Marsha Kuhnley is an American author of Christian non-fiction and Christian Young Adult Science Fiction/Fantasy books. She has a passion for Bible prophecy, finance, and economics. She received her MBA in Finance and BA in Economics from the University of New Mexico. Prior to becoming an author, she enjoyed a career at Intel Corporation. She uses her education and career experience to take complex Biblical information and present it in easily understandable concepts. You’ll benefit from over a decade of her research and study of the Bible, Bible prophecy, and Rapture theology. She lives in Albuquerque, NM with her husband where they attend Calvary Church.
Marsha has been a guest on the popular Christ In Prophecy TV program where she discusses her books, the Rapture, and End Times topics.
I was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I didn’t grow up knowing God or Jesus. As a young child, I was raised in a secular home. We didn’t go to church. We didn’t talk about faith or religion. I remember believing that God existed, but I often thought of him as a puppet master of sorts. Much like me playing with my dolls and orchestrating everything they did.
My first memorable encounter with someone religious happened when I was a first grader, six years old at the time. A mean boy in my class told me I was going to go to hell because I didn’t go to church. I didn’t really know what hell was, but I knew it wasn’t good. After telling my mother about this, I learned it’s the place bad people went when they died. I remember being so confused because I wasn’t a bad person and I didn’t understand what being good had to do with going to church. So why did this mean boy tell me I was going to hell?
When I was a little older, middle school age, my mom and her friends were practicing new age spirituality. It didn’t take long for this to influence my entire family. I attended psychic fairs, had tarot card readings, used a Ouija board with my friends, thought I had spirit guides, believed in past lives, and was even hypnotized several times so I could get a glimpse of those past lives. I grew up in a pagan, new age home. I thought I was enlightened. That I had a better understanding of the spirit realm and life after death than most people.
When I was in high school, I started dating my husband. He and his family were Christians. He did what any good Christian would do and invited his girlfriend to church with him. This was the first time anyone had ever invited me to church. I remember being excited because I was often curious what church was like.
For many years, I attended church with my husband, but just on occasion. It’s because I had a really hard time with it. I was still participating in new age activities during this time. I struggled to understand the songs they sang at church. I remember one song in particular with a verse, “nothing but the blood of Jesus.” Why were they singing about blood? It was gross. I also didn’t understand what the preacher taught. I remember him talking about Jesus’s death. But I didn’t understand why it was important. I also didn’t understand Communion. They passed crackers and grape juice around during the service and then ate them after a prayer. My husband told me not to take it because I didn’t believe. Believe what? That Jesus died? I didn’t understand. I felt like I was the only person in the church who didn’t participate in Communion. I felt like an outsider and like I was being judged during every service. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t understand why these Christians believed their way to heaven was the only way. I honestly believed that I would go to heaven because I was a good person.
I was also reading the Bible a little bit now and even had a difficult time understanding it. My husband even tried to explain these things to me. I wasn’t struggling because I was incapable of learning. I had completed college and earned a couple degrees at this point. It’s like I was up against an invisible wall preventing me from understanding, and I couldn’t get past it. This is that veil I explain in chapter 27 of Rapture 911: What To Do If You’re Left Behind!
I remember one day during this time period, I was at my mother-in-law’s house and I read a note that was taped on my teenage brother-in-law’s bathroom mirror. It was a simple note that read something like: “Pray for salvation for:” and then listed a couple names. My name was on his list! I was taken aback. I was shocked he was praying for me to be saved. This time was different than the little boy in first grade who told me I was going to hell. This time someone was praying for me. It filled me with wonder, and I felt special. It had an impact on me and, as you can tell, has stuck with me since.
When I was close to 30 years old, my mother-in-law invited me to a women’s Bible study class at church. This was the first time I had been invited to a Bible study. Since I had struggled to read the Bible on my own and I really wondered what it said, I thought this class would help. So I decided to go. I went through Beth Moore’s book and class about Believing God. I can’t pinpoint what it was about this class, but this is when my understanding slowly started to improve. I learned a lot about God, the Bible and why we could trust it, and what some of God’s promises were. I met God for the first time in this class.
A short time after finishing the Bible study, my husband and I moved to Los Angeles. Since we didn’t know anyone there, we decided we should find a church to attend so that we could meet some people. We asked the only person we knew at the time, our realtor. Turns out he was a Christian and his brother-in-law was a preacher who had just helped start a new church in Hollywood.
The preacher, Tim Chaddick, had just started teaching through the book of John in the Bible. He wasn’t like any preacher I had ever heard before. He was immensely passionate about what he was teaching and that was infectious. I wanted to pay attention and learn where his passion came from. I learned that I was a sinner and why I needed a savior, that Jesus loves me, that Jesus died for me, and that I could be saved by believing in Jesus. I finally understood the meaning of Jesus’s blood. This is when I met Jesus.
Fast forward a few months. I was by myself out of town flipping through channels on the TV in my hotel room trying to find something interesting to watch. I came across a couple women talking about the Bible and Jesus on one of the Christian channels. I listened for a while as they shared the gospel, and then the women said I could invite Jesus into my life and into my heart. I really wanted to, so I prayed right along with them. At the age of 30, I became a believer and put my faith in Jesus. I fell asleep that night with a sense of peace I can’t explain.
A few months later, I had a strong desire to get baptized. My husband and I traveled back to Albuquerque so that I could get baptized in the church we were married in and where my faith journey started.
One of the first things I did after getting baptized was purge all of the new age stuff I had. I remembered reading about the people tearing down the altars of Baal in the Old Testament. I wanted to do that same thing in my life. I didn’t want anything to do with new age practices or beliefs anymore. I gathered books, tarot cards, music, and pictures and threw it all away.
One of the first books I read after becoming a believer was Randy Alcorn’s book Heaven. I hadn’t read the entire Bible at this point and I didn’t have a good understanding about heaven. I wanted to know what the Bible said about it now that I was certain I was going to live there forever. Looking back, I think one of the main reasons that God gave me a desire to learn about heaven after I was saved is because of my upbringing. God wanted me to understand His truth, so that I would no longer be deceived.
If you’re not familiar with New Age, it’s kind of a buffet of religious practices. New Agers essentially pick and choose what they want to believe. It’s heavily influenced by some of the Eastern religions and the occult. They’re into psychics, mediums, tarot, palm readers, past lives, healing power of crystals, and the list goes on. They believe that there are multiple paths to heaven. They believe that heaven is a spiritual state, not a real physical place. They believe that you evolve through multiple lives on earth and work your way to the heavenly state. They believe you can communicate with people who have died by using mediums. They believe you can communicate with spirit guides who teach the “real truth” about heaven and how to get there. I don’t remember any talk of Jesus. So you see, just like Eve in the garden, the fallen angels and demons had deceived me and filled me with so many lies. In Randy’s book, Heaven, I learned that God wasn’t the one behind any of those New Age practices because His word expressly forbids doing those things (Deuteronomy 18:9-14). It was the enemy masquerading as an angel of the light (2 Corinthians 11:14). God used Randy’s book to correct all of those false beliefs that I had about heaven. It’s hard to describe the peace I felt after learning God’s truth.
This book also ended up steering my life in an unexpected new direction. In Randy’s book he said some people wouldn’t die. Instead, they would be taken to heaven in an event he called the rapture. I was completely fascinated with this and had to learn more. I read all sorts of books about the rapture, and that led to me reading books about Bible prophecy.
Soon afterwards, my husband and I moved back to Albuquerque and started attending the Calvary Church where pastor Skip Heitzig teaches. He truly is one of the best Bible teachers on the planet. I’ve learned a ton in the time I’ve been attending his church. He helped instill a passion within me to study the Bible and share all the wonderful things I’ve learned about Jesus with all of you.
And here we are today. I’m so passionate about this topic that now I’m writing books about the rapture and Bible prophecy! Now that I know Jesus, I can’t imagine life without him. I want everyone else to know what that’s like too. I know that God will use the books I write to help people meet Jesus.
I often wish that I had grown up knowing Jesus, like my husband did. Before I met Jesus, I was so miserable, and life was so hard. I often felt alone, like no one cared, and that my life didn’t have a purpose. I don’t feel that way anymore. Life is still hard, but Jesus is with me every step. That gives me great comfort because I’m not alone and I know he completely understands everything I’m going through. I have someone to talk to now that truly gets me. He did create me after all! I know that growing up while having a relationship with Jesus would have given me that sense of peace that I have now. However, without my past, I wouldn’t have the passion to help people who worship false gods and don’t know or struggle to know God’s word, just as I did, come to see God’s truth. God indeed works everything for good.
I believe sharing this additional part of my testimony will help you realize what time it is. God has put a passion within me to deliver urgent messages regarding the rapture. He doesn’t want anyone to be left behind!
After reading about and studying the rapture for years, I decided to create a binder full of information for someone left behind. This was the summer of 2012. I figured someone might come looking for me after the rapture and hopefully they’d find the binder. It would explain the rapture, where I had disappeared to, and how to be saved. The binder kept getting bigger and bigger because I kept coming up with more things the left behind person needed to know.
After some time, I realized that I should put all the information in a book and make it available for anyone. So, I started an outline of all the chapters and content the book would have. Fast forward one year. It’s now the spring of 2018. I still hadn’t started the book. I only had a really long outline. You know how it is. Life often gets in the way of things we hope to do one day. I couldn’t seem to find the time to actually start writing.
Well, this is when God intervened.
I don’t recall the actual day this happened. I only remember it was in the spring of 2018. So, I have a pretty even keel personality. I don’t get easily agitated or fly off the handle at things. One day I woke up just not myself. I couldn’t shake the feeling of frustration, anger, and irritation. I was short with my husband and people at work. I initially chalked it up to just being stressed from work. Yeah, that wasn’t it.
This went on for a couple weeks. After not being able to get myself out of this funk, I reasoned that I was under a spiritual attack. And you know what, I could tell that it was indeed something spiritual. I can’t easily explain this, but I could literally feel it. I called it my dark cloud. It was stuck to me.
So, I started praying specifically about my dark cloud. I asked God to remove the evil presence that was coming against me. No relief whatsoever.
On top of that, I started to get really frustrated with my job. The projects that I loved working on had all moved to a different campus in the company. I had absolutely no desire to move to a different state. Suddenly, I wasn’t working on exciting projects anymore. All the opportunities that I once had at work, gone. I felt like my job wasn’t a good fit for me anymore. That I needed to make a change and do something different.
Months have gone by. At this point the dark cloud has been with me for so long that my husband thinks I’m having some sort of a breakdown. I remember the day he told me that he thought I should see a doctor. I knew that wasn’t going to solve my problem. I was absolutely convinced this was spiritual because I could feel my dark cloud still there. I asked him to pray that God would help me figure out what was going on.
In my daily Bible reading, I started to get the sense that God wanted me to quit my career. The more I prayed about that, the more confirmation I kept getting from God.
It all came to a head in the late summer of 2018. I was driving to work one morning with the Christian radio station on. I was talking to God, and I said something similar to this: “God, it seems like you want me to quit my job. Who walks away from a job like mine? That would be ridiculous!” Literally one second later, here’s what I hear on the radio: “Sometimes you need to do the ridiculous in order to experience the miraculous.”
Yeah, that happened! So now on my drive to work I’m taken aback because God literally spoke to me through the radio. And then it hit me. God really did want me to quit my job. But he promised me a miracle if I did it!
So, I mustered up the courage to tell my husband about this experience. The very moment that I told my husband that I had decided to quit my job, my dark cloud went away. I could literally feel it lift off of me. I felt like myself. I knew all would be well once again.
My dark cloud is a mystery. The best example that I’ve found in the Bible is the distressing spirit that God sent to King Saul to trouble him (1 Samuel 16:14). Trouble me it did. Looking back, it seems I had been ignoring God’s call on my life to start writing.
One month later and I was no longer employed. I started writing Rapture 911 shortly afterwards.
Fast forward another year. It’s now the winter of 2019, and I’ve just recently self-published Rapture 911. The very first person to contact me through my new website, rapture911.com, was Dr. David R. Reagan. He asked me to send him a copy of Rapture 911. So, I did. A couple weeks later he asked me to be a guest on his TV show Christ In Prophecy and talk about the rapture. God was the one who orchestrated all of this.
As for that miracle God promised me, I believe I’ll see it on the other side of the rapture.
In these last days, what might God be calling you out to do? Don’t wait to respond until you get a distressing dark cloud sent to stick to you. You know, Jesus called his disciples out of the life they were living because he had an extraordinary opportunity for them to partake in. They changed lives. So can you.
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