Sandielyn Taylor, who goes by Sandy, was sitting in a college class, looking out the window while her professor taught, when the room began to change. She says it seemed to collapse before her eyes and turn into a different realm.
She had constant nightmares and lived paralyzed by fear. In her words, “I couldn’t really function in a normal environment. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
In this interview, Sandy tells Justin Gilpin how a girl left by her mother asked God to be her Father, how a chant led to years of torment, and how Jesus set her free in a small church where she mopped the floors. What follows is her account.
A vision at five
When she was five, Sandy lived in a small apartment in a crime-ridden part of Manila. One morning she woke to music she says was beyond words. She followed it and saw, in the sky outside the window, a beautiful place and a man in a robe.
What she remembers most is His eyes. They seemed to tell her that He was her home, that He was love and joy. She knows now the man was Jesus. At five, she mostly wondered why He was wearing a dress.
Some days later, playing outside, she saw a cloud bursting with golden light open up, and then a crystal clear river reaching from heaven to earth. She was fully awake both times. She calls it an open vision.
Her life had already been hard. When Sandy was one and a half, her mother said she was going to buy candy and didn’t come back. Her father was a drug addict most of his life. Sandy grew up in the province with a pagan aunt and uncle. Her uncle was a soldier. He trained her the military way, and she was beaten if she didn’t obey.
As a young girl she sold balut on the streets at night. For what she remembers as more than ten years, she slept in the kitchen of a house that flooded in storms. She was also abused by people in the neighborhood, and she had no voice to speak about it.
Witches came to read palms, cards and crystals for the children of the town. One told her she would be a nobody, marry a nobody and never get out of that town. Sandy believes God defied that.
A prayer at twelve
At 12, Sandy heard the gospel for the first time. A man asked her and others if they knew God could be their Father. Hungry for a father, she prayed the first prayer of her life: “Lord, whoever You are, this man says that You can be my Father. Can You be my Father?”
She promised that if He could, she would serve Him for the rest of her life. Near the end of the Bible study that followed, the man asked her to read a passage about repentance. As she read, she felt a heat coming from her heart. She was shaking and crying and couldn’t keep reading. She remembers it as her first encounter with the Holy Spirit.
Her uncle saw her becoming gentle and took it as weakness, so he told her no more church. Sandy threw a bag with her Sunday school clothes out the back window and went anyway. When her aunt and uncle found out, she was beaten and locked in a room for three days without food or water. The church leaders went to plead with her uncle, but he wouldn’t budge, and they told her she had to obey him.
It felt to her like God had let her down too. The rejection turned to anger, then to full-blown rebellion, and she backslid.
The chant
Street fights followed. In college a girl gave Sandy a chant and told her it would change her life. She read it that night. It called on false gods, which she knows now are demons.
Nothing happened at first. Then, over many days, things got really bad. She began seeing demons attached to people, and evil spirits that looked human but were not. She stopped college for a year. Those years, she says, were really dark.
A knife in an alley
The year away from school stretched into three. One evening, riding a jeepney with her boyfriend at the time, Sandy ran into two drug addicts looking for trouble. They had the jeepney stop at a small alley, grabbed her boyfriend and beat him. Sandy put herself in the way and was punched in the face, twice as she remembers it. Then one of the men pulled out a knife.
For the first time since she had backslid, she called out to Jesus for help. A tall, big man in white stepped in, took the knife in a second and told her to run. She knows now it was God’s intervention.
Sandy decided not to go back home, and she ended up at a pastoral house that took people in. She arrived still bloody, and the pastor gave her the first beautiful words she had ever heard from anyone. He told her she would do great things for God, write a book, be a missionary and teach many people about the Lord. Then he told her to remember this: “It doesn’t matter how bad is your beginning as long as you will have a beautiful ending.”
Three years with a mop
Her first ministry, she says, was mopping the floor. For three years she mopped the church, prayed in the upper room early in the morning and read the Bible, with no phone and no TV.
Over those years God taught her about forgiveness and deep repentance. She says He set her free layer by layer from unforgiveness, bitterness, resentment and abandonment.
One day, after she finished mopping, the same presence she had felt at 12 came over her. She told God that even if her parents disowned her, she only wanted His presence: “As long as Your presence is with me, I’m the most richest person in the world.”
Another day, at the window after mopping, she heard an audible voice call her His daughter and tell her she was going to finish. She knew that peace. She knew it was God.
What God restored
Sandy went back to college and finished in less than a year. A Christian school then sent her to South Korea as a missionary for three years, where God kept healing her abandonment. She learned that being alone doesn’t mean being abandoned, and it doesn’t mean being lonely.
Before Korea, her mother came home and they reconciled. Her mother had practiced sorcery, and today she is a Christian. Her father, a drug addict most of his life, became a pastor. He founded five churches and died preaching in the pulpit. Sandy even forgave the people who abused her.
She takes no credit for any of it. As she puts it, “It’s only by His grace.”
Today Sandy teaches and ministers deliverance, and she helps believers learn to know God’s voice.
Sandy’s word to you
Justin asked what she would say to someone who is struggling because they too have been taken advantage of. Sandy says life brings tests of time, faith, purity, forgiveness and love, and they come because the Holy Spirit wants us to be transformed to be like Jesus. When we respond to God with love and forgiveness instead of hate or bitterness, she says, that changes things.
Forgiveness is one of the hardest tests. Sandy didn’t do it by herself. She let God help her surrender, and she says of forgiveness, “It’s such a beautiful freedom.”
In the years when she had nothing but the Word and prayer, she learned to depend on Him more and more. She says, “I think that’s actually the most important thing is to really have dependence on Him.”
Her own brokenness gave her compassion for other people’s weakness. Because God restored her, she told Justin, “I can really always put my confidence in Christ that this next person is going to be someone that God can also transform.”
If God did it for Sandy, He can do it for you.
Watch the full interview
Hear it in Sandy’s own words. Press play at the top of this page to watch the whole conversation.