He drifted into New Age astral projection

All the astral projection stopped when Mike – strangely – grabbed a seemingly kind old man by the lapels and demanded he confess Christ as the Son of God. Instead, the man hissed at him in a hideous manner.

“I realized the Bible was true,” Mike says on his YouTube channel, Shofar War Lamb. “First John says every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. That’s the day I really started to walk with Jesus.”

Today, Mike has completely quit New Age. But for many years he wavered between Jesus and astral projection, a phenomenon in which people leave their body during sleep and fly around in the spirit realm and interact with people.

When he was a kid, a relative gave him a book about Jesus, and he accepted the Lord.

But as the years passed, he forgot about Jesus and got into marijuana, mushrooms, and ecstasy with his neighborhood buddies in Illinois. Riding BMX bikes around, they searched for hallucinogenic mushrooms in the wild.

They found one, and Mike, then 16, decided to consume it even though he realized it wasn’t hallucinogenic and he didn’t worry that it might be poisonous. It was.

“All of a sudden from my stomach I feel these shocks. The shocks went down my legs and down my arms. I could feel the poison coursing through my veins with every beat of my heart,” Mike says. “Eventually it subsided. But it scared me.”

Despite the danger, Mike consumed it anyhow to impress his friends. “Being the young punk that I was, I wanted bragging rights,” he says. “How stupid is that?”

The next day, he felt much better. While smoking blunts the next day, one buddy, induced by the drug, was talking gibberish, mostly “rambling stupid nonsense,” Mike remembers. But one thing the friend uttered hit like a thunderbolt:

“What happens when you die?”

The question echoed over and over through his mind. “I could not stop thinking about it. I entered a thought loop.”

Like many of his generation, he looked it up on Google. The search engine led him to a Near Death Experience website. The hodgepodge of testimonials ranged from Christian to Islamic and Buddhist.

“They had people who had died and had seen the light,” Mike summarizes. “Some said they talked to God, some to Buddha. Some people saw Jesus, some people saw Allah. The message that was clear was that God was love.

“What I read was made-up garbage from witches trying to usher in the New Age,” he adds.

But at the time, the eclectic approach appealed to him. Forgetting that he had committed his life to Jesus as a child and that he had cried out to Jesus when he consumed the mushroom, Mike adopted the New Age idea that Jesus was merely one of many “ascended masters.”

On the NDE website, he met in a chatroom “Amused Maya,” who provided an explanation for his sleep paralysis: “You have an advanced soul. You have the ability to astral project.”

“The next time that happens, stay calm, don’t freak out, and you will float out of your body,” Maya told him, “You can float through walls, travel other dimensions, talk to spirits.”

Honestly, Mike thought she was nuts but decided to find out if it was true for himself.

Sure enough, the next time he experienced sleep paralysis, he floated out of his body and began to fly around at will.

That’s how it started. For the next months and years, Mike was astral projecting, which he now classifies as “evil veiled in a cloak.”

“I did float through walls,” he says. “I did talk to spirits. I had sex with demons. I didn’t know they were demons at the time. I tried to do it every night, but it didn’t happen every night.”

Mike was getting deeper into darkness thinking… Read the rest: Christian perspective on astral projection

George Foreman found God when he was dying

His powerful punch and menacing demeanor in the ring led George Foreman to Olympic Gold and heavyweight championships, but when Jimmy Young brutalized him in a humiliating defeat in 1977, the street bully from Houston felt he was dying.

“In the dressing room, I was walking back and forth to cool off,” he told The Houston Chronicle. “Then in a split second, I was fighting for my life.”

He lay on a locker room table. While friends and staff attended to his physical body, the battered brute battled with the God he learned little about as a kid.  He admitted later he only went to church for the free lunches.

“I kept thinking, ‘You believe in God. Why are you afraid to die?” Foreman told The New York Times. “But I really didn’t believe.”

Foreman began bargaining with his Creator. If God saved him, he would give his prize money to charity.

“I don’t want your money,” a voice responded. “I want you.”

Foreman was bewildered and confused. He had never met anybody who didn’t want money.

“It was the saddest, most horrible place I had ever seen,” he said. “Tears fell. I was scared. I’d never heard anyone turn down money. There I was fighting for my life with something that you couldn’t deal with. That changed my life forever.”

Then as his life ebbed away, too late to repent, Foreman felt a “giant hand” thrust him back into consciousness. He saw his friends. At the same time, he felt strangely filled with the presence of a dying Christ. He felt his forehead bleed and he imagined it pierced by Christ’s crown of thorns. He sensed his wrists punctured as if by the nails of the cross.

“I knew that Jesus Christ was coming alive in me,” Foreman told The Times. “I ran into the shower and turned on the water and — hallelujah! — I was born again. I kissed everybody in the dressing room and told them I loved them. That happened in March 1977, and I never have been the same again.”

A passion began to stir in his heart. “I started reciting the Bible, talking from the pit of my stomach in that dressing room. I was talking about how Jesus was God’s son and that he was alive. So when I came out of that, I asked a friend to go get me a Bible. And he said, ‘What kind?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, one like your mother has.’ So, he went out and bought me a King James version of the Bible. And that’s how I got into religion.”

The turnaround in Foreman was immediate and dramatic. Today, he preaches punchy sermons as pastor at the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Houston.

Transformed from a rage-filled street punk into a humble and sweet Christian, Foreman found he couldn’t muster the will to fight anymore, so he dropped boxing for 10 years. Read the rest of the George Foreman story.