This testimony includes addiction, withdrawal and deep despair. If you are struggling, please reach out to a crisis line in your country, a doctor or someone you trust today. You are not beyond hope.
Hunter came to the God’s Truth Podcast with a frightening belief: that part of his soul was already in hell. A surfer from Santa Barbara, California, he had spent twenty years drinking, years in the New Age, and months seeing things in the spirit he could barely describe. He had met Jesus, repented and been set free, and yet he was still terrified it might be too late.
This is an honest, unresolved story, and that is part of why it matters. In this episode, Hunter tells Abigail Smith what he has been through, and Abigail answers him with the truth of the gospel and a powerful prayer. What follows is Hunter’s account, and Abigail’s response.
A seeker who found the wrong answers
Hunter grew up in a home darkened by an alcoholic father and was raised Catholic, but after years of hurt he “didn’t see or feel or hear God at all.” He drank heavily for twenty years. He experimented with psychedelics, studied quantum physics and computer science, and became a yoga instructor practising the law of attraction, which he now calls witchcraft. He believed in “Christ consciousness,” not Christ.
In late 2024, he went over the handlebars into the back of a car, split his scalp open (36 staples) and broke two vertebrae in his neck. In hospital, he says, a dark presence attacked him in his room, even while he was in a neck brace.
“Call to Me, Hunter”
Early in 2025, he fell asleep at home and dreamed he was under attack by beings that shot at him again and again but would not let him die. Then a white cross came down and spoke, and the words translated instantly in his heart: “Call to Me, Hunter.” He cried out, “Jesus, please save me,” and a white light enveloped him as the dark figures retreated.
He stayed up for three days watching The Passion of the Christ, telling Jesus he would give Him his life. He started learning about Jesus through The Chosen. But he kept drinking, by now so dependent that he needed medical detox. For months he had warning dreams of hell. In one, walking to the liquor store, he saw two points of light in the sky and knew the Father and the Son were watching him.
Before the white throne
During a stay in hospital to detox, Hunter left before he was ready, dehydrated and in pain, and walked home barefoot. He himself admits he does not know how much of what followed was God, the medication or his own exhausted mind. The next morning, he says, he had an open vision lasting hours. His spirit was drawn up before a vast being on a white throne. He saw his sins weighed against his works and heard, “Depart from Me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:23). He describes the pit, and the worst of it: “eternal separation from God. It’s hopeless and it’s forever.” He came back to himself on his couch, his feet still burning.
The back row
Convinced he was already lost, Hunter went to buy alcohol. Unprompted, the woman behind the counter told him, “You should come to church.” He went and sat in the back row, crying. A man came over: “Hey, bro, are you okay?” He told Hunter he needed to repent and confess Jesus as Lord. Hunter said, “Jesus is Lord. He’s the Lord and Saviour of my life.” He didn’t feel any different. But the man discipled him, and Hunter repented and was baptised.
Two days after his last drink, still shaking from withdrawal, he went to a deliverance ministry. They prayed against spirits of trauma, rejection, addiction and fear. Without being told, they asked about yoga and prayed over his spine. Then they prayed the Holy Spirit in. “The best feeling I’ve ever felt,” Hunter says, “peace beyond all understanding” (Philippians 4:7), “so much better than any drug or any alcohol.” He began preaching on street corners, giving his money away, and leading a man in a park to confess Jesus as Lord.
“Is it too late?”
But then the fear returned. Hunter began dreaming that it was “too late.” He reinterpreted his first encounter with the cross as a deception. He says the Holy Spirit now feels outside him rather than within, and that for months he has faced spiritual attacks at night, waking up saying, “I rebuke you in Jesus’ name.” He wonders if he is the wicked servant in Jesus’ parable (Luke 12:45–47), and asks anyone who hears from the Lord to tell him whether there is still hope. “I’m praying every day that it’s not too late,” he says.
Abigail’s answer: it is not too late
Abigail did not let that stand. “We do not live by feelings,” she told him. “We live by faith” (2 Corinthians 5:7). Not every experience that looks spiritual comes from Jesus, she said, and the hand that “wiped his name out” was not Jesus. “Your name is not wiped out of the book of life.”
She reminded him that God’s mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22–23), that His thoughts toward us are “thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11), and that “there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Salvation is by grace through faith, not by our works (Ephesians 2:8–9), and it rests on the blood of Jesus alone. She urged him to stop declaring that he was going to hell, and to say instead: “I am saved by grace through faith.”
Then she prayed over him, asking listeners to agree. She thanked God for Hunter’s eternal home in heaven. She broke every scheme and curse of the enemy over him and covered him in the blood of Jesus. She commanded every broken and separated part of his soul to be knit back together in wholeness, and every arrow of the enemy to be removed. “In the name of Jesus,” she declared, “we declare that you are free.”
If you have ever feared that you have gone too far or waited too long, hear what Jesus said: “Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37). The very fact that your heart is still crying out for Him is a sign that He is still drawing you.
Connect with Hunter
- Instagram: @sbsurfer009
Scriptures in this episode
- Matthew 7:21–23, depart from Me
- Revelation 20:11–15, the great white throne
- Luke 12:42–47, the faithful and the wicked servant
- John 9:4, the night cometh, when no man can work
- Philippians 4:7, the peace of God
- John 14:6, I am the way, the truth, and the life
- 2 Corinthians 5:7, we walk by faith, not by sight
- Lamentations 3:22–23, His compassions are new every morning
- Jeremiah 29:11, thoughts of peace
- Romans 8:1, no condemnation
- Ephesians 2:8–9, by grace are ye saved through faith
- John 6:37, I will in no wise cast out
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