Kathi Sharpe had a troubled upbringing and a number of negative experiences of church. As a young adult she became interested in paganism. She was introduced to Wicca and beyond that she developed an interest in Egyptian goddesses. She married a man who had no interest in religion. She began to to experience progressive hearing loss, which was acute by 1999.
Her husband's daughter was been taken to church by the girl's mother. Kathi and her husband, Ken, were upset by this. But Ken's daughter convinced them that they should attend before the pass judgement. Kathi's impression was that these people were nuts, but sincere. They went back a second time and concluded that this church would not be bad for Ken's daughter.
Two people were praying for Kathi. One was a work colleague and the other was a member of the church. Then in July 2000 Kathi had a strange dream. The dream was about Jesus. She blamed the pizza that she had eaten. But two nights later she had another dream about him. This time Jesus spoke to her, in sign language. He said, 'I love you. Come follow me.'
That second dream took place on a Saturday night. So the next morning she nudged Ken and told him that they were going to church. She lip-read what the pastor was saying but it didn't make a whole lot of sense to her. She went to work that Monday in a wretched state. 'I had almost convinced myself that the dream was only a hallucination.'
The pressure was on at work that day. Kathi had been been given responsibility for fixing a software program that was vital to the business. Her boss was blaming her for the problems with the program. She sent numerous emails to people who used a similar program asking for help in getting the problem fixed. Kathi then did something she had never done before. She prayed to God. 'Okay, if you're really God, you can fix this software. And do it in a way that I know that you did it.' The prayer seemed to go unanswered as no one responded to her email.
But when she got back from lunch on Tuesday there was an email waiting for her. It was from a guy whose address was at christianity.net. The subject was 'Answer to Your Software Problem.' She was freaked out by this because it had been several months since she had sent out any messages to software support groups. The message simply had three lines of code. She applied this to the program and all the problems were immediately fixed. She sent an instant message to the guy at christianity.net and told him that he had just proven to her that God exists. It turns out that he had felt led by the Holy Spirit to answer that particular email at that particular time. She asked the guy questions over the next two days and then she gave her life to Christ.
That Friday Kathi and her family left on a family holiday. She attended a small church that Sunday. She discovered that she could understand every word the preacher was saying. Most of the time when she lip-read she was able to understand less than half of what was being said. So she spoke to preacher after the service and he prayed that her hearing would be restored. That afternoon she began to feel violently sick. This sickness continued for hours. Then she felt that God was speaking to her. He told her that the other gods that she had been worshipping had to go. Until that point she had not seen the problem with them. She started calling out the names of her Egyptian gods and telling them in Jesus' name that they had to go. She told anything that she had worshipped as a Wiccan, and anything that she remembered from the folklore of her childhood, that it had to go too. 'I knew that they were no gods at all, but demons.' Immediately after they were gone she felt better and when she went back to tell her family what had happened she realised that her hearing was restored.
In March 2001 Kathi started a ministry helping those who experience the pain and hopelessness she once knew so well.
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