By Eden Garcia —
Andie Janelle was a YouTube Christian, not a church girl, in her sophomore year, but by her senior year the Phoenix-area girl had left God and become a “drinking maniac, a drinking psychopath.”
“I got sick right before my 20th birthday,” she says. “I just couldn’t control my body. I couldn’t control my face. I was laughing at one point and drooling. It was a very weird day and it freaked me out.”
Andie’s prodigal period took her through marijuana, New Age and greed until she was confronted by a African-American entrepreneur on Instagram, who jolted her with surprising perspectives that drove her back to Christian YouTube videos.
Andie Janelle wasn’t a Veggie Tales girl and her dad didn’t take her to church. But he did teach her Bible stories and give her Bible kids stuff.
In her sophomore year, she got turned on to Christian videos and sermons online and was telling everybody about God.
But her friends drank and smoked. It wore off on her.
By her senior year, God was out and marijuana was in.
So was sleeping around.
“By senior year I had kind of fallen away cuz I I had just started living my life and I didn’t really put my life and God together,” Andie says. “I didn’t understand that you shouldn’t have premarital sex, you shouldn’t be smoking weed and doing drugs. I did not make that connection.”
She didn’t go as far of some of her friends, who got into heavier drugs and now are in and out of prison and in and out of rehab, she says.
After four years of heavy drinking, Andie experienced the drooling uncontrollably on her 20th birthday. Her mom took her to ER.
The episode led her to panic attacks. Had she damaged her body so badly that there was no recovery? she worried. Had she crossed the point of no return?
“This whole season of anxiety strong, strong, almost crippling regret and anxiety lasted for a good four or five months,” Andie says. “I was afraid of everything. I even stopped drinking coffee.”
The backoff from substance abuse was good. What came next, however, wasn’t much better.
Andie got into New Age.
A “spiritual” co-worker impressed her with his vast understanding of concepts adapted from Hinduism, “all these spiritual concepts like ancient Egyptian Emerald Tablets, Law of Attraction. He kept telling me that I am my own god. God is inside of you. You are a part of god; therefore, you are god.”
After surrounding herself with partiers for so long, Andie was relieved to meet someone “spiritual” and went all in. She began “manifesting” her way to riches and fame.
“I was trying to manipulate my life so that I could ascend and get whatever I wanted,” she recalls. “It looked like I could become super powerful and super wealthy through manifestation and law of attraction.”
New Age beliefs transitioned from being “spiritual” to being ambitious for material wealth.
“I got pretty greedy and I got really obsessed with money and obsessed with proving myself,” she says. “Since I believed there is no overhead God, then right or wrong was basically up to me. If I needed to sleep my way to the top, if I needed to scheme my way to the top, I was going to do it.
“I was going to be coldhearted,” she adds.
But a couple years of this nonsense led her basically no where.
During Covid she joined the Trump-hating crowd online when an African-American entrepreneur, a millionaire, confronted her gently: Donald Trump had done nothing wrong against blacks and didn’t have anti-black policies, he pointed out.
At the time, the Trump=racist propaganda was surging, so when a black contradicted the media’s narrative, she paid attention. The entrepreneur turned her onto a podcast about freedom vs. government control with a measure of God mixed it.
One video led to another. God crept gently back into her life.
“Remember me?” he asked her as she lay in her bed. “Remember the realness of me and who I am? Now I’m coming to you where you’re at and asking you: Will you believe in me again?“
Andie realized she needed church. Being a YouTube Christian was not enough.
But as she attended, all the New Age trash clouded her thinking. She rejected the pastor’s teaching whenever it conflicted with her ideas about manifesting.
Tearful and conflicted, she prayed: “I don’t know what’s right from wrong anymore. You’re going to have to cleanse me of all of this stuff. You’re going to have to help me love you again.”
She got baptized October 2020.
“My life has been a wild road,” she says. “the Lord uniquely allowed me to go through a lot of very different scenarios and really gave me a very wide perspective as to where Jesus is in multiple areas.”
