Picture this: After a long day at work, you choof off to the gym to relieve some stress. Between your dips, squats and sprints, a random person says you’re “dancing with the devil”. They then attempt to shake your hand after completely disrupting your groove and basically preaching at you. Well, unfortunately, situations like this apparently happen IRL, and it happened to this TikToker.
Shelby (@shelbyroseolson) went viral on TikTok after she captured the “uncomfortable” moment a “gym prophet” came up to her mid-set at the gym.
In the caption of the video, which now has more than 1.2 million views, Shelby wrote: “Came to the gym for a sweat sesh, left with a prophets message that I’m in love with the devil. Don’t be this guy.”
“I can’t ask God to save my life multiple times over and run back to the thing that caused my life to be taken in the first place. Make sense?,” the unnamed man asked her.
The “prophet”, as Shelby described him, asked to shake her hand, to which she replied, “No, that made me severely uncomfortable”.
“Don’t know why you needed to come here and do that,” she added.
The man then replied to Shelby, blaming God for his mid-gym homily. Instead of leaving Shelby alone, he continued to preach and argue with the TikToker.
“God loves you severely,” the man said to Shelby.
“But he’s jealous.”
She then interrupted the man, proclaiming that God loves everyone, to which he replied: “No, he doesn’t. That’s not true.
“He hates the wicked. His Bible says it.” ALLEGEDLY.
The gym prophet then goes on about the Kingdom of God and how everyone is not going to be let in — like every club on Oxford Street on Saturday nights. The video cuts off when the man asked Shelby if he could show her the Bible.
A couple of days later, Shelby posted a full story time about the so-called “gym prophet”.
According to the story time, the man followed Shelby from the stretching area to the hip abductor machine. She was wearing headphones, so it was obvious that she was occupied with her workout.
The TikToker claimed the man motioned for her to take her headphones off, which then led him to his message.
“He basically has me take my headphones out and starts to talk to me about how God told him — he was in the sauna — that there’s girl that was coming into Lifetime, that he needed to have a conversation with,” she said.
“[The message] was something along the lines of ‘if you’re taught how to play soccer from a young age and then you go and try and play football, are you going to know how to play football? or are you gonna go and know how to play soccer?’”, she said.
Things took a dark turn when Shelby claimed he said she needed to pay God back and the “devil was coming after [her] soul” and she was “dancing with the devil”.
“He just kept speaking gibberish about how I was dancing with the devil and how God was telling him he needed to protect me by telling me I needed to save my soul again,” she said.
Apparently, at the end of the conversation, he just walked away.
In a second video, Shelby revealed that the man gave her the “heebee jeebees” and the “ick”. She also clarified that she wasn’t anti-Christianity and the video was supposed to point out that there was a time and place for everything.
Just like Shelby mentioned in her final video on the gym prophet, I grew up with Christianity in my life — Pentecostalism, to be exact — so I definitely understand how that religious faith works. However, there’s a time and place for everything.
The gym is definitely not the place for preaching of any sort. I fucking get annoyed hearing my partner’s grunts through my earphones when we go together, so I don’t think I could handle someone preaching at me for 10 seconds.
Religion can also be a very uncomfortable subject to talk about, and in this case, the man literally told Shelby that the devil was gonna get her. Like, I would be shitting my pants if someone said that to me out of the blue.
It’s giving Drag Me To Hell — a scary but iconic horror movie. Actually, it reminds me of Adam Sandler‘s The Waterboy, where Kathy Bates says everything was invented by the devil.
Hopefully, Shelby never encounters this man again, especially because she said the encounter made her “severely uncomfortable.”
