I grew up in a small town where everyone knew each other (old, small, big), where people went to church, observing the customs and traditions inherited from previous generations. Almost everyone in our village was Catholic, and going to church was a normal part of life.

If you were born into a Catholic family, you belonged to the Catholic Church and lived accordingly by maintaining the family tradition and thus showing that you were also a believer.

In our family it was not possible to say you didn’t want to go to church. So I accepted many things as a child, because it was others who decided for me how to live my life and my faith. It was essential to observe God’s commandments, customs and folk traditions.

I thus lived a life full of religious rituals, customs and folk traditions. One of the many folk traditions was, in case of illness, the visit of the village ‘grandmothers,’ the healers. They used various spells, hot coals, herbs, performed purification rituals, spells to ward off evil, especially disease.

In education, it was important to obey the authorities-parents, teachers, priests-and obeying meant doing everything they said, no protests. Another important thing was not to fail, to do everything perfectly, without mistakes. I learned that for a happy life it was important not to make mistakes and to do everything they tell you. And in the way I related to the authorities, so I also built my relationship with God. For me, God was someone who definitely exists, someone very important, the most important, but very distant, impersonal, who doesn’t care about my experiences, my emotions. Someone who simply supervises my behavior and punishes me if I make a mistake or do not carry out an order. God for me meant a strict judge, to whom I was accountable by having to do only what he says.

A small change happened when I was invited to a Christian youth group where young people talked about God in a different way, suddenly I began to see that there were young people whose family and faith experience was not the same as mine. This is where the first questions began and I also began to desire something else, particularly a different relationship with God.

After finishing high school, I moved to a big city. Although far from home, it was important for me to live as I had been taught in my family and in the country. I was very afraid of non-believing people: non-Catholics. And so I avoided them; I always found believing Catholics with whom I felt safe.

The turning point came when I fell in love and started building a relationship, thinking that we would get married and live together until we died. But after eight months, my fiancé broke off our relationship. Everything I had dreamed and planned collapsed. It was then that my depression began. Life suddenly lost its interest; I could see no future ahead of me. At that moment I began to call out to God in my darkness somehow. I was desperate, begging for strength to survive another day, I needed to be pulled out of the abyss of darkness. At this difficult time, I received an invitation for a renewal meeting in the Holy Spirit — charismatic. Here I heard for the first time new things about God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. There, for the first time they prayed for me to be filled with the Holy Spirit. For the first time I felt that Jesus is alive and I was touched by something supernatural. A great desire grew in me to know more about the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ, to live spiritually.

Even though I knew and experienced the living Lord and that the Holy Spirit is in me, I still continued to live with the beliefs I had grown up with and according to which I had always acted. There was still my depression, emptiness of not being myself, complacency, etc. I heard that Jesus brings freedom, that I am free in Him, but I didn’t feel or live that way. I tasted a little bit of heaven, but at the same time I fell to the ground. I simply was not yet living the life of the first disciples, what is written in the Acts of the Apostles and that fascinated me so much.

That changed when I attended a Christian event where I met people from Cantonuovo. When they started praying, things happened that I was reading about in the Acts of the Apostles that I wanted to experience. I knew I wanted that. I wanted the life that they had. And it wasn’t just about how they prayed, but how they lived. And at the same time I was afraid. Because I knew that life would never be the same again.

Through the prayer of deliverance I experienced very clearly that the Kingdom of God is already here. There came a time when they began to pray for me, suddenly my hands began to twist, as if a force was passing through them, a physical experience that I had not invented. Something was happening, I was experiencing something unexplainable. And through this experience, I learned that there is a solution to my problems, that there is a road and that there are people already walking it.

These people, through whom the Lord was acting because they made themselves fully available to the Lord, helped me to be free and to start living in that freedom. Today, in this moment more uncertain than ever, I can experience the certainty that only He gives.

Thank you, Lord, for all that you have done in my life and all that you will do, for giving me Cantonuovo as a family. Now I am happy.