A Book by Shirley MacLaine
Liz Haley grew up in Ohio in the Russian Orthodox Church. Until her teenage years, the services were in Russian, and she didn’t have knowledge of Jesus outside of the rote prayers and hymns of the services. Her family didn’t talk about Jesus outside of church, and she didn’t know what questions to ask to go deeper. Liz felt called to ministry when she was in the ninth grade, but, at that time, she didn’t really understand what that meant.
Liz moved to Atlanta in her late 20s. It was then that she really started to wonder at the role God played in her life. She looked around for churches, but nothing connected with her. Meanwhile, she was working for a Fortune 500 company, and someone at work handed her a book by Shirley MacLaine. The book was about McLaine’s journeys in New Age spirituality. It left Liz with a curiosity about God, but this curiosity took her in a direction she didn’t necessarily intend to go. “I ended up stumbling into the New Age movement and hung out there for about eight years,” she says.
Liz then moved to Florida, where the New Age movement was not as easy to find as it was in Atlanta. Nevertheless, she found like-minded people to connect with and felt led to do hands-on healing. “In the state of Florida, in order to put hands on anybody, you have to be certified in something,” Liz says. So she decided on massage therapy as the avenue through which she would use her hands – and New Age practices – to be a channel of healing.
An Inferno
It was 1995. Liz was ten days away from starting massage therapy school in Miami. Then something happened that derailed her plans. “I had this desire, a burning desire, to read the Bible,” says Liz. “Never in my life had I opened it at all.”
The desire followed her everywhere. She walked into the bookstore of a Baptist church and was given a Bible. When she went home and started to read it, a strong sense of oppression grew within her. “Things started to happen, physically. Internally it felt like there was an inferno. It was burning. I couldn’t get rid of it. I ran, I did whatever I could to try to shake this thing, and it wouldn’t. And it got greater and greater and greater.”
One evening, at home alone in her bedroom, she saw a physical presence at the foot of her bed. First, he looked identical to Jesus. But in a blink, he turned into Satan and said, “I can be whoever you want me to be.” Liz was scared to death as she realized the presence had been Satan the whole time. “He showed me how beyond crafty he is at disguising himself,” she says.
The next day, Liz “hightailed it” to the Baptist church where she’d gotten the Bible. No one there knew how to handle her when she opened up about her situation. “It felt like there were two entities in my body fighting against each other. I could physically feel it,” says Liz. She became suicidal. As a last effort, she went to a women’s Bible study hosted at the church. After it ended, she looked around, wondering who she could talk to. Liz was drawn to a woman by the piano with white hair and approached her.
“You Switched Teams”
The woman listened without judgment as Liz shared what was happening to her. She then told the Bible study leader what Liz had shared. The leader came over and said to Liz, “Can you hang on for a couple of weeks? Just hang on.” Within those two weeks, she checked on Liz and said, “I have someone I need you to meet. Come back to this Bible study.” So Liz returned and, after it ended, a lady who’d once rescued people from cults was brought over to Liz.
They sat knee to knee, facing each other. The lady asked Liz a series of questions, and Liz answered them honestly. “And her eyes kept getting bigger and bigger,” says Liz. The lady then said to her,”You have absolutely no idea how close to Satan you truly are, just by doing what you did. And even though it was with good intentions, you switched teams.”
Liz wondered aloud how this had happened. She didn’t want to be on “that team.” She hadn’t signed up for that. She had done Reiki; she had touched crystals. Yet she had done these things in the vein of wanting to help people.
“Well a door was open, and the enemy came charging through,” the woman said to Liz. “I don’t know if I can help you or not. I’ve got to step out of the room.”