You Don’t Have to Leave Your Church to Sit at My Table

A woman sat down across from me many years ago and prayed before we started. Out loud, eyes closed, the way you do when it’s habit and not a show. Then she looked up and asked if she was going to be in trouble for being here.

She’d been a Jehovah’s Witness her whole life.
I told her I had no idea what anyone in her congregation would say, and that guessing wasn’t my job.
I’m a psychic medium in Edmond, Oklahoma. A lot of the people who sit down with me are working out some version of that same question before they ever get to what they came for.
Then I asked what I could help her with.

Two camps, and neither one is looking at you

If you go searching for whether a Christian can get a tarot reading, you land in one of two places.
One side tells you it’s divination, it’s forbidden, and the door is closed. That position is old, it’s consistent, and the people holding it are not confused about what they believe. I’d rather deal with that than with somebody hedging.

The other side tells you the discomfort you feel is conditioning, and the way through it is to keep examining your faith until you’re free of it. That gets framed as liberation. Underneath, it’s the same instruction as the first side, just pointed the other direction.
There’s a smaller group writing that you can hold both. Read those pieces closely and you’ll notice who they’re written for. They’re written for somebody already on their way out, looking for company on the walk.

So the person who is staying, who still goes, still believes, still prays, and also wants to come sit down with me, has nowhere to land.

I got asked to leave more than one church

Not quietly, either. I asked too many questions.
This started when I was a child. I wasn’t trying to tear anything down. I wanted the answers to hold up. When I asked how something worked and got told to accept it on faith, I’d ask again, because “have faith” answers a different question than the one I asked. That went over about as well as you’d expect.

They didn’t ask me to leave because I stopped believing. They asked me to leave because I wouldn’t stop asking.

By the time I was a teenager I was living in an unsafe home. During those years I had things happen that I can only describe as some type of protection. I didn’t summon anything and couldn’t explain it either. I’ve never needed anyone to agree with my read on it. I’ve also never been able to talk myself out of it.

So when somebody sits down with the faith they were raised in. Or with a curiosity they can’t shake. I’m not looking at it from the outside.

The people sitting in both places

One of the people I talk with regularly is a deacon.

He isn’t hiding it and he isn’t in crisis about it. He wants to talk through religious topics. He’s interested in how his congregation responds when he works a less traditional idea into a sermon. That’s the conversation. He’s doing his job and thinking carefully about the people in his pews.
Nothing about that requires either of us to give anything up.

Pew found about three in ten American adults consult astrology, tarot, or a fortune teller. The rate runs higher in some religious communities than it does nationally. These are not people on their way out of anything. Meanwhile church attendance among young adults has been climbing for a few years rather than falling. That makes the story my own industry keeps repeating, that young people are leaving church and turning up here instead, harder to defend.

I’d treat the exact figures as directional rather than settled, since attendance research gets amplified by outlets with a stake in the result. What I’d stand behind is the pattern. Both things are happening at once, in the same people.

Almost everyone asks if they should be scared

Anyone who comes out of a structured religion asks me some version of it. Not always in those words, but that’s the question sitting underneath.

What happens next is pretty consistent. A few minutes in, they’ve watched how I work. They start to connect, trust builds, and the skepticism and the worry about what I do get set down somewhere, and I didn’t argue anybody out of either one. They’re looking at the person in front of them, at how I communicate and how I engage, and they come to their own conclusion about whether it’s safe to sit with me.

That’s the right order. I’d rather someone decide that for themselves than take my word for it, because my word is the one thing they have no reason to trust yet.

The part that’s actually worrying you

The hesitation is rarely about doctrine. People who’ve done the reading have usually made their peace with it one way or another. What keeps someone in the parking lot is who might find out. A sister. A small group. A husband who’d make it a whole thing.

That’s a real cost and I won’t wave it off. Privacy is a legitimate reason to keep something to yourself. Plenty of my clients haven’t told anyone they’ve been here, and some of them have been coming for years.

What I’d push back on is the word hypocrite. Holding two things that don’t perfectly reconcile is most people’s actual experience of being alive. You’ve got a friend whose politics you find indefensible, and you love them anyway. You know how the sausage is made and you eat the sausage. Consistency is a lovely idea and almost nobody manages it.

When a client prays first

I don’t ask anybody to change their vocabulary at my table.
If you say God, I say God. If you call them angels, I’m not going to correct you into calling them guides. Your framework came with you and it works, so I’m not spending your session swapping words around to match mine.

The work goes better that way anyway. Somebody busy translating themselves into my language isn’t relaxed, and relaxed is most of what I need from a person sitting across from me.

The woman who prayed at the start of her session got the same reading she’d have gotten without it. Her prayer didn’t change what came through. It settled her, and that made the next fifty minutes easier for both of us.

What I won’t do in that room

I won’t tell you your pastor is wrong, or your elders, or your priest. I’ve got no standing to and it isn’t my business.

I won’t argue theology with you. I’m not trained in it, and someone who’s spent twenty years in scripture will run circles around me on their own material. That’s fine. It isn’t the conversation you booked.

I’d never try to change someone’s faith. That just invalidates them and what they’re saying to me. I don’t judge it or weigh in on it unless you ask me to.

I won’t tell you what to believe about any of this, including about me. Plenty of people walk out of a session and file it under interesting, still not sure. That’s a reasonable place to land, and I’d take it over somebody agreeing with me.

If your faith teaches that this is off limits, then it’s off limits, and me being warm about it doesn’t dissolve that. You’re the one who has to carry both. I can tell you plenty of people do.
The lady did come back and she’s still a Jehovah’s Witness and still prayed before that session too.

If you’ve been circling this a while, doing the math on whether wanting it makes you a hypocrite, the curiosity has probably been around a lot longer than the doubt.

If you want to come sit down, bring your own words for it. That’s all I need.