By Bethania Wonagseged –
In front of the camera, Jamie Zhu was wildly successful Australian social media influencer doing funny prank videos. Behind the camera, nothing was funny. In 2021, he saw 10 psychologists, psychotherapists and counselors for the evil and suicidal thoughts taking over his mind.
“Something took over me,” he says. “Every morning where I start like calling my mom saying I’m going to kill myself. I had all these weird sort of intrusive thoughts.”
Ultimately, he got resolution in the place he least expected, the place he would never go to, church.
“As soon as I entered the church, straight away I felt peace,” he says. “I started hearing this voice, This is where you belong. This is where you’re going to get healed.”
Born of a Chinese father and Hungarian mother in Australia, Jamie Zhu grew up atheist. After not getting into professional soccer, the Sydney native started in 2014 doing prank videos and was one the first Australians to explode online. He has 5.7M followers on Facebook.
It became his livelihood. With the income spike, in rolled the sin spike: parties, drugs, women.
“I never once felt guilty,” he says. “No one ever tried to talk to me about God.”
As a matter of fact, he mocked God.
“I made a really disrespectful joke about Jesus, and since nothing happened to me, I thought I can do it more and talk more and more and more bad things about Jesus.”
His mind was turning dark, though.
“I was always very broken, always very depressed, anxious, and I was very unhappy,” he says.
To fix the OCD, depression and anxiety, he turned to New Age, especially reiki healing in which certified healers – it is said – open up chakra points for chi to flow and make you feel better.
He didn’t realize he was opening up portals to demons. It cost tens of thousands of dollars. (Basically, he paid for demons to enter.)
His world was getting darker: suicidal ideation, invasive thoughts about perversion. When tried to refuse those thoughts, he felt the sensation of getting stabbed in his abdomen (or below).
“I would be physically stabbed by something,” he says. “It got to a point where I was scared of what I was going to do to myself, so there would be nights where I would be clinging to my bed frame just crying.”
Ten psychologists, psychotherapists and counselors didn’t help either.
Finally a friend invited him to a dinner. The group spontaneously started talking about God. They invited him to church. Ordinarily, Jamie had his guard up against Christianity more than anything. But he was at wit’s end.
From the moment he entered the service, he knew he had found the answer. He accepted Jesus and began a process of prayer that ultimately delivered him from demons.
He posted on Instagram in 2022: “Blessed to have God in my life 🙏 The single best thing I have ever done in my life is to follow the most powerful source that exists. I thought I knew everything about myself and my life, but by following the social programming and conditioning of our society, I was using money, fame, women and other forms of short term gratification as a metric for my ‘success.’
“When I realized that there was more to life than fulfilling my own pride and entitlement, I started living my life for the one that created me, who already had constructed a perfect plan for my life. I started to focus on how God wanted me to live my life.”
