Hi. New to this forum. I just want to share with others my desire to have a personal encounter with God. To very briefly introduce the context and motivation of my search, I think it basically reduces to a combination of 1) me having several episodes of existential crisis (being agnostic, not knowing the purpose of life, not being able to successfully build an "artificial purpose" to motivate myself either), 2) watching tons of testimonies about the existence of a spiritual world (testimonies from the new age, witchcraft, occultism, psychic powers, reiki, psychedelics, ayahuasca, DMT, astral projection, remote viewing, spirit guides, paranormal activities, also testimonies about the Holy Spirit, God, Jesus, etc.), and particularly 3) watching testimonies of people who were once involved in occultist practices and due to different life circumstances ended up finding Jesus and becoming Christians, having supernatural experiences both before and after their conversions. Here are some example testimonies of point 3 available on YouTube (some of them uploaded very recently actually):
So basically I've watched many testimonies as the ones linked above and more, and I got to the point that I just needed to make up my mind and start seriously seeking God by myself in order to have my own personal encounter with him. Because, no matter how impressive others' testimonies are and no matter the potentially overwhelming amount of testimonies I could watch, at the end of the day all testimonies are just anecdotal information that I'm storing in my brain, but if I don't experience or live anything by myself, all this information will be useless.
So, long story short, about a week ago I began to seek God everyday in prayer, asking Him to concede me a personal encounter with Him that would change my life forever. My "seeking plan" comprises the following points:
- Living in holiness as much as I can (not giving in to sinful urges, avoiding worldly things, purifying my thoughts and actions the best I can, etc.)
- Listening to Christian music.
- Praying, specially at night when there is more privacy.
- In particular, when praying one of the main points I stubbornly stress almost all the time is that I want to have a personal encounter with God.
- Continuing watching testimonies, sermons and other materials to keep me engaged and motivated to keep seeking.
So far, the main "highlight" of my seeking process so far is that a couple of times I've been able to experience what I would call as "moments of intense fervor in prayer", I mean, moments in which I became very emotional during prayer, even to the point of crying, feeling deep inside a very deep desire from the bottom of my heart to find God (for instance, a few nights ago I remember praying in my mind something along the lines of "Oh God, how beautiful it would be if I just could find you and live the rest of my life in deep communion with you ..." while experiencing intense fervor and having tears in my eyes at the same time). I'm not always able to achieve such level of fervor while praying, as I said it has only happened a couple of times, only lasting for relatively short time spans each time, but I try to take these experiences as little glimpses of what may eventually lay ahead if I keep seeking God everyday non-stop.
I'm afraid though that days may go by and I could lose motivation and quit seeking God prematurely. To prevent this from happening, I try to motivate myself to keep going by watching testimonies of people who testify having had personal encounters with God. One of the testimonies that motivates me the most is Paul Washer's, in which he says he prayed every night for months without success, until eventually God visited him. Check it out:
So basically that's it. Based on tons of testimonies from all around the world I've come to a point in which I have a very strong suspicion that the spiritual realm does exist, and in particular I've felt moved by very strong conversion testimonies to seek God myself. Right now I'm in the middle of this seeking, with the hope that God will eventually reveal himself to me and my life will change forever.
I would love to receive feedback from others.
I hope to post updates here from time to time.
Thank you very much.
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Update: you can find all testimonies I've watched
in this link (work in progress). The testimonies are ranked from most impressive to less impressive. The top 10 testimonies are just unbelievably astonishing.
