Expert: Griff Ruby - 12/7/2009

Question
QUESTION: Please help me. Although as I type I think I know I am beyond help.

This is a genuine testimony that I am sharing at the end of my life. I wanted to let you hear some testimony about hell and near death experiences and the horror of committing the unforgivable sin. I am a 25 year old female. I know a lot of people worry they have committed this sin but my testimony is a truly powerful warning. Please take its warnings deadly seriously. The one point I would like you to take from it is how important it is for young children to know that they are loved by God, and that He hates anything that has hurt them. I did not believe I was loved by Him and that He had caused terrible things to happen to me and this made me hate Him and let various demons create strongholds in my mind.

I have been ill for many years and suffered serious abuse when I was very young. I picked up a bible when all other treatments had failed and was instantly terrified by the passages regarding the unforgivable sin but spent my time cursing God for my bad luck and past hurts anyway. I wanted forgiveness without repentance. I was also angry as I believed in a sort of Christian reincarnation as I'd had a strong sense from childhood of having met God previously on the death bed of a former life. It made me think that we were all blameless puppets under a cruel God. I now realise this was badly confused delusion. I truly didn't in my heart think God would reject me no matter how appallingly I treated Him.

And then one evening after a year of striving with me, (God would come near with his loving kindness and I would scream and swear and imagine hurting Him, I was even able to make out his figure he came so close), the Holy Spirit managed to get close enough to my heart to convict me and I felt the beginnings of salvation and conversion, with Jesus sitting next to me. I was able to truly feel for the first time in my life but it was overwhelming and I ran away and refused to let the light enter and break me. I said to it as it convicted me, I want to feel better not worse! I literally turned my back on Him and for a fortnight tried to escape to a place in my head saying that, yes God might really be all goodness, but he's a delusion sent to trap us by evil tormentors who control the universe. I knew fine well he was God. Even a week before I'd written a note to myself saying 'don't reject Him, he is life'. I was all ready to reject him. I found it so hard to trust Him. In hindsight, I claimed that good was evil whilst knowing the truth and this is like how the Pharisees ascribed Jesus casting out of devils to him being Beezlebub. I heard a voice in my head telling my to resist, resist, the Holy Spirit and I tore at my own heart trying to remove it. Something in me whispered to me to 'resist resist'. I screamed I didn't want to repent, I didn't want to have to let go, it was too painful. I said I wanted to live in the 'real' world where I could do anything I liked, even murder and rape, without having to come under judgment. This may seem like an odd thing for a outwardly normal 25 year old female to want to do but I have always felt like my personality is that of my male abuser. I shut down my ability to feel over 20 years ago and it left me with a heart of angry stone. It took the miracle of God sitting right next to me to even open my heart a tiny crack. I then, thinking I would keep my options open just in case I was wrong, looked over my shoulder at the
place in my head where God had been and asked 'well God, what does this mean, is it true?'. And the Holy Spirit who up til that point had been striving with me said into my deepest soul 'It means.. I.. REJECT.. YOU!!!'  I saw God turn on his heel and I felt the Spirit being ripped out of my body. The most crippling agony. But I have been left with the tormenting voices and delusions for comfort.

I have been living in hell ever since, that night was back in March. I can see, smell and taste hell all around and am now close to dying from the disease Jesus tried to heal me of. I have had many many further episodes when my breathing has stopped at night and I have passed over to a place filled with thugs waiting to rape me. That is what hell is, a place of unending rape, murder, hideous experiments and torture, lack of light, despair, no love and most of all regret at being separate from God for eternity. A lot of people say that if you're bothered that you have committed the unforgivable sin then you haven't but I know that is not true. I have been unable to repent of the sin that the Spirit convicted me of because I have no power to repent of it by myself since the spirit was withdrawn. The sin I was convicted of was of 'clinging on' to past hurts in my life. I cannot now let them go from my tightly closed hardened heart as much as I try. I can actually feel the worm of pain in my heart becoming tighter and tighter.

I also think that since that moment God has allowed/sent me strong delusions. A week after that terrible moment I tried to humble my stony heart and I prayed a prayer for something I knew I had done wrong, I said 'God, I'm sorry I sometimes say you've said things to me when I know it is my own voice in my head or y'know, maybe the devil'. But it was such a pathetic half hearted little prayer and it didn't really come from my heart, I don't think I even thought I needed to ask for forgiveness. And straight after that a strong message came into my head saying 'you're forgiven'. But it did not in anyway feel like the Holy Spirit of old. And then a few weeks later I prayed the same prayer again, as I was starting to panic as I could feel there was something wrong, I didn't feel forgiven or washed clean. And I got a message saying 'I told you, you're forgiven, God is Love, God is Mercy, God doesn't change'. Which is comforting but again there was something about it that felt false and it feels like it has kept me clinging on and stopped me repenting properly. I have prayed focusing on the message and asked to be made clean like several times and at night I had a powerful dream If I had never had that message I feel I would have stopped running and repented fully. I have not yet let go and the pathways the message has created in my brain make it hard to let go. Letting go for me is to stop running and give over control for the first time in over 20 years of despair at the abuse. It is so frightening but cowardice is no excuse. Although as I type this my head and heart are still filled with excuses. I even scream them out lod at God, 'it was too hard' etc.

Please use this as a warning to others. I was/am incredibly profane and selfish and childish in my life and am still completely unregenerate, filled with the same pain and blasphemy as before. I had experienced hell and still I wouldn't take His word seriously.

I can't feel although part of me is appalled at what I've done and yet it has not led me to repentance. My heart is broken for myself in a worldly fashion, not a godly sorrow for how I have hurt God. I just can't feel what is right and wrong, I want nothing else but to be able to feel. I still cling to the Lord being merciful and loving and not wanting any to perish, I will not know if there is any way back until I am truly gone. Please spread this round Christian sites to help save souls, I am deadly serious and swear to the truth of my testimony. I do not know why my life has been so extraordinary but if I can help save someone from what I have been through then my experience wouldn't have been totally in vain.

Please think of me and when you get a chance in your life please testify to young children of God's love for them, and how He is the best friend we could ever have. We must be obedient to Him because it is the only way we can be be happy, whole and healed. And I do believe that God works all to the good and that my rejection of him pained him terribly. God bless all who are saved by the Lord.



ANSWER: I will have to respond further to this soon as I have time to pray and discern what is needed, but for now I can only please ask and request:
Do not do anything drastic or which cannot be undone.  I will have more to say here for you within the day.
For the meantime, the bare fact that you could even desire to be with God and to be forgiven (no matter how impossible you feel it to be) shows that you have not committed the unforgivable sin.  So there can be hope for you.
And I sense a possibility that part of you needs to forgive God, and I believe I can help you with that.
Have hope, hang on, and watch this space later today.


---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thank you for your message, I am currently trying to focus on God's Love and Mercy but finding it hard and feeling cut off from it. Thank you for your prayers, Best wishes SR

Answer
Let's see if this helps.  I have been sensing a need to write this piece for some time now and perhaps it was meant for you:

To Those Who Hate God
There is much evil that happens in this world and the victim of every evil wishes, desires, prays, pleads, and so forth that the evil would not happen or that it would stop.  Somehow we all seem to expect that God should be like some adult who comes into a situation kids fighting up or bullying or what not and they promptly break it up.  And of course that expectation is let down.
Not that God doesn't answer prayer, but that sometimes its answer is delayed or is not what we expect.  Sometimes God seems to feel we are up to accepting some trial and proving our merit, or even sharing in His own trials and tribulations.  Of course, the Devil also uses these times to tell us such things as God doesn't care God doesn't love us, God can't help us, and if we are foolish enough to believe him he gains a warrior against God, and some have remained such for many years.
But now as you read this it is time to start looking at your life objectively and making responsible adult decisions about how to handle things, and what to make of them.
We all want a fairy tale god who takes away all pain and suffering.  Maybe Heaven might be something like that, but here on earth things are different.  Suffering is a part of our existence here.  If we didn't suffer we would have to wonder if we can even feel at all.  Just like after an operation and they can start letting the anesthesia go down and you finally begin to feel again.  Even though it hurts it is a good hurt since it means that things are healing up and not gangrenous or dead.
Or we wish sometimes that we could be protected from everything that anyone could ever do to us.  But who could ever really want it that each of us is in our own little universe by ourselves.  For how can there be love and kindness and gifts and generosity unless we are all put in the same universe and in which our choices can affect each other, either for the good or for the bad.  And then we get mad at God for all the bad things others do to us, or even good things they neglect to do to us or for us.
Remember how much your eyes hurt when you have been in a dark room for a while and suddenly someone turns on a light?  The light of Heaven is painful like that as we see the horrors of our own sins fully for what they are.  Such suffering is intrinsic to sin, and we can deal with it now as do the saints or confront it all later when we are ill-prepared.
So what has God done to help us?  As Christians and Catholics we must believe that God came to earth as a man, the Man Jesus Christ.  He came and did no wrong, helped many, and guided us all well, and for that He was taken and killed most horribly by slow torture.  He who had done no wrong willingly accepted this at our hands.
Think of all those times you were mad at God for not helping.  Oh, if only you could have gotten your hands on Him, what you would have done to Him!  Would you not have your hands around His throat even now?  Would you not have pounded Him and beat Him until He looks more like hamburger meat than a man?  But you must see we all already did that, and Jesus's only response was to willingly go to the Cross for us, you and me and all of us.  We did it to Him in the person of those who put Him to death already way back then.  And He took it all willingly and humbly, not because He was in any way justly owed any of that, but out of love for us, "torture Me, kill Me if your must to get it out of your system, but please be at peace with one another, and with Me, My children!  That is all that I want, and for that I willingly die at your hands."  Such is the love of God towards us, even who have hated Him.
Yes, those who crucified Him knew who He was; that was the real reason they crucified Him.  It wasn't for blasphemy or for upsetting a political order or whatever but because those who did it to Him hated God, and now with God at last within their grasp they did as they always wanted.  Of course, the soldiers carrying out the actual work were merely carrying out orders and truly had no idea what they were doing, hence He said "Forgive them; for they know not what they do."  But one soldier dropped the hammer, and with His feet and one hand already nailed down to the cross He picked the hammer up and handed it to the man who had dropped it so that he could use it to do the other hand.  This soldier did so, crying, and it was he who said, "Truly, this man was the Son of God!"
And then we realize it wasn't even God who did these bad things to us, it was each other.  God didn't hurt us, didn't make us sick, and didn't cause a loved one of ours to die prematurely.  It is in fact our own hatred that crucified Christ and worked all the evil we have ever done to each other.  It was the evil each of us has passed on to others, having received it as its victims before, and so the evil goes on back to the beginning of all evil.
Realize the truth and see the power and necessity of forgiveness and break the chain of evil.  For forgiveness is the whole bottom line of the Gospel.  We forgive others, and we ask for forgiveness ourselves for our own sins, that we may forsake the evil and become part of the solution instead of being part of the problem.  For every time we lashed out, every time we retaliated, every time we did any evil of any kind to others we sustained and passed along the same evil we received, giving it life, and empowering it to do to others what it did to us.
Let the evil stop with us.  For this is the very thing we most ought to pray, and in this there is always help.  God may or may not stop the evil from coming to us, but He is always willing and eager to help us see to it that we do not spread it further.
Jesus Christ, who loves you enough to die at your hands if only that will allow you to get over your anger, did not protect you from evil, but now He stands ready and willing and eager to help you destroy the evil itself in your own heart.  Think of a town where there is an evil man prowling about doing violence and stealing and robbing everywhere he goes.  A person prays, "May he never come to my house," but one day the bad man comes, performs his violence, and you wonder why this was allowed to happen, but then he gets trapped in your house in a shootout and the police shoot him dead at your feet.  With the help of our Lord Jesus Christ the evil itself can die in the house of your heart, or else without Jesus it will survive and continue on hurting others.
That is the God we will all see and face one day, and that is the only God who can help us now.  Turn to Him in prayer and in the Sacrament of Confession.