Eight Years Between the Encounter and the Freedom

Blake Koteita was burning a CD for a party when the Holy Spirit walked into his bedroom.

He was sitting at his computer in Southern California, downloading tracks for that night. Cocaine and ecstasy had been his weekends for years. Raves at Laker Stadium. Fighting every weekend. Guns getting pulled. Buddies getting stabbed. He'd already been preaching to his friends at three in the morning, coked out of his mind at the riverbed, talking about God while everyone else just wanted to get higher. They'd tell him, "You're gonna be a preacher one day, dude." He'd go home and sleep with the lights on because he could feel the darkness pressing in.

That afternoon, he came across some worship music. Downloaded a few songs on a whim. Hit play.

And he started to weep.

"I used to tell myself for years, like, you can't cry," Blake told me when we sat down at his coffee shop in Dayton, Virginia. "There's something wrong with you. Your heart is so hard. And when I started to cry, like weep, I knew who had walked into my room."

He describes feeling like he was taking a spiritual bath. Everything he'd ever done laid bare in front of him, and simultaneously this overwhelming sense that God had been with him all along. He started saying, "I'm done. I'm ready to live for you."

That was 2009.

He didn't get fully free from porn until 2017.

The Part Nobody Wants to Talk About

We love the encounter story. The dramatic moment. The altar call where everything changes in an instant. And sometimes it does happen that way. I'm not here to diminish genuine deliverance.

But for a lot of people, the encounter is the beginning of something that takes years to finish. Blake had a real, life-altering experience with the Holy Spirit. Nobody can tell him otherwise. He was a completely different person after that afternoon. He stopped doing cocaine and ecstasy. The pleasure was gone from those things. When he used that night at the party, he felt dirty instead of high.

But he still struggled with pornography. Still smoked cigarettes. Still wrestled with shame and compartmentalization for nearly a decade after his bedroom encounter.

This is the part that messes with people. If God really touched me, why am I still stuck in this? If the encounter was real, why didn't everything fall off at once?

Blake moved to Virginia without telling anyone, just a guitar and a skateboard. Packed for what everyone thought was a visit, then called his grandparents the day before his return flight and said, "I found a job. Can I stay?" He got an apartment at Hunter's Ridge, right across the street from JMU, not realizing he'd landed in the middle of party central. His whole complex was raging every night while he was trying to follow rules he couldn't keep, white-knuckling sobriety from certain things while other addictions still had their hooks in deep.

"I was still struggling with porn," he said. "I kept it from my wife. I was still struggling with tobacco. The Lord really set me free of that in 2017."

Eight years. From encounter to freedom. Eight years of desiring to be healed but not knowing how. Eight years of shame. Eight years of compartmentalizing his life into boxes: this is my time with God, this is my sin, this is my marriage, this is my secret.

Why This Matters

I've watched too many people walk away from faith because their experience didn't match the testimony they heard from stage. They had the encounter. They felt something real. But when the struggle persisted, they assumed they must have done it wrong. Or God didn't really show up. Or they're just too broken for this whole thing to work.

Blake's story tells a different truth. You can have a genuine, life-changing encounter with the Holy Spirit and still have years of work ahead of you. Deliverance and discipleship are not the same thing. The moment God touches you is not the moment every chain falls off. Sometimes it's the moment you finally have the power to start fighting.

Blake's grandfather, a minister who'd planted churches around the world, gave him the simplest discipleship instruction imaginable. "Read John. Then Matthew, Mark, and Luke." That was it. And Blake went back to California and asked God to help him understand what he was reading. "All of a sudden it was like a light went off. Everything I read, what was inside my stomach was confirming what I was reading."

He started skating around with a Bible in his backpack, sitting outside Starbucks waiting for someone to ask him a question so he could share Jesus. His desires had genuinely changed. But the muscle memory of certain sins took years to untangle. The thought patterns didn't rewire overnight.

Breaking the Cycle

Now Blake is married with three kids, running Harvest Table Dayton, a coffee shop where faith and community intersect. And he's parenting with the awareness that what he models matters more than what he preaches.

His parents told him not to watch certain movies, then watched them after the kids went to bed. They told him how to live, but he never saw them praying, never saw them laying hands on people, never saw faith operating in daily life. "I knew growing up as a kid that I felt like if I would've saw it modeled, things would have been different."

So he made a decision. If he tells his kids not to watch something, he doesn't watch it either. Pure entertainment, not informational documentaries, but the junk food of media. "I'm not gonna sit in front of something that my kids can't sit in front of."

He told me about his youngest son, maybe five at the time, who was playing a game on his Kindle when an ad popped up. A cartoon girl you could swipe to remove her clothing. His son started to confess it, then went inward with shame. For an hour Blake tried to get him to talk. "You can't keep this from me."

When his son finally told him what he'd seen, he started crying. Not because he was in trouble. Because he was sensitive enough to know it was wrong.

That's what Blake is building. Not kids who never encounter darkness, but kids who are sensitive to it. Who've worked that muscle enough that when they do have access to everything, they don't want it.

"I can't control my kids to make their decisions," he said. "But when it comes time, they've worked that muscle enough where it's like, I don't want to do that. That doesn't feel good."

That's the fruit of breaking generational curses. Not perfection. Sensitivity. A conscience that's been trained, not calloused.

The Consistent Thread

I asked Blake what the consistent thread was through all of it. From the coked-out kid preaching at the riverbed to the dad modeling purity for his children. From the 2009 encounter to now.

"Staying the course," he said. "Seeking the Lord."

He knows that sounds simple. Almost too simple. But he believes anyone who truly seeks God will meet Jesus. Not everyone who goes through religious motions. Not everyone who knows the right words. But anyone who genuinely knocks will find the door opened.

"God will never, ever, ever," Blake said. "It says anyone who knocks, the door will be open. Anyone who seeks will find. Anyone who asks will receive."

The path from encounter to freedom took Blake eight years. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't instant. But he kept seeking. Kept showing up. Kept believing that the God who walked into his bedroom that afternoon wasn't done with him yet.

If you're stuck in the middle of that process, clean from some things but still fighting others, here's what I need you to hear: that's not failure. That's sanctification. The encounter was real. And the God who started the work is faithful to finish it.

Even if it takes eight years. Even if it takes longer.

Watch the full conversation: YouTube

Listen on your preferred platform: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Visit Harvest Table Dayton: harvesttableva.com

If you or someone you love is searching for a faith-based recovery program, we can help you find the right fit. Reach out to Shenandoah Valley Teen Challenge at 540-213-0571 or visit svtc.info.