A former vice presidential candidate within the 2024 presidential election has been baptized as a Christian after greater than a decade of working towards Judaism.
In a publish on X Tuesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vice presidential working mate for his or her impartial marketing campaign, lawyer Nicole Shanahan, introduced that she had been baptized as a Christian.
Whereas Kennedy dropped out of the race and endorsed President Donald Trump in 2024, the Kennedy-Shanahan ticket nonetheless appeared on the poll in a number of states and finally gained greater than 750,000 votes nationwide. This quantities to roughly 0.5% of the nationwide in style vote whole.
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Shanahan’s X publish, titled “My Baptism Story,” recollects how one evening in January, she “felt a heaviness settle over me, thick and suffocating, just like the air earlier than a storm” after waking up in the course of the evening to calm her younger daughter who had skilled a “evening terror.”
Shanahan — a 39-year-old patent lawyer, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin — detailed how the “heaviness” that engulfed her “pressed in opposition to my chest, not like a weight, however like a presence — one thing unseen but plain.”
“At that second, I might solely assume to bow my head, shut my eyes, and provide a silent prayer to God,” she wrote.
Her journey into Christianity started 4 months earlier, in September 2024, after her household suffered a “heart-wrenching loss,” she stated, declining to “talk about [it] intimately.” Shanahan encountered “a deeply devoted soul who helped information me nearer to Jesus” and “prayed with me after my loss.”
Shanahan met the lady, whom she recognized as Diane Robinson, via her masseuse after she had requested the religious Christian therapeutic massage therapist if he knew “anybody who may also help maintain ‘dangerous vitality’ away from individuals.” She reached out to Robinson the morning after she skilled the burst of “heaviness,” telling her she wished to get baptized.
The baptism was performed by Robinson and her husband, Peter, in Shanahan’s yard in Atherton, California, on Jan. 19, the day earlier than President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Each Robinsons had the phrases “bishop” and “apostle” listed beneath their names on Shanahan’s baptismal certificates, which she shared an image of.
“Throughout that assembly, Diane opened her worn and well-loved Bible — full of highlights, underlines, and Publish-it tabs. A e book that had been studied and prayed over hundreds of occasions. She moved via it with laser precision, guiding me to verse after verse as I struggled to learn via my blurry tear-filled eyes,” Shanahan acknowledged.
“The ache of life generally can eat your complete actuality, and the injustice, the loss, and the acute nature of all of it can really feel genuinely insufferable. The load of the world, perpetuated by greed, lies, and indifference, can typically really feel hopeless. Diane checked out me and stated with absolute certainty that Jesus might save me — that His blood is ready to wash away sins and defeat the darkness that haunts the harmless.”
Whereas she’s all the time “believed in God,” Shanahan stated that she by no means “absolutely grasped the truth of the satan.”
“Rising up with a father who appeared overcome by his demons, I attempt to keep away from ‘dangerous vitality,'” she stated. “He was hooked on alcohol and would fall into manic rages, yelling profanities on the wall. He would scream, giggle, cry, and wail all in a single night, alone downstairs in our dwelling in Oakland. I used to be taught that my father was a ‘sick’ particular person, however I by no means significantly thought of whether or not demons have been actual — till just lately.”
Shanahan’s expertise with working for workplace modified her perspective on life.
“Studying simply how far some will go to inflict atrocities on harmless Individuals has shocked me awake,” she wrote. “Different unexplainable occasions have additionally pressured me to rethink whether or not we’re waging a conflict not merely with flesh and blood however with non secular forces.”
“Many individuals shrink back from acknowledging the truth of non secular warfare,” she continued. “However anybody who has seen habit up shut or lived via deep trauma and witnessed how evil takes maintain on this world is aware of that the battle of excellent versus evil is not simply theoretical — it is actual and throughout us.”
Stressing that demons “definitely exist,” she known as Jesus “our covenant with God to combat them.” Shanahan likened her embrace of Jesus to “being wrapped in a heat cocoon whereas changing into a grounded, weighted, immovable obelisk.”
Shanahan’s historical past of non secular practices contains “meditative prayer” and changing to Judaism in 2014, she defined.
“Now, my prayers are directed towards Jesus. He’s the bridge between us and heaven — our Intercessor earlier than the Divine Creator,” she acknowledged.
“With the New Testomony in my palms, I see the world’s non secular ache in a approach I by no means might earlier than,” she asserted. “It is like a veil has been lifted, revealing a deeper understanding of the wrestle between mild and darkness. In the present day, I’m a Jew for Jesus.”
Shanahan’s publish included an image of her and her husband, Jacob, absolutely immersed in a swimming pool, together with the couple who baptized them. She delivered a message to “those that are looking out, who really feel the identical longing I as soon as did,” telling them to “maintain asking, maintain in search of, maintain knocking.”
“Religion will not be about having all of the solutions however about trusting within the One who does. And while you discover Him, you’ll know you might be lastly dwelling,” she vowed.
The ultimate sentence of Shanahan’s publish is a sentence studying “Nisi Dominus aedificaverit domum, in vanum laboraveunt qui aedificant eam,” which interprets to “Except the Lord builds the home, they labor in useless who construct it.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Publish. He may be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
