AMAZING
STORY
Joel
Zovar: Ex-Vampire
By
The 700 Club
CBN.com –
Nearly 12,000 violent hate crimes take place every year,
and many are committed by deeply disturbed teens facing challenges
today that past generations would have never imagined. As a child,
Joel Zovar was a victim of merciless ridicule that bred a deep
hatred in his heart. A hate, which ultimately found itself, expressed
in a vampire cult. Dory Nissen brings us his story.
Scoffing at mainstream society, some hate-filled teens find a
false sense of acceptance in groups of twisted young minds. Joel
was one of those teens.
"I would see people in certain situations,
and I would wonder what it would be like to taste their blood, to taste the saltiness
of their blood, to engage in that act with them." How do our nation's teen-agers
fall prey to the bizarre practices of vampirism? For Joel, the trip to this grotesque
fringe of the gothic punk movement was fueled by his intense hate. It began in
his early childhood, when he was mercilessly ridiculed by his classmates, simply
because he was overweight. Their cruelty bred a deep hate in his heart.
Even though his appearance changed as he grew, he remained full of contempt. Joel
found an outlet for that bitterness, an outlet that could lead to spiritual death. "I
got to the point in high school where I was beginning to start a grimoire, which
is a witch's diary, of various spells, things that I'd picked up from different
books, different sources. I also began to deeply get into demonology, the study
of demons." In sexual rituals, Joel would slit his arms so that he and his
partner could drink his blood. He said it was a craving, an intense desire and
that this act is demonic. Prominent in their string of monstrous acts is
all consuming hate; hate for anyone or anything that stood for morality; hate
for Christians; hate for The 700 Club; hate for Pat Robertson. Joel
watched the show as a joke; to get a good laugh, but one day, the very message
he ridiculed began to pierce through the hate. Pat Robertson looked into the camera
right to where Joel was sitting and said, 'God loves you, and God will change
your life." Joel came face-to-face with Jesus Christ, and prayed with Pat
to accept Christ as his Lord and Savior. "I saw what He did for me. His
blood covered me and He became so real. I could feel Him in the room. It's like
He was right there. Years and years of sin and decay and hatred just went away
just like that. It was gone. I let Him into my heart and I was new. In a second,
I was somebody else." The 700 Club was there for Joel in his hour
of darkness, showing him the way to salvation. It was the beginning of a long
healing process, and as he grew spiritually, CBN continued to encourage him. Eventually,
Joel found his place in a local church and received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. "It
felt like the sin that was caked on me, the sins that were so easily besetting
me, when I began to walk in the spirit, just fell off." Joel has made a
real drastic change in his life. He's gone from a definite lack of any interest
in God to a total love for God. "I'm somebody so different from anything
that I was and I've got the ability to live for Him and to love, not hate. Bitterness
and anger can't touch me anymore."
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