A teen witch who became involved with witchcraft and the devil, eventually using drugs, ended up on a church doorstep.
Victoria Batiste
Victoria’s childhood was far from a princess-like tale of living in a palace, waiting for her prince and knight in shining armor to arrive. Instead, it was one of brokenness and despair, abuse, and abandonment.
Her parents were often violent, intoxicated, or high. Her father was a pastor who applied incorrect interpretations of Scripture to support his severe form of punishment.
“A few times of him slamming me on the ground and choking me, telling me, “If thine arm offends me, cut it off,”” Victoria scoffed.
Teen Witch
To escape the harsh reality, Victoria found a way to deal with her imperfect world. And that was to become a teen witch.
“I felt like they understood me,” said Victoria. “The witchcraft became more to me than just play. It wasn’t play, because I knew that stuff was real. Deeper and deeper, I would go into it. Like I would… astral projection, that’s where you project your soul out of your body and you travel in the spirit realm. That’s where I felt like I had power.”
“It was always about me,” Victoria said of her imaginative world. “People loving on me, people taking good care of me.”
But time passed, and even witchcraft couldn’t satisfy the longing of her broken soul. So, she turned to a different thing—opioids.
She Stopped Being a Teen Witch and Got Addicted to Drugs
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“It was like it altered something in me, like I was happy,” Victoria said. “Like the pain, the heaviness, the emotions that I felt when I woke up every day as a kid, I didn’t feel them anymore. This was something that helped me cope with what was really going on, on the inside of my head.”
She was just a teenager when she started depending on drugs. She got so addicted that she started hearing voices in her head. And one day, the voices told her: “If you just give your life to the devil, then everything will be okay.”
With nothing to lose, Victoria agreed. But all of a sudden, she had her hands around her mother’s neck before she knew it.
Miscarriages. Homelessness. Brokenness. It was a cycle of those three.
But one day, she heard a voice.
Victoria, who was lost and had nowhere to go, once more heard a voice saying, “Go to the church.” Though this time the voice was different from all the others that tormented her.
At a Church’s Doorstep
“My shoes broke. I literally just broke down in tears.”
Victoria wept as she approached the church doors and got to her knees. As they entered the church for the service, several people asked if she was alright.
“I said, ‘No. I’m 19 years old. I’m three-and-a-half months pregnant and I don’t have nowhere to go,'” she said with exasperation. “This lady walks up to me, she goes, ‘Honey, do you need me to take you somewhere?’ And in that moment, that’s when I started to recognize that that was God’s voice. And I surrendered. That was it. ‘Okay God, this is it. Do you want me to serve you? Do you want me to give my life to you? Here I am.'”
Church members assisted Victoria as she committed her life to Christ. The lies she had believed about God and herself, as well as her addiction to opioids, started to fall apart.
“I started to realize that He was a loving God and He was a father and He was there all along. ‘I’m ready to do whatever you want me to do.’ Because what I did before was not working,” she concluded.
She gave birth to a healthy son and is now pursuing social work studies while leading a full life with Christ!
Her story was like the prodigal son who spent his life searching for life’s meaning and healing in the world. But only God can satisfy a person’s pursuit of wanting to be understood and accepted.
Like what happened to Victoria, it is in our prayers that you and your loved ones receive your healing, freedom, and heart’s desire in Christ.
Header image: Victoria Batiste [The 700 Club]. YouTube, 5 November 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B12LjqZ06Sc
Reference: CBN News
