That happened to me in a dramatic way at a Jack Winter meeting in Hamilton some years after I became a Christian in 1973. Standing in the meeting room with about 100 others Jack described how we can ask the Holy Spirit to deal with the hurts and the things in our past which hold us back. He encouraged us to ask the Holy Spirit to take us back to those times in our past which need healing and where strongholds have arisen. Instantly the Holy Spirit took me back to me as a nine-year-old standing behind my bedroom door with my baseball bat in my hand determined in my heart to whack my father over the head. I saw that many issues stemmed from my hatred for my father. Oh yes there was one positive that came out of life with my father, my aggressive, hard hitting tennis game. But far more negative and destructive results came from my past. God made it clear to me that my atheism started that Sunday when I declared in my nine-year-old head “There is no God” and then proceeded to live by that statement thereafter. I repented for that false vow I had made way back then and asked God to heal me and remove the effects of it. The second issue I needed to deal with was my hatred toward my father, which also was a factor between God and me that needed to be dealt with.
