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Notes - Email - Serious Rings - Fun Rings The Lighted Path - Design - Host |
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My testimony. This is my testimony, as promised to the wonderful people at Exwitch.org. ~~ Joy�s story: 6-24-03 Ok, so I took a while to write this. I had to cut ties with a few hang-ups, and decide where I stood. Now that I�m getting there (almost, almost, and always walking in His Word), I feel like I can talk about the things that brought me here. But I should warn you, this is not short, nor is it strictly a recent story. I think it goes as far back as I can remember. (Not that I can remember all that far back . . . ;)) And it�s not pretty, but what testimony of a former witch is? Anyway, here goes. My mother and father divorced when I was 9 months old. No, I don�t remember this, I just know it to be fact, and it flavored my life from then on. Anyway, I digress. My mother and father divorced, and she and my grandparents moved me to the hot, dry, but lovely anyway, state of Arizona. They moved here against court order, and as a result I didn�t see my father for 10 years. In fact I barely knew he existed. My grandparents raised me, for all intents and purposes. My grandfather was my �daddy�, although that�s something I didn�t really *realize* until the other night. And let me tell you, that realization had me in tears for an hour. Ok, so then my mother got married again when I was five. She married a man who was older than her, and, as she found out, abusive. She knew it before she married him, but by the time she found out she was already scared. So she did it anyway. My grandfather told my step dad that if he hurt us, he (my grandpa) would see him dead. He really said that, and I think he meant it. Then they (Grandma and Grandpa) moved back to Michigan. My mother and I spent the next 8 years in fear, and lying about it out of fear. He was horrible. Abusive both physically and mentally, although thankfully not sexually, he was a monster. I remember once, he looked at me after he got done hitting me once, and told me �The Devil made me do it�. And I believed him, although after I started to think it wasn�t true, that he was just a crazy monster. The abuse made me start to question everything in life, and spirituality was a big part of the questioning. Ok, so we will skip ahead. Now I�m 13, just getting my period for the first time, and dealing with the fact that he turned *that* into a shameful experience, just like everything else. Somewhere in here, I can�t remember just where, they had to try to contact my father because they wanted to get insurance for me by giving my aunt guardianship of me, since my mom had lost her insurance due to a union problem. Needless to say, it worked, and I talked to him. And the union problem cleared up. Ok, so I was 13. I�d been making escape plans for the house we lived in, as well as plans for what to do if he tried to corner me. I had his old army knives laid out in the garage so if he tried to hurt me I could defend myself, and if he tried to hurt my mother, I could defend her. Thank the Lord, I never had to use any of it. Ok, so now we�re getting more recent. My mom got a boyfriend. He was a drug addict, and stupid because of it (smart without the drugs, which is the shame of it), and that gave her the strength to leave. She did, and took me with her. For the next few years, we lived in Mesa, which is a far east-valley city. Anyway, I went to school and lived life almost normal again. I talked Mom into trying a local church, and we went to a service or two, but then I was singled out, or all but, but the pastor. He told the congregation that he was going to preach about one thing or another, but that he noticed that there were women in the church with pants on, and men with long hair. That broke me. I was the only female with pants on, brand new blue jeans, and they were the nicest thing I had to wear. I didn�t own a single skirt. I refused to go back, and since my mom�s never been much of a churchgoer, we never went to another one, either. Then I got to know Mesa. It�s full of LDS, and while I never had a problem with the LDS church, I never fit in with the girls at school. By this point, I was pretty disillusioned with the whole religion thing. No excuse, really, just . . . it was easier to sit on the fence than to take a stand and deal with people�s opinions. That�s how it started, anyway. I saw Witches, who I knew weren�t the evil hag-like creatures of Halloween folklore, bashed and slammed and trod upon, and that made me feel sorry for them. So I studied them. I had no real background in Bible teachings. I had learned the stories, but never the reasons we remember them. I learned my morals from the people who taught me the Bible stories, but never that those morals were *from* the Bible in the first place. Combine that with a 16-year-old, and you get a dangerous mix. This is about the point I found out that I have MS, btw. First I was agnostic. I had no idea what was out there, but I knew that something was, and I was determined to search until I found it. Ok, so, agnostic searcher. Then I met my now-ex-husband, and he introduced me to a woman who had been Pagan for a long time. She was caught up in ceremony, and magickal herbalism, and in her own healing power. And I, being an ignorant 17-year-old, thought she was totally wonderful. Then I found her darkness, and the fact that she put up masks that made her look like a totally different person from who she was. She was massively abusive to her boyfriend and to her friends as well, and I took it for far too long. Then, after bearing his child, I married my (Atheist) ex-husband. This was after I had done a personal dedication to the god and the goddess, and decided that I wanted to be Wiccan. Then I discovered that there was no real cohesion to Wicca, just a bunch of opinions and �insert god/dess here� stuff, so I decided to just be a Witch. Then I realized that I hated that title, so I became just plain Pagan. Now, for the lifestyle I led as a Pagan married to an Atheist. We were very sex-addicted. Both of us. We swung, and a lot. We�d foist my oldest son off on my mother on weekends to have long . . . well, I�m not getting into it, but it was definitely sin. And I loved it, reveled in it. I thought it was ok! Then it made my marriage destruct. He decided that he couldn�t share anymore, and I didn�t listen. As much as I try to blame the divorce on him, it really was as much my fault as his. Boy, that admission tastes bad in my mouth. . . There was more involved in that, but I feel like going into it is making excuses, and placing blame, and I�m done with that. After, I moved in with my mother again. I dated a couple of people, one of them the owner of a game store. He�s a great guy, but certainly not my type. . . But a nice guy all the same. My attitude about sex hadn�t changed, and I had no concept of the sin of it at all. Now, to my second marriage; I met John at an impromptu acting group on Mill Avenue, in Tempe (where ASU is), and I was interested in him immediately. I took time to get to know him over the next few weeks, and one day, when I went into the store of my then-sorta-boyfriend, he came up to me and told me that he remembered where he knew me from. He said I looked like the women in his art history books, the models for the renaissance art. It was the biggest complement I�ve ever been given, and it was totally guileless on his part. I fell in love then and there. That wasn�t without mistakes, either, though. I tried to use sex to get him to fall for me, which failed totally. When that failed, I broke up with him to be with a Pagan guy I had met, and realized that there was nothing about his that I really liked, let alone loved. He had the potential to be an abuser, and he was a false person. At the end, we had gone to the company picnic for his employer, and he made me hide the pentacle I was wearing from them. I was furious. . . And was broken up with him the next day. After all that, I went home (I was living with a Pagan friend at the time) and called John. I was in tears, because I had hurt him so badly, and I had cited difference of religion as the reason. He had told me it was a cop-out and I realized after that he was right. So I called to beg forgiveness. He came to me at my house, and we talked, and he forgave me. And he wanted to take me back. I hadn�t even asked, because I had no hope for that, but he did. And then we were married. He was a virgin at 24, and he turned 25 not long after I met him. He lost his virginity when we were married, and not a moment before. I�d never thought of sex in regard to marriage before, just as a fun thing, or a tool. It�s amazing what a difference it makes. Anyway, I spent the next few years, give or take, as a Pagan married to a Christian. His parents tried to get him to divorce me, because of II Corinthians 6:14, the whole �Do not be yoked together with unbelievers� thing. All he told them was that he felt that God wanted him to be with me, that He put us together. Then, after I was saved, I read 1 Corinthians 7:12-16 �12To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord): If any brother has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her. 13And if a woman has a husband who is not a believer and he is willing to live with her, she must not divorce him. 14For the unbelieving husband has been sanctified through his wife and the unbelieving wife has been sanctified through her believing husband. Otherwise your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. 15But if the unbeliever leaves, let him do so. A believing man or woman is not bound in such circumstances; God has called us to live in peace.� And suddenly I was convinced that he was right, that we were meant to be together from the beginning. Things are starting to make sense now. I see the truth about the things that confused me before, and I love my husband for believing in me and helping me make it this far. Praise the Lord for everything that has happened in my life, because without it I would never have become the woman I am today. Every hardship is indeed a lesson, and every mistake a chance at practical application. My only difficulty now is how to talk to my friends, the people I know as a Pagan who have now seen such a drastic change in me. The woman I see the most doesn�t see much difference in me at all, and I think it�s because I tend to backslide when I�m around her, and find my language reverting and my attitude changing. I want to change that without cutting ties with her, because I want to be able to witness to her and give her an image of Christianity that�s not the negative thing she�s seen all her life. ~~ Ok, I think that covers it all. That�s my life in a nutshell, take it or leave it. Joy
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