Lola Sheen, the daughter of famous actors Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards, recently revealed how she drew closer to Jesus Christ during a “very bad panic attack.”
The 19-year-old first began sharing her newfound Christian faith on Instagram in January when she posted a clip of her baptism and a follow-up post detailing how her embrace of Christianity made her life “worth living.”
In Monday’s episode of her “HeavenlyBonded” podcast, titled “God’s Strength in Our Weakness,” Lola explained that after doing press interviews in New York to promote her podcast, she began to experience “a very bad panic attack,” and credited God with helping her overcome it.
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Lola said that through her experience, “I got to see how God’s power worked so much in my weakest moment.”
“I flew to New York on Feb. 25 and right when I got there, I landed really late and then I had to wake up really early the next morning to get into hair and makeup and to do press and everything, and I think I didn’t make enough time to pray and to […] let God fill my mind with His truth,” she said.
“When you’re doing press and you’re doing all these things, there can be a lot of feelings of unworthiness because you’re around all of these people and you constantly have eyes on you,” she continued. “I had a full day of press, so I probably had five interviews back-to-back, and then the next day the same thing.”
New York City as caused her to feel “very anxious and overstimulated,” she said, lamenting that during her marathon of interviews, “I never made enough time for Jesus because I was so busy.”
“When I’m busy like that, it’s really important to make sure that I’m putting God at the beginning of my day and the end of my day. And if I’m so busy throughout the day, at least I should do that.”
During her marathon of interviews, Lola said, “I wasn’t reminding myself of God’s truth and filling my mind in anxious moments with God instead of believing these lies that aren’t from God.”
She also reflected on the self-doubt she experienced during her time in New York City. “I’d wake up with all these anxious thoughts like, ‘What does this person think of me?’ or ‘What if I said something wrong in that interview?’”
“When I feel really anxious, I start to feel really bad physically. I will feel dizzy, lightheaded, nauseous, just all of these really bad feelings,” she added. “And then I start to freak myself out, that there’s actually something physically wrong with me.”
For example, Lola shared that she was late to a planned meet-up with her friends on the third day of her trip because of her anxiety: “I was so anxious; I was so worried that if I left my hotel room I was going to have a panic attack, but I could also have a panic attack in my hotel room too.”
“Still, before I left, I did not read my Bible; I did not really receive God’s peace,” she maintained. While meeting up with her friends for dinner, Lola said she began to feel “very, very dizzy.”
Her anxiety attack prompted her to leave the hotel room where her friends were gathered and talk to a friend on the phone. “He starts praying over me,” she recalled. “Everything goes quiet. I can’t hear anything. Like literally, I felt like I couldn’t hear. I could not see straight.”
The podcast host said she thought she would have to “go to the hospital” because of her panic attack, which she described as the “worst” of her life. “It was so scary because it was like everything felt like it was going in phases. It was like I couldn’t remember what I said five seconds ago.”
After going into her sister’s room at the hotel, Lola began playing worship music on the television. “I actually convinced myself I died. I literally was like I felt so out of body, I felt so disconnected from where I was. I literally was like, ‘oh my gosh, did I die.’”
Lola then called her “sisters in Christ” and began to feel “the presence of God” and the “peace of Jesus.”
Her sisters in Christ, she said, helped her “speak out every single lie I believed. So I spoke out, ‘I believe that I’m going to die,’ ‘I believe that my anxiety is too big for God to handle,’ which is a lie. I know that’s not true, but that is a lie that was coming in my mind.”
“Basically, what we did is we went through every single lie I was believing in that moment and I repented against the lie and I came out of agreement with what the enemy was telling me,” she recounted. During that conversation, Lola said she and her sisters in Christ then replaced “every lie I was believing with Scripture.”
She continued: “There was a moment where the peace of God literally […] washed over my mind. It felt like Jesus put His hand on me and instantly, every single feeling I felt was gone. It left. It literally was gone instantly. The second I start speaking Scripture over myself, the second I start replacing every single lie from the enemy with God’s truth, the power of God that I experienced was unexplainable.”
“The only way I was OK again was because of Jesus,” she stressed, maintaining that God allowed her panic attack to happen so she could see “how powerful He is in my weakest moment.”
Lola said she considered her experience a lesson that “the only strength that I have is from Jesus” and that “when God shows me that I really cannot rely on my own strength in my weakest moment, I get to see the power of Christ.”
“If I didn’t go through that, I wouldn’t have seen the way that God worked in that moment as much as I did,” she proclaimed.
While it’s been nearly two months since the first “HeavenlyBonded” podcast episode was released, Lola said she planned to release a new episode every Sunday going forward.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
