The Testimony of Anthony Senecal

Shifted

From ages 10-15, things shifted. After leaving the first church, then connecting with the second church, and then fading out of that for whatever reason, Anthony’s dad had, in the background, gone through a really big political shift, moral shift, and handful of other things, and had come to terms with the fact that he believed he was gay, had been gay the whole time, and that his relationship with Anthony’s mom had been a cover the entire time. 

Not having any friends, and with Anthony being home all the time due to being homeschooled, at age 12-13, his dad was sharing everything with him. 

“Our routine was, staying up till midnight/1 o'clock watching movies, talking, doing whatever almost every night, and he would just share things with me that were wildly beyond my developmental capacity.”

Once his dad had started sharing his feelings with Anthony, a weird relationship dynamic was building with his parents. His mom was getting more and more depressed as she started to sense what was happening in the background, struggling with her mental health. 

In the last couple years, up until he was 15, Anthony’s mom was working nights and sleeping all day, and his dad was working days, so the house was basically being run by the kids. They were still homeschooled at this point, but no school work was really being done, and Anthony was really doing most of the house work. 

In the 8th grade, Anthony started going back to public school, and was really struggling with anxiety and depression, needing to be physically dragged out of bed most days.

“I've got a series of dysfunctional friendships and relationships, I'm really anxious, depressed and all over the place, and I'm an atheist, I don't want anything to do with the church.”

Anthony’s family had left that second church and had gone to another church. His dad was getting more isolated and stopped going to church because he no longer believed in what was going on. He didn’t really have any friends, wasn’t doing anything, and started taking medication for back pain to the point of addiction.

 “At one point, he was on gabapentin, hydrocodone, oxycodone, oxycontin, and morphine all at the same time. I don't really understand how he didn't die.”

Darkness

In the few months before his dad was arrested, Anthony went from being an atheist, to experiencing the holy spirit and getting baptized. He had gone from a “screw the church”, God isn’t real mentality, being very angry, bitter, manipulative, and emotionally unstable, to sensing God’s presence, the Holy Spirit speaking, and a comforting presence over him. 

“I remember, one night my youth group did baptisms, and I walked up to one of my friends, a leader, she was probably 15 years old, and I walked up to her for a prayer and I just literally, completely melted down, just on the floor. And then she took me outside and baptized me, and at that point, something started to shift. I just knew that this was something that I was called to and supposed to do, and not long after that is when I found that pintrest article and realized everything, and then had the confidence to just say, hey, no, I'm actually done with this.”

In the time between reading that article, and his dad’s arrest, the foundation of their relationship had started to crack. Anthony was becoming less tolerant of manipulation, and his dad’s instinct, as the cracks were forming, was to move towards anger and control, hitting Anthony for the first time when he challenged his command to go upstairs. 

“ I also just had a sense pretty quickly that, part of what was happening was narcissism, sociopathy, bad decisions, and control, but there was a layer of, there's something spiritual happening here too. I remember sensing that even when I didn't believe it.”

Anthony remembers it being physically darker in his house than should have been possible.

“I remember one day, reading a book in my room with the lights on, the windows open on a sunny day and feeling like I was struggling to see the words because of how dark it felt in the house. Friends would come over and be like ‘what's wrong with your electricity.’ and then I would have [other] friends who weren't religious at all, had never been to church, and wouldn't come over to my house to play video games or whatever, and I remember, pushing to ask why and they would be like, ‘I don't activate your house. I feel dark. It feels like I shouldn't be there.’” 

After having his father arrested, Anthony stayed at a friend’s house for a couple nights and upon returning home, the first thing he noticed was how bright his home was. 

“The blinds were closed. The lights weren't on.I knew it was spiritual. Something was gone that was there before.”

A Change

Over the next year, the last of Anthony’s friendships imploded. And Anthony had this realization of, “I can't keep operating how I've been living. I can't keep doing the things that I've been doing and the way that I've been surviving is not going to work, because this is what it does to people.”

 Anthony began the slow work of realizing that no matter what he believed about the church or how he felt about “religion”, he knew who Jesus was and that he needed to be more like him, in a way that it was the only thing that would allow him to exist.

 “It was a very long and still is a very long process, because I sucked for a long time. and I still sometimes kind of suck, but I sucked less than I did”

When he got to the age of trying to figure out where he wanted to go to school, Anthony wanted to go to the local State University of TSU, and was gonna study political science with a double major in Middle Eastern and Russian studies, and wanted to be a negotiator overseas. He was all set to go, was enrolled, had scholarships lined up, and then was studying scripture one night and was reading translated Hebrew into English, and had this sense of, “there's something here in this, there's someone speaking through this.”

“[There was] something way bigger, way smarter, way more powerful, way more intense, with more love. It was almost hiding in these words.”

Anthony remembers realizing, “there's nothing else I really wanna do with my life than what I'm doing right now at this moment.” Anthony felt called to attend a christian school, was .5 off of the GPA requirement, but ended up getting accepted with school starting within a month and a half. He ended up needing to take out as many loans as he was going to get in scholarships from TSU.

“Most of us tend to think, following Jesus into the thing is what's going to give us the blessing and give us all this stuff, but really it was like, hey, you actually have to make a huge sacrifice to follow him. I remember it impacted me particularly because I think most of the faith I had grown up in was like ‘believe the right thing about Jesus and he’ll bless you, he’ll reward you, he will give you what you need to survive and you'll be okay.’ In that moment, I think what it kind of taught me is, ‘no, actually following Jesus means giving up everything I thought I wanted as a blessing. Just being willing to follow, to follow, and see what happens. And since, over the years coming to understand,  the reward of following him is not what I get out of it, but it's getting to follow.”