Sarah, The Teenage Witch… No Longer

Many teens are intrigued by witchcraft. Hollywood feeds that appetite with shows about young people involved in the occult. Sarah Sumpolec turned to witchcraft to give her power over her life and the identity she was looking for.

“It began that search of something I had just been interested in—the whole occult thing, seances and the Ouija board,” Sarah says. “Growing up, those things that I maybe just dabbled in began to turn very serious at a time in my life when I desperately needed more than I had.”

Sarah considered herself a witch in high school.

She says, “I was a solitary practitioner. I felt like this was what I was supposed to do. You’re actually inviting spirits into your life. I did that on multiple occasions. I believed in this idea of a spirit guide.”

The manifestations were eerie.

“It was more outward signs: things falling off the shelf by themselves or hearing a ball rolling across the floor.”

As she was drawn deeper into the occult, Sarah says that she was desperate for her life to change. Her “spirit guide” led her to believe that there was only one way she could really experience change.

“I really felt like I was getting signs that, for my life to change, I had to die,” she explains. “In a physical sense, I had to sacrifice my life. It was that idea that: if you let go of this, if you sacrifice this, then you’ll get a new start and you’ll get a new chance.”

So, Sarah took her car, which leaked carbon monoxide into the passenger compartment, and drove off with the windows rolled up. Her hope was that she would crash and kill herself, making her suicide look like an accident.

“I remember waking up knowing what I was supposed to do. My car door is sitting open, and I’m on the ground. I got back in the car, and I really felt like a failure. I had even failed at killing myself.”

With college soon approaching, Sarah did not try to kill herself again. “I thought [that] maybe something will change when I go away.”

Sarah graduated from high school and went to college. When her dorm roommates showed up, they couldn’t have been more different than Sarah.

“I met two little Christian girls,” Sarah says. “They just came in and talked about God in a way that I had never seen before. They really believed in God, and they really loved Him. I didn’t know what to do with that.

“I don’t remember them ever having a conversation with me that I was wrong or I needed to do this or I needed to do that. It was never that. They just lived their lives.”

The girls started a Bible study in their room. Sarah found herself listening as she pretended to do homework. They invited her to a campus Christian meeting. Sarah went, figuring she had nothing to lose.

“I still remember the sermon almost word for word. He talked about altars in the Bible. The reason why we had to lay down our lives on those altars was because God loved me. And to me, that was completely new.”

After the meeting, Sarah found a quiet spot on campus to think about what she had heard.

“I just laid it out. I said, ‘God, if You are real and You do really want me, then I’ll be Yours. I’ll be Yours.”

When she went home during Thanksgiving break, Sarah says that although things were still the same, she realized that the change she was looking for had begun—in her.

“I read the Bible during the whole break, and I remember being at peace for the first time in my life.”

But, Sarah still had some occult paraphernalia. It was stored at her parents’ house.

“I had a big bonfire and burned everything,” she says. “That was the only thing I could do to demonstrate to God that I didn’t want anything to do with that world -- that I was shutting that door for good.”

Sarah is now a wife, mother of three daughters, and the author of a series of books for teenage girls. She says that she will never forget how God came to her rescue when she was crying out for a new life.

Sarah says, “Satan confused me and deceived me into thinking that I had to kill myself to receive that new life. Then I learned that the truth was that Christ was asking for my whole life. He was asking me to lay down my life -- not to kill myself -- but to lay down the old ways, the old life, that old 'flesh person', so that He could make me new.”