Story Archives - Clear Creek Resources

Searching for Light, Lured into Darkness: The Crystal Corl Story

August 10, 2026/in Spiritual Growth, Story, Testimony/by Christy St. John

It began in elementary school when classmates introduced Crystal to love spells. Growing up in a Mexican household where the idea of unseen forces felt normal and influenced by shows like Hocus Pocus and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, she became fascinated by the idea that magic could offer control. She brought the spell instructions home, hoping it might help with a childhood crush. Her mother threw them away, but the encounter became her first exposure to witchcraft, eventually leading to fifteen years in the occult.

As a child, Crystal believed in God, especially influenced by her aunt and grandfather. Although her family attended church, they also regularly visited a tarot card reader. Crystal believed she experienced unusual spiritual sensitivity that went beyond ordinary intuition, which was reinforced by her family’s interpretation of her dreams and other experiences.

Childhood trauma and abuse had deepened her desire for control and belonging, and the reader’s knowledge of personal secrets made her wonder whether that path offered the control she was searching for. Still, something about those visits felt off, though she couldn’t explain why.

She met her future husband, a man in flight training for the Marine Corps, in Corpus Christi in 2012. After they married, they moved to San Diego, where her husband deployed. Alone and seeking control, Crystal entered a metaphysical bookstore. She recalled her past unease but was also drawn by curiosity. A medium read her tarot cards, revealed intimate details from her childhood, and said there was something different about her. The medium affirmed her “spiritual intuition,” recommended books, and gave her crystals to amplify it.

This was when Crystal first encountered the light‑and‑love movement, which encourages people to seek identity and guidance through the universe, nature, and crystals rather than God.

Crystal began reading books, learning tarot, and exploring other practices. She eventually seemed to know things she shouldn’t have known about others, just like the other tarot readers she had met before and felt like she was succeeding in gaining control over her life. Yet, as she practiced mediumship, strange things occurred in her home, and her sleep became plagued by nightmares. She did not connect these experiences to her practices, believing she was inviting light and that her faith in God, which she still carried from childhood, would prevent evil from reaching her.

Another military deployment moved them to a base in the Mojave Desert in California, which was far more isolated from activities and community than San Diego. Seeking peace and community, she began attending an on-base church and joined a women’s Bible study. She became pregnant with their first child and stopped reading cards during her pregnancy, not wanting to risk anything harming her baby, though she still did not connect her experiences to her practices. She and her daughter nearly died during childbirth. In the postpartum period, while struggling with recovery and depression, she saw what she described as a demonic presence, which disappeared when she prayed.

She began attending church more regularly, but another move to North Carolina left her without community. Struggling with the need for security and control, she returned to reading cards and paused again during her second pregnancy. After her son’s birth, she saw the same demonic presence as before, which again disappeared after she prayed.

Eventually, she returned to reading cards for others. “I felt a sense of control,” Crystal said, reflecting on the back-and-forth nature of her practices then and how she kept returning to cards out of a desire to prepare for her future. “But in reality, I was searching for light while being lured into darkness—inch by inch.” Her marriage became strained, her self-image worsened, and she felt lost.

A few years later, her family moved to Texas, but more strange events followed. Crystal’s five-year-old daughter drew a picture of something she saw in her window and showed her—the same figure Crystal had seen after the birth of each of her children.

Concerned, Crystal discussed it with her husband. He questioned the altars in the home, including one to Hecate, an ancient goddess associated with witchcraft, suggesting they might be related to the events. She did not see the connection and kept them.

Crystal took a job at a metaphysical store as a medium but still wanted her children raised Christian. She enrolled her four-year-old son in a Christian daycare, and he began asking about baptism and sharing the gospel with her. His joy reminded Crystal of her grandfather, a key influence in her faith. She asked a friend about local churches, and the friend invited her family to Clear Creek Community Church.

Her family began attending and continued to attend despite a sudden wave of chaos, including loss and illness. She and her husband felt as if each sermon spoke directly to them. Crystal’s husband accepted Jesus as his Savior and was baptized, and they joined a small group and continued growing.

One Sunday, a sermon on Gideon in Judges described God commanding him to tear down his father’s altar to Baal before building an altar to the Lord. As the pastor spoke about the impossibility of being “half in and half out,” Crystal felt as though the message was meant for her alone. She realized she had claimed to believe in Jesus while repeatedly turning to the occult for control. Like Gideon, she recognized it was time to tear down the literal idols and altars in her own life, surrender her need for control, and follow Christ alone.

Filled with conviction, Crystal went home and threw everything away—cards, books, altars, crystals. She declared to her family that Jesus alone would reign in their house, opened the windows and played worship music. The experience brought her tears and relief. She was finally able to surrender her craving for control and entrust her future to Christ.

Since then, Crystal has left mediumship, and she and her husband have developed a strong desire to learn about Jesus and the Bible through classes, books, and pastoral mentorship. Crystal was baptized in August 2025 and is learning about spiritual warfare, motivated to more deeply understand her own experiences as well as ensure that anything she does or believes moving forward is from the Holy Spirit and not from other influences. She prays for her friends who are still mediums and uses her tattoos—once symbols of her occult past—as tools to share her testimony of how she was brought out of it.

Looking back, she sees how letting go of tarot and trusting Christ lifted her need for control, and how what once seemed like “light and love” led her deeper into darkness. She describes her return to God like a battered runaway coming home to an open door and porch light on. Jesus met her without hesitation or judgment, just a hug and a welcome back. After years of searching for love and belonging, she finally found both in Christ, the true Light, and for the first time felt fully at home.

The Molly Clark Story

July 16, 2026/in Story, Students, Testimony/by Clear Creek Resources

I didn’t grow up knowing God, and at a young age I experienced true pain. I faced depression, fear, and waves of heavy emotion that seemed unbearable.

On April 19, 2019, my world collapsed when my dad passed away. I didn’t know how to cope. I felt hopeless. I tried every worldly thing to make that feeling go away – substances, influences, and self-harm. But nothing took the pain away.

I felt completely lost.

Then, in the summer of 2023, I signed up for Camp Creek. I think I was just desperate for something, anything to help. What I found was hard to explain – it was like stepping into a different world where my struggles and temptations were quieted, and I could just hear God. It honestly felt like hope. Like something I was longing for and never realized.

During worship and with my group and my leader, I felt like God was speaking directly to me. Calling me to a life with him filled with hope. I gave my life to Jesus that week. I learned that he died on the cross for my sin, and he was raised to life three days later, defeating death and sin and making a way for me to be made right with him. All the sin I had dealt with was forgiven because of Jesus. He found me at my lowest and offered me a new life with him.

I went from lost to found. Hopeless to filled with hope.

And now I live to serve him. He has worked in me to bring healing from loss, forgiveness for my past, and now calls me to live fully for him daily. I serve on Sundays and went on a mission trip this past summer.

I still struggle, but I’m no longer struggling alone because he’s walking with me through it all.

Faithful Living: The Brittany Sartor Story

June 22, 2026/in Small Group, Story/by Christy Williams

Brittany Sartor grew up in a home where faith was lived out—where putting God and church first were part of daily life. But as she stepped into adulthood, she began to feel a quiet ache, as though a vital piece of her relationship with God was missing.

She had connections at Clear Creek Community Church and began attending on and off. It was through the smaller campus of East 96 where she began to wrestle with deep questions about the faith she grew up with, realizing that many of her childhood beliefs didn’t align with the gospel of grace she was learning about at Clear Creek’s Sunday services.

Brittany needed a place she could ask all her theological questions. She tried joining a women’s small group but had difficulty finding a time that worked with her schedule. Undeterred, she joined Starting Point, attended classes offered by Clear Creek, and even began serving in Creek Kids to find answers and community. During this time of seeking, she began to accept the grace Jesus offered.

After months of searching, she joined a women’s small group that felt like home. Many of the women were further along in their faith journeys and patiently walked alongside her as she openly asked questions and began fitting together the puzzle pieces of her faith. Small group was the place she felt seen and known. She began to see problems of pride and shame melt away as she experienced friendships without judgment. No longer did she feel the expectation to measure up to certain standards or hide her struggles. Brittany experienced the tangible love of God through simply sharing life with these women—allowing them to bring meals after the birth of her children and praying over deep concerns. Together they saw prayers answered and celebrated them. These women were all in for growth in their faith and sharing life with one another, transforming the way Brittany saw a community of faith.

Small group now feels so part of her normal routine and essential part of her walk with God that she recently began leading her own small group. She often encourages other women to get plugged into a group, saying, “You need to have a day-to-day relationship with other people that are believers that are walking the walk and having those conversations that allow you to form a deeper relationship with Christ.”

Through small group, Brittany has learned that community isn’t a requirement for faith but a source of support that has journeyed with her. This transformative experience in small group is what has fueled her conversations with those in her Top 5 and beyond—really a network of family and friends who she intentionally prays for and builds relationships with in hopes they one day come to know Jesus.

Often, Brittany simply gives others a glimpse of faithful living—engaging in church, participating in small group, and prioritizing her relationship with God.

Brittany says that she never gave a formal invitation to any of these people to come to church. They just saw her living out her faith, and they decided to try it, too. She finds a positivity naturally comes out in the way she interacts with others because she knows she’s “living with the reassurance that she’s saved by grace.”

When talking with others who are seeking Jesus, she trusts God’s direction in what to say and where to go, understanding that she doesn’t have to get it “just right.”

“Living out your faith begins with focusing on your own relationship with Jesus first, and it naturally comes out in conversation,” she says. Brittany is always trying to find ways to keep God in “the front of her days.” When she prioritizes time in God’s word and prayer, those topics are simply top of mind when she’s talking with others. The conversation can easily shift into matters of faith because she’s already been thinking about it.

More than anything, she invests in prayer, having prayed for some for over a decade to come to faith in Jesus.

This past spring, Brittany baptized two women in her family she had walked with for years. And the effect trickled down into the next generation with her niece and her cousin’s daughter also making the decision to be baptized. Over twelve people in her family have become engaged with Clear Creek Community Church since she began coming on her own twelve years ago. Noting the moments when God has moved in the lives of these people she’s prayed for has fueled her faith and encouraged her to keep praying.

Brittany recognizes that investing in the lives of others to know Jesus is slow work. On the day of her sister-in-law’s baptism, over thirty people showed up in support. She says, “It can be frustrating whenever you’re looking at it day-to-day, but when you look back at a decade’s worth of prayers you realize it went from me coming to church by myself [to a whole community supporting and loving one another.]”

Brittany’s life reflects faithful living, yet her story points beyond her own effort to the God who always moves first. He first stirred her heart to receive his gift of grace, and now he continues to move through her life—drawing others toward the same love, community, and hope she has found in Jesus.

The David Sanchez Story

September 16, 2025/in Small Group, Story/by Heidi Akers

David Sanchez’s smile comes readily these days. He serves in the Children’s Ministry at East 96 almost every week, singing and dancing along with worship. And he seems to never grow tired of meeting new people, getting to know them, and sharing Christ’s love with them.

His wife, Sharon, is amazed at his transformation because she always saw David as a true introvert. She jokes, “Now he wants to talk to everyone!” He feels that people have been put in his path that need to be there.

But the love David shares so freely now is a powerful contrast to the type of love he grew up with. Raised in the foster care system, David learned early on that love was often conditional, even transactional. The kind of love he longed for simply wasn’t there—and deep down, he knew it never would be.

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David Sanchez was born in a border town in South Texas to an abusive mother and her boyfriend. The family was very poor, and at the age of eight, David became a ward of the state and was put into foster care due to the physical and sexual abuse he was enduring. He was separated from his sisters and the only family he had ever known. His sisters stayed in the home and were not abused. At first, he missed his mother, but he was happy to have enough food and his own bed and a reprieve from the abuse.

David’s initial foster parents took him to church, and he witnessed a community who were able to genuinely love people because of their love for Jesus. He realized that he wanted to be a part of that and have Jesus in his heart. He was baptized at the age of nine but didn’t have anyone to disciple him as he bounced around in several other foster homes over the next five years. He described his faith as “becoming stagnant” during this phase of his life.

David learned much about how he thought life worked during those years in foster care. He started hanging out with the wrong crowd and getting into trouble. Because of the direct abuse David had suffered and the life he witnessed in foster care, he became very calculated and saw his life like a game of chess during this time. He saw the devastation of the other foster kids when they would hope to go back to their families but then get phased out of the system.

Through it all, his inner voice became I’m the guy. None of this is going to get me down. I will be successful.

Around the age of fourteen, David caught a break and was able to enroll in a magnet school called The Science Academy due to his gift for math and understanding how things worked. It was around this time that he met Sharon—his future wife. They could not have been more opposite. She was a rule follower, while he was breaking them all. Sharon was very focused on her academics, and David was hanging out with troublemakers and making poor life decisions. Despite this, Sharon said once she got to know him, she could “just feel how big his heart truly was.”

Sharon had her own story of abuse. Sharon’s father had been abusive to her mother and siblings but had spared her. She felt a continuous need to rise to his high expectations of her, for fear he may turn on her if she didn’t follow his every rule. She had a very strong Christian upbringing from her mother and remembers coming to Jesus while staying in a hotel with her mom and sisters after one of her father’s abusive attacks. Her mother wanted to sing devotionals, but Sharon was so filled with rage towards her father that it was hard for her to be in the moment. Her mother persisted, and while she was singing the old hymn “It Is Well With My Soul,” she came to know that Jesus was her savior.

These two deeply hurt people were able to see the best parts of each other and come together. The struggles they had both endured during their childhoods created a special empathy in each of them for others, and when they recognized this in each other, they fell in love. David graduated from college with an engineering degree, married Sharon at the age of 28, and they started creating the family and life David had always hoped for.

Five years later, when Sharon and David’s first daughter was born, everything seemed to come crashing down again for David. As a man, he had normalized anxiety and rage as what men just do. The false belief playing in his mind was that men have to be strong. They can’t feel their emotions. David vowed to figure parenting out and studied it like he would an engineering project. Having never been given unconditional love as a child, he found it difficult to feel compassion for his daughter and her sensitive ways.

Sharon leaned on her faith and knew when to pick her battles. She never forced her beliefs on her husband, yet she stayed faithful to her relationship with Jesus. David and Sharon had a second daughter, and as family life became busier, they made church attendance a goal. They tried to attend Clear Creek Community Church when they could but without making any true connections.

Then one day Sharon and David found themselves in front of a group of tables at Clear Creek looking for a small group to join. They began talking with Peggy and Randy Trout, who were starting a married couple’s group. They felt at ease in each other’s presence, and the date and times matched their schedules. So, David and Sharon took a leap of faith and joined their small group.

The group was composed of a lot of older couples with grown children, and even though David and Sharon’s new family was just starting out, they felt like they were amongst aunts and uncles in this small group. The mission of the Trout’s group was “to know and to be known.” David and Sharon soaked up this unconditional love they had never consistently experienced in their young lives.

Soon David and Sharon had people to sit with at church, and they felt known there. This church family that was growing out of their small group started breaking down hard fought for walls. While David felt that his faith was “still lukewarm at times,” he sensed the steady love and support changing him.

Sharon felt constantly in awe of the consistent connection she felt with the people in their group. The older couples modeled how to live a godly life, and the interconnectedness of their church family brought peace to the struggling new parents.

Randy invited David to attend a men’s gathering on the topic of leadership in the home. The speaker talked about how loving your family cannot be done from your own limited source of love, but that you can only love from God’s abundant love. This struck David as very profound. The hardships of parenting and the gift of having two little girls started to slowly chip away at the hard exterior David had created to survive.

David started to understand how selfish and cynical he had been. He could feel the walls he had built as a child slowly starting to come down. In foster care, love was seen as a weakness. But as they experienced love in their small group, David began to feel how good it felt to love others deeply.

He also began to see how his wounds from childhood created a lens of brokenness that he carried into his adult life. But he also discovered that those same wounds that Jesus healed could be his own gift for reaching out to others carrying the same pain.

These lessons naturally flowed into their home life, as their new community showed them how to more confidently disciple their two daughters. The girls could feel how much more their parents had to give to them after they had been poured into during small group meetings.

David and Sharon have been a part of other small groups since the first one that began their journey of transformation. Sharon recalls when one small group leader told her it would bless the group if they could provide meals for their family after one of David’s back surgeries. “That was a pivotal moment that touched our hearts so deeply,” she said.

The endless support from small groups has helped the Sanchezes reach a place of peace within their marriage as well as each of their own inner struggles. They’re able to share the word of God together each morning and bring more patience and compassion to parenting their daughters.

David now seems to carry an abundance of love in his heart for people and shows a deep desire to help those that are fighting similar battles that he once fought. He and Sharon both serve in Children’s Ministry and are planning to become Navigators. Looking back, David and Sharon realize the spiritual drought that they experienced helped them clearly see and appreciate their church family, the authentic community God has beautifully placed in their lives.

Stones of Remembrance: Ali Llewellyn’s Story

April 22, 2025/in Article, Community, Story/by Kaylee Campbell

Ali Llewellyn’s life looks like most people’s: normal and ordinary. On any given day, she remains busy managing two teams at NASA and co-running a consulting company doing strategy for missional organizations. She even recently co-published a book entitled What Comes Next? about Christian leadership with her friend and business partner.

It was in the middle of the ordinary, in August 2023, that Ali received a major shock: her doctor diagnosed her with cancer. Ali’s response, however, was anything but ordinary. She became determined to not let cancer slow her down.

“I wanted to put cancer in its proper place,” Ali said. “I wasn’t willing for it to be my whole story, nor even a detour. I wanted it to be just a chapter. I’m not going to let it take away the things I care about, and it doesn’t define the terms of my life.”

Despite loved ones and co-workers encouraging her to consider slowing down to let her body rest, Ali persisted in her work and in the callings God had placed in her life. Knowing deep in her soul the love, strength, and wisdom of God, she chose to continue following Him despite her life changing dramatically.

“Growing up in church, I was a dedicated over-achieving little girl who knew all the answers and did all the things,” Ali said. “Doing church is not the same as being saved, though. I ended up at a summer camp where the gospel was shared with me, and it was there that I knew that I knew that He loves me.”

Standing on the lakeshore at Camp Allen, Ali sobbed profusely as she felt the love of God wrap strongly around her. Standing there was a new daughter of God who knew she was secure in a relationship with Him. In return, she wanted to know Him, too. Upon returning home, she began to ravenously read God’s word with the knowledge of how deeply God loves her fresh in her heart.

Ali hasn’t stopped yearning to grow closer to her Father since then; nor has she returned to the “church kid” performance she embraced as a child. When she began attending Clear Creek Community Church in 2022, she dug roots into a community of friends and family. These were the very people who told her “You belong to us” and would prove pivotal in Ali’s life throughout the next few years.

One of these pivotal moments arrived one night in early 2024, the night before Ali was to start chemotherapy. “A friend brought over a giant pink shopping bag stuffed with items and gifts. It was a message of ‘Hey, sorry you’re in the club that nobody wants to be in but we’re here with you,’” Ali said.

One of the most significant items in that bag for her was a quilt with a prayer tag sewn in it, noting that it had been stitched by someone with stage 4 cancer. “I had never met her because it was just left on my porch,” Ali explained. “But it was so humbling that someone with even more advanced cancer turned around and made this for me.” For Ali, this was a gift truly needed the most the night before chemo: the reminder that God was with her and so was her church community.

Two weeks later at church, Ali was at worship – and having difficulty standing up in the service – when someone sat next to her. Miraculously, that person happened to be the anonymous quilter. They started a conversation about how that quilt served them both and prayed for each other.

“God plants those seeds of hope that will help you process and move forward in the journey,” Ali shared.

Later in the spring, another pivotal moment of community happened during an annual girls’ trip, which would involve hiking through a river gorge. Exhausted and weak from surgery, and with her short hair barely coming in, Ali wasn’t sure how the trip would go. She looked at the climb ahead and felt major doubts at being able to travel to the other side. Her friends, however, rallied around her and declared, “We’re going to do it together. No one fights alone.”

“I have a desk job, and I’m not athletic,” Ali said. “I wasn’t honestly sure if I could make it, but my friends wanted to make the climb with me and were there the whole time. At the end, I was so energized. They asked me why that was, and I just replied, ‘It was easy because we did it together.’ Things I couldn’t do before cancer, I could now do in the middle of it.”

Since her diagnosis, chemo, and surgery, Ali’s life has not radically changed like she thought it would (besides climbing a literal mountain). Her life did not stop, either, because of cancer. Her work and general life still remains the same as it was before.

“The gospel goes deeper in my own heart than I even knew,” Ali shared. “Cancer demonstrated the things I thought would end the world but didn’t. We all have a thing in our heart that says, ‘If I had to do that I’d fall apart.’ For me, it was chemo. When chemo was my only option, then it was losing my hair. When I lost my hair, I recognized God’s kindness in showing me that the things I thought would destroy me didn’t. With Him, I have everything that I need.”

Ali recognized that God used cancer to draw her closer to Him and to teach her new things. She doesn’t always understand or like the lesson itself, but she treasures it nonetheless.

God’s reminders for Ali are the reasons she hasn’t slowed down in her work or in God’s callings of her life, despite other’s pleas to do so. That’s how she climbed the mountain despite just having surgery.

“Cancer doesn’t define the terms of life. God does!” Ali said. “As long as I remember where faith belongs and don’t get freaked out along the way, there’s really nothing I can’t do. God says, ‘With Me, you can do anything.’”

To grow one’s faith, one’s perception of God must shift first. When she first received her diagnosis, and then later discovered that she has a genetic disorder that predisposes her to cancer, Ali had to change her perception of God in order to deepen her faith despite the events in her life that seemed to contrast her knowledge of God and faith.

“We live in a broken world where sin and cancer are consequences of the fall,” Ali stated. “God uses it for my good–to demonstrate to me that He is God, and I am not, and that He can be trusted. Do I believe God gave me a predisposed genetic condition for this? I don’t know. Again, God is God, and I am not. But I know this: more is within me than I knew. There’s more hope and faith in me than I knew.”

By sharing her story, Ali strives to provide comfort to those experiencing a major life change themselves or walking alongside someone experiencing a major life change, like cancer.

“If I could go back before all of this, I would tell anyone in a trial, ‘The more you can know God and know yourself is going to help you in that trial,’” Ali shared. “Read God’s word, be in a community, serve people, and worship. The more you can do that, the more you’re making a deposit in the inner man. Out of the overflow of our heart the mouth speaks. Deposit everything you can before the crisis.”

Ali also learned and valued the importance of leaning on other people in difficult times. She knows that there is no virtue in independence and that we were never made to be alone in our pain. She highlights the importance of the idea of community in the gospel itself.

“I was the first person to ask my doctor if I could drive myself to chemo,” Ali said. “I was always independent, so I didn’t like the feeling of needing help or being dependent. Whatever the crisis is, we need people. There’s something in a community response that is part of God’s intent. So, find your circle and let them help you even when you think you don’t need it.”

In an email update to her care circle, dated shortly after her diagnosis, Ali wrote: “We can’t choose our road, though; we can only choose how we walk it. So, I choose to have hope and pay attention to the lessons and the good things. I want to set up stones of remembrance so I don’t forget.”

“And those twelve stones, which they took out of the Jordan, Joshua set up at Gilgal. And he said to the people of Israel, “When your children ask their fathers in times to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground.’ For the Lord your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you passed over, as the Lord your God did to the Red Sea, which He dried up for us until we passed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever.” –Joshua 4:20-24 (ESV)

As Ali finishes up her treatments, she continues to set up stones of remembrance. She tries not to set up stones of pain, suffering, hopeless nights, or questions of why cancer is happening. Instead, she sets up stones of remembrance of who God is, what He has done for her, and what He will continue to do.

“God is not a vending machine; I don’t get to make a wish and get what I want. But I do get to know Him. When I listen and conform, what I get is Him. So, I win.”

Here is the full Kim Halverson story:

The Ryan Petty Story

March 26, 2024/in Spiritual Growth, Story/by Clear Creek Resources

“I saw how easily I fell into temptation and how I needed a savior. I had heard the story of Jesus, but never really grasped who he was or what he did for me.” – Ryan

Here is the full Ryan Petty story:

The Michael Jeffrey Story

September 6, 2023/in 8 Practices, Community, Small Group, Spiritual Growth, Story/by Clear Creek Resources

“My small group is a safe place to ask my questions and I can honestly say it’s changed my life!”

Here is the full story of Michael Jeffrey’s small group experience.

Check out more information on small groups at clearcreek.org/smallgroups.