I wrote my first song with my father when I was in primary school: it was called “Dimmi papà” (Tell me dad)
In year 2000 I published an album with a band of Christian music with whom I sang (Kerigma). The album is called “Quando l’esperienza si fa musica” (When the experience becomes music). I did not believe in God but despite this, I’m the author of three songs of the album: Dove sei (Where are you), Da te ritornerei (I would come back to you) and Affetti Spirituali (Spiritual Affects). To leave the group has marked my final departure from God. I had already left the Church long before.
What follows, is the witness of how The Lord did change my life: it was necessary for it to be written. You will read about how my life used to be when I did not believe in the existence of God, about the pain that was inside me; you will read about the revelation of God into my life, and about the following conversion as a radical change of my ways. So you will understand how I do what I do, and you will understand what is pushing me from deep inside of my heart to proclaim with ardor that “Jesus IS REALLY The Lord”. Halleluja!
Have a good reading.
The change of route – the road toward the conversion:
I was in the dark for several years and my life was struggling to move forward. I lived as a slave of anxiety, depression and lot of fears until I turned 23 years old, when due to the loss of our first child at the beginning of pregnancy, my life has been completely eroded. The work was going badly; we could not afford the rent of the apartment in which we lived; projects for which I worked were all finished with a closed door on my face.
For almost a year I cried, I physically banged my head against the wall, and feel completely alone and at the mercy of the “events”. I have meditated suicide, practiced self-injury, and wished fervently that my life had never begun.
Finally came a little “quiet after the storm” and I was ready to take stock of the “victims” – Just as happens in a night of furious storm, when you hear the branches of trees knocking on your windows and water roaring without rest, then you finally hear that the worst has passed, the wind has stopped blowing and the sun is rising. That is the moment you are rady to put your nose outside the door to look around and take stock of the damage…I could see as it were still drops of water falling down from the roof, but before me was rising a dawn of peace and that was the important thing: the storm was over. Nothing to do but go through all that the storm had hit, wich was meaning my entire life, and see what was saved and what was ready to be “trashed”.
While I was watching very carefully what remained of my life, and evaluated with the same commitment from where to start to live again, I began to see that around me some situations were getting better: I do not remember exactly what they were, but they were probably related to the work that began to go better and other small things that finally got going…
I remember I thought: “Finally! It was about time! After all this suffering, finally a bit of deserved rest!”
But my mother, in the neo-cathecumenate path for the past 20 years or so, was not of this opinion: for her, what I was calling coincidences, were a clear sign of God’s presence. In her opinion He was reveling Himself to me with all His grace and His mercy, so I could realize about His existence, for I could get closer to Him and do not feel alone anymore.
It took a month to make me believe that what I was experiencing was not the ‘fate’ but a deliberate act of God to convert my heart and my mind to His mercy. My conversion occurred after an episode that with my whole reason I was not able to explain: On October 29th, 2004 during the annual conference for the Italian leaders of the Renewal in the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus healed deafness to a colleague of my mother named P., who was 50 years old and suffered of deafness since she was born. I had had the pleasure to meet P. just a few weeks before, and I felt deep compassion because of her condition. My mother received a call from this lady. We were sitting on the sofa in the living room, when she turned to us with a mixture of wonder and enthusiasm, exclaiming: “P. just called me from Rimini!”My answer? … I thought: “What can I hear about P. that could merit this enthusiastic reaction?” and I said: “She can hear!”
What followed between me and mom, marked the foundation for my conversion:
My mother astonished looked at me and said, “How do you know?”I said: “Why? Can she really hear? “And she: “Yes! Just called me! The Lord has healed her!”
I answered: “What? This God that does not exist –and even if exists He is too busy by His own business to remember about us–did this? “… There followed a moment of silence.”Wow!” I thought “How this could be explainable rationally?”I was sure that the rest of things that were happening were coincidences, but what about this? How can a deaf person since almost 50 years to regain her hearing after a meeting of prayer? It was too much even for a rational mind like mine. And in my heart took place a thought: “What if my mother is right? What if this is really God who is making anything for showing me that He really exists?”So that evening, returning home after this “unusual” afternoon, I said to my husband: “You know what’s going on? I’m going to pray tonight! Basically I can not complain that things do not change if do not ask to be changed … but it would be legitimate if nothing will change after I asked.” I was really convinced that I had nothing to lose… and so that night, after 9 years, I opened my heart and I prayed.
The dream that changed my life:
That night I made an unusual dream, to say the least: I dreamed Jesus. After discussing “lively” with me about things that were not working in my life, because of my stubbornness in saying it was all wrong, He turned to our left where there was a white dove. The dove was crucified on a tablet of wood floating in the air approximately 2.5 meters in height. Then He put His hand into the chest of the dove as if it were made of energy, pulled out it’s heart, and changed it’s heart with mine.
I could see this little heart in the hand of Jesus as a pink little rock… something between a heart and a stone.
Then came to my mind the words of the prophet Ezekiel: “I will take out from you the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
As soon as the Lord had changed my heart with the one of the dove, I felt a physical sensation: it was like as if my heart had changed its beating.
Again in the dream, I started to cry! Crying, crying and still crying, and I completely changed the perception I had of the world around me.
I saw things differently, with different eyes!
Still in the dream and still crying, I went to look for my mother thinking she could perfectly understand the amazing thing that happened to me. But unexpectedly, she couldn’t deeply understand. When I spoke of Jesus and what he had done, crying still in tears “Everything changed!!!”, she invited me to resize the event without really understanding what had happened inside me. I remember that I told her: “No… you did not understand … Everything changed!” At these words, I woke up in the middle of the night and, as you can imagine, nothing was changed.
My dreams lately were just nightmares. Peaks of anxiety and violence: nightmares in which I was chased by people who wanted to kill me, and there were blood, dead people, death, suffering … dreams in which I had no rest. I made an effort to remember what I had just dreamed of, because of the clear sensation I dreamed of something far different than usual.
The next morning I told my dream to Mauro. He looked at me at least perplexed.
I looked at him with equal concern trying to explain my position and said: “I just prayed! I do not know the meaning of what I have dreamed!” He suggested to talk to my mother, because as a “woman of faith”, she would be probably helpful more then him.
So I called her on the phone.
My mother listened very carefully to my dream, and while I spoke, I heard she was crying. In my rationality I could “understand” the figure of Jesus in my dream, but what was really alien to my understanding, was the presence of the dove, which I identified as the symbolic “dove of peace.”
My mother was very helpful about this when she cried in tears: “Erika … the dove is the Holy Spirit!”
It took another week before I could experience what the dream foretold.
Conversion:
On Saturday, November 6th, 2004, I was in a prayer group of the Renewal in the Spirit with my mother and my aunt (sister of my mother). We were invited by P. because she would have given the witness of her recovery after the end of the prayer. That afternoon I also prayed with the rest of the people gathered.
I experienced such power of prayer and a concentration so strong and sharp for what I was asking for some people who were not there with us, to physically feel the intensity of that moment: I started to sweat and felt “burning”. It was a feeling so real, while it seemed appropriate for the strong situation of “power” in which I found.
I had no longer any doubt: God was real, was there and He was listening to my prayer. Was this faith?
Once out of the meeting of prayer, we all three, my mother, my aunt and I, were pleasantly disoriented.
None of us had the idea of how long this unusual prayer meeting had lasted.
Our reaction? My mother was crying because she experienced what is called “Rest in the Spirit”; my aunt was between beeing in a deep wonder and the reality of what she had lived; I was in a bath of sweat and very aware that God existed. What happened? Throughout the journey back to home, we tried to reconstruct what we had just experienced, and in this effort of reasoning, we slowly woke up from that state of “numbness” that had enveloped us like a blanket all prayer long.
We returned home, and our husbands realized that something big had happened just looking to our faces. When they tried to ask details about our evening, none of us was able to explain, describe or outline; what happened was only understandable by our eyes.
The following Saturday my husband was also with my mother and I to the prayer meeting. That Saturday was the beginning of my inner healing. The Spirit of the Lord rested on my heart like a thin fog that descended from heaven, as the “signing in tongue” grown (a spontaneous singing that the Holy Spirit puts in your heart, which becomes hearable through your mouth, and it becomes presence of the Spirit when it joins the singing of the heart of the other brothers).
His delicate touch, provoked in me an unexpected reaction: I felt completely overwhelmed by something that was too delicate to be perceived as a touch, but too precisely targeted and effective to be ignored: It was the Lord! He had mercy on me, and he was setting me free from all pain and all the suffering that I had choked up until then. I started to cry.
That cry was for all the tears I had never cried before, was for all the pain that I had never expressed and that over the time had poisoned my heart making it more sensitive and suffering. It was a pain that I tried to deny, but that before God, was evident as a dark stain on a white sheet. It was a pain that I had done everything to forget, but that the Lord had not forgotten. That was the meeting between me and the Lord God. Now I knew that He was real… I had nothing else to do than to follow Him! My life has changed accordingly.
Today:
I’m Christian, Catholic, part of the Italian Charismatic Renewal in the Holy Spirit since November 6th of 2004 (the official day of my conversion).I received the filling of the Holy Spirit on May 13th, 2007. Today I dedicate my life to evangelization with the “talents” that He has entrusted to me, trying to bring forth the fruits for the glory of His name and the salvation of those who are lost and feel alone, as I felt myself before.
I contribute to catholicclasses.org and divineoffice.org as a composer, writing and singing a modern version of several Hymns and Canticles for the Liturgy of the Hours.
I’m currently engaged as a singer and (if we can say that) “actress” in the evangelization spectacle of Francesca Satta Flores “Più che le sentinelle l’aurora” (More than the watchmen for the dawn). I am author and arranger of the songs of the spectacle except for the song “Io, Tommaso” (I, Thomas), whose author is Angelo Van Arkadie.
I love Jesus.
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