Welcome back to the Let's Be Friends podcast.

I'm here today with friend Michaela Nikolenko.

Michaela is the host of Raised and Redeemed Podcast.

She's a Christian author and an ex-New Ager. Michaela was radically saved from child

abuse trauma, substance abuse, and ungodly relationships, and the occult. And now she is an

Orthodox Christian, a mom, a wife, and a storyteller. And she's one of my good friends. And I'm so

excited to have her here today. Welcome

to the show. Welcome back, actually, Michaela. Yeah, thanks for having me again. It's so weird, because usually when I come on a show, it's like I know I'm going to tell my testimony, but I already did that. So now we're having a whole new chat. Yeah, we're doing like a kind of a girl's chat today. We've been talking about doing this for a little while, and today is the day that we're doing it.

And we want to really talk. of a girls chat today. We've been talking about doing this for a little while, and today is the day

that we're doing it. And we want to really talk about kind of a female's perspective, coming into

orthodoxy as a convert, and also coming out of the occult and the new age, and then also out of

Protestantism and how we see spiritual warfare differently now as an

Orthodox Christian. I think that's basically going to be the theme of this conversation,

but also we just want to like hang out as two girls and have a nice chat because there's a

big male presence in the orthodox community, right?

Have you noticed that?

Yeah, there is.

But one thing that's just so funny is like you and me trying to be normal and just like

have a normal girls chat.

All of our voice memos are always like, you know, like the spiritual battle or what we're

going through or like orthodox details and different conspiracies. And I don't know. So it's funny. Like we're going to try to

be as normal as possible. I promise Michaela I would be normal and I wouldn't talk about

...