By Exjani Rojas –
Paul Reuben became an atheist, then a New Ager, but when he composed his first song, strangely he felt compelled to name it “Jesus.”
“The music is flowing out of my hands,” Paul says. “It felt holy, you know, and I was astonished. I recorded that song in five minutes or something, and the the song was finished like bam I was so amazed.”
It was a weird twist for a man who had abandoned the faith of his parents, but it was a milestone in his return to Jesus.
Born in Austria, Paul liked church until he got into high school and started learning evolution and other philosophies. All his friends were drinking and listening to rock, so he joined them and stopped believing in God.
Drinking became a regular feature of his life. His circle of friends had no belief in anything.
After years of drinking, he realized one day he got winded just walking up three flights of stairs.
“Every day I’m getting weaker,” he says. “I understood that I’m killing myself, that I’m
killing my body and my spirit.”
He worked a job but had no direction. He liked music and wanted to compose but needed something to make a living with. He was in Vienna and decided to study music in the university until he got bored and, quitting the university in 2010, returned to his grandmother’s house in Burgenland where he could live for free and dedicate all of his attentions to his dream of music.
As he quit smoking and drinking, he embarked on a quest to know spiritual truth and fell into New Age.
“I remember several times meditating and having an out of body experience,” he says. “I found myself in darkness, completely black. I was freaking out. What is going on? It was only for a few seconds and I come back to my body. It was like, is this where where it’s supposed to go? I thought I was supposed to go to light. I was shocked.”
That’s when the Jesus song “flowed from his hands.”
But since he still was far from Jesus and deep in New Age, nightmares started to afflict him. In one, a spider was biting his hand. He fought it and tried to shake it off. He could not. Then sleep paralysis attacked.
“I wake up and feel pain in my entire arm,” he says. New Age teaches you to accept everything, including pain, but he didn’t like it. “Somthing really bad was going on.”
Since it seemed like he was going in the wrong direction, Paul started looking elsewhere.
“I was really desperate. I was afraid to go to sleep,” he says.
He turned, now an adult, to what he had spurned as a young man, the Bible.
He read it, especially the Gospels. What struck him was the concept of sin. In New Age, there is no sin. You can do whatever you want. There is no right or wrong. The more he meditated on the concept, the more he pondered.
“Maybe there is something to this sin thing,” he says.
Kneeling, he thought to confess his sins. He asked for forgiveness. One after another sin popped into his mind. He confessed them all, like “a waterfall” they flowed out. “It was like vomiting actually,” he says.
“Then I felt such a peace. A weight lifted. I felt free. I was quite happy,” he says. “That really worked.”
But the battle was only beginning. By practicing New Age, he had opened doors to demons. They came for him in his dream with sleep paralysis and a dark presence.
“I feel the darkest, darkest energy that I’ve ever felt in my life. It was so full of hatred. It’s like there is something that wants to kill me,” he remembers. “It’s on my chest with two hands coming to choke me.
“I’m trying to call the name of Jesus and after a few times I finally did it: ‘Jesus, help me,’” he recalls. “I hear a dark voice below everything calling in a language I have never heard, something like a demonic language, like cursing me. It felt like with the words it was
harming me.”
He screamed and woke up.
Frightened by the dream, Paul was also frightened by how real it was. He was frightened that no one would believe him.
The next day, he recounted the experience on social media, not caring who would make fun of him. Of all his friends, only three congratulated him for coming to Christ.
