I Heard God Tell Me To Start My Own Business

It’s hard to believe Danielle Gault was once a staunch atheist. Joy Tibbs met the Irish entrepreneur who’s now spreading the good news.

- Joy Tibbs

Danielle Gault made a commitment to God at the age of 12 and remembers experiencing a ‘whooshy feeling’, which she later realised was the Holy Spirit. However, Danielle’s father had died when she was a child and that, coupled with other difficult experiences, turned her into an angry teenager. Heavily reliant on drugs and alcohol, she overdosed several times and was also self-harming.

“I was so full of hatred against everyone and everything,” she says. “I blamed God for a lot of things. In my arrogance, I actually tried to turn people away from their faith.”

Danielle studied Environmental Science at university before getting a job on a small Greek island looking after sea turtles. She had a lovely Greek boyfriend and everything was going well, but at the age of 24, her back completely collapsed.

“My spinal cord was like an S shape,” she explains.

“I had permanent pins and needles from my hips down and was on 29 prescribed tablets a day to calm the pain. My brain was totally mangled.”

Everything came to a head when a girl from the university called to find out what Danielle was doing with her life as part of an alumni research exercise.

“I ended up pouring my entire heart out to her. I hung up and was staring at my phone like, ‘What just happened?’ Then it starts ringing again and she said, ‘Hi, I could get fired for this, but I’m a Christian and I was just wondering if I could pray for you.’ I just said, ‘Yeah, OK,’ so she prayed with me. I phoned my mum, who was there with her prayer partner, and they’re shouting, ‘Hallelujah!’ And I’m screaming, ‘This doesn’t mean anything! God’s still not real!’”