Insight into why some people experience the Christian faith as sudden relief and comfort

After watching this video testimony from a young woman about her Christian faith I had an email exchange on it, and a real, unique insight came out of it.

In the video testimony the young woman spent a lot of time talking about how she, as a younger girl, experienced a type of anxiety (her word) that she couldn't figure out the source of and the medical community couldn't figure out the source of. Finally her mother simply gave her a Bible passage to read (from Isaiah), and it instantly gave her relief.

This is a phenomenon we hear over and over from Christians, i.e. how they get a real feeling of, I don't know, a pressure being taken off of them based on an encounter with Jesus or the word of God or the Holy Spirit and so on. I think I know what they're referring to now. Before I didn't get it and chalked it up to a sort of shallow churchy behavior or people saying what they think they are supposed to say because they think it's what they're supposed to feel when they become a Christian.

Here's what I now think is going on: in the spiritual realm, which we all are in (as well as being in this physical realm) they are experiencing being pulled back from (or out of) the darkness of Satan's Kingdom as it's experienced in the spiritual realm.

In the case of the girl what she was going through that she articulated as 'anxiety' was the usual sexual feelings manifesting in her young, maturing body, together with the usual pull of her peer group and the temptations and pull of the culture she lives in (a very decadent culture as we see currently) vis-a-vis her upbringing in a family that taught her the Bible and the Christian faith and going to church every Sunday (as she said). In other words, she was being pulled towards the darkness in the spiritual realm, and her own maturing sexuality was making the temptation and lure all the more strong, yet she knew it was the wrong direction, but since it was happening in the spiritual realm mostly for her (she lived in the country, in a seemingly safer environment from where such dark influences can overwhelm a young person) it manifested as a strong 'anxiety' within her. So now we can *see* how a passage of the word of God could indeed hit her suddenly (like an epiphany) and in a new way to in effect give her a solution to the struggle she was in the middle of; and *give her needed strength* and even a sense of shelter (from the storm), and an assurance that it's *OK* to stand in the light with her Creator over against the darkness of Satan's realm. So when a Christian like this says they felt a sudden sense of comfort and relief and so on we can see how that can be.

In this last paragraph I'll state just *why* Christians stating such things and describing such experiences would be mysterious to someone like myself. Take a person who has been involved in alcohol or drugs or crime all their life in one way or another. That is not *my* experience. Yet for a person who does have that experience you could see how they might have an experience/encounter with Jesus, the Bible, etc., and the sense of a weight being taken off them, that is similar to the girl described above. Just seeing that there is a solution, a way out, an *other side* to begin with. In my case, not totally inexperienced regarding drugs, alcohol, or even crime, but only in the 'sampling' degree of it (and I have original sin and actively sin like everybody else) I explained my situation/crisis to myself like this: I can't go forward, I can't go backward, I can't go left, I can't go right, I don't want to go down, I can only go upward. And upward to me meant engaging higher influences. So I did engage higher influences (imaginative literature, history, philosophy, art, music, science, sacred writings/religion) until I got to the summit level of those influences, and then finally moved on up to the beyond-summit level where the Old and New Testaments reside. Yet in all that effort to engage those influences and climb the mountain of them any sudden epiphany once I moved on to the beyond summit influence that is the Bible became diluted due to my being acclimated to the altitude I had laboriously climbed to. But if you've spent your life actively engaged in - and engulfed by - the low influences of the darkness of Satan's spiritual realm any *touch* with the living, quickening truth of Jesus and the word of God will most likely (as you are on the road to being a believer to begin with) ignite a real, sudden feeling of relief and comfort; and give you an epiphany that the other side - the light - exists; and that the all-powerful Creator of the universe is on your side.