted from Bapttist church building to building, nondenominational to Protestant. Eventually, most recently, I went to a Pentecostal church who demanded high tithes, had women’s prayer groups where wailing and hollering and walking in circles while praying in tongues wasn’t just the norm, but seen as a status of being in-dwelt by the Holy Spirit; love bombing, time adulteration, false teachings on finances and prosperity, and here, lots of the “clergy” went wild in laying on of hands to heal me of my juvenile diabetes and kidney failure, providing “anointed cloths with healing oil” to me to put on my body, yet ultimately stating I didn’t have enough faith if I wasn’t seeing miracles and to stop refusing the gifts of God I could find there.
I quickly saw how flawed and broken these churches are, how worldly and undiscerning. Praise God, He kept me on the path of urgently and sincerely seeking HIM, His will and not being pulled asunder. I read my bible, studied scripture and sought out answers in online ministries, praying and looking for a church or group that resembled the church in Acts, a Bible teaching, scripture espousing body of Christ that righteously and non-superficially taught God’s living word. I count it a true miracle the quickening that God has instilled in me, a holy gift I wouldn’t have even know how to ask for let alone the thing to pray for in the level of awareness and discernment He has provided. For a while, I felt very alone, frustrated towards the lies these other churches taught and at times even wondered if I should have been ashamed I couldn’t speak up and rebuke them openly in what they purveyed; yet... grateful all at the same time in my God-provided views of knowing there was more to be done for the Lord, more to see and learn, to seek Him earnestly and that is where I found Creation Liberty’s videos on YouTube.
I have been watching these teachings and reading the articles for about a year. These articles and videos have profoundly helped m in transforming my walk in seeking to use Christ’s example and commandments in my life. To live biblically.I have been able to know and stand in and share the truth of scripture more readily after having the scales lifted off my eyes, by the grace of God. I cannot overstate how grateful I am to be led to this body of believers by the hand of God on me.
I am sorry this “intro” turned into a massive wall of text. Feel free to reach out to me with questions or comments if you feel so moved or to offer info or rebuke on anything I’ve stated here, as I am still a young follower of Christ and want only to please the Lord in what I do, share and think. Thank you for being here for reading this and I look forward to connecting with you guys.
God Bless and may you see the Will and Graciousness of the Almighty LORD in your own life.
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