Medium Seeks Control In Life of Chaos and Confusion

At 28 years old Maura was a wife, a mother and an account executive at a radio station in Tampa, Florida.  She was also a fortune-teller and medium for those seeking insight from spirits.

“I would see these spirits and they’d look like people but they’re transparent. They would talk to me and tell me about the person and about their home life and about different things.”  Maura first heard spirits speaking to her at 13 while using a Ouija board with friends but she believes it started before she was even born.

“In Cuba my grandmother was a very renowned spiritist medium.  When my mother was pregnant with me, she prayed over my mother’s stomach. We would pray to the different saints.  At 15, the lady that was babysitting me, she was involved in the occult. The lady my mom took me to at 18 was involved in Santeria. And so I’m saying ‘Okay, this is the way it is. I guess if you believe in God, this is what believing in God is.  I thought I was working for Jesus And I thought I was helping people.”

“I had an altar. It was like a triangle. I had a brandy sifter with water, a crucifix, a white crucifix and then the Bible opened to Psalms 23… and cauldrons, animal sacrifices were in there.  I felt a power, but it wasn’t a good power. It felt like something else was in control. It wasn’t me.”

Although Maura looked to the spirits for wisdom and direction she says her life was in chaos and confusion.  By her late 20’s she had divorced, remarried, and was without hope.   “During that time, I was very fearful. I was angry. My husband and I were fighting all the time.  I always felt like there was an emptiness, a hole, something missing in my life.   I even had thoughts of driving my car into a telephone pole and committing suicide.  I asked myself, ‘Is this all there is? There’s got to be something better than this.”

One day Maura was filling in for the receptionist at the radio station, when an old classmate walked in. He was now a pastor, and was there to record a weekly program. He asked Maura if he could pray for her.

“And I said sure, you can pray for me all you want. And I’m just smoking my cigarette and that night I went to the spiritist meetings.  And then the following week he would come and pray for me.  I started doubting what I was involved in. Something was changing.  And I said ‘Jesus, if what I’m involved in is of You, show me. If not, I want to know Your truth.”

A few days later Maura was at a birthday party with her family, when they started to discuss the Bible, “And I said, ‘You know, I can read anything out of the Bible, I can read a Psalm, I can read any little verse, but I can never read anything out of the book of Revelation.’ And my uncle looked at me dead in the eye and he said ‘That’s because you’re with the devil.’ He said, ‘You can’t be with God and the devil at the same time.’ I got so angry.”

“I was angry. I went home, grabbed the Bible off the altar and I was going to start to read, the wall behind me started banging, like boom, boom, boom.  And I got scared and I started to close up the Bible. All of a sudden it’s like this presence entered this room and the only way I could describe it was like a blanket, like a blanket of peace. The noise stopped instantly.”

That night she read the entire book of Revelation.  “So when I read the last word, which was Amen, literally something flew off my eyes.  I had this knowledge, this knowing, that Satan had used me, and he had deceived me, all of my life. I balled up my fists and I said I renounce you, Satan, and all your works.  The Lord said, ‘Now you’re going to work for Me. I mean, the love that flooded my being, was incredible. That missing hole was gone.

The next day, she called the pastor that had prayed for her. Together, they tore down the altar in her home.  As Maura read the bible, prayed and attended church her husband took notice. “He saw such a change in me and that made him curious. So, he started to go to church with me. Then he got saved 8 months later.”

Today, Maura says she’s found peace, as she looks to God for guidance.  “I let Jesus take control of my life. Jesus took my fear, he totally set me free.  It was His love that brought me to salvation. His love is everything to me.”