She took Ecstasy and went to EDM festivals

By Sandra Marroquin —

Rubee Lana grew up without a father and always felt resentment towards her mother. She argued a lot with her mother; she used to stay at her grandmother’s house whenever that happened.

Rubee witnessed verbal and mental abuse and suffered depression as a result. She listened to a lot of dark, suicidal music. She thought about killing herself, but she was too frightened to consider going through with it.

She believed that no one really loved her.

After a blowout with her mom one day, she decided to overdose with her sister’s medications. Nobody cared for her, she thought.

She ended up taking a lot of pills and blacked out for about 15 minutes. When she woke up she was in the hospital, and family members surrounded her.

Oh, now they care about me but before they didn’t, she thought.

Apparently, most of the pills she took were expired so they didn’t have the requisite potency. The only bottle that wasn’t expired was Tylenol. She was in the hospital for a week and after that she went to a mental hospital for therapy.

From the end of 8th grade to the beginning of her freshman year she began smoking marijuana and going to parties. She was partying with 21-22 year olds and driving while intoxicated.

At the same time, she posted short videos of herself in inappropriate outfits and lots of makeup. She gained a following on social media and even began to make money from the large number of views.

Still, the God-shaped vacuum in her heart and soul remained.

When she got older, she moved to Chicago. Rubee started going to Electronic Dance Music (EDM) festivals where she took Ecstasy.

“I remember like this whole different side of me came out,” she recalls. “Wow! This is the purpose of life. You can be free, you can do whatever you want, you can do drugs. The festivals were something different for me because it just felt more open, free and euphoric.”

She was burning out however. Eventually the drugs stopped making her feels so happy, and they crept into addiction. The friends she thought she had proved to be superficial. Her depression was so overwhelming that she stopped posting on social media, and that source of income dried up.

One day she was driving with friends. As a bottle of Hennessy was passed around the car, Rubee Lana cried out to God. She had never known God before.

“One day my heart was just so heavy, and I just asked myself: Am I going to Heaven or Hell? I knew that if I had died that day, I would go to Hell. I was literally in a car with random people,” Rubee says on her YouTube channel. “They were passing around a Hennessy bottle.

“I’m looking out the window. In my mind I’m like, God, I’m sorry, forgive me God forgive me God forgive me God,” she adds. “I’m just repeating that in my head out of nowhere.”

The moment she cried out to God was completely off the radar. What did she know about God? She only knew about misery – the unhappy situation she was born into, the appalling situation she had created for herself.

She started going to church and began to actually build, instead of destroy, her life.

Rubee surrendered her life to Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, and was born again.

Today Rubee is posting Christian material and serving Jesus.

To learn more about a personal relationship with Jesus, click here.

About this writer: Sandra Marroquin studies at the Lighthouse Christian Academy near South Central Los Angeles.