A woman who was raised as a Muslim in an abusive home and later fled to New Age and the occult is sharing her powerful testimony of finding true freedom in Jesus Christ.

Rising from a childhood marked by deep pain to a season of chasing wealth and power, Nadeen Flaveney thought she had everything—until the darkness she'd carried since girlhood nearly consumed her. She recently told the "No Longer Nomads" podcast that what looked like control, success, and freedom was really a trap. 

A Childhood Shaped by Pain

Nadeen's life started in turmoil. Born into a Muslim household, her mother quickly discovered that the arranged marriage she was promised was to an abusive husband—soon to be an abusive father. At just one year old, Nadeen's mother kidnapped her to Jordan to escape. 

But after five years, during what was supposed to be the first unsupervised visitation in years, Nadeen's father took her to what she thought would be a fun day at the zoo. Instead, he kidnapped her back to the United States.

"I always felt like I was just something passed between them. Not a daughter. Just an object," she recalls. 

In her father's home, life became a nightmare of neglect and abuse. Hunger, shame, and fear became her norm. Even as a child, darkness felt close, visits from demonic presences in the night, voices no one else could hear. No one believed her. She was screaming for help, but no one came.

Running Toward the Wrong Light

As a teen and young adult, she searched for anything to make the pain stop. She turned to New Age practices, the occult, a Buddhist monk, parties, and eventually a glamorous nightlife in Dubai and Atlanta. 

"I had everything—money, cars, attention," Nadeen says. "But it meant nothing." 

One night, surrounded by piles of cash on her apartment floor, she sobbed from the depths of her soul. She had finally reached the pinnacle of what she had been chasing, but it still left her feeling empty. 

That was the night she decided she didn't want to live anymore. She took a week off of working at the nightclub she was working at in Atlanta and made preparations to kill herself. She even wrote letters to her friends and family and prepared her apartment. Nadeen was going to jump off a building. 

A Verse That Cut Through Everything

Then came the unexpected: a drug dealer friend invited her to church. 

Nadeen had nothing to lose, so she accepted the invitation and walked in wearing a shirt with the Virgin Mary with an AK-4 on it because it was the only shirt she had that covered her. 

But that evening, something shifted. When the pastor read Matthew 16:26—"What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?"—it was like the verse had been written for her. 

Nadeen didn't know what a sermon was. This was her first time stepping foot in a church building. But she said in that moment, "My jaw literally dropped and I'm looking around, everyone's quiet, everyone's chill, and I'm ready to scream in my chair! I'm thinking to myself, who wrote that? Who is Matthew? What book is this in? What is Matthew's last name? How does he know so much about me?"

Watch Nadeen's full story on YouTube:

Found, Freed, and on Mission

That night, during the altar call, Nadeen encountered the real, personal, life-changing love of Jesus. The torment that had followed her since childhood began to break. Later, as she read the Bible at home, she knew without a doubt that when she had cried out to God, "It wasn't Krishna, Buddha, the universe, or Allah who answered me—it was Jesus."

God used a drug dealer who was just beginning his own journey with Christ to lead her to Him. "If that's not the love of God," she says. "Someone dead in sin himself, invited me to church!"

Today, Nadeen is married to her husband, Rotimi, and together they lead Kole Ministries – a ministry devoted to helping others experience the same freedom through God's Word and the Holy Spirit that radically transformed their lives.

Click here for more powerful podcast episodes from No Longer Nomads.

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