Your faith in Christ yet reconciliation with things spiritual and how it has changed your life.
Okay. Give us a day, weâll get back to you.
Alright, weâre going to try to not make this a word wall, but weâll see, hahah (note from later: it is a word wall, with lots of digressing and random, irrelevant stories) (note2: this is basically our life story, tell us if you need a TL;DR and weâll write you one) (note3: God this is so sappy and too philosophical). Sorry it took us a bit, we wanted some time to form our thoughts for this one. (Not that they turned out organized at all anywayâŚ)
Keep in mind all weâre doing here is sharing our personal experiences. You should not build your beliefs and views based on this, but rather on your experiences. We hope we get that across. And itâs perfectly fine if you disagree with these things, feel free to let us know if you do and weâll have a discussion about.
Well, like we said, it was an incredibly slow process. Weâll start from when we were wee little. This was before Harry Potter and Buffy, and we donât think weâd even heard the word âwitchâ by then, because we didnât associate with it or even think about it. (But we had probably heard of wizards, because Merlin, but that didnât have the same negative connotation in our household.)
We had some strange habits and abilities. We loved using pendulums, and we would hold our hand completely still and see if we could get them to move - we could. We could also change direction and speed, but it took a fair bit of effort. We got better at it over time. We would feel like certain aspects of nature were communicating with us, like the wind, or animals, or the moon or sun. We could swear we could sense a friendly, but guarded presence attached to different locations, including our church. We would try to manipulate elements like changing the direction water flowed or making fire grow or shrink (without touching anything). We did that a lot with air in particular, trying to make it stronger or weaker, and that was the one we definitely became the best with, and we can still do that by instinct. We also engaged in astral shapeshifting, and that was very vivid for us. We were an empath, and also had a lot of obnoxiously accurate but ultimately meaningless deja vu, along with other âpsychicâ experiences that we didnât choose or control. We had an intensely strong connection with dragons, and it wasnât until later on that we learned that they generally represented the Devil in Christian lore. We werenât attached to them because we thought they were evil, or anything like that. They just felt ârightâ? That was, for a while, the biggest reason we questioned the Bible, and we thought a lot about it. That and what heaven would be like.
By the time we were in middle school, our pastor had moved away and we had to find a new church. He had been wonderful, and that church was like a family; everyone in our family volunteered there, and we were often at the houses of other church members, and it was all great; nothing fishy went down (thank God). We were fortunate to have a really, really healthy first, and long-term impression of Christianity. Not everyone is so lucky, but we didnât know that then.
We went through a bunch of churches, going once or twice and then changing places. Our dad, though not the best person ever, was at least very, very picky about his church. He only wanted a place more modern and open. Never figured out why, but weâre not complaining. He was definitely wary of donation fishers, at least. It was around this time that we fell out of most of our practices, deciding that we needed to âgrow upâ and âstop playing pretendâ, and started to ignore anything that wasnât definitely physically there. Only many years later would we figure out that our experiences were not typical to a child playing pretend. We also ignored our plurality around this time and denied our own existence as headmates, which wrecked utter havoc on our mental health (and we are still recovering from that).
So, we finally settled down into a new church. It was non-denominational, very modern and had a rock band instead of a piano, organ or choir. That kind of church, hahah. One of the pastors there was really awesome, and very down-to-earth. The other was very charismatic, and while we wanted to trust him because everyone loved him, we just felt something âwrongâ with him, all the time. Weâd never really felt something like that before, and we attributed it to our âpretendâ, so we ignored it. That was a mistake. He ran and owned the church. Turned out heâd let the band get away with child rape in his church, and was protecting them from the police and telling them God would forgive them, but did nothing for the girl other than telling her to stay silent. The other pastor, the one that seemed alright, left the moment he found that out, and so did like 99% of the staff and congregation. Heâs been rebuilding at a new church, though, and we really worry about it. We sometimes go by and play sports with our energy donor by the playground area (he recognizes us, so he doesnât care that we hang out there even though we donât go to church anymore) to make sure the kids are safe, because the new people there havenât heard that story, they think itâs safe to just drop their kids off there and not watch them, and they wonât believe anyone who tells them what happened. We donât know what he told them. Even our dad, who again isnât the best person ever, when asked about that church will say, âNow, thereâs something fishy going on, there.â
But, that was a massive digression, but one we wanted to share regardless, as it is relevant to our church experiences. It taught us that just because someone says they follow God doesnât mean they mean it. Before that news came out, we had been e-mailing him a ton of genuine, curious questions about heaven and other things like that. We think we had once believed in past lives, but we had since decided it couldnât be real because âit wasnât Christianâ, despite having plenty of past life memories ourselves. So we were obsessed with figuring out the relationship between life and the afterlife, and if there could be anything in between. We were a teenager at the time. He patronized us and dismissed whatever we said, to make himself look good and narrow our beliefs. We drank in everything he said like an adoring fan. Eventually he got sick of replying to us and passed us off on the other pastor; the one we definitely liked. Instead of the one-sentence responses the first one gave us, he would put time and effort into having a discussion with us, and wouldnât force anything on us. He would quote the Bible where possible and always cite his sources. We asked him if, if all of Godâs creatures were going to be in heaven, would that mean dinosaurs would be there, too? And we had quite a conversation about that, hahah. We agreed there must be. We asked him about dragons, and he admitted he couldnât give an answer on whether or not they actually existed, and if they actually meant something evil or not, or if it was all just metaphor. We asked him about people maybe being reincarnated before the second coming. He again said he didnât know, and was honest about the Bible not addressing everything. We were in high school by then, and had a few friends who were gay and bi. Probably thanks to that pastor, we learned that the Bible wasnât perfect, that it had only been drawn from so many sources, and the modern translation was definitely very different from the original, and itâs easy to pick at a lot of things in it. That was when we really started questioning if it was, in the current time, a really reliable source or not. We struggled for quite a while over whether or not God hated gays, and if it was a disease or just an orientation. Weâre ashamed to say it wasnât until one of our headmates realized he was gay that we finally fully accepted it, and that was a struggle, too. We had the help of a Mormon friend who is trans and gay, and Christian. (We have never been Mormon, heâs a friend of our family). He pointed out all the things that didnât make sense and didnât go together, and we came to the conclusion that being gay doesnât hurt anyone, so why would it be evil? It was at that point that we started looking at the Bible much more critically, and reread it several times. We decided that some of it definitely made sense, while other parts didnât, and that because of that, it might be better to just use our best judgement and try to be good people instead of worrying about rules that didnât always line up. And aside from all of that giant ramble⌠there was so much about us that the Bible just didnât address. Plurality and non-human identity, for one. But we would always get signs while praying that God loved us anyway, and that weâre supposed to be how we are; it isnât a sin. We had a very strong, personal connection with God, and we could sense them to some degree, though nothing dramatic.
By the end of high school, at the same time we were doing all this questioning, we made friends who noticed our strange abilities and traits. We made friends with a plural system, and a therian, along with a sang vampire. Because other people had the same experiences as us - and could tell what we were doing - we couldnât just brush ourselves off anymore. We also embraced our connection with dragons. This was also when we started to take our past lives really seriously, and that had an actual effect on our daily life. We were really stressed out by it. We didnât know what to think or believe about it, but the memories were there, and they were very strong - and they definitely werenât from this life - but they felt like memories regardless. Weâre just glad we had those friends, because otherwise we probably would have dropped out of school. We just had to figure out too much all at once, mostly in secret. But we could confide in them.
In our last year of school, we got really, really sick. Physically. Exhausted constantly but could never sleep, nauseous literally all the time but having weird cravings, pale and shaking constantly, but no fever, no virus, no nothing. We had a whole host of heart problems. We were overwhelmed by lights (sunlight hurt our skin and eyes), sounds, smells, touch and especially people. Just the presence of people. Passing by a person, it would feel like some kind of field around them was pressing on us, and there would be a crushing pressure all around us when we would be in a full classroom. It would feel physical. There was one class we felt okay in, but the teacher always kept the lights off and used a dim lamp, and it had no windows. There were also only very few students in that class; it was an advanced class that most people didnât want to deal with, but that we wanted to be in. Because there was the space to do so and the class was really just reading high level literature, he would let us put a few desks in a row and cover them with blankets and pillows so we could lie down. We missed school so often we had to go to our doctorâs office literally every day in the afternoon to get a slip. It was more than half an hour away which was, fun, with our symptoms. (Though we did our best to at least show up to that one class every day, but we couldnât always, and because it wasnât the first one in the morning, we werenât counted as attending school.) We got every test imaginable, had our blood drawn literally a hundred times in a couple years, saw every specialist in the area⌠no one could diagnose anything. We even had to go under a few times for invasive tests, and had all kinds of imagining done. Nothing. Our doctor decided we were faking and threw us out of the clinic. Because our family took his word as law, they treated us the same way - like a freeloader, and our needs werenât met at all (though we didnât even know what we needed to feel better). We felt worse every day and this went on for years. We came to terms with death back then, but not in the best way. It was more of a, âWell, when we eventually die off, at least we wonât be a burden anymore.â It felt like everyone around us was waiting for that, and it was a real dark time for us. Literally the only thing that kept us going was our faith in God. So we didnât change our views on things lightly. It was the most important thing to us, and it felt like God was the only being we could trust, and the only one that loved us. (All our previous friends had moved, disappeared, or otherwise become busy with life, and we werenât in contact.) God was also the only reason we didnât just kill ourselves to end the suffering. We thought it was a sin to commit suicide (which, we do feel differently about now, but weâre still really glad we didnât go through with it). We didnât have the energy to do anything and everything made us feel sick, so we would just lie around all day every day and night (sleeplessly).
We were at least involved in the online therian and otherkin community then, because of some of our non-human headmates, so when we had the chance, we would check up on forums and chatrooms. We finally told everyone about our illness, and one of the members told us it sounded like vampirism, and that he went through the same thing. We were automatically skeptical (and we hadnât taken our previous vampire friend very seriously to be perfectly honest, but we had at least heard of the idea before), but we checked the links he gave us and found Merticusâ website (notable vampire community resource). If you donât know what vampirism is by the way, it isnât the same (but it is similar) thing as the magickal practice of vampirism. What we have is a condition; for whatever reason, our body doesnât have enough energy or whatever it needs to run itself properly, and we have to take it from others to be healthy. So, we looked at this website, rolled our eyes and muttered âroleplayersâ and forgot about it for a year. Being no better off, we decided to look again at that point and really read what people were saying in the forum linked there. Exactly the same symptoms. Same experiences with being undiagnosable. These were posts that had been there for years already, long before we had talked about it to others. For the next couple years, we cautiously toyed with the idea that we might have vampirism. We realized we had had some of those same symptoms in our youth, for as long as we could remember, such as getting tired quickly and not doing well in sunlight. Being able to sense energy around us. Etc. That was very common in the vampire community, as itâs believed that people are born with this condition, and then go through a very rough patch with it usually about around the end of puberty (not the same for everyone), and after that point, you have to feed to maintain your health, or the consequences will be horrible. Even when we finally decided that was probably the issue, we thought it would be a sin to take energy from anything - that it would be unnatural, and wrong to weaken something else just so we could feel better. When things were finally just too bad a year after that, we caved in and tried just feeding on general nature energy. We felt a little better. We kept doing that every day. We had been advised that if we had been without energy for so long, that we needed to ease ourselves into it, like a starving man eating only a tiny bit at first to regain his strength before he can handle a full meal. So we kept up that practice for a year, and our health steadily improved. We could sit outside. We could leave the house. We could go for short walks. In the next couple years, we met our first energy donor (a person who is educated about vampirism and consenting in letting a vampire take their energy on a regular basis for the sake of the vampireâs health). We experimented with feeding on them and relearning energy work. After a lot of discussion with donors and the vampire community (there are several Christian vampires), we didnât understand how we could have thought treating an illness could be a sin. It turned out feeding on someone didnât hurt them unless it was done way too much, but there were ways to mitigate that. The vampire community had to learn ways to be healthy without harming others over the decades theyâve been organized, so we learned everything we could. We still struggled with why we had vampirism though. Again, after long-term prayer and questioning, we got more signs that weâre supposed to be this way. We eventually came to accept that vampirism isnât only a sickness, but rather just a different way of being, with different needs. Because after getting more donors and having a ring of them, and being on a strict feeding schedule (and doing other forms of energy work to maintain our well being), our health reached a peak we had never had at any other time in our life. We had abilities other people didnât have naturally. We took up parkour and excelled at it, and trained intensely for a long time. We were just different, not necessarily sick. Our previous logic had been like saying being human is a sickness because we werenât eating food, so we would have negative symptoms all the time, and that it must be a sin to eat food because you have to harm animals and plants to maintain your own health. But thatâs just the way the world is. Itâs just part of survival, and that, to us, is definitely intentional. All things need energy in some form or other to exist, thatâs just how it is, and in our mind, thatâs how God made things. There is balance to things. You give, you take. Etc. Something will take you eventually, and thereâs nothing wrong with that. We just believe in not taking in excess, for no reason other than being greedy.
So, by the time we were a regular participant in the vampire community, we realized that we were already practicing âthe occultâ just by being a vampire at all. Energy manipulation is a form of magick, we would say. All our new experiences, research and learning had also reminded us of our childhood and everything we did back then. We started to experiment more with magick, though we only had a few snippits from members of the vampire community to go on. We found that the more we did, the less we needed to feed, and that was what others experienced, too. We do still need to feed, that will never fully go away, but the more we work our own energy, the more it seems to be worth to our body. Expending it, however, is different. Then we need to fill that void. But that can easily be avoided by just not spending our own energy, and instead using nature, elemental, deity, etc energy. Oh, and we also used to ask God/Jesus for their/his energy three times a day to supplement what we fed on. That was always nice. Itâs already been several years since all this.
So⌠we basically naturally fell into the process of practicing magick, partially out of necessity. We physically benefit from doing anything with it at all, and we think that may be why we were naturally drawn to it when we were young. It may have done something for us that we werenât realizing back then. Throughout all of this, we never lost our faith. Weird, we know. It was when we met our current donor, and began to fully realize the implications of all our experiences that we really thought over what we believed.
Another thing we did when we were little (and we mean real little) was research all sorts of gods from other cultures. We were fascinated by them, and felt instinctively drawn to respecting them and showing them the love and care we gave to God. We saw nothing wrong with it, and could swear we could feel their energy, too. We wanted to get to know all of them. We saw them as part of Godâs creation and therefore, kind of, sort of, as aspects of God. Just different spirits with different jobs and different things to govern. We were already very animistic because of what we could sense, so this wasnât unusual to us at all. It wasnât until we heard about idol worship and all that from the church that we started to worry about things, though we didnât think that was what we were doing. We gave up thinking about other deities at the same time that we decided to âgrow upâ, roughly in middle school.
Our current donor is agnostic, but very knowledgeable on many different religions; they are very curious and open to them, but donât follow any one. We talk to them about everything, and we can have the most honest and open conversations about⌠anything. They helped us develop our current, healthy skepticism (not judgement), and have helped us experiment with magick, accepted our beliefs and experiences without having to change their own. They were a real eye-opener on how to treat other people, which we didnât learn about in church. They felt no need to force us to change, and didnât think there would be any consequences if we didnât think exactly the same way. Weâve gotten to use them as a neutral, thoughtful sounding board for our beliefs and organized our thoughts that way, which was much more important for figuring out our feelings than weâd realized before. They made us feel comfortable and safe in acknowledging that we had communicated with other deities at all (which like to approach us sometimes). We realized that we werenât scared of God judging us, but of our family, church, the world etc judging us for it. Weâd gone through so much with God, and weâd come to the belief that we were meant to be plural, have vampirism, have past lives, practice magick, etc. This just felt like a natural extension of that, to us, as we had always felt drawn to it and nothing bad had come of it.
Perhaps the one thing that helped us trust that this would be okay with God the most (aside from just praying and asking, which we also did) is that some of our headmates were not the best of people in their past lives, and did not do the best of things in said past lives. They have (and still do) feel intense remorse and guilt over those things. Some of them just canât forgive themselves, and have prayed about these things a lot, and have gotten a lot of messages saying that God forgives them, some very dramatic. Basically, that itâs okay for them to exist, after all, they already died - and in our opinion, no one should be held responsible for something they did in a past life, thatâs just unreasonable (unless they keep trying to do it in this life, but that goes without saying). Theyâre obviously better now for it, and have really learned to be better. So⌠weâve thought to ourselves that if God can accept those people, what could really be wrong with practicing magick and talking to other deities? Weâre not hurting anyone by it, and do our best to make sure we donât. Basically, it straightened out our priorities. Those headmates know what they did was wrong, and donât want to do it again - and again, theyâre dead. Theyâve served their time/had their punishment, and as far we know, they didnât choose to have another life here (none of them are from this world, by the way). We know the important thing is not to be harmful (but it is important to defend yourself! We mean being harmful as in hurting someone without reason), and since weâve also come to see God as a Creator of every world that our headmates are from (though they didnât all believe in anything in their past lives, and there wasnât a Jesus at all in a majority of those worlds), and therefore basically owning everything, we just donât see why deities would be a bad thing; how they could be in opposition to God.
We see humans as having free will, and having the ability to do whatever they want, wrong included. But we would also say that was something given to them by God, so even though they can do whatever they want with it, we still think that it is a natural part of the world. Not necessarily a good one, but natural. (And if you think about how nature is, it isnât all sunshine and roses.) Basically, we think the world is a difficult place to get by in, and can be very cruel and painful, but that thatâs just how it is, and that we canât change the fundamental cycle of things, and that thatâs okay. That does not mean weâre accepting of crime or anything like that - we still want to stop wrong where we can. But we think there is value in suffering. But again, that doesnât mean we want everyone to suffer, nor that people who cause suffering should get away with it. After all, if people are going to go out of their way to put even more suffering in a world that already has plenty, shouldnât they get the full dose of it? Karma, and all that. Weâre saying thereâs a balance to things.
In summary of the last paragraph - we think existence is a level playing field and there are no rules. We personally prefer to try to do no harm where possible, but harm is necessary sometimes, to stop greater harm. The key then is in thinking hard about what is and isnât truly causing harm.
On another note, it could be argued that all deities are man-made constructs. Godforms, if you will. Basically extremely high-level tulpae. But even then, they would still exist in some sense. Computers are also man-made, but it isnât considered a sin to draw on them as a resource and use them. Weâre not saying deities are tools; itâs just a metaphor to get a point across.
We also donât think it matters what you worship, because in our minds, God made everything and is in everything, and therefore no matter what you feel fits you, youâre still worshiping God. And after all weâve been through with God, and still accepting us after everything we thought must be sinful, we just cannot imagine God turning people away because they donât know about God, or because they see God in another form and still do their best as a person. It doesnât line up with our experiences and personal relationship with God. We think the church made that up to control people and gain members.
Probably because of that sort of mindset, weâve also come to believe that you were given your passions for a reason, and you should pursue them. We are more passionate about magick right now than we have been about anything in our current life. And as we already established magick is a natural part of our daily life because of past lives, vampirism, etc (and we believe energy is just an aspect of everything and magick is harnessing said energy), we want to see what we can do with that. We want to study it in a very scientific sense and see what we can learn about the world from it.
So yeah, it was quite a process for us. It didnât happen overnight, but rather has just been the culmination of experiences over the years. We know weâll never be done trying to figure things out for us, either.
We hope that helps. Hearing about what other people have been through helps us to think over things again, too. But again, donât let us choose for you. Thatâs not the point here. If anything, all we would tell you is to experiment with what you want to try, communicate with God and see what youâre told. See if anything happens. We just donât see whatâs wrong in trying, so long as youâre definitely not trying to hurt someone for no reason. But again, we can only give you our opinion, not law or fact. Itâs up to you to decide what feels right to you.
Hello, all of the above was written while we were blendy. Iâm Derek, nice to meet you. I just wanted to add my two cents, since I was Christian in my past life and still consider that to be my own religion.
As a Christian (and a doctor, in my past life only - Iâm not qualified to give medical advice now), Iâve always been fascinated by the utter complexities of creation, and just how much we donât understand. Iâve always been excited to learn more, about anything I can; thatâs how Iâve always worshiped God, by figuring out how things work, the beautiful processes behind everything. Studying the human body tends to give a unique perspective on things, as the deeper you look the more complex and nuanced things are. No one quite knows how the soul interacts with the body, or how spiritual events occur. That, in particular, fascinates me, and I couldnât be swayed to believe thereâs anything wrong with curiosity about what God has made and learning more about it. If anything, I would say willfully remaining ignorant - especially when you feel driven by curiosity - is more of a sin than exploring it. I know I would feel insulted if I created all this and no one wanted to look closely at it. I would appreciate people marveling at it. Just my thoughts, take them or leave them as you like.
-Derek