Saved from a Life of Drug Addiction and Occultism

Jessica - Frankfurt, Germany

Hi, my name is Jessica, I would like to tell you how God gave me a new life.

When I was a kid I believed in God, but I didn´t understand the Bible. That´s why I tried to live my faith by going to a Catholic Church on Sundays, using Rosary beads at home and becoming an acolyte. Quite quickly I noticed that all this didn´t bring me closer to God. So, at the age of about eleven, I turned away from this belief, and paid more attention to my friends. We met daily in front of the church building to just hang out together.

One day we wanted to attend a mass, because one of my friends had never been to one, but the priest came to tell us that if we just wanted to make trouble we should leave. At this point I knew I wanted to break with Christianity at least the Catholic form, which was completely narrow-minded and hypocritical.

At twelve or thirteen my life consisted more and more of meeting with friends. At one overnight party, at a friend´s house, after drinking beer and champagne, I became drunk for the first time and shortly afterwards I had my first high on hash. Fairly quickly, smoking hash became a new habit. Daily I met with my friends to smoke. We loved all that was extreme, started to wear only black clothes and listened to dark music like; “Dead Can Dance”, “Goethes Erben”, “Current 93” and songs like “God Is Dead”. We focused our thoughts and minds on Alistair Crowley’s teaching and retreated to a world into which our parents had no entrance.

Following the principle that Aleister Crowley taught, which says “Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law”, I decided to live for the moment and to always do what I wanted to do in that particular moment.

At this time I was very attracted by all mystical and occult practices such as using pendulums, glass moving, tarot cards, etc. But the more I immersed myself into that world, the more depressed I became. Often I sat together with my friends and we hurt ourselves, slitting crosses in our arms or stubbing out cigarettes on our skin. At some point my parents discovered the injuries and they forbade me from wearing black clothes which led me to put them on secretly as soon as I was outside the house.

My relationship with my parents was not very good anymore because I excluded them from my life and lied to them in many respects; regarding my drug habits in particular, revealing only what I could not hide. When they found out that I was smoking hash, it was like a big slap in the face for them and they took great pains to talk to me. Due to my parents’ despair I wanted to quit smoking, but this decision didn´t last for long as life without drugs seemed to be rather boring and monotonous.

I continued living a lie and told my parents I wouldn´t take anything anymore. As I still managed school quite well my parents believed me initially, but soon found out again. Again I tried to quit, started again and lied to them again and again. This happened time and time again over the years to come, except the drugs changed from hash and alcohol into stronger drugs.

At the age of fifteen I had my first LSD trip which convinced me that there was a spiritual world. For quite some time I had the opinion that drugs were my religion and that they would show me all truth. I adored Jim Morrison and it became my aim to “break on through to the other side”. When one of my friends started taking heroin, I tried it a couple of times, but preferred LSD and ecstasy pills.

When I was seventeen or eighteen years old I went to rave parties with my friends where we danced the whole night through until the next noon. I loved to dance and to lapse into ecstasy, and hated it when at noon time the lights were switched on, and the music stopped and when we had to leave. Often instead of the ecstasy a big vacancy remained inside. To fill that up again and to feel “fresh” during the week I often took ecstasy pills and speed even outside the clubs. As a side effect I started to experience panic attacks. In my thoughts I was primarily occupied with discovering “truth” and other people´s thoughts, and it became increasingly harder for me to speak about things relating to everyday life. As these attacks became more frequent and more unpleasant I tried heroin again thinking that as I had already tried it I could leave it again. But this time heroin “helped” me to think about normal things again. I felt great and I liked the fact that I could finally speak about normal subjects again and that I could do everything in a normal way.

First I smoked the heroin only on weekends, but quite soon I found myself taking in during the week too and eventually I was taking it daily. In the first year I didn´t need too much to feel good and even the withdrawals were only noticeable through symptoms like having a slight flu, so I still managed doing my final exams at school without any big problems.

At this time I was still convinced that I had control and that I could quit the habit at any time if I wanted to. After my final exams I moved out of my parent´s house into my own flat. I turned away from my former friends, because their concerns got on my nerves and I wanted to be around people who had the same interests as I had: heroin! So I was almost exclusively together with people that took heroin as well. At some stage during this time I fell pregnant. I was extremely desperate and as the father of the baby went into prison because of a knife-fight, and I decided that I definitively couldn´t have the baby. The abortion was done under general anaesthetic and when I awoke from it I didn´t feel anything but a deep emptiness. A few days later I started to have frequent crying attacks and I knew my life would never be the same again. I spoke with my friends and a psychologist about it. Everybody confirmed to me that I had good reasons for my decision, but the guilt wouldn’t leave me. From then on I threw myself into the drugs even more than I did before. I set my border, which should warn me early enough to quit taking the drugs, further away, and on top of all this I lost the few morals that I still had.

I started going to a doctor daily who gave me methadone, a drug substitute for heroin that should be taken under strict supervision of a doctor. But I didn´t succeed for too long taking methadone only. Instead I got to know more people from the drug scene there and after having received our methadone we often went to the nearest pusher to buy some heroin. In the course of time I needed more and more heroin to simply be on a normal level.

I still persuaded myself into thinking that I could stop taking drugs at any time, if I wanted to. This was despite my boyfriend dying from a heroin overdose. At this time I received methadone from the doctor to be normal, and additionally I took heroin to be high. After a while I was chucked out by a few doctors, because sooner or later they all found out that I still took heroin as well.

For the first time I went into a rehabilitation clinic to undergo a detoxification. Once again I had to leave this location after only three days, because my heroin level did not decrease. So my double life continued. To keep up my appearance of being a normal young woman, I continued my studies to become a child social worker, which, as long as I got enough heroin, went fairly well. In this respect it was a vicious cycle, because I needed the drugs to simply function normally. The methadone I received from the doctor wasn´t adequate to eliminate the symptoms of withdrawal, as I was still taking more heroin than methadone, due to my extra heroin top-ups. Usually I took 5 to 10 grams of heroin daily; this was in addition to my methadone. So my day was spent looking for and taking heroin to just function. There was no time left for friendships. In the morning, at noon, in the afternoon, in the evening and at night I only had one aim: HEROIN! Heroin was my first thought in the morning and my last thought at night and often even my dreams were possessed by this ardent desire.

After a while I tried to pass another detoxification in a rehabilitation clinic. As I couldn´t sleep there at nights I went to the doctor asking him to prescribe me some sleeping tablets. He didn´t want to, and just mentioned that there is probably a good reason as to why I couldn´t sleep, and that I should thank the Lord. I was quite angry about his reaction and thought he was crazy. But still I couldn´t sleep and started to talk to God in my despair, asking him to help me.

I was finally released from the hospital as ‘clean from drugs’. But the first thing my boyfriend and I did, was buy some heroin. We were too ‘high’ that night to drive home. We had to spend the night in our car in front of the clinic. I finally had to admit to myself that I was addicted. It became increasingly harder to keep up the nice appearance I wanted to have. In the end I lost my driver’s licence and my flat. With large debts I had to move back in with my parents. I told them that I wouldn´t take anything anymore. At this time I was tired and very weak. As long as there was sufficient heroin I felt okay but when there wasn´t enough or when it was not good quality, I realised what a wretch I was without this powder, not even capable to walk properly and so on. Often I was lying in my bed crying and thinking that I needed something that would help me. But I thought a life without drugs didn´t seem to be worth living. Without drugs I had this deep longing that seemed to be even worse than my addiction. Often I thought; “Imagine, if you had all the money in the world and could buy everything you wanted to…”, but I couldn´t think of anything in the world that would make me happy and fill the emptiness in me. I decided that it would be better to have a short life with drugs, instead of a long life without them.

After I came to this conclusion about my life, I met a Christian man named Georg on the street one day. He, together with another man, told me about Jesus and that God had changed his whole life completely, see testimony of Georg. Furthermore he explained to me that I was an enemy of God, but that God would forgive me if I converted to him, got baptised under water and baptised in the Holy Spirit with the sign of speaking in other tongues. Everything I had ever done, even if I had committed murder, would be as if it had never happened. ISAIAH 1:18: “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow, though they be red as crimson, they shall be as wool.” These words touched me deeply, because deep inside I knew that I, beside many other things, was guilty of murder. Until that day no other religion or any psychology could take my guilt away. I knew that if God really existed, I would have committed many sins and that my life was full of lies. Lastly Georg and I exchanged phone numbers and afterwards I went to the nearest toilet and took some heroin.

After this meeting with Georg I thought more and more about the consequences if there really was a God? I was too deeply involved in my drug life, so it took quite some time before Georg and I managed to get together again. So in the mean time Georg put the book “The Cross and the Switchblade” into my letter-box. It tells the story about a man who went to the gangs in New York and experienced how heroin addicts, after receiving God´s Holy Spirit, were set free from their addiction. This occupied me so much that for the whole night I couldn´t sleep. I just could not understand why nobody knew that, as it is perfect evidence that God really exists. As I walked to my work the following day, I suddenly started to cry and knew somehow that God was there and that in the past I had done so many things which were completely against him.

One day I eventually managed to meet Georg. While we were driving in the car, he asked permission to ask a personal question. As I said “yes”, he asked me if I ever had an abortion. I asked him how this occurred to him. He just said that it came into his mind while he was in prayer. I was finished! This was exactly the point which in all those years had never let me loose. Somehow I knew that this was from God and that he was bringing up my most sore points to show he had not lost interest in my. This evening we visited a nice married couple, who were friends of Georg, and they told me the story of how they came to God. In their story they used always the term “relationship with God”, and I was wondering how it could be possible to have a relationship with him. That was a thing I wasn´t taught in my former years in church. Only a short time later I went with them to a meeting of the Assembly and noticed that these people had something which I definitively didn´t have, but what I wanted to have.

Georg explained to me that every human-being has a natural longing to be with God, but that most of the people tried to plug this hole with things like jobs, money, drugs, etc. He told me that only God could actually fill it. From this day on I started to read the Bible from time to time, but as I didn´t understand most of it, Georg explained to me particular scriptures on the phone. I was very much impressed by such scriptures which said that from our body streams of living water will flow, and that we´ll never be thirsty anymore if we just turn to God; JOHN 4:10,13,14 “Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water… Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” That touched me deeply, for I knew this thirst which was recurring again and again.
One day I prayed to God, telling him that he could have my life if he wanted it, and shortly afterwards I decided to get baptised.

Until then I was still fully hooked on heroin. When I woke up at night, my body was aching due to the withdrawal symptoms. Then I instantly had to take something to be able to continue sleeping. Georg was absolutely convinced that God would heal me from my heroin addiction within a second, and told me a few examples of people who had experienced this. My faith wasn´t exactly huge. I thought that this might have worked out with others, but I was not sure that God could do that for me because of the large amount of heroin I took. After I took my heroin for the last time at 1 pm we went praying together that I would receive the Holy Spirit with the sign of speaking in other tongues. I myself was rather astonished when suddenly unknown syllables streamed out of my mouth. I was overwhelmed. Afterwards we went to a lake, and I got baptised under water. Afterwards we decided to go to my place to take away all the drugs which I had stored there. Being at home I thought that it might be nice to smoke a very last cigarette. But when I lit the cigarette and inhaled the smoke, all of a sudden this whole procedure was strange to me, and, although I usually smoked three packets of cigarettes a day, I never touched another cigarette since this experience, without any effort. Now it was the drugs turn. Slightly shaking I flushed all the heroin I had down the toilet. So far these drugs were all I was living for, my only content in life, but God made it possible for me to throw them all away.

In the first days after my baptism I stayed with people from the Assembly, and even though in the beginning I was not convinced that it would work, I discovered that there was no “cold turkey”. I felt a bit weak, but this was nothing compared to the symptoms I experienced when only for a few hours I didn´t take heroin.

God had completely taken away my physical addiction. Not only that: my mental subjection to the drug was gone as well. I noticed that everything was different. I knew God was with me. At that time a scripture always came into my mind: 2 CORINTHIANS 5:17: “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”, and I knew it was exactly like the scripture said. The memories of my old life were all still present, but somehow I knew that although only a few days had passed by, all this belonged to the past.

It has been four years now since I made my decision for the Lord and I can say that he really blessed my life. One of the first things I did after my conversion was to have a real conversation with my parents and for the first time in years I answered their questions without lying. Although they were quite sceptical in the beginning, God healed the old wounds and they are very happy now to see that my life has changed so drastically.

Two years ago Georg and I got married and we are planning to move to Australia as missionaries for a period of time, which is really exciting. Meanwhile we have a little daughter and I´m truly thankful to the Lord that he gave me a family and a new life.
In retrospect, I can say that God did for me, what was impossible for the doctors and social workers. However, besides the fact that God delivered me completely from my heroin addiction, it is a far greater and more special gift that he forgave me my sins and that through the sacrifice of Jesus, through his death on the cross and his resurrection, he gave me everlasting life with him, and saved my soul from eternity in hell.

MARK 8:36: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
ROMANS 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

I thank God for His grace,

Jessie

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