n a powerful interview on “The Shawn Ryan Show,” Leigh Bortins—founder of the classical education movement Classical Conversations—shared a stunning account of a supernatural encounter with Jesus that radically changed her life.
“The Holy Spirit in the form of Jesus came into my kitchen in a blinding light, knocked me down,” Bortins revealed. “The book fell. My husband looks over and said, ‘What happened?’ and I said, ‘Did you see that?’ and he said, ‘No, but there was obviously something just happened to you.’”
The moment was deeply spiritual and deeply unsettling. “It was the most terrifying thing in my life that that happened. And if you read through Scripture, whenever an angel comes down, it’s ‘fear not.’ It is scary,” she explained. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t want that.’”
At the time, Bortins and her husband were not Christians. A trained aerospace engineer, she had made the unconventional choice to leave her career and homeschool her children. “We weren’t Christians at the time, but we wanted better academics, and we saw the destruction of the family occurring… and we’re like, ‘This is destroying the family. We’re not going to let that happen to ours.’”
Despite not knowing Christ, the Lord was already pursuing her. She explored a wide range of religious beliefs—Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and Protestants. But it was her neighbor who persistently invited her to church, handed her Christian books and even paid for her to attend a creationism conference. “We left kind of mad that even though we didn’t believe any of it, that we’d never heard any of it.”
Eventually, Bortins was confronted with a truth she could no longer deny. “I was reading a book from Josh McDowell… and he brings up C.S. Lewis’s logical option—that either He is the Lord, He’s a lunatic or He’s a liar. And we have to pick.”
After a nature walk with her husband one day, Bortins describes how she finally knew that God was the One worth living for.
“At that moment, I knew that I was His forever… That He put me on this Earth with a purpose, and it was to serve Him.”
From a blinding light in her kitchen to the foundation of a national homeschool movement, Leigh Bortins’ testimony is a striking reminder of God’s power to pursue, reveal and redeem.