My story

Businessman and an owner of a graphic studio www.christianstudio.sk

After the velvet revolution when I came back from the elementary military service, I started intentionally to look for God. He however already “found” me earlier, which I could feel also during these two distressful years of the military service in a foreign state.

After 1989 so-called “lay orders” started working again and I decided to join Franciscans. I experienced a prayer, reading of a Bible and talks about a spiritual life for the first time in this community. Mostly retired people used to attend but already there I could experience people who had something what I could not define then but it attracted me very much. Now I know that it was a living faith and the love of Christ.

After some time I got an offer to go to work in a business world and I became a businessman. I enjoyed the work and what is more I could earn nice money.

With time passing power of money and desire for wealth and recognition started to control me. Thanks to these desires, compromises in my relation to God, to my own conscience and to my faith started to enter my life. One day I realized that I was sitting on two chairs and that I had two masters that didn’t like each other.

God proved me guilty also through my friends who asked me why I was going to a Christian group when I was not living by it too. They said that it would not help me anyway and that I was a hypocrite..

I chose a simpler and more comfortable way: I stopped going there and I started shutting down my conscience. At the end “vows” were taken and with such a way of life as I had I was not able to vow “poverty and chastity” in front of God and brothers in the order.

After longer time I started to feel a spiritual thirst and I knew that I could not approach God with my disordered life and what was more with my unwillingness to put it in order. And so I started to look for another source to quench my thirst in a form of different esoteric and occult teachings.

It all started innocently. I met a man who was doing East Mystic, meditated, he was well-read and he practiced martial arts. After a short time and regular meetings he convinced me totally about my mistaken way and he showed me a direction in which I should walk. When I recollect this, he needn’t make a big effort. My knowledge of the Scriptures, teachings of the Church and a relation with the Lord were so weak that I was not able to defend myself and I easily surrendered to these mistaken things. He was willing to spend his attention on me and he became my master. So in this way I have exchanged the eternal Master for an earthly, imperfect one.

I got more and more entangled in different occult practices. I applied myself to astrology, healing (reiki) and I practiced martial arts. Instead of prayer I meditated in solitude, which pulled me many times away from the life’s reality. I created a religion for myself in my own image, which I needed and which suited me. I became “free” and at the same time also a slave of my own mistaken way.

My business went well from its financial side. I had influential friends and in those times I was well off. When it was necessary to get, arrange, provide for something, it was “no problems”! The world was “a button” and I was a centre point of it.

After some time I married a pretty woman whom I love till today. We got married in a church – how else, indeed I was a “good catholic”. I had many things very wrong and when somebody wanted to give me an advice, I put him off with “I know it better”. Oh, that pride of mine!

Through mentioned teachings and practicing occultism, a certain power was entering my life, which demonstrated itself in a particular way. My way of life bore fruits – very attractive from the outside but etching inside and rotten. I was already supposed to pass a master “sanctification” in reiki.

I was able to heal people through practices of this teaching, I felt energy, thanks to which I was able to lay somebody down on a ground when he was relaxed. I was convinced that I did the right thing and that I served and helped people.

Now I know that it isn’t God’s will and that the way of getting this energy, “initiating” into these teachings, is occult. It diverts people from God and they run after something they don’t know many times. I had increasingly bigger, already greedy hunger for this power and knowledge. I spent much money for different esoteric and occult books. I was completely obsessed by it.

One day a mysterious man appeared in a store where I worked, who came with an interesting offer. At first we talked about teachings to which I applied myself and then he proclaimed all that to be a weak infusion. He was a magus (sorcerer) who was looking for an apprentice. I had a unique opportunity but I hesitated slightly. It is not fun with magic, it is a serious matter. So he gave me certain time to think it over.

My wife was at a business trip in Switzerland in that time and I found myself on a way of destruction.

During the week of initiating myself into the magus’s teachings I had visions of different transcendent things and creatures, my presence was accompanied by transcendent effects: thermometers burst, lights went on by themselves and so on. After a short time I ended up at psychiatry.

The visions stopped after spending three months at a closed ward and after going through uncounted number of electroshocks and medicament therapy. I put on weight 20 kg and my personality, also thanks to medicines, was changing. I was only like a body, I was sleeping, eating and smoking all the time.

After the second hospitalization my wife filed for a divorce. During two months and ten minute proceedings I lost a woman who once wanted to stand by me in good and bad.

It is a paradox that a judge, who led the proceedings, asked me whether I realized that I couldn’t have a church wedding anymore. I answered her by a contra question – what was I supposed to do when my wife didn’t want to live with me?!

In that time I started to lose everything that had a meaning. I was losing everything that I gained in my faithlessness to God. You know, it is not pleasant to live suffering from shortage but when you start becoming poor both materially and spiritually, it is even harder. I didn’t enjoy my work, friends deserted me, my family bore all this very hard, but it always wanted to, was and still is standing by me, although their abilities had the limits too. After two years even my mother, with whom I lived in one household and who took care of me, suddenly died.

More and more I was controlled by a great uncertainty and unearthly fear. I had terrible dreams and I felt that somebody claimed my soul very much and asked a charge for things I got dipped in by myself. There was so much of it all that I refused my own life.

I attempted twice to commit a suicide: once with medicines and the second time I wanted to cut my veins.

This way of solving matters got me even more on the edge of a society. I then quietly envied people whom I defied before. I didn’t accept myself, the world and either my surround. I felt refused everywhere and I was looking for acceptance where I got even more hurt. At last the psychiatry, from where I was running before, became my place of consolation. People could understand me there at least – as we were all at the same boat.

Literally I was melting in a pot of fire, but I thank God I survived. Where a sin and despair increased, there the God’s saving power could show even more. In time I realized that only my Creator could help me and I started to turn and rely on Him. And it was exactly God who managed to overcome my fear, distrust, and hardness by His love. He led me back to Himself, even I left him myself and He showed me that He was happy from my return. If He didn’t save me, I wouldn’t be among the living.

The first time He touched me with His love – it was during a prayer in a group – and I was just crying, crying, and crying…. Nobody ever loved me as he let me experience it then and still does. He alone can love till the utmost

My next journey wasn’t obviously simple. I had to be making a decision every day anew whether I want to live with God or without Him. My experience says that I have nobody better to go to. I have committed my life to Him and it was the best decision I have ever made. After the decision to belong to God completely, the things started to move.

I regretted all the occult blackness and I renounced it. I have burned occult literature in a value of several ten thousands Slovak crowns. It was not easy – it took me about a year. Why is it actually necessary to burn it? People who open themselves to such teachings and powers don’t realize enough whom they invited to their lives by this. It is a sly servant and a cruel master. At the beginning you think that you have power over something but when he has you in a hand and starts to control you, you will not get rid of him that easily. The only solution is to turn to the One who has all the power in heaven and also on earth – to God.

I regretted all the occult blackness and I renounced it. I have burned occult literature in a value of several ten thousands Slovak crowns. It was not easy – it took me about a year. Why is it actually necessary to burn it? People who open themselves to such teachings and powers don’t realize enough whom they invited to their lives by this. It is a sly servant and a cruel master. At the beginning you think that you have power over something but when he has you in a hand and starts to control you, you will not get rid of him that easily. The only solution is to turn to the One who has all the power in heaven and also on earth – to God.

Although I don’t have children physically, I believe that I was present at a birth of several “spiritual children”. It is also a form of fatherhood which substitutes for the original one to which I was called.

I realize that much of the bad I have experienced were the fruit of my wrong decisions, sins and spiritual disbelief. Many things were recovered, corrected and healed. I was able to forgive people who hurt me, because I myself have experienced and experience forgiveness. I have again found a meaning of my life, new friends and work. I lead also others to a deeper knowledge of God, but I am the most happy from the fact that God is my real Master who is really present in my life.

I encourage those of you who are in despair or in doubt whether you also could encounter something similar as I did: Try it with God and see how good He is.