Dabbling with Deadly Power

CBN.com - "I knew I had found power. I knew I'd gotten something I'd wanted and it was in the occult realm, and I just opened the door and walked through it," says Janelle.

Janelle Wade of Staunton, Virginia, wanted supernatural power so much she became a witch. But her dark journey into the occult really began when she was just a child. Janelle was raised in a broken home. Her father left when she was only three months old.

"As a child, I lived in a very abusive situation. They were very religious and they were very dogmatic and very legalistic. And they would beat us children and say God told them to do that, and then also there was such sexual abuse. The incest in my family was running rampant."

Janelle grew up feeling unloved and extremely powerless. But her search for power and control ended when she entered the dark side of the occult.

Janelle recalls her first taste of the occult. "I opened the book up and started making a doll that first night, and the asterisk at the bottom of the page said I must have a blood sacrifice, so I took my own blood for this doll of a person I needed desperately to see. A few moments later, there was a knock at the door and there he stood, and I had not seen him for three months. No one had. And the first words out of his mouth were, 'I don't know why I'm here, but I was compelled to come.' "

After that, Janelle's curiosity was piqued. Her search for more information about occultic practices led her deeper and deeper into the ways of darkness. "I had to get more books, I had to get more information, I had to dig deeper to learn how to read cards. I made an altar and I would go in there and I would practice with candles and dolls and books to tell me what to do. I was a natural in a lot of it--levitation or talking to spirits or calling up spirits."

But one day, she was pressured by a warlock and high priest to do something she just couldn't do -- to denounce the blood of Jesus Christ.

Even though Janelle was not a Christian, something inside her rebelled against this request. The evil forces of Satan she had craved now turned against her, and she feared for her life. She quickly married, hoping her new husband would protect her from other cult members. But Satan's forces of fury turned to her family. One night, as her three sons from a previous marriage slept, a bizarre accident occurred.

Janelle remembers that terrifying night well. As she explains, in a freak accident, a car became airborne and flew almost half a block off the road and ten feet into the air and crashed through the boys' bedroom window just three inches above where the boys were sleeping. The car continued through the front room of the house and landed on top of itself. Though the boys' beds were totally destroyed and their room was left in a shambles, fortunately the boys were safe.

Janelle's middle son was knocked out of bed and onto his feet in the middle of the room, while Janelle's oldest son, who was sleeping in a sleeping bag on top of his bed, got flipped 180 degrees and only suffered a small cut on his head. The youngest boy, just three-and-a-half at the time, jumped out of bed to call for mom and dad. This proved to be a blessing. As Janelle says, "The odd thing about it was that if my baby son had been in his bed--they found a piece of wall about two feet-thick and as big as his bed--he would have been smashed because it was laying on there."

Fearing more accidents, Janelle and her family left the area. But demonic forces still terrorized her.

"We started moving from house to house that were all "haunted." The spirits would shake my bed clear across the room with me in it. Windows would fly open and shut by themselves. Voices like growling and hissing would go all over the house. There was no safe place for me--none."

But she had a praying mother. And when an old friend of Janelle's invited her to go to church, she reluctantly went.

"I went to these miracle services at the local high school and I saw people doing things I'd never seen. So I went into this room and they began to pray with me, and for 45 minutes, they asked me to talk about my past and where I had been and what had happened."

What followed next was a miracle that Janelle would not soon forget. "They started casting things out of me," she continues. "The most amazing thing about it was I could see inside myself, and all that darkness--when Jesus walked into that darkness, I could see the brightness of Him, and it was like He never had to cast anything out. They looked at Him and they ran away, and I knew at that time that somewhere inside of Janelle, that the God they knew was greater than the God I served."

Janelle and her husband Kirk now minister to those trapped in the occult.

"Our motto is just believe and anything's possible. And, you know, there are so many people out there that are into the same things that I was--into witchcraft, the occult--and they think it's so hopeless. They think that they haven't got a chance and there's no way out. But I'm here to tell you, at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow and every tongue will confess that He is Lord. He's the greatest power of all, and His power is love. There's a lady that said once, 'If I live in all my yesterdays, I'll have no tomorrows.' And I thank God that He's given me tomorrows to live in and He's taken the hurt out of the yesterdays."