Hi. My name is Teresa Nash. And I am a middle-aged white woman. With a wild and crazy story about how Jesus Christ intervened in my life, save me from hell, and changed me into a better person. I have lived through a lot of pain. I have overcome many things. But not because of anything that I did. Only because Jesus Christ did it for me.
I grew up a very lonely and sad child. My parents were young and dysfunctional. But it wasn't because they were bad. It was because they had inherited dysfunction from their parents, and their parents had inherited dysfunction from their parents, and so on and so forth. All the way back, really, to Adam and Eve. But in my family line I could trace it back at least 800 years with actual documentation.
My family suffered from a lot of sickness. Now, I would consider it demonic oppression. We had lost our contact with God at some point after serving as his soldiers for a good 500 hundred years. And because we chose to indulge in sin and not pursue God. We became sicker and sicker with every generation that passed. Because of our inability to connect with God or to recognize Him in any way, shape, or form, evil was able to hook their dirty claws into my family’s blood very easily.
It has been very hard to get free from the oppression, sin and blame that has riddled my people for a very long time.
I myself have struggled with very many things such as loneliness, addiction, depression, anxiety, fear, suicide and prostitution. Really immoral behaviors. But also blame, hatred, especially self-hatred, manipulation, lying, cheating, stealing, hurting others, selfishness, you name, I know it... Anything bad that you could ever possibly imagine, I've done it or experienced. I've been a murderer and a rapist. I have far too many things that I am not proud of.
But I wasn't born to be that forever, I was born to be a child of God.
Jesus himself knew what I would have to endure and what I would have to overcome in order to break the curses in my family line and change the destiny of the next 1000 generations. He knew that one day I would become addicted to methamphetamine. He knew that one day I would become a sex worker. He knew that I would leave my husband and daughter. And most importantly, He knew that I would leave Him.
He knew.
He knew that I would run away. As fast as I possibly could. And that I wouldn't look back. In fact, He knew that I wouldn't even be able to realize that he was the one who was chasing me and trying to save my life. He knew how long it would take before I would be able to recognize Him and what tragedies my family and I would have to incur before the veil fell from my eyes, ever so slowly, a scale at a time and only then would finally begin to see His hand upon my life.
The fact that God knew all of these things that I would have to go through. The fact that he knew that I would be ungrateful for the air that I breathed for 40 plus years, and that I would be so selfish at one point, that I wouldn't realize that I was hurting EVERY SINGLE PERSON around me seemed so tragically unfair for a long time. I didn’t understand that I was affecting much, much more than I could’ve ever realized.
But He loves me so very much. He loved me as much on my very worst days of life as He does now that I am finally getting better and learning to live a holy life. He made me the way that I am. The way that I was. And the way that I will be. And He did it for His glory.
That's amazing.
Evil. Satan. Darkness. Demons. Anything that is not of God are in a very, very compromised situation at this time and hour in the world and they are doing their very, very best to claim any unbelieving soul that they can. Misery loves company, even if they don’t know how to love.
Love belongs to God.
I myself have lost family members, because of evil. My baby sister died an absolutely horrendous death. Essentially, a forced suicide because she couldn't escape despair.
We look at demons and devils like they are some kind of creatures that just crawl out of hell and come after us with claws out. And they do. But that is not always the case. Most times, or at least in my own particular experiences, demons, darkness, evil, and things of that sort are feelings. Awful, horrendous negative feelings that bloom and blossom into big fat, devilish weeds that surround our hearts and make them dark and evil just like the devil himself.
My biggest demons? Self hatred. Self pity. Self righteousness. Suicide. Guilt and shame. Anything to do with myself.
In the Bible, it talks about idolatry. When you think about idolatry, you think of something like a statue or golden calf or a house or a car or something like that. But that's not always what idolatry is. Idolatry can be your husband or your daughter, or your friends or your job. Or as I have found myself.
Anything that you put before God is an idol. Even sadness and shame. Idolatry is always fancy things and living poor isn’t being humble. Being mean to yourself and punishing yourself by not enjoying life in your heart or your circumstance is not a means to find humility. God wants his kids to have nice things.
Do you think in heaven that anybody's walking around with secondhand clothes and a hoopty just to get to their crappy minimum wage job? No. Not at all. God wants good things for his kids. New things for his kids.
God told me one time that I would never find my blessings in a trash can. So, if I'm not gonna find my blessings in a trash can. I don't belong in the trash can either. I never did.
The thing is this, I put myself before God. Whether it was when I was being selfish and bashing him and saying lots of hurtful things. Or when I was trying to do right by Him and trying to perfect the way that I walked with Him so that he would love me for what I was doing instead of for who I was. Thinking that I had to change because I was so defective. But He made me like me, for a reason and to try to change that and to feel so bad about who I was, even in my most broken state, was an insult to Him.
He made me the way that I am because he loves me. There are a lot of people in this world who love themselves way too much, and that's their problem. That's their pride. But my pride was thinking that I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t think I was worthy of His love or anything good. Or fancy. Or godly. Or holy or expensive. I've recently been told that there is such a thing as an orphan spirit where you're always settling and saying no, it's OK, I don't need that or it's OK I don't need this.
And I'm not an orphan! I belong to the Most High, Most Wonderful, Most Handsomest Warrior God of the Whole Universe. I am HIS child. I belong.
My story is really wild. It was really dark at certain times and I'm still trying to figure out some things... like exactly what I’m supposed to share and what I'm supposed to forget.
But I can tell you this much, God pulled out all the stops for me. I have seen some wonderful, wonderful, miraculous, miraculous things in my life and I'm so very blessed to know how much he loves me. And also, to know how much He loves everybody!
There are a lot of people in the world right now who think that they don't need God, or they think that they will somehow sidestep Judgment Day just because they don't believe in it. But that's not true. Everybody's gonna be judged and everybody will either go to Heaven or they will go to hell and really, that's up to each person for themselves. God doesn't send anybody to hell. We send ourselves.
I know this for a fact. Because I chose hell at one point.
It's a very, very scary place. And I was stuck there for the better part of two years. It's an awful, awful place. Where you cannot get to God no matter how hard you try. All the churches refuse you, you can't even get your hands on a Bible! It's crazy! And demons chase you everywhere you go.
No matter what try to do, that's good it doesn't matter because everybody treats you vile and disgusting anyways. No matter how good you think your heart is or how hard you try to change, you can't. Hell is an awful, awful place. People are dying everywhere and there's no clean water and essentially, the sky is falling. Oh, you feel like Chicken Little and Alice in Wonderland all wrapped in one. And it's an awful, awful place. It's terrifying. In the streets there's bags and bags and bags of dead people stuff and all the buildings are rotting away. It's terrifying. It's a very scary place.
But God loves his children sooooo much He came and saved me from hell itself. So that I could help other people who are trapped in their own hell, whatever it might be.
There is redemption!
For anybody that repents and asks for it.
Repentance. It's a tricky term that anybody who has never met God or learned about God cannot really understand. It took me a a long time, 40 plus years before I could comprehend what repentance actually meant. It does not mean to cry on your knees and say I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, and then turn around and do the same crap 5 seconds later. It means, to sincerely, with all your all your being… your heart, your mind, your body and your soul, to ask God for His forgiveness and for his help to change the way you think, to change the way you act, and to change the way that you feel.
I did not understand scripture until I was 40 years of age. And I know that there are people in this world that are in their 80s and 90s that still don't understand scripture because they have not sought the Lord with any sincere desire. They have not asked for his help, nor do they wish to. And in my mind and in my heart. It's sad. Mostly because I actually care about some of these people. People that I know, people that I've experienced, and people that I have been related to.
Repentance is key. Confessing that Jesus Christ is your King and Savior, that he died for your sins, is also key. Crying out for help and then looking for him in everything, is another key. Pursuing Him and not giving up and trusting that He will undo your shackles, is another key. These are the keys that open the doors and strongholds of hell.
I find keys all the time lol. But it was Jesus who I had to get the keys from to get me out of Hades. If you are stuck in your own sort of hell, whether it be from sadness, sickness, unforgiveness, bitterness, anger, shame, guilt, pain, suicide, addiction, grief, debt, loneliness… anything… if you go to bed at night and your mind just races and races and races, you wake up in the morning and you don't want to get out of bed. If you are addicted to cigarettes or alcohol or drugs or sex or talking bad about people or talking bad about God, and if you really want to get well, if you want to find the keys out of your own personal hell. Ask Him.
Call out to him and say Jesus. Will you help me please?
Believe He will, because it IS WHAT HE LOVES DOING THE VERY MOST.
There are plenty of books out there, Christian books that can help guide you to Him. But I have found in my own personal experience that without the encounter with Jesus Himself, there was no way I would end up reading a Christian book about anything! I had absolutely no desire to be a Christian.
None at all!
I thought Christians were full of crap. I hated religion. I talked bad about the Bible. I said that there was no way God could ever fit inside of a book. I thought Jesus was a man that was pretty cool, but just a man. And I thought that the Science Channel could explain how the Red Sea was parted. I used to love watching science documentaries that could explain this and that and that and that and this. Anything that didn't have a solution that had to do with God.
I thought that Jesus was the cause of all pain. I thought that people went around killing other people in His name, and that He was OK with it. And I hate to break it to you, but God is not OK with that stuff.
Anybody who goes around using his name and doing bad things will pay the price. God does serve vengeance. He does. You reap what you sow. If anybody in the whole wide world should know that it would be me. I definitely reaped what I sowed. And now I try really hard just to do only good things. That way I don't have to reap any awful consequences for the things that I do, the things that I think or the things that I feel.
But on my own. There is absolutely no way that I would have or would have changed. Trust me, I tried. I tried to do it on my own a million different ways. I tried to do it on my own a billion different ways. I tried to do it on my own by quitting and giving up on life many, many, many times. I have committed suicide more times than I can remember.
And God saved me again and again and again and again and again and again and again. He saved me more times than I'll ever understand. And every single save and every single rescue was something that I couldn't have done for myself, and it was something that I couldn't understand, and it was absolutely something that I could not appreciate.
But now I do. Jesus saved me all those times so that one day I could help other people that have felt like I had. I get to help other people who've committed suicide and who have lived through it and absolutely cannot forgive themselves. I get to help the hookers and the liars and the dope heads and the alcoholics and the ill reputable women and the sex workers and the murderers and the rapists and demon infested people. And I get to help everyone who is just hurt period.
I get to help them get better. Actually, I take that back. It's not so that I can help them get better… it's so that He could work through me and save His people. He is the Savior, not me. This is my testimony. But my life is His life.
He saved me for his glory.
And I get to be so grateful to be alive for the first time ever, that I don’t hurt when I breathe anymore, I look forward to waking up instead of dreading the daily realization that I’m still me and I get to serve Him, humbly, with no credit for any of it and be so happy it’s ridiculous.
If you'd like to know more, or if you need someone to talk to, or would like some resources for help, please feel free to e-mail me and I will respond to you as quickly as possible.
I don't know a whole lot. I'm in the process of learning right now. But I do know that I need to put my testimony out there in the world because Jesus did a lot of work to keep my butt safe and sound, and sharing my testimony is the only way that I can be certain to extinguish my own personal demons.
For forever!!! Whoooo!!!!
If you know somebody who's hurting or sick or that you've given up on, I beg you, don't give up on them. It doesn't mean that you have to be a part of their life right now but do me a favor and instead of hating them or hurting them with your words or thinking, instead of saying that they are awful and they're worth throwing away, I beg you, pray for them instead.
It's the prayer of others, that I do believe, helped save my life. And I'm so very grateful that I had a few intercessors.
And ask God to watch their back and to help them want to breathe again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. God bless you.
Sincerely,
Teresa Nash
Aloha Ke Akua – God is Love
(the Good kind)
