Sarah Sumpolec once found herself enraptured by incantations, Tarot cards, and casting spells, until an encounter with Jesus transformed her perspective. Decades later, she’s now a devout Christian who shares her experience as a former teenage witch to help people see God’s power to change lives and perspectives. Her harrowing story of engaging the spirit world and nearly losing her life is deeply compelling. Sumpolec recently told how she grew up a “nomad” with her father frequently moving her family around; at times they faced near-homelessness. But when she moved to a house in Delaware at age 13, something seemed different. “My dad had said that we were going to stay, which, of course, was a big deal,” she said. “My dad insinuated that it was a special house,” she said. “When we moved there, he was like, ‘You know this house is haunted.’ Sumpolec said her father found the prospects of a haunting “awesome.”
Considering how much she looked up to him and wanted to connect with him, she said she “just went with it.” She recalled the move into the home. “That was the first time he really ever introduced the supernatural or his interest in the supernatural.” Thirsting for a deeper connection with her father, she became increasingly intrigued by this otherworldly “worship.” Then, when her dad gave her a book on witchcraft, proverbial gasoline was tossed on the fires of that rabid interest. “My dad introduced me to it very specifically through that. I started asking more questions,” Sumpolec said. “Soon Sumpolec was diving into that book and consuming other New Age texts, “voraciously reading” anything she could get her hands on. Witchcraft suddenly became the connective point she had always wanted, something that would draw her closer to her dad. And strange events inside the home only added to that connection.
The more Sumpolec asked, the more her dad engaged, and the closer she felt to him. Her father told her witchcraft is “who we are as a family,” indicating it was deeply embedded in the familial fabric. That revelation clothed Sumpolec with a newfound identity of sorts. “I really felt like I had opened up this key of something that I was meant to do, and identity is huge, when you’re a teenager,” she said. “I had an entire altar set up in my bedroom.” Sumpolec, considered herself a “good witch” and practiced so-called “white magic.” “Everything in witchcraft is a truth from God, perverted,” she said. “Satan doesn’t have any new ideas; he takes truth and twists it.” Over time, this apparently enrapturing experience started to evolve into something else. While it “started out great,” soon Sumpolec’s relationship with her father began to unravel, as did her family circumstances.
“There was nothing ever scary about it for a long time until it changed, and this is the biggest thing that I wish I could communicate on a grander scale to, especially teenagers, that the enemy is all about seduction,” she said. “He doesn’t come in with this big evil intention, it’s a slow luring in, like, ‘Oh, look at this power.’” Over time, Sumpolec said, playing with fire birthed consequences; eventually, it all “turned on its head.” “There were all these spirits that I thought I was messing with that I thought were good and that were guiding me,” she said. But her communication with these spirits soon turned sinister, sending her on a diabolical path that could have ended her life. Everything came to a head when her father, also in crisis, reportedly began using drugs and things turned ugly. One night, her dad, in a fit of rage, confused, and not realizing who she was, allegedly pointed a gun at her in a potentially deadly showdown.
“It was the most terrible moment of my life,” she said. “He had 3 guns with him at the time. Sumpolec’s father luckily never pulled the trigger, but the event changed everything. “It shattered my trust in him,” she said, noting how the incident also drove her deeper into witchcraft. “I was lost, but because I had this altar in my room and the witchcraft stuff, I was like, ‘OK, I’m gonna just dig down here.’” Around the same time, Sumpolec recalls being plagued by scary dreams, and a feeling like the spiritual experiences she had so fervently embraced were starting to turn negative. At first, she assumed she was doing something wrong that made the spirits angry and attempted to remedy it. “I was aware of the shift, but I didn’t know why the shift had happened,” Sumpolec said. “And I assumed I was doing something wrong, and so doubled down with all of it, because it was the only place I had to go.”
That plan left her even more destitute, as she felt the only way she could heal herself was to end her life. At first, she said she was fearful but assumed the lies being spoken into her were somehow truths. “I walked out one day, and said ‘I’m not coming back.” But her attempt to use her vehicle to inflict carbon monoxide poisoning miraculously failed. Sumpolec still has no memory of what unfolded before she woke up lying on the ground beside her car. “I honestly think I was rescued because I woke up. I don’t remember stopping my car. I don’t remember getting out of my car,” she said. “I literally woke up on the ground next to a tree. So I fully believe an angel got me out of that car.” Other attempts to end her life were just as fruitless. As Sumpolec’s family chaos and financial woes worsened, she headed off to college, and that’s where she experienced an unexpected life change.
The teen witch suddenly found herself rooming with Christians. Those newfound friends eventually convinced Sumpolec to attend a Christian gathering on campus, and that’s when she was introduced to the Gospel. “I still remember the whole sermon because it was about altars,” she said, noting how the message was, in part, about Elijah and the prophets of Baal. She pondered how mistruths are often crooked truths as she sat and listened. As these sentiments are corrected, things begin to straighten out, and the pure, unadulterated truth became easier to see. Sumpolec began to wonder if she, amid her witchcraft and occultism, had been living out a twisted version of reality. “I was searching for truth and I fully believed that what I had found in witchcraft was true,” she said. “So when I heard that sermon, I realized that if this is true, then this was off. And maybe this is the truth that I’ve always been looking for.”
That realization brought Sumpolec into the Christian fold and entirely transformed her life. She embraced the Bible and renounced witchcraft, which created tension with her father. “It was like anathema to him because he was like, ‘I taught you better than this,’” she recalled, explaining how her father saw Christianity as essentially “stupid.” “It was a betrayal to him that I had become a Christian, and he was furious for a long time.” Nothing stopped Sumpolec from her Christian journey. Today, she’s thankful for her “dramatic testimony” and often shares her conversion from teen witch to Christ-follower through interviews and the written word. “I should be dead. I would have been dead,” she said. “I was truly transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.”
Source: Faithwire
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