Divine Light Consumed My Darkest Night
A Testimony of Mercy
As a child, I was taught that a woman who lived in the 1800s was the embodiment of the “Spirit of Prophecy.” I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, immersed in a religious worldview marked by extreme anti-Catholic sentiment and suspicion toward every other Christian tradition. I wasn’t even allowed to play with children who attended church on Sunday (they were said to have received the mark of the beast).
Despite the rigid religiosity of my upbringing, I felt weak, empty, and alone. The religion of my youth offered rules but no real power, doctrines but no encounter. I longed desperately for something sacred to enchant my senses, to stir my spirit with undeniable truth. But no such grace came. Instead, after deep wounds tore my family apart, my heart turned toward the shadows.
By my teenage years, I had plunged into the abyss of the occult. Fueled by anger, rejection, and a burning hatred toward God and Christianity, I gave myself fully to darkness. For six long years, I sought the power I never found in religion—through Satan worship, spiritualism, and forbidden knowledge. But the deeper I went, the more hollow I became. By 2001, I stood on the edge of suicide, possessed by desires that could not satisfy and swallowed in despair.
That summer, I attended a Christian music festival, not to seek truth, but to convert Christians to Satan. I was brimming with malice. For three days, I wandered the festival grounds, attempting to draw believers away from their faith. I failed.
On the final night, surrounded by thousands of worshippers, I stood up and cursed God at the top of my lungs. And that’s when everything changed.
The resurrected Christ appeared to me.
In an instant, an unseen force drove me to the ground, face down in the dirt, trembling beneath a weight I had never felt, not even in the deepest rites of the occult! I was seized with fear. For the first time, I believed that God might be real.. and also that He might be about to take my life in judgment.
My body burned and tingled from head to toe, as though my soul were about to be torn from my flesh and cast into eternity. But then, suddenly, an unearthly peace flooded my being. It was as if a thousand rivers of living water surged through my core, reworking my very essence. I saw light all around me. And then…. He spoke.
I had heard many voices in the occult, none like this.
“My son, you are forgiven.”
The voice was gentle. It was thunder. It was peace. It was fire. In a single moment, suspended beyond time, those words shattered the lie I had carried for years, that I was too far gone to be loved, too defiled to be redeemed. The Father had called me son. Mercy had triumphed over judgment.
I opened my mouth, and to my own astonishment, the name I had once despised roared out of me: “Jesus!” A confession of sin poured out like a river. The chains that had bound me broke as I wept and worshipped, not in a church, not under human instruction, but in a field, beneath the stars, beholding the Risen Christ.
In that sacred moment, I didn’t just invoke His name, I encountered His Person. He was alive! He is alive, forevermore. And He had mercifully granted me metanoia, the gift of repentance and a completely new way of being.
The road ahead would be bumpy. It would be messy. But it would also be beautiful.
Thanks be to God!
Rev R. Alvin Radosti
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