When Grace Found Me

Jai Roza's Journey From New Age to Jesus

May 23, 2026

Friends, I gotta tell you…. Satan did NOT want this episode out! I realized after I published the YouTube that it was only audio. He caused all kinds of shenanigans including deleting in from my computer where I couldn’t find it again. When I went back to Canva, where I edit the episodes, it wasn’t there. How could that be? Canva always saves everything. Even the original raw video was gone. Finally, after praying and rebuking him, I found a copy in an email I had sent months ago. Whew! Thank you Jesus!

So…. get ready! This one is powerful.

There’s a moment in this week’s episode that I keep replaying.

Jai Roza is in his late 20s. He’s been saved, rebaptized, trying to follow Christ. And he falls again — into the old patterns, the old darkness — and finds himself on his knees, confessing to God.

“I am a sinner. I am a liar. I am an addict.”

And God stops him.

“You are not allowed to talk about yourself except the way I would talk about you.”

I have never thought about repentance that way. That there could be a form of confession that actually dishonors God — by claiming sins He already took. By using the sacred “I am” to speak death over ourselves when He has spoken life.

Jai didn’t come to faith easily. He grew up in the church — ordained deacon at 14 — and by 17 was

channeling spirits, hearing a dozen demonic voices around the clock, and planning to end his life.

He was pulled back by a midnight phone call from someone who almost didn’t make it.

This conversation goes deep. Into possession and the lie of possession. Into what the Book of Acts looks like when it glows. Into how every choice we make is feeding either God’s authority or the enemy’s.

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Our pain and our suffering is not in vain.

It has meaning. It has purpose. It can be a catalyst for growth. But you can’t see any of that when you’re seventeen years old, standing at the edge of your own life, and the darkness is all you can see.

This is my story. The short version, anyway.

The Perfect Family That Wasn’t

I was born and raised Christian. But we were what I’d call cultural Christians — the family at church that everyone pointed to as the model. When we went out to eat, strangers would stop and compliment my mom on how well-behaved her four boys were. In church, we were the ones serving, showing up, doing all the right things. By the time I was fourteen, I was an ordained deacon.

But my life at home was very different.

There’s this thing that starts when you’re living a double life — you become an expert at it without even trying. Our house was chaos unless we knew someone was coming over. The minute a guest was expected, everyone scrambled and suddenly everything looked perfect. And I think that’s the best picture I can give you of what my interior life was like for years.

When I was eight, I was molested by another kid outside of the home. Nobody in my family knew. And what I felt immediately afterward — I didn’t have language for it then, but I understand it now — was the weight of sin. When you read Genesis and you see Adam and Eve hiding from God after they’ve eaten the fruit, that hiding instinct isn’t theoretical. It’s deeply, physically real. I felt it as a child.

Someone’s going to find out.

That fear took root in me and shaped everything that came after.

The presentation side and the personal side split further and further apart. And when a faith is built on family tradition, all Satan has to do is attack the family to break the tradition. Eventually my parents separated, and when they did, so did my faith. You told me all these years the Bible doesn’t condone divorce, and here we are. That was enough for me to throw it all out.

What I Was Running Into

So I ran. And when you run from God, you don’t just end up nowhere — you end up somewhere. For me, that somewhere was New Age spirituality. I started channeling spirits. I was addicted to pornography. I was practicing spiritual exercises that were cracking open dimensions I was absolutely not prepared for.

And here’s the thing about that season of my life that I want to be honest about: at first, it felt like power. It felt special. This was the era when the X-Men movies were hitting their stride and the superhero genre was just taking off.

You’re a teenager and you’re like, I can see things other people can’t see. I have abilities.

That’s a compelling story when you’re young and you feel powerless everywhere else.

But what was actually happening was that I was gradually surrendering more and more of my will. And the more I gave, the more they took.

I had about a dozen voices at any given time that just wouldn’t stop talking. Imagine trying to sleep while twelve different presences are talking at you. The only time they’d calm down was when I was actively channeling — surrendering myself more fully to them — or when I was doing whatever they approved of. Pornography. Anything that fed what they were feeding on. They’d quiet down in those moments, and that quiet felt like relief.

That is the trap. What starts as cool ends up as control.

You’d see it in how I treated people. I was easily triggered, aggressive over small things, ready to fight at the slightest provocation. And then on Sunday I was the most helpful guy at church. Serving at food banks. Involved in every program.

Serving two masters — and the Bible is exactly right that you cannot do it.

Because it doesn’t just stress you out. It tears you apart from the inside. You’re one person trying to be two, and eventually one side demands authority over the other.

By the time I was seventeen going on eighteen, I was planning my suicide. I had gotten to the point where I thought: if I can’t control what’s happening inside me, then at least I can choose to end it. I knew where I was headed after. I had no illusions about heaven. But the suffering I was in was so intense that I would have taken anything — anything different from what I was going through.

That’s the lie Satan sells. You have this, or you have worse. Pick one. He doesn’t need you to believe life is good. He just needs you to believe there is no other option.

The Flashbang

And then God showed up.

Minutes after I made my decision — literally minutes — someone called me from another state. It was after midnight. They’d just gotten out of a Bible study and said they felt like they had to call me. They had no idea what was happening.

From where I was in the spiritual world I’d been trained to see — it was like a flashbang going off. If you’ve ever been in a completely dark room and someone shines a flashlight directly into your eyes, your eyes don’t adjust. The room doesn’t get brighter. But your brain registers: something different was just in front of me.

That’s what it was. There was a spiritual presence in that room for a moment that was greater than anything I had ever encountered. Greater than any spirit I had ever communed with.

And I remember thinking:

That was all God needed. One small shift in direction — not a conversion, not a dramatic altar call. Just a pivot from I choose to end it to I choose to seek that. That one moment of curiosity was the crack He needed to get me moving toward Him.

This is what I now call Eden’s Conflict. In paradise, there is still a choice. The first sin happened not in a pit of misery, but in a garden. That moment of decision — partaking of the fruit — shifted the trajectory of everything that came after. And I believe that every moment of decision in our lives is a small echo of that. Every choice to seek God or to turn away carries more weight than we realize.

What the Bible Looked Like in the Dark

In the weeks after that night, something strange started happening. My Bible began to glow.

I’m not being metaphorical. I would show it to people — people I knew were dabbling in the spiritual world the same way I was — and I’d ask them without telling them what it was: do you see any light around this book? They’d say no. Nothing.

But I held it and the voices went quieter. Not silent. But muffled. I couldn’t sleep without holding my Bible pressed against me because it was the only thing that dampened the noise enough to let me rest.

And there was one part of the Bible that shone the brightest to me. Acts.

I didn’t know why at first. But I noticed I would physically get up and leave a church service if I heard that Acts was going to be preached on. One day I stopped and asked myself:

Why am I walking out? Why does this make me so angry?

Because Acts chapter two is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. And that is what those spirits hated more than anything else. Not because Acts is more holy than other books, but because it’s the moment the Spirit of God comes directly upon His church — offering His presence not as something that takes you over, but as something that flows through you. A gift, not a curse.

That’s the real Spirit. The One God intended to inhabit your vessel. And everything else that had been pushing its way in was doing it fraudulently, claiming territory that wasn’t theirs.

The Lie of “I Am”

Years later — I was around twenty-nine, thirty — I had a relapse. I’d been re-baptized. I was no longer actively channeling. But I couldn’t make the voices stop. They had a new argument now:

You’ve tried to separate yourself from God twice. We have the right to test you as long as you’re here.

And there was something in me — I think it was something close to Stockholm syndrome — where I had lived so long in that abuse that I had learned to miss it. I would fall into pornography again, into the old patterns, and I’d go before God in repentance, genuinely broken, saying: I am a sinner, I am a liar, I am an addict, I am—

And God stopped me. His voice, clear:

Stop.

He showed me something I already knew from my time in Eastern spirituality: the words I am are sacred. In that philosophy, the “I am” is the seat of identity and power, so to diminish it is to diminish yourself. But I had taken that same construct and was using it in repentance — I am broken, I am damaged, I am a failure — and what I was actually doing was attaching negative declarations to the name of God. Because as a believer, who is the I Am?

He told me:

Who are you to decide where your sin lies? I have cast your sins as far as the east is from the west. If you are still claiming them, you are claiming authority over what I already took from you.

The only sin I was committing was the old belief.

So I learned to ask: how would God speak of me? I am born again. I am saved by the blood of the Lamb. I am a prince in the kingdom of eternity. Not pride — alignment. Learning to echo His voice over my life rather than the enemy’s.

Because here’s what I’ve come to understand: in the spiritual world, faith is the currency. What we declare, what we dwell on, what we speak out loud — we are feeding the authority of one side or the other. When Paul says “pray without ceasing,” he doesn’t mean be on your knees all day. He means: speak as if you’re talking to God in the moment. Would you say what you’re about to say if He were in the seat next to you? Because spiritually, your words are either amplifying His authority in that space — or the enemy’s.

The Choice Is Yours

Here’s the truth I want to leave with you, because it’s the thing that changed everything for me:

If Christ hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have a choice. Our only option would be death. But because He died, life became a genuine option — true life, eternal life. And because it’s a genuine option, the choice belongs to you. That is what Satan works hardest to hide from you. He wants you to believe there’s no way out, no other option, nothing better than what you’re already enduring. It’s the same lie he told me at seventeen.

He’s still telling it.

But the demoniacs in scripture — the ones chained in tombs, the ones so possessed they’d broken their own chains — they still came running to Christ. I don’t think it was the spirits that were screaming when they saw Him. I think it was the soul of the person crying out: that’s my way out. And Christ delivered them. Every one.

If you’re listening and you’re struggling — you’re not in a tomb. You’re here, reading this. That already puts you ahead of where I was.

The choice is yours. And it always has been.

Eden’s Conflict — The Game

Everything I’ve walked through has shaped a project I’ve been building for years — a card game called Eden’s Conflict, designed to help people understand spiritual warfare not as abstract theology, but as real choices they make every single day. Temptations have counter-promises. Intercessory prayer is a grace card that converts negative points into positive ones. Because that’s how it works in real life. Darkness becomes a testimony. The night you almost didn’t survive becomes your greatest moment of proof that God is real.

That’s what happened to me.

What the enemy intended as the end of my story became the beginning of it.

You can find the game, music, and more at edensconflict.com. Our music is on Spotify, Apple, and all major streaming platforms — and you can download it free from the website. We’re most active on Instagram @Eden’s Conflict.

Everything we create — the music, the game, the shirts — exists for one reason: to help you cultivate a kingdom-first mindset. Not looking at your life from where you’re standing today, but from the perspective of the person who finally kneels before the throne and says:

I’m finally here. Everything else — it was all worth it.

Jai Roza is the creator of Eden’s Conflict, a card game, music project, and apparel line built around helping believers understand and engage in spiritual warfare. Find him at edensconflict.com and on Instagram @edensconflict.

1 Thessalonians 5:17 — "Pray without ceasing"

Ephesians 2:4–5 — “Because of his great love for us, God who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.”

Romans 5:20 — "Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more"

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