I Am Renata: Part Two

Renata is not the real name of the woman in this story. To protect her family’s privacy, she asked for a pseudonym. I gave her the name Renata, which means “reborn.” I am telling you her story very much as she told it to me. To read the first installment of her story, visit last week’s post.

***

Mark and I started dating after meeting that one time at the party. He was 18. I was 15. 

The woman of the house where I was living was a high priestess in some weird, cultish offshoot of the Anglican church. Mark and I helped her start a very successful body-piercing company. We were her first two employees. By the time I was 17, I had gotten close to 30 piercings. 

Mark grew up in a very conservative Baptist home. His parents were upper middle class and lived in a big house on a hill. I was fascinated by his life. I would go into his house, and the freezers were full of food; the cupboards were full of food; and I thought, This is crazy! You can eat whatever you want, whenever you want. I remember asking him a lot of questions about God and what he believed.

He told me, “I’m a Christian, and this is why I’m a Christian: Jesus died for my sins, and he rose again the third day, and now I’m forgiven for all my sins and will go to heaven. If you don’t believe Jesus is your Savior, you’ll go to hell.”

I remember being pretty perplexed and saying, “So you’re going to heaven, and I’m going to hell?”

And he was like, “Yeah, but you don’t have to; you can repent. Just confess you’re a sinner, and ask forgiveness, and say that Jesus is Lord.” 

I remember saying, “That sounds really dumb.”

Mark was the first boy I ever met who was kind. I thought, Oh, good, I can get out of this life of mine. But instead of me going into his world, he came into mine. He had planned for a career in the air force, but soon after high school, he left home and was just homeless. We were homeless together on and off for a couple of years. He joined the Skinhead gang also. 

We had a very violent lifestyle and took pride in being street fighters. We kept guns in our home for protection but never carried them with us, considering that a sign of weakness. About two years after we met, we got into a big street fight and were surrounded by a Mexican gang in a mall parking lot. I had a switchblade to my throat; and Mark was off to the side with a gang of men around him. I saw one of the men pulling a gun out of his coat. 

I was only 95 pounds, but we had learned on the streets it’s not about how strong or big you are; it’s about how much you disregard your own life. I was very good at that, because I really didn’t care. People are born with fear and a desire to protect themselves, and if you lose that, you become dangerous.

I grabbed the person holding the blade to my throat and threw him down. Mark punched the guy with the gun in the face. We were just buying ourselves time, knowing it would only be a matter of time before the police showed up. Sure enough, the police came and everybody scattered. 

At  home that night, I said, “You know, we could have died. It was close. What would have happened if we had?” 

And he said, “I told you, you’d go to hell and I’d go to heaven.”

“Why, though? We’ve lived the same life for years.”

He said, “Because I said the sinner’s prayer when I was five years old, and now I’m saved for the rest of my life. Just do it. It’s so easy!”

And I said, “No! It’s so dumb I won’t do it.” 

My best friend at the time was a practicing witch, and her answers to my spiritual questions made more sense to me than Mark’s answers about Christianity. She told me there are living, powerful spirits around us we can communicate with. That sounded a lot more attractive than what I saw as a powerless God who didn’t intervene to save little children and didn’t answer prayers. She started teaching me to cast spells. 

Mark got very angry about it. He said, “Don’t do that stuff around me. I don’t want to see it; I don’t want to hear it. Just keep it away from me.”

We had married when I was 17 and he was 20. By the time we married, we both had good jobs, but Mark, with his conservative Baptist background, wanted me to quit work and stay home. So I was bored out of my mind and had lots of time to explore witchcraft. I started with the Ouija board and got deeper and deeper into communicating with spirits until they were always in my dreams and thoughts. I called them “ghosts” then, but I now believe they were demons or familiar spirits. Three of them stayed with me all the time. 

I sought after witchcraft for the same reason I sought after street gangs and 30-year-old men on steroids: I was looking for the sense of power I’d never had. It was a game of sorts. My friend and I would say, “They can make a cup move; can they move 20 pounds?” We were always testing the spirits. 

I believed I was powerful and in control, and the demons went to great lengths to make me think that if I wanted them to leave, they would. But I was getting to the point of being physically controlled. One time I was driving my car and felt someone grab the steering wheel. 

At first, Mark claimed the spirits didn’t exist. But when he started seeing strange things—like  something flying across the room when no one was there—he had a wake-up call. We had a lot of atheist friends, and it was bad enough they started asking, “What is going on in your house? It’s so creepy.” One or two actually told us they wouldn’t come over anymore. 

One night I was with a friend, using the Ouija board. I didn’t use it much anymore for myself because I communicated with the spirits directly, but she needed it. And that night things got really scary. For the first time, I actually saw a demon in my house. I was terrified in a way I could never explain, terrified straight to my soul. I said, “What do you want?”

The Ouija board started spelling out Jesus Christ, even after we let go of it. I started mocking the name of Jesus, mocking that the spirits were even saying that. I believed then the ultimate kind of virtue was never to show fear—that if you show fear, that somehow gives them power—and I didn’t really care what I was saying. My friend had to leave at that point, and I was left alone and scared. 

At one point in the night I called out to God to help me. When I did, the needle pointed away from the Ouijee board toward a Catholic candle we had. On the candle was a prayer to Saint Michael the archangel, asking for protection. I read the prayer and got emotional, remembering how I had prayed as a little girl for God to save and protect me. He doesn’t do that, I thought. It doesn’t mean anything. 

And then I heard a voice—I don’t know if it was audible or if God just put it on my heart—but God said plainly, “I love you.” I sensed a completely different presence in the room than what had been there, and I went and laid my face on the kitchen floor and cried and cried and cried.

I called Mark and said, “I need to talk to you. I was communicating with the spirits and things were getting really weird, and God just told me he loved me.” I started crying and said, “God loves me. I know he does.” 

He said, “Renata, I know. I’ve told you a million times.”

And I said, “No, this is different. He really loves me.” 

We kept going back and forth like that until he got frustrated and said, “Well, what do you want me to do?”

I said, “I don’t know what to do. You’re the Christian, I’m asking you.”

His grandfather was very big on sharing the gospel, and he had given me a New Testament. Now Mark said, “Why don’t you read the Bible Grandpa gave you?”

So I started reading the Bible, but I didn’t understand very much of it. I don’t think I’d ever read a book in my life, outside of what we had to do in school. This Bible was a KJV, which made it harder to understand.

I felt like I needed to do something more, so we got ahold of the high priestess’s father—she was the only one I knew besides Mark who claimed to be a Christian. He came over in full priest attire with incense and holy water and did a full exorcism in every room. Afterward, he said, “You need to burn everything you have that has to do with these spirits.” 

So we did, and I said, “Now what?”

He said, “You’ve had these things so long, you’ll feel a real emptiness and loneliness. There’s going to be a vacuum, and you need to choose what you’re going to replace it with.”

I interpreted that as needing to read the Bible and fill that vacuum with whatever God was saying. So I spent all my spare time trying to figure out those hard-to-understand scriptures. Whenever I understood a verse, I would write it down, and I loved it. I started praying a lot,  asking God to help me.

I began changing very rapidly. It scared me. Sometimes Mark would want to get drunk or get in a fight, and I wouldn’t want to. I remember watching a very violent movie about Skinheads with a group of our friends. Mark and all our friends were cheering at the violent scenes, and I got sick to my stomach. I covered my ears, put my head between my legs, and tried not to throw up. I remember praying, “God, what’s wrong with me?”  

I thought I was completely broken, that I was going crazy. I’d been around violence my whole life, and now I was nauseated by acting. I found myself more and more on the outside of things. More and more I was asking God, “What’s wrong? Why am I being so weird?”

Then I saw an advertisement for camp counselors to teach foster children about the love of God. I was so excited. I told Mark, “I want to tell all these children that don’t have families and don’t know about God’s love—I want to tell them that God loves them!”

The camp was held by an evangelical church, and the people there were very sweet. When they started asking me questions, they soon knew, and I knew, that I had no idea what I was talking about. So they made me an assistant counselor and told me they’d love to have me as counselor the following year. 

At every one of the training meetings I attended, I was full of joy in a way I had never experienced. I wanted to run up and give every person there a hug and never wanted to leave—and I’d never willingly hugged anyone before.

The first time I got in the car to leave after having this stranger urge to hug people, I was a little shaken up. I said, “God, what is wrong with me?” Pulling out, I flipped on the radio and a verse came over the air: “By this do all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.”

I think that’s when I realized that the changes were good and that God was doing it. This wasn’t some weird phrase, but I was actually experiencing something real. 

Mark and I started going to a Baptist church and then meeting with the pastor every week. He was very sweet, even though he’d come over and we’d be smoking and Mark would be sitting there with his loaded gun. The pastor told me at one point, “You need to be baptized,” but I wasn’t ready yet. As radical as my conversion was, it wasn’t one where my heart instantly turned to Jesus. I had to walk through, pray through, work through, to even know who Jesus was. 

It took a couple months. I would go to the Christian bookstore and buy lots and lots of Bible studies. And every single Sunday in church when the pastor would give an altar call, I’d raise my hand. Yes, Pastor, I want to go to heaven. He was very gracious with me, every time. After a few months, I was ready. I was baptized, very sure I was a Christian, and wanted to live for Jesus no matter what. 

At some point, Mark got born again through me writing down all the scriptures that I understood or had questions about. I started writing down scriptures like, “If we say we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness we lie and do not the truth.” Pages and pages of scripture over several months. 

He came home one night, and I said, “I have a question. I’ve been reading all these verses about walking in darkness, and how we’re liars if we walk in darkness and say we’re Christians.”

He said, “Yeah, those are good verses, but what’s your question?”

I said, “Well, why do I feel I was walking in darkness all this time and now God’s changing me, but you say you were already changed and a Christian that whole time?”

God used those scriptures and our conversation to really convict him. He came home one day and confessed to me, “I’m a liar. I don’t know God.” And he became a Christian, which shocked me because I thought he already was. 

As I grew in my knowledge of the Bible, I became what my family and the world saw as radical. When I read Jesus’ teaching on not taking oaths and what Corinthians says about wearing the headcovering, I took those things at face value. I would ask Mark or the pastor, “Doesn’t this mean you shouldn’t swear oaths?” or “Doesn’t this mean I should wear a headcovering?” And they would say, “No, it can’t mean that.” 

I remember over that time Mark was into conspiracy theory, and he wanted to bury guns, some money, and a Bible. I said, “Can I just bury a Bible? I can’t imagine Jesus having a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other.” So I was onto the idea of nonresistance. 

But I doubted my understanding, because I wasn’t educated and none of the Christians I talked to agreed with my ideas. I thought I must be wrong. Eventually, though, I took a stance and said: Whatever I understand the Bible to say, I’m going to do it. I had to take that stance because I didn’t have any Christian culture to interpret the Bible through, other than what I felt like it said. Mark also took that stance. 

That started us on a journey that led us away from the Baptist church and several years later to people called plain Christians. But we left our church on good terms, and kept up with those people for years. 

My family, though, hated what they saw as our radicalness. I once was close with my grandpa, but when he first saw me in a headcovering, he cursed and called me names and ripped it off my head. When he was in the hospital dying, I went to see him. I sang him a song and rubbed his hand, and he looked into my eyes and said, “I hate the way you live your life. I hate what you do. And I hate the way you raised my grandchild.” 

He didn’t die at that time, but in his mind, those were his last words to me. That’s how my whole family felt about my Christianity. They hated that we didn’t cut our oldest daughter’s hair and put dresses on her. They accused us of being abusive and time and again threatened to call the CDC. 

Mom has changed tremendously toward me over the years. At first, she hated our Christianity and what she thought of as my frumpy clothes. But after she started visiting our family and saw that the children were joyful, that they had a good education, and that they were obedient and courteous, her attitude changed. She would say things like, “I wish I was more like you.” Two or three years ago, she started asking a lot of questions about Scripture and Christianity and started going to church. When she told me she was getting baptized. I said, “Why?” 

She said, “You and Mark are the only real Christians I ever met. I always said I would never be one of those born-again people, but you guys actually live the Bible. I want to be like you.” 

Facing my past was difficult for many years because my family minimized everything I said. My grandparents and aunts and uncles would say things like, “All teens are rebellious,” and “Having a fight with your parents is normal.” Often, when I remembered an instance of abuse I had seen or experienced as a child, my mom would tell me it had never happened. That messed with my head. I began to doubt everything I thought or remembered. 

I finally got to the place where I went to see my oldest brother Phil in prison. And I said, “Phil, here’s how I remember life, here’s how my childhood was.” Telling him my memories felt like a huge risk and made me feel so vulnerable. I told him the issues I was working through now and said, “Are these memories true? What was life like for you?”

He fought back tears, and he said, “It was horrible. I’m so sorry I did those things to you.” 

Soon after that, I took Kit out to a restaurant and said, “Hey, I just want to pretend I’m a stranger. Can I tell you how I came to Jesus?”

He said yes, and I shared my testimony with him, and he started crying. He said, “I am so sorry.”

I said, “I just want to share with you because I want to know, was it that bad? Am I overreacting?”

And he said, “No. It was that bad.” 

That brought so much healing. 

My new birth was over 20 years ago now and was simply just the beginning. His love for me was only the starting place that led me to his good news which was freedom from the bondage of and slavery to the devil’s kingdom. I pray this story will glorify him and demonstrate how he can reach into darkness and give us power to overcome that darkness. As for his love that drew me into his kingdom, I continue to learn about it day by day and year by year throughout this life’s many trials. 

We continue to build strong and loving relationships with my family. Mark and I live in an urban Christian community and are expecting our 12th baby. We are very excited to start a new phase of life with a new grandbaby coming this summer. 

***

“I Am Renata” premiers a news series of posts I call In Every Life a Story. I plan to publish a new story for this series every 6 weeks or so. Do you have a story or know of someone who has a story to encourage and inspire others? Contact me at lucindajkinsinger@gmail.com. Although many stories will feature Christian themes, I hope to hear from people of many faiths and persuasions. Whoever you are, please get in touch.

Feature drawing (young woman bathed in light) is by Sharla Miller. Follow her art on Instagram.