-
Testimonies
(Click for Details)
-
Jack Gormley
Jack GormleyAge: 25
Location: Leeds
Occupation: Doctor
If becoming a Christian means asking Jesus into your life, then I have been a Christian since 11 years old. As to this having much bearing on how I lived, that was minimal. For me it was one thing to know it and completely different to live it.
I had been going to church since I was born. It was something we did as a family and I had a good group of friends who enjoyed winding up our leaders and escaping to play football. After years of youth groups I was pretty well trained in the art of debating the meaning of life and what it means to follow Christ. We had the answers to satisfy the leaders and that was enough.
By the time I reached 16 it was my choice as to what I wanted to do with my Sundays, priorities were changing in my life and my friends and I were spending less and less time at church.
Being a 16 year old boy at a mixed boarding school was a challenge. I still held onto my faith, knowing full well that God was for real but with all the other distractions it wasn’t the best time to be accepting it. I had a girlfriend and a good group of friends, in the eyes of many including myself it was good and I had it pretty sorted. I managed to maintain a balance of my life and God’s life which worked well for me. It meant doing what I wanted, and when I needed it I would call on Jesus, more often than not he would answer.
As I got older, having this knowledge of Christ became more and more of a problem, it meant I couldn’t comfortably do what a lot of my friends were doing and as one recently put it, it was as if I was labouring under a burden, rather than being full of joy. It also began to affect my relationship, although I wasn’t altogether close to God I still wanted to honour him. This became hard to understand for a girl who didn’t feel the same. We were in love and that was enough. After a while I began to agree.
As I grew up freedom increased and so did the parties, I remember a week of driving around to different parties, having great nights, just to jump in the car the next day move to the next place. It was a rush, my friends and I felt like kings, dinner jackets, marquees and few rules in my eyes meant fun. I was living the same life as all the people around me, but somehow that didn’t make it easier. There was still the feeling that something was wrong and that I was neglecting a huge part of my life.
After leaving school I came back to London. Suddenly it was more of the same people, although this time we all had more money. I was working hard by day and enjoying the nights. There was a “Gap year” scene with lots of 18/19year olds roaming around the capital.
At this time things began to change. A hunger inside me and a call to lead an “Alpha” group at Holy Trinity Brompton in London had me spending more time at church. I was also seeing a minister in North London learning more about our Supernatural God and spending time with the Holy Spirit. We would find ourselves spending days in this room, praying and listening to prophecies about the future of our world. It would reach 11pm and we would stumble out, filled with Gods love and excitement about seeking it. The more time I spent with the Pastor, the less everything else seemed to please. God was becoming increasingly real and it was clear to me that he wanted his son back.
All that I was living for began to change, I began to see holes in going to clubs, desperately wanting to be seen with the right people and feeding off each others insecurities, I just wanted to spend time praying. This also came in between my girlfriend and I, a relationship which I had once dreamed of ending in marriage was over because she felt in the way of my relationship with God.
It was a very strange place to be in; my life had been shaken. All that I was chasing suddenly seemed empty and my heart was broken. Part of me wanted to be angry and yet there was a real peace, this was just the beginning.
With all this on my back I ran away. I had planned to go to Africa for half a year, to work in a hospital and travel around the continent. I remember well arriving off the plane into the Ghanaian capital Accra and thinking I had made a bit of a mistake. I had gone with high expectations. I longed to see miracles and walk in great intimacy with God - the reality was quite different. I was working in a hospital where it was abnormal not to see someone die everyday. For me these were my first experiences of death and left me crying out to God asking "Why?". It was an incredibly lonely time. The worst part was having a small baby die in my arms after praying over and over for its life. I don’t think I have ever been so broken.
The release seemed to come through drinking. It was cheap and easy, there was a crowd of volunteers so the evenings were spent chilling in bars. For me it was a constant battle. I knew what I wanted to be doing but it wasn’t really happening. I soon discovered the local pure marijuana leaves and the rest you can imagine. It was like being on a see-saw, up and down, sin – repent. A cycle that was doing my heart no good. Africa holds for me a whole range of memories. It was an incredible time surrounded by the beauty of God’s creation and his people and yet being quite lonely myself. Trying to process the things I saw and also deal with a broken relationship.
Coming back home couldn’t have come at a better time; I was ready to be back with my family. I had time again with my friends. I went away on a retreat for a week organised by the church, something I had done every year. I was finally at a point where I was ready to accept the call that God had put on my life years ago. I remember one night that was special. The talk had finished and the band came back up to play more music. I started worshipping, singing to the Lord, singing turned to dancing and dancing to jumping as a consuming fire filled my whole body. I had to move otherwise I would explode. The Holy Spirit was raining down, it felt like the hand of God was upon me, charging my body with raw power. To me this was a rather confused mix of intense joy, sadness, passion and a yearning desire for more. As I praised I knew what it was like to be totally free from everything. All I cared about was Christ, no-one else in the room mattered; this was my time with my creator. For the first time I began to open my heart to God in a way I had never done before. I knew that He had been waiting for that day for years. I had learned many things while I was away; the most important one was my need for God’s touch on a daily basis. To this day that knowledge remains central to my existence. What has followed has been an amazing walk, full of challenges and life. I have seen so much of God’s love and walked in His presence, and the best bit is at the age of 20, this is only the beginning…….
-
Theo Brun
Theo Brun
Age: 32
Location: Hong Kong
Occupation: Lawyer
I grew up on a farm in Norfolk, the middle of three brothers. We were fortunate enough to be well looked after. Provided with a great education and allowed to explore every opportunity that came our way, apart from the occasional short-lived fraternal strife, we had an extremely happy childhood.
As a family we weren’t spiritual in any sense in which I have come to understand it now. We only went to church very occasionally – dreary and uninspiring at the best of times - and at the age of 7 I was sent away to boarding school, from which point onwards any religious or spiritual side to my life was directed by school chapel – again a thoroughly dead experience.
Throughout my school years, it seemed clear that anything to do with Christ had little to do with me. I didn’t decide this so much as just go with the flow. I knew no one in my peer group who would have described themselves as Christian, still less who would ever talk about it outside chapel.
Nevertheless whenever I found myself reading about the history of the church I found it strangely compelling. I could sense that there was some mystery at the root of it all, probably, in my mind, based on human historical action – something to do with people using religion to retain and exploit temporal power. I don’t know why but the word that comes back to me from the few conversations I ever had about this is “hoax”. Somehow a bunch of people had conspired to pull the wool over the eyes of millions of people throughout the last two thousand years, exploiting their simple uninformed minds - such was my view. I felt a sophisticated mind of the 20th century couldn’t entertain the possibility that a man called Jesus was divine any more than Zeus lived on top of Mount Olympus. It was at this point that I happened to read a book called the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail – recently given a new lease of life as the main source for the Da Vinci Code. Based on the presumption that the resurrection was simply not possible or else not totally central to the development of the doctrines of the early church, the book led me to the conclusion that the gospels of the New Testament had been hand picked to fit an agenda that served the political ends of a wobbling Roman Empire. Christianity, it seemed to me, while fascinating, did not do what it said on the tin. At the time I didn't stop to think whether this really made any sense - the idea that mythical claims about this Man were somehow projected back onto him by a later church that needed a "divine" person at its heart to have credibility amongst other belief systems - but how did this movement ever get off the ground if at its root it was empty of all truth?
So I carried on through my university years leading the life that all my friends were – doing as much sport, as little work and chasing as many girls as I could get away with. I had plenty of good friends, people seemed to like me and most of the time I achieved what I set out to achieve. I had no real sense that I possessed a spiritual side, much less was I interested in developing one. I studied archaeology and saw everything in the world as the result of human action, from grand trends of groups of people interacting and developing through the ages down to simple social relationships on a day to day basis. A person could play their part in the great mystery of the human story, but, within their historical context, it was pretty much down to them what that part might be.
Despite this view, there was something that kept cropping up which I always kept in my back pocket as it were. Many of the figures of history whom I most admired believed in God. And whilst I felt I had no experience of Him, I refused to write off the possibility of His existence more or less solely because it seemed to me if it was good enough for people of far more questioning minds and powerful intellects than I, then why not for me also? But even if He did exist, I felt He was 'out there' and unknowable.
So if we jump forward a bit to about two and a half years ago, I’d been living in London for about 3 years. My career hadn’t really gone where I’d planned. Having loved reading history, I’d imagined myself in the Foreign Office, being despatched to far-flung and fascinating places to keep the British end up and have a big adventure at the same time. I wanted to experience great historic events on the inside, have an input. I guess the FCO thought otherwise, since despite three applications I never managed to get selected. In the interim, I’d tried a couple of other jobs that didn’t really suit me – selling software, a truly bizarre memory if I imagine it now! I still craved adventure – I’d studied a lot about Central Asia and started teaching myself Russian and casting around for ways in which someone might be careless enough to send me out there. Nothing. It was clear if this was going to happen at all I’d have to take a big gamble and just head out there and find something to do when I got there. Not exactly a huge risk-taker at heart, I thought this a little foolhardy given all of my peers seemed to be ploughing on with their careers. Eventually I settled on qualifying as a lawyer, justifying this decision to myself by resolving to always try to direct my career towards an involvement in the Russian-speaking and Central Asian world wherever possible. So I secured an offer from a firm and off I went to law school for two years – an eternity of treading water as far as I was concerned but it had to be done.
Throughout this time I’d fallen into a fairly standard London lifestyle of squeezing as much fun as I could out of the week. Broken relationships, all night partying, discovering the excitement of clubbing, planning the next expensive holiday, embracing a darker side of life that is so readily available in this town. This is of course said with hindsight. At the time, I just plunged right in and pretty much was having a great time. The only niggle I had in mind at the time was that I had a huge desire to feel passionate about …..something….anything. But I didn’t know what that could be. I wanted to know who I was going to become and what I was going do…..I just could not see a path for myself, but I contented myself that I had made a decision (to become a lawyer) and that at least would take care of the next four years.
But into this fairly standard existence of a young man of my background, an unusual thread began to be woven. I had become friends with a woman who used to cut my hair. Her name is Sophia and she is undoubtedly one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. She describes herself as a white witch and she used to regale me with her view of the world and amazing spiritual experiences she’d had. I think a lot of people would have found most of what she told me at best hard to believe. I suppose because I liked her and could see her integrity, I felt who was I to deny her experience. The fact that I had never seen or felt anything of “the spirit world” didn’t mean it wasn’t there. She also demonstrated enough to satisfy me that she has some sort of psychic abilities. At the least it was uncanny. But in short we became friends and I would look forward to each time I’d see her, wanting to know what else she could tell me.
Because I seemed interested, she gave me a few of books about a man’s quest for knowledge and the truth through Native American wisdom and a "separate reality" which was at least initially to be accessed by using hallucinogenic drugs, and which went into parallel dimensions and the spirit world. After two or three books like this, it seemed reasonable to take what I read at face value since it was simply the writer's account of what happened. But I never really imagined myself getting into it all. Nevertheless what it did do was open my mind to a spiritual dimension, and contrary to what I felt many of my friends believed, I came to realise that scientific understanding need not, indeed it does not, exclude the existence of the totally incomprehensible and unknown. But reading about parallel dimensions and the limits of our perception in this life didn’t offer any answers. Like peeling back the layers of an onion, it just threw up more and more questions. I didn’t find truth in it. But I did come to the conclusion that beyond all these veils of perception, behind it all must lie some irreducible and constant reality.
A friend tells me that in thinking this, I became a meta-physical realist though I didn’t know it. I believed that reality was not relative and determined by our perception, or put another way that what we perceive is “our reality”. Rather, that there is some reality that transcends my perception. That I could never have existed but that same transcendent reality or truth would be there just the same. I didn’t view this “reality” as God. Instead I thought we, and all matter and energy, are all "god" (or divine) in the sense that we are part of the mystical and ultimately inexplicable complexity of “everything”, in which I saw a beauty and certain divinity. I realised that what didn’t fit into this idea was any sense of morality. I saw that, adopting this view, what we did in life didn’t really matter which didn't sit well with my understanding of life and the way people live it. All the same, I remember thinking that in death, the energy and matter that makes up each of us will dissipate into something else in a way that is totally incomprehensible but in that sense I would nevertheless endure. Pretty basic and flawed philosophy no doubt, but this view did actually take the sting out of death for me.
At this point Someone else began to step into my life. My little brother had become a Christian some time previously, though anytime he’d spoken about it my older brother and I had scoffed at him fairly mercilessly, to such an extent that he rarely spoke about his faith to us anymore. I guess I still struggled with the idea of anyone taking what is said in the Bible at face value, given what I thought I knew about it. Nevertheless, undaunted, his girlfriend, also a Christian, gave me a book by C.S.Lewis – Mere Christianity which I devoured in about two days. As I read it, I remember turning down countless page corners as each new argument seemed to blow apart my conceptions about the universe. Now this really got up my appetite for seeking the truth. Lewis’s arguments for the existence of a God the Creator, who was distinct from his Creation, although of course intimately involved with it, resonated with me, especially through using the universal human experience of morality, which is what I saw in the world as I knew it, to point to the existence of an ultimate source of good. But was it really likely that what Christians believed about this man Jesus could be true? One thing I took away from the book. My view of Jesus as simply a good moral teacher that had come to an untimely and unfortunate end was untenable. His repeated reference to Himself as something more than a man (which is what got Him crucified) meant he had to be one of three things: a liar (which seems to contradict the unimpeachable honesty and integrity evident in his character); a madman (which appears to contradict the undoubted wisdom and humanity in his teachings) or……he was who he said he was. This left me very uncomfortable as I could feel the foundations on which my worldview stood begin to shift.
Not wasting her moment, Abby gave me another book – A Case For Christ by Lee Strobel. This book looks at the historical claims made by Christians about Jesus, and goes into a pretty detailed historical analysis about each of them. It was written by an American journalist who was slightly put out when his wife came home one day saying she was a Christian. Not believing and feeling totally unable to believe, in an attempt to get to the bottom of the problem he set out on an investigation to disprove some if not all of the key claims about Jesus. To his surprise and consternation, his search led him in the opposite direction which he eventually had to accept. He challenges you at the end of the book: he says it can never be proved with absolute certainty that these historical claims are true but if you as the reader felt persuaded on balance that it was more likely that they were true than not, then you should do something about it, seek out people who might enable you to experience Jesus and God. By the end of the book, I had to be honest with myself. Contrary to my express will and desire, I had to say that on balance I believed Jesus did die and was raised again based on the evidence available, and this fact was witnessed by a number of people. Great! So what! What do I do with that? And what do Christians mean when they speak of experiencing God and that Jesus lives, or that Christ is in us? It sounds bewilderingly mysterious - incomprehensible yet tantalising. Obviously I had to find out, since if Jesus was who he claimed to be, and I now could believe that, then I’d be a fool not to listen to what he said.
At this point I’d say intellectually my journey towards acceptance was nearly over, but spiritually and emotionally it was only just beginning. Throughout my university years and the few years following I’d gone from being a virginal aspiring sportsman into a committed hedonist, interested only in my friends, women and ways in which we could all have fun. My identity was very much bound up in these things. Like I said, I had some ideas about what I wanted to do in life but I never managed to secure the jobs I thought I could be passionate about. In the end I convinced myself in some round about way that the law was what I should be doing. In fact, at least for me, it may have been just another way of avoiding taking any risk, another layer of comfort and security in which I could wrap myself.
The social life my friends and I were living seemed to head off in directions I never would have imagined for myself, and although I had some lovely girlfriends, I couldn’t stop myself being unfaithful. It was as if I was an approval junky, probably resulting from being shy as a child, but "other" women seemed to provide a source of that approval. About the time I came to accept the historical claims about Jesus, I was building up to breaking up with a long-standing girlfriend. Every night I’d lie next to her thinking “if you only knew the person you’re here with you’d never want to speak to me again”. I took a step of faith and started praying to God (not Jesus), asking him to guide me in my relationship but I didn’t feel like anything was coming back. I dug out an old Gideon bible which an old lady had handed me on a train about ten years earlier, and which I could never bring myself to throw out. From this, I started reading the New Testament. I was somewhat surprised to discover that the character of Jesus was absolutely nothing like the picture I had from the little I remembered from childhood, but all I could really focus on were parables warning of condemnation. My mind was not at peace. I couldn’t sleep properly and I had some very dark dreams. Over the course of the summer, I did a number of things that, in my mind, were genuinely unforgivable, occasionally aggressive, but usually sexual. This was of course always when I’d been out on a "big night" but that was a poor excuse. I remember waking up after the worst of them the next morning and being genuinely scared because I didn’t recognise any part of myself in those acts, though I had clearly done them. I started going with my friends to some very dark places, all part of listening to the music we were into. I thought my restlessness was largely because I was forcing myself to be in a relationship I couldn’t see lasting but I think there was more to it than that. Sometimes I would speak with my friends about how guilty, I guess, I felt about all this. You may well say that's hardly surprising, but this was a new kind of conviction, something I'd not felt before. There was a lyric from a song we quite liked at time: “I can’t control these feelings, the darkness……is calling me”. It struck such a cord with me that I couldn’t listen to it anymore, and of course my friends would wind me up about my misgivings.
Eventually, after much effort of will (for me) I ended my ailing relationship, and I started to feel better…freer. I told myself, “right now you are going to grow.”
Earlier that summer, I had tried going along to an Alpha course (an introductory course to Christianity) but only caught about three talks and it was always a little difficult as I felt my girlfriend had been completely closed off to all this. It was great talking about big questions with Christians but ultimately they just made me feel uncomfortable. I could see what needed to be done, I just couldn’t do it. I could hear the clear message of the Gospels: “Follow Christ”. But I couldn’t bring myself to turn away from the life that had a hold on me, and give up my present hopes and dreams to follow Jesus.
So on I carried, partying as hard as I could, much happier now, occasionally going to church, praying and reading the Bible, but rarely thinking of Jesus and never about the Holy Spirit, and always holding preciously onto that last offering of actually giving up the reins of my life and handing them to Jesus.
As I’ve said my little brother is a Christian and has an amazing story of his own conversion, in itself a very climactic and supernatural moment. Shortly before Christmas ‘04, I was sat at dinner with both brothers, and a couple of very close friends. The conversation turned to God and I made Alexis tell his story. The others listened intently and were suitably fascinated, and I remember smiling and saying “If that ever happened to me I’d shout it from the rooftops”. At a party three days later I ran into Will, an old university friend who from training as a teacher had since become one of the church leaders at St Mary’s Bryanston Square. We had a discussion and he persuaded me to have another look into Christianity by coming on the “Life” course at his church – this is similar to the Alpha course.
By the time the first week came around, a very unfamiliar, unexpected yet wonderful passion had started to bubble up inside of me. I was still feeling (sometimes painfully) pulled in two directions, both towards and away from Jesus at the same time. Like one voice saying ‘what do you want to do with all this….think of all the things you’ve done, of who you really are, and you think Christianity might be for you?? Stick to the life you know’, to which another voice would reply “so why do I feel like I need Jesus so badly”? I ride a motorbike around town and have a lot of time to think to myself – there was a moment when this internal dialogue erupted and I actually shouted out loud in my helmet – I don’t know who to – “you are not gonna stop me coming to this!!”
I was amazingly reassured when, by chance, I then found this quote from C.S. Lewis on the internet, writing to a person seemingly close to where I was with all this: "There will be a counter attack on you, you know, so don't be too alarmed when it comes. The enemy will not see you vanish into God's company without an effort to reclaim you."
Eventually I found myself walking in the door at the back of the church, with the warmest feeling of homecoming I’ve ever experienced - something like the feeling of getting home from an exhausting long walk in the wind and the rain, tired and dirty but savouring the delightful anticipation at the warm bath that awaits. I sat down at the front barely able to contain my excitement and listened to the introductory talk, the whole time holding tightly onto my chair since I had this barely controllable urge to leap up, grab the mike off John the speaker and shout I believe in Jesus! Perhaps fortunately I didn’t(!). But this time, at the end of the talk, I followed the speaker’s prayer asking Jesus to come into my life. At John’s suggestion I did this with an innocence in my heart, as a child would demand something of its father, with the image of tugging at a father’s trouser leg in my mind. As I did this I had a clear sensation of a comforting presence standing behind me with his arms around my shoulders. Both then, as now, I believed this to be Jesus.
I went home thinking, I suppose I’m a Christian now……wow! I never expected that. In fact if someone had even suggested that to me only months previously I would have thought them slightly insane.
That was a Wednesday. By about Friday, I was still trying to figure what on earth I had just done but I knew I wanted to go back to that church as soon as I could. That Sunday I went to a service there to worship God. At the end, I was about to go home when my friend Will came up and asked me if I wanted to be prayed for before I left. I said sure. Not having planned this, I went to one side of the church with Will and John. John just came out and said “Right, now you are going to give your life to Christ.” Although unexpected, none of the old resistance remained in me. It made sense to me given everything I believed and wanted to know, so I said fine. John then explained the deal – how things I had done in my life up to this point were preventing me from having a relationship with God. That Jesus had come down to pay the price for my mistakes and enabled me to be fully forgiven by God the Father, so that I could come into a relationship with Him. All I had to do was accept this gift from Jesus. So I went ahead and said the words, giving my life to Christ, asking for and accepting God’s forgiveness in full.
On receiving His forgiveness I was filled with the Holy Spirit. I can only describe this as the defining moment of my life. It is hard, if not impossible, to explain this fully (especially to non-believers). I will only say that it was a very physical and supernatural experience – throughout the sensation was one of pure awe and wonder - being physically filled with light and a kind of ecstatic love that was so powerful that I was unable to stand after a while. This was revelation from God. His response to my tentative steps in His direction was to knock me down with His love as He came running to meet me. Lasting around half an hour or so, I eventually got up (off the floor!). The thought filled my mind, “There is a God!” I’d always imagined that while faith could be strong, one could never know with absolute certainty that God exists until the moment of death. But there I was, here I am, finding myself absolutely and unshakeably convinced of His existence. Not convinced, but knowing He is there as I know my own father exists. So in the space of four days I had experienced the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Suddenly the concept of the Trinity made perfect sense to me. Suddenly so many verses in the Bible proclaimed the truth to me, as it was borne out by my own experience. To say that this was a life-changing event is to understate. This was a re-birth. Though I never imagined saying this about myself, I am a born again Christian. (And thank God for that)
From this point on life has been very different. I can only describe the feelings of the following weeks as similar to being in love – I still felt filled with an unbelievable light and I think people could sense the difference. It was not always easy reconciling this change in me with some of my friendships. Of course, I could explain what had happened to me but often I felt an unseen barrier between us. Everyone has their own view on God and religion but this would mean that there were many different reactions to my experience and testimony. Nevertheless, they are my friends and have accepted this change with time. Some of them are now themselves on their own search.
Apart from a deeply felt spiritual renewal, I‘ve experienced changes in other ways too. My attitude to other people completely changed. For a time I was consumed by an almost frantic love of everyone - although this has calmed down(!). I wanted to hear everyone's stories, wanted the best for all, to help people, give to people, to understand them - as I walked along a street or in a shopping mall I would have an acute awareness of each person's individuality as they passed me and a sometimes overwhelming sympathy for the burdens in each person's life. I started volunteering for charity work, wanting to sponsor children - all these kinds of things, which I mention here not as some pious reflection on myself, far from it, since I know what I am but because for me these changes provided the most obvious evidence that what I had experienced was real - it really transformed what I was motivated to do, and not because of anything I read, simply from what now came from within.
I stopped looking for my identity in other things. That being this or that, or having this or doing that would make me who I am. Instead, I feel innately fulfilled, even though of course there are still many, indeed even more, challenges in life to be met. But there is an irreducible peace and confidence about who I am, and who I am becoming which I'm not sure I had before, which is derived from this growing relationship with God. Besides this, a lot of my more destructive tendencies have fallen away as I turned away from stumbling around in the darkness and headed back to the light.
Since my conversion, I've seen my mother, older brother (an arch cynic of Christianity) and sister-in-law have all become Christians as well as a few very close friends, and I've seen many others drawn in by what has happened. I've seen and heard the stories of ordinary people experiencing extraordinary transformation, and seen the power of God working through people. It's all pretty exciting, but it also confirms that suspicion that I carried for so long inside me whatever I was doing whether life was going well or badly - that there must be more to life than this. It turns out there is.
Finally, the Bible has literally come alive for me. As I said above, as a non-Christian the only real message I could hear was “Follow Christ”. Once I’d done that, the words I read became a source of beauty, truth, guidance and great comfort. It really speaks to me in a way I could never have imagined. Before, words like, “peace”, “grace”, “compassion”, “joy” and “love” appeared fairly one-dimensional. Now they are so pregnant with meaning that they make my heart swell. I was listening to the radio the other day. A Robbie Williams song was playing. He sang, “I just wanna feel real love and the life ever after.” I tell you that is exactly what I feel every day.
You may read this and be left wondering what on earth I am talking about. You feel no desire or need inside you to find out more about Jesus. You may even be offended by this suggestion. I understand that. For years, from time to time I would hear people’s testimony about coming to Christ and feel nothing or something worse, thinking that’s just not for me and nor will it ever be. But I now believe that Jesus calls on each and every person who’s ever lived at some point in their lives often in ways we wouldn’t even comprehend. So it may not be your time now.
The truth is Jesus came looking for me long before I started seeking Him.
But if this testimony did speak to you, and awaken something in your heart……well…….those that have ears, let them hear.
Please feel free to get in touch with me at my email address below for any reason, and I will do my best to answer any questions or point you in the direction of somewhere where you can find out more about this for yourself.
THRB
www.bethinking.org
theodorebrun@yahoo.co.uk
-
Steven Poole
Steven Poole
Steven's letters from H.M.Prison Gartree (the spelling and grammar has been altered)
LC,5422 G WING
Mr Steven Poole
H.M.Prison Gartree
Gallow Field Road
Market Harborough
Leicestershire
LE16 7RPDominic Muir (no longer at this address)
Alpha International
Holy Trinity Brompton
Brompton Road
London
SW7 1JADear Dominic,
Many thanks for your visit to Gartree. Please accept my apology for my spelling, I’m dyslexic. Thanks for the Holy Spirit day, we all enjoyed it. I became a born again Christian about eighteen months ago. Jesus coming into my life has been amazing, our heavenly Father has bought me so much love and comfort. I’ve told a few od my fellow prisoners here at Gartree about the amazing power of the Holy Spirit and the love God has for them if only they would open up their hearts. I know our Lord has put me here to spread the word. I know God has plans for us all. I wish there was a little more time to talk at the end but you know how the prison system works. I was so embraced with God’s love and the Holy Spirit, I wanted it to last forever. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, I was the lad with the tatoos. When we first sang the first song at the morning session I was so much wanting to cry I had to fight back the tears. I know how much God loves me by the way he makes me feel – it’s just so amazing.
My first experience with God was when I was in Lincoln prison in 2004. I was reading the book Nicky Gumbel wrote, ‘Questions of Life.’ I’m sure you are familiar with it as it’s to do with the Alpha course. I started to read it and couldn’t put it down. I found it very interesting. I always had my head in my Bible and was still searching for the right answers. My grandparents always took us to church and Sunday school. I rememeber some of the stories they used to tell us. As I read my bible things came back to me. I always wondered who Jesus was and now I know.
As I continued to read Nicky’s book something happened to me. I remember feeling this overwhelming feeling. I’d never felt anything like it before. So I lay on my bed in my cell. I remember my eyes still open. Everywhere was so bright I can only describe it as a bright light so bright I couldn’t see anything else. Something was happening to me. It felt like my whole body was being drawn to some sort of force. I know from the experience of Holy Spirit that this can only have been God. At the time it happened I didn’t know much about the Holy Spirit. As I looked around my cell and pondered for a few minutes I thought to myself “did that really happen?” I was scared at first because I thought I was going mad. I couldn’t believe what I’d just experienced. God knew that was the right time in my life to reveal himself to me.
I’ve only told the Reverend Ann Weston at Doncaster prison in Yorkshire about my story. I did an Alpha course in Doncaster prison – things just kept on happening to me, different experiences, in the end I had to share them with someone. The Holy Spirit is wonderful. Was it just a coincidence I was reading Nicky’s book at the time I had the experience? Alpha means the beginning. It was the beginning of my new Christian life. Thanks to the Alpha course.
Thank you to all at Holy Trinity Brompton. I pray our Father will continue to bless you in all your good work. Hallelujah! We have Jesus!
Yours sincerely,
Mr Steven Poole, your brother in Christ.LC,5422 G WING
Mr Steven Poole
H.M.Prison Gartree
Gallow Field Road
Market Harborough
Leicestershire
LE16 7RPDominic Muir (no longer at this address)
Alpha International
Holy Trinity Brompton
Brompton Road
London
SW7 1JADear Dominic,
Many thanks for your reply to my letter and yes you have my permission to use the letter for your web site. I hope it will encourage others to keep strong in their faith and their beliefs.
I remember the Reverend back in Lincoln she once said to me 'God has a plan for all of us' and that's so true.
I don't know if you'll just use the letter as it is but if you need to word it differently it's fine by me. You know I struggle with dyslexia.
We aren't able to use computers here at Gartree so would it be possible for you to send me a copy of the read out of your web site when you've finished putting it up on to the web site?
On to your story (see MUNDANE MIRACLES 'Aids and Prophecy') about the woman cured of cancer (mouth cancer). Isn't God amazing? Thanks to great people like Joshua our Lord Jesus still shines through and is able to perform some great miracles. Can you remember the coloured man in our Alpha group? His name was Shepherd, he's from Africa and he's also told me about such people like Joshua who have performed some wonderful miracles. And yes I am blessed by reading your letter.
Thanks again and good luck in the future. I hope and pray that you'll continue to bless others with your good work and that God will bless you in all that you seek to do. May the peace of God be with you.
Yours sincerely,
Steven Poole, your brother in Christ.
(Jeremiah 29: 11 - 13)
-
April Vincent
April VincentI'm afraid of the dark.
To be as old as I am and still have this childish fear is somewhat embarrassing; it was embarrassing when I was twelve and when I was eighteen and when I was twenty-five. Now, at thirty, I realize WHY I am afraid, and I know now that it's not so much the dark that scares me, as what darkness itself symbolizes for me: death, hell, loneliness, separation, suffocation, exhaustion, apprehension, anxiety, and most of all, mind-numbing, heart-strangling, breath-stealing, kick-you-in-the-gut panic.
Let me start at the beginning.
When I was five years old, I made a profession of faith. I don't think I knew what it meant to be a Christian, but I did know that my dad was a Christian and that was good enough for me. I walked down the aisle, got baptized, and wrote my name on the front page of a brand new Bible. I was at church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and usually Thursday night when my parents went on visitation. We had family devotions every night, and as part of the children's activities at my church, I had memorized a good chunk of the Bible. I read voraciously, and I had several different collections of Bible stories and a large library of Christian-themed books. By the time I was ten, I probably knew the Bible as well as-if not better than-most of the adults in my life. All my Bible knowledge did not make me a Christian. Because my dad was in the military, my family moved to a new state every three years. Every time we moved, one of our first priorities was to find a new church home. Inevitably, we would start attending the church, then my dad would start a new adult ministry, or my mom would start a new children's ministry, and my sister and I would be involved in everything available to us, and others would comment to my parents on their perfect Christian children in our perfect Christian family with our perfect Christian lives.
My church attendance could not save me.
When I was twelve, we moved to Tennessee, and my father made it clear to us that he intended to retire here. For the first time ever, we had the feeling of belonging to a community, rather than regarding ourselves as visitors just passing through. We owned a house. We had a pet. We bought a lawnmower and a station wagon. We were a commercial for the suburbs, right down to the sparkle in our gleaming white teeth.
This is, of course, when my troubles began.
I don't know how it started, exactly. I just remember that one time, during the invitation at the end of the church service, the pastor asked us to raise our hands if we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ lived in our hearts and that we were going to heaven to live with Him eternally.
I hesitated. I'd never done that before.
Some time later, after attending a summer youth camp, the girl that I most admired for her Christian attitude declared that she had realized she was not, in fact, a believer, and at camp she had asked Jesus to be her Lord and Savior. This news knocked me for a loop; if SHE wasn't a Christian, and she was the most godly person I knew, could that mean that I-far from being godly-might not be a Christian too?
It was around this time that I began to wake up in the middle of the night for no reason. It began sporadically, and I would think nothing of it, comforting myself by attributing it to indigestion or too much caffeine. Soon it became evident to me that my inability to sleep could not be blamed on food or drink, but on my soul-uneasiness. I would lie in my bed, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if God could hear me. I would cry out to Him for peace, but it never came. I began to suspect that I had never asked Jesus into my heart, but I would reassure myself by listing my spiritual accomplishments; surely I wouldn't have been able to memorize Bible verses or sing in the choir or lead friends to Christ if I weren't a Christian myself!
Still, I could not find peace, and my nighttime awakenings became more frequent and more frightening.
Always, appearances ruled me, and I didn't want my "perfect Christian family" to know that one of us might not fit the description. I struggled alone, and that, of course, exacerbated the problem.
I read everything I could get my hands on-commentaries, question/answer books, Bible verses, theological histories-anything that might tell me that I was, in fact, a believer and that this was just Satan trying to fool me and that I had nothing to worry about. Needless to say, no book could give me relief, no words of man OR God could calm me, no explanation could ease my anxiety.
I would be awake for three or four hours in the middle of the night, poring over these giant books of prophecy, feverishly seeking the peace that eluded me. I was careful in my pursuit; no one in my family ever knew that I was living with a secret that shook me to my very soul.
By the time I was fifteen, I had lived in this state of fear for over a year. I finally approached my Sunday school teacher and told her that I had doubts as to my salvation-I understated it JUST a bit. She led me through the Bible, showing me how much God loved me and how He did not want me to be afraid of anything. She invited me to say "The Prayer," to confess my sin to God and to trust His Son Jesus to save me from my sin. I did, and I was at peace-for a moment.
I think it was two nights later that I woke up again with the same terrible feeling of helplessness. No matter how long I prayed, no matter what I read, no matter how many times I asked Jesus to deliver me, it didn't work; I was falling further into despair with every passing night.
It was at this time that I read a book called Raptured!, which is a work of fiction based on the book of Revelation. Raptured! tells the story of those who are left behind when all the Christians leave the earth during the Second Coming of Christ. The author goes into graphic detail, including passages dealing with the Mark of the Beast and the torture of those who come to believe during this time. It scared the crap out of me.
Now, when I awoke in the night, I would lie very still and strain to hear my parents and my sister breathing, or rolling over, or talking in their sleep-anything that would act as proof that they had not been raptured out and left me to face the Tribulation. I became even more irrational; I somehow got the idea that a burglar might come into the house and kill me and I would die and go to Hell. Night after night I would wrestle with my fears-it's a wonder I ever got any sleep at all.
Two nights after Christmas in 1991, I had stayed up late (intentionally, this time) to finish a book I had gotten as a gift. It was about 2:00 a.m. when I finally started to get ready for bed. Again, fear consumed me, and I started at every small noise, every tree limb shaking in front of my window, every leaf drifting across the front porch. I lay there, gripped in terror, sure that this was the night that I would be gunned down by a sociopathic burglar.
Suddenly my breath caught at this thought: "There can't be anyone out there; the dogs next door would be barking if that were true." Our neighbor had two huge dogs penned up less than twenty-five feet from my bedroom, a huge rottweiler and a pit bull who barked at EVERYTHING. They were quiet that night, and the profound relief I felt allowed me to think even further, and I believe God spoke to me at that moment, saying, "Why do you trust those dogs more than you trust Me?" That question broke through as no Bible verse or commentary or book of theology had been able to; why DID I place more trust in dogs than in God?
At that moment, I confessed my fears to God, I asked Him to forgive me for not having faith that He alone could deliver me. I thanked Jesus for sacrificing Himself, for putting Himself in MY place on the cross, and I invited Him to live in my heart and to be the Lord of my life.
This time, the peace that I found was not temporary, and I have no doubts that my salvation is assured. I cried, I laughed, I thanked God again and again for His mercy--and His patience with me.
I know now that I let my pride get in the way of my relationship with God. I couldn't stand the thought of others thinking I was less than I presented myself to be, and I couldn't come to terms with the fact that I would not be able to save myself from sin. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I'd only been willing to put my faith in God instead of in my family, or my church attendance, or my religious knowledge ... or those dogs.
I have claimed as my life verse John 10:28, in which Jesus says, "I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand." The image of a tiny sheep being held gently in a giant hand ... well, it gives me a giggle, for one thing, but it also reassures me that I am God's child FOREVER, and no ONE and no THING can change that.
This is not to say that it's been smooth sailing since then, because it hasn't; it's not like I'm prowling the streets after dark or throwing all my night lights away. But at the times when it's most dark, I know that I can call on the One who is the Light of the World, and that He will keep me safe.
-
Levi Booth
Levi Booth
Age: 27
As far back as I can remember, I’ve believed that God existed. This world we live in is pretty messed up but it’s so beautiful that it just made sense to me for there to be a creator. However, the idea that this creator God would want to get involved with this world was one I would not have agreed with. Why would God care about us, about me? It seemed that God was keeping to himself and I was keeping to myself and that was fine by me.
My parents were (and are) both Christians and I was lucky enough to be raised in a family who helped me find out about God whilst not forcing any beliefs or religion on me. We went to church basically every week, which was good fun: we played games, sang songs and sometimes got free chocolate! When I became old enough to be trusted alone, my parents gave me the choice to keep going or not and I had good friends at church so I kept going. Looking back, it seems quite stupid really: I would sing songs about loving Jesus, whilst not believing or really understanding what it meant; I would rush to find the passages in the bible, not because I cared about what was written but because it made me feel proud to be the first to find them; I would even memorise bible verses and then forget them as soon as I’d been given my chocolate bar for remembering them. I was living a lie but I presumed every else was, because after all why would anyone actually believe that the bible was more than a storybook to keep children entertained?
However, as I grew older I did begin to accept the things we were taught: that God loved me; that Jesus was God and that he’d died for me and that if I believed in it I’d secure my place in heaven. But it was a pretty half-hearted belief and it didn’t really affect the way I led my life. I guess, as with my church life in general, I followed it for selfish, short-term gain. I didn’t really care about Jesus and I hadn’t truly repented, I had merely offered a reluctant, childish ‘sorry’ to appease God and let me get on with my life. I thought that giving God a couple of hours on a Sunday morning was a fair trade for eternal life and he didn’t seem to be telling me otherwise.
As I went through school, I got a bit of stick for being a ‘bible basher’ and not wanting to appear uncool I made sure that Jesus had a minimal effect on my life, my friends knew me as the ‘nice Christian guy’ but I can’t remember ever trying to tell people about Jesus, I didn’t really have anything to tell them. I still held onto Christian morals (I guess I was sort of afraid of God but hoped that by keeping some of his commands he’d accept me) but those were starting to crumble. I started going out with my mates quite a lot, getting drunk and checking out the girls (fortunately I’ve not been blessed with great looks or a lot of confidence with girls so I managed to retain the ‘no sex before marriage’ card!)
This continued as I came to university where I was suddenly hit by the student culture that told me that life was all about having fun, going out, getting drunk and forgetting any worries you had. But after following this lifestyle for a while, I realised that it didn’t satisfy me at all; living for myself and for the here and now left me feeling like there had to be more to life. I don’t know if my friends truly found peace and happiness at the bottom of a pint glass but I know I didn’t and it left me feeling a bit confused and lost. Also at this time I started to get to know a few Christians, which was weird because I would have called myself a Christian. I still went to church quite often but that didn’t affect me much at all and these guys seemed to have a real peace and joy even when life messed them around. And they also talked about the Holy Spirit changing them and they referred to God as their Dad and Jesus like he was their best mate!
Well this really bugged me and it made me look at what I did believe and why I believed what I did. And I realised that if Jesus had died for me then that demanded my full attention but if he hadn’t then I’d best just forget about it and get on with my life.
So looking back on my life, I realised that even though I’ve been so unfaithful to God and even though I’ve taken advantage of all that Jesus had done for me, he has always been faithful to me and he’s always been there when I needed him. I saw that the times when I’ve had enough faith and humility to ask Jesus for help have been times when I’ve been totally blessed by God, even though most of them were quickly forgotten or ignored by me then. The truth that Jesus truly did die on a cross and, more than that, came back from the dead, slapped me right across the face and I realised that it’s something I’d known for a long time but I’d been too proud, or selfish or afraid to accept.
However, having finally decided to give myself fully to Jesus, I met a bit of a problem. Over the last few years of my life, I had managed to let lust slip into my life in a big way. I wouldn’t have said I was addicted to pornography or masturbation but I was pretty close and maybe I was. I knew that disrespecting my body after allowing Jesus to take ownership of it was something that I shouldn’t be doing. Jesus deserved better than that. But try as I might, I couldn’t overcome the desires that were inside me; on one hand I was repulsed by the thought of looking at internet porn but on the other hand,, a part of me just enjoyed it too much to stop. A few times I thought I was making progress; I told myself that it was a simple case of mind over matter and that will-power was enough but I would always come crashing down after a couple of weeks of avoiding temptation: I was ready to give up but Jesus definitely wasn’t. I remember reading my bible and coming across 2 Corinthians 12 verse 9 where Jesus says, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”. It made me understand that Jesus can save us not only from the punishment we deserve for rejecting God but that, by the Holy Spirit, God can and wants to make us pure and holy now. I swallowed my pride and talked to some friends to get prayer and was absolutely amazed by how awesome God’s power is: the temptations still remain and I battle daily against lust (as well as all the other rebellious desires in my life) but I know that when I rely on the power of the Spirit, God’s grace will strengthen me so I can continue to strive towards living a life worthy of the one who saved me.
So now I’ve finally managed to say that I want to let go of all the rubbish in my life that I’ve been grasping hold of and I want to trust in and follow Jesus with everything that I am. Because Jesus isn’t half-hearted in his love for me and he gave everything so that I could know him and share eternal life with him so it just makes sense to me that I should follow him 100%.
And to be honest I’m fairly terrified, because trusting my entire life to Jesus seems pretty big and I don’t know how God’s going to use me. But one thing I do know for sure is that Jesus has never once let me down even a little bit and I know he’ll always be there for me because that’s who he is.
-
Damien Hine
Damien Hine
Age: 21
Growing up I always considered myself a Christian. I grew up with Christian parents, went to church every Sunday and even enjoyed Sunday school. Every Sunday I’d go to church, sit through the songs, and introduction, before going off to have fun with the other kids. After the service I used to run around with the other kids and have fun. Then my parents would come and get us, take us home, and by that afternoon I’d have forgotten about what the pastors had spoken about during our session. That was how I saw church; it was a place where some people go to have fun. For me there was nothing there of importance.
Between years 4-8 at Pilgrims’ I considered myself a Christian, but it made no difference to my life. I believed that Jesus had died for my ‘sins’, but I didn’t even know what those were so it all seemed pretty pointless. At the age of 12 I got confirmed, but only then because everyone else was doing it. In fact I’m not even sure I did get confirmed; I didn’t even hear myself when I was asked if I accepted Christ as my Lord and Saviour.
But even when it didn’t seem relevant I was searching. I was searching for the first 14 years of my life. I was searching for something, but I didn’t even know if it existed and, if it did, I didn’t even know where or how to find it. I just knew I had to. I saw the beauty of the world and I knew that God had to exist, and that if he did that had to have a profound meaning for my life.
Things really began for me in my first year at Charterhouse. In my first week a big guy three years above me, Cameron Brown, asked me if I wanted to go to the Christian Union with him that night. Believing I was a Christian I said ‘why not?’ and went along. I don’t even remember what the talk was on that night. I just remember what I felt. I didn’t find myself questioning the validity of what the speaker was talking about. I simply knew it was true. I enjoyed that meeting and decided to go the next week, and the next week after that, and have gone to every one since.
Each week I went along, each week curious to learn more. For the first time I was having the gospel explained to me properly and in a way I could understand. The speakers actually explained what words like ‘sin’ and ‘grace’ meant. For the first time I was having the gospel explained to me in spirit and in truth.
I still didn’t feel ready to make a commitment, though I knew it to be the right thing to do. At the time I’m not sure if Cameron recognized this, but he didn’t give up. It turned out that he was an attendee of a Christian camp called Iwerne and that that summer he was going. He invited me, and, after some persuasion, I went along.
That holiday was certainly the most influential of my life. When I went along I was surrounded by Christians. At first I found this to be quite unnerving. I’d always seen Christians as either boring old folk or hippie-esque people I was ‘too cool’ for. Within a matter of hours, this had been completely flipped on its head. The people around me were really nice, and they were cool.
It was at that camp that I decided to invite Jesus into my life. Every morning and evening I heard a talk and, though the gospel had been explained to me before, it was as if my ears had been unplugged. It was now not only true but also the most important thing in the world. I left camp determined to live for Jesus, as he wanted.
And for the first few days back I did. I did try to read the bible, to pray, to stay close to God. But it just wasn’t the same. At camp it had been easy to do, it had been a joy to do, now it seemed completely impossible. When I got back to school I found myself slipping back into my old lifestyle. There had been no true change. I still went to the Christian Union each week, I had invited Jesus into my life. But that was it, I’d only invited him to stand on the front doorstep. He didn’t seem to come into the house and live with me.
The next summer I went back to Iwerne with the same result. The summer after that I went back, and it looked like it would again have the same result. But this time I not only didn’t want it to. I was determined that I would live for Jesus, and that I would keep on living for Jesus. He loved me and had given his own flesh and blood in a gruesome death all for me. That meant something and the least I could do was try to please him.
When I went back to school I was determined not to fall back. I wasn’t going to allow this to happen again. And when I got back I did fight. By then Cameron had left. But God wouldn’t let me live alone. He placed two Christians beside me who showed me the power of fellowship and answered the questions I so wanted to ask.
I soon got involved with a church, not out of any sense of obligation- I felt it was the ‘Christian’ thing to do. Only there did God finish my journey to a relationship with me.
I had felt the power of his spirit before, but not in the same way I felt it here. At one particular service there I remember at the end of worship the band carried on playing. I didn’t want to stop I kept on worshipping. I was praying, singing and crying in a way I had never done before. I was so full of joy I felt I was going to burn up. It was then that my heart first decided that I was going to follow Jesus not because I had to but because I loved him. In that moment it was only him and me. Everything else faded away and I was standing in his presence, I felt that if I only I opened my eyes I’d even see his face. He was the king of the universe and he’d died for me, he loved me more than I could ever know.
It was then that I began to see God not just as my Lord and Savior. He was and always will be my father who loves and cares for me every day. He supplies everything I need. He is my joy, my peace, my strength, my corner-stone. Till that moment I didn’t think I could have a relationship with God. Much to my surprise, awe and joy I can. It’s a relationship stronger and closer than I’ve ever felt to anyone in my entire life, including my best friends, my brothers and sisters, my parents, anyone. People ask me to show them God, but you just have to look. God is everywhere, he’s all around you, he’s right beside you and he loves you more than anyone could ever know. He loves you enough to become a human and take you place on the cross, taking your full punishment for every wrong deed you ever did.
I’ll admit it hasn’t always been easy, there have been times when I’ve felt it so difficult I’ve considered giving up. And there have been times when it’s been very easy. Every Christian knows that sometimes it’s hard and sometimes it’s easy. But I can honestly say that there has never been a single second when it hasn’t been completely worth it. I wouldn’t have it any other way, there could be nothing better than knowing Jesus in spirit and truth.
I searched for the first fourteen years of my life for the truth, yet, in the end it wasn’t me who found truth. Truth found me.
-
Daniel Handel
Daniel Handel
Age: 31
Location: Colombo, Sri Lanka
Occupation: Economist
My earliest memory of staking out my theological position came when I was about five years old. In my first ever Hebrew school class we learned the story of Jonah and the whale. When my mom came to pick me up I asked, “Isn’t believing in God like believing in magic?” After a moment’s pause she said, “Yes, that is pretty much what I think too.”
I next remember sitting at the lunch table in third grade (about nine years old) questioning with my friends why if God existed don’t we see him? If God existed why did he stop talking to people 2,000 years ago? If God existed why do good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people? If heaven existed where was it? We generally concluded that as primitive man may have thought that thunder was God being angry, all religion was simply a vestige of superstitious, pre-modern science (though admittedly at the age of nine I may have said it a bit differently.) This took me happily through the next 15 years of my life.
I grew up in suburban New Jersey as a comfortably atheist Jew. I did attend Hebrew school all through my time in high school, but like nearly all my classmates just focused on the Jewish traditions, culture, and history. I had a fairly strong sense of being an ethnic Jew but was respectably atheist. In retrospect I was perhaps technically agnostic, but was closer to an optimistic existentialist than anything else. After graduating from Brandeis University in Boston in May 2002, I moved to San Diego with some friends- moving to southern California being the logical thing to do after suffering through four Boston winters!
Working as the administrator of a small health clinic project, I remember one day overhearing some coworkers discussing religion and saying, “Well, I believe in something, just not God exactly.” It struck me that it had been over a decade since I had had any new theological thoughts.
I then moved to England in October 2003 to do a course that ended up as a two year Master’s degree at the University of Sussex. At an introductory meeting for international students the first week, the university chaplain, The Reverend Canon Dr. Gavin Ashenden, mentioned that he held a weekly theology discussion group. In that exploratory mood that accompanies starting a new life in a new place, I thought I would give it a look.
Before the first meeting I made a long list of the reasons I did not believe in God and the questions I felt I had to answer before I could. The general stages I felt were deciding that there was something divine about the world, that that divinity came from a deity in the Judeo-Christian mold, that there was a messianic component to the whole story, and whether or not Jesus of Nazareth was that messiah. Since I had so many stages to go through before getting up to the core of the Christian story, it felt quite safe talking to a Christian clergyman for the time being.
During a few weeks of conversations I was quite stunned to find that the chaplain had reasonable answers to what I thought were intractable and clearly devastating questions about God in general and Christianity in particular. Perhaps more than anything, I was surprised to be sitting across from a sophisticated and very well read, intelligent and highly skeptical academic…who believed. My assumption had always been that only simple-minded, somewhat ignorant and uneducated, superstitious people were religious. Here was undeniable evidence that I was wrong.
One day after speaking with the Gavin (as the Reverend Canon Dr. Ashenden insisted on being called) I was walking back from his office and looking up at the sunlight beaming down through the leaves of the tree I was passing under. At that moment I had a feeling that, “You know, there is something divine about the world.” About three seconds later I came to my senses and banished the idea from my mind. “That was strange.” I thought.
One or two weeks of thought-provoking conversation (and a life enhancing introduction to Laphroig single malt whisky) later, Gavin suggested that I read ‘Mere Christianity’ by C.S. Lewis since it addressed many of my questions. However, as my coursework was starting to pile up I did not have time to get to the book. As the meeting was often just me and him, I felt bad continuing to take his time if I could not even read the one thing he suggested. So in November 2003 I decided to stop going until I had time to read the book. I did not see him rest of my first year in England.
Almost a year and a half later, now April of 2005, a friend of mine asked me and another friend to go to church with her on Easter. Being an atheist Jew I thought it would be an interesting anthropological experience. I think I was also a bit hungover that Sunday morning and not in the mood to do anything that required much thinking.
Her church was a very big ‘happy clappy’ church with a rock band. A far cry from what I pictured going to church would be like I felt rather uncomfortable with the whole thing. However, at one point in the ‘service’ the preacher said something like, “There might be someone here today who has never gone to church before and has many intellectual objections to God.” It was almost like he was speaking directly to me. “How many people go to church who don’t believe in God and why would a preacher say that to his entire congregation? Very strange.” I thought. Yet, whatever, the girl standing on the balcony next to me was quite attractive though amusingly carried away with the singing…and therefore a better recipient of my limited attention.
In July while writing my dissertation, I did what all responsible graduate students would do and took two weeks off to go to western Ireland with my family. Our first stop was the ruins of the ancient monastery of Clonmacnoise. While there we watched a little cartoon video of its history, with the narrator discussing how an early missionary had come and converted the local king. Just as this was being said I had a little thought pop into my head that, “Yeah good, the king got that right.” Surprised and slightly concerned about my misfiring synapses, I quickly banished the thought from my mind.
During the rest of the summer of 2005 I felt an every increasing need to ponder issues of religion and God. Actually, it dawned on me that since those discussions with the university chaplain in autumn 2003, there had been something in the back of my mind encouraging me to go back and give the God question another look. During the summer I also started to feel some vague yet tangible divinity in the world. Almost what you might call a ‘divine presence’. “Perhaps it is just a new found appreciation for nature, an awe of the vastness of time, a sense of the universal connectedness of things, but…very strange.” I thought.
With a sigh of relief I handed in my dissertation at the beginning of September and took a short road trip around northern England with some friends. The last day of the trip I was dropped in York as my other friends needed to get back to London before I did. Walking around the town center I passed a church where people seemed to be gathering for a service which was about to start. As I walked by I was struck by a sudden urge to go join them. But this was more than an urge for an ice cream when passing a store on the beach for example, but an almost physical tingling accompanied with an intense compulsion to walk in the church door. Taking a few steps forward I stopped and reminded myself, “Don’t be ridiculous, why would you want to go in a church?” Coming to my senses and taking a few steps away, I again felt a deep urge to enter the church. Turning around to do so I again stopped myself, now with the thought, “You are Jewish! You have no business going to a church!” With that I finally got a grip on myself and walked away, but with a strange sense of sorrow and guilt coming over me.
A few days later I returned home to my parents’ home in New Jersey to start the job application process. Underwhelmed by life in the ‘burbs and finally having time to read something besides economics, I quickly picked up a stack of literature I had been intending to read, including ‘Mere Christianity’. Starting to feel this sense of divinity in the world more strongly and still for some unknown reason finding myself increasingly concerned with answering the God question, I threw myself into the book. While I had problems with one of the first steps of Lewis’s argument for the existence of God, and therefore his resulting conclusions, I again was struck that an obviously brilliant man could use logic to come to faith. Perhaps religion was not the domain of the unable or unwilling to think after all.
About this time I also started praying, “God if this presence is you, if it is more than just a random neurological sensation, please make yourself real to me. Please show yourself to me.” But no voice from the heavens or magical apparition ever appeared.
In November in the midst of a not so subtly drunken conversation with a very intelligent friend of mine (us having reverted to our youth and stealing from my parents’ liquor cabinet while they were away for the night) he said that he believed in God. “What?! How could someone with his education and intellectual ability really believe in God? Very strange.” I thought. However, he proceeded to give a description of the deity as the Eternal Source, and mentioned that science tells us that the universe is eternal and infinite. How could that be? If it was, could not God also be eternal and infinite? After all, these are properties or states of being which we know to exist. After a moment of enlightened revelation, I went and took another shot of Hungarian chili vodka. Very strange, but very good!
One weekend in early December I went into Manhattan to see an old college friend. Sunday morning we went to go see the newly released ‘Chronicles of Narnia’. Sneaking out during the movie for a bathroom break, as I walked across the theater lobby I suddenly felt a soft yet firm downward pressure on my shoulders and knowledge- not an idea but knowledge- that God existed. Looking around I wondered, “How many other people know this?” Then coming to my senses I quickly banished the idea from my mind. “Forget strange, that was incredibly bizarre!” I thought rather nervously.
I soon found a job working overseas and one evening in late December, going through my books and trying to decide which ones to bring, I suddenly had a very intense ‘day dream’ of standing on a white sand beach that stretched straight out in both directions to the horizon. I had an intuition that while I was on this one place on the beach- this one place in time- and that while I could not see the rest of the beach (time) behind me or ahead of me, that even when I was not there, ‘Something’ always would be. That while I may disappear from the beach, the beach itself would remain and continue. That while my participation in history was temporary, history or time itself was a constant. But there was also a feeling that there was something transcendent and conscience about this constant. In that instant I felt that this was what was meant by ‘eternity’. The whole episode lasted just a few seconds.
By the end of February 2006 I had (despite the best efforts of the Sri Lankan embassy in DC) managed to secure a visa to go start my job in Colombo on March 1st. Instead of going directly there however, I decided to stop in England for two weeks to see friends and attend my graduation ceremony before continuing on to Sri Lanka.
Now in a full-blown spiritual crisis, and most importantly having finally read ‘Mere Christianity’ I managed to contact the chaplain at the University of Sussex before leaving. A bit to my surprise, Gavin said he remembered me from 2 ½ years previous and would be happy to meet.
We made an appointment to have lunch on campus, though due to the sad state of the British rail system (or my instinctive aversion to punctuality- can’t remember which) I arrived a bit late. Because of this Gavin suggested we just grab a sandwich at the university canteen and head back to his office to eat. Sitting down, in truly European fashion he offered me a glass of shiraz to go with my sandwich. As I got through the first glass of wine, in truly gracious fashion he offered me a top-up. As I got through that second glass of wine and most of my sandwich, in truly social fashion he offered me another glass. As I finished both wine and sandwich, in truly British fashion he offered me a post-lunch glass. I accepted and continued with what was becoming a rollicking theological conversation.
Again, I was stunned that he had brilliant yet often straightforward answers to questions I had struggled with for months. As we were talking I started to feel that divine presence in a particularly strong fashion. After discussing the work of a well known Jewish theologian I had been reading, I realized that even as I got tipsier (we now were into our dessert glass top-up) that in fact our conversation was remaining remarkably coherent. I also had a sense that as we were talking it was as if (not a hallucination in the proper sense but a vague yet tangible impression) that a beam of light was coming straight down onto him and then out through him onto me. Perhaps that impression just lasted a few seconds as well. “Very very strange.” I thought.
The part of the conversation that most impacted me was at one point he said, “Look, everything you know about the world scientifically you know because you have read it in a book or someone has told you it is so. Because it makes logical sense to you and you trust the source of the information, so you believe it. But on some level you are taking it on faith.” I realized then that over two years of conversations with him what he said was logical and that I trusted his opinion. “Well then…in your opinion…is God real?” I asked. With a smile he answered, “Maybe.” Tossing me a small Gideon’s Bible he told me that all the theoretical stuff was fine and good, but that I should do the core reading.
A week later I was on the plane to Sri Lanka and reading the Bible (as discreetly as possible- hidden behind other books or tucked deep into my lap) for the first time.
A few days after arriving I was walking around looking at some houses for rent when I passed a church with a big Alpha Course sign in front of it. Having heard about it the course while in England, the next day I stopped by and asked the priest if I could join. He said that actually they were already up to the fifth week of the twelve week program and that normally they take down the sign after the second week since they feel it is too late to join after that. However, this time around they for some reason forgot to do so. He decided to let me go ahead.
Walking into the first session a few days later (with nervous backward glances to make sure no one I knew happened to be vacationing in Sri Lanka and walking by at that moment) the group started with some passionate worship music and singing which made me very uncomfortable. After breaking up into groups it became apparent that most everyone there was several decades older than me, had been Christians their whole lives, and had never struggled too much with the type of questions I had. However, they were incredibly nice and welcoming so despite my discomfort and occasional frustration, I stuck it out. Plus they provided free Sri Lankan dinners.
During the following weeks I continued to feel the divine presence in the world and continued to become increasingly torn with figuring out if God existed, even as I became more settled in the city, with my new job, and was starting to meet people. I also continued talking into the air asking that presence to make itself real to me if it really was God. In addition I continued to read the New Testament I had been given, which I found to be a series of short, repetitive, choppy stories all thrown together with little attention to flow or style.
At the end of March was the Holy Spirit Weekend retreat with Alpha Course. We went to a lodge on a lake a ways outside of the city and for the whole weekend I felt a terrible frustration trying to answer enough questions so that I logically could say “Because A and B, therefore God must exist.” My conversations in the groups did not help as we got stuck debating human origins and the literalness of the entire Bible, just a few of the things which made it impossible for me to believe.
Saturday evening the preacher on the video presentations used as the focus of the course (Nicky Gumbel, the vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton in London) was discussing how the Holy Spirit turns nominal Christians into Christians overflowing with God. However, he suggested that some people might not even feel like nominal Christians yet, so before asking them to invite the Holy Spirit into their lives he offered a basic conversion prayer. Feeling completely fed up with a weekend of agonizing mental struggle and prayer without any success, not to mention a month in Sri Lanka consumed with trying to reach God and really six months previous of constant theological questioning, I gave up.
I prayed to the best of my ability, “Okay God, I don’t know if you are real but I can not reach you intellectually. I give up. I am Jewish and I don’t really believe in Jesus, but if he is part of the equation then fine. But you are going to have to come to me.” I then went down to the lake by myself and looking out over the scene of villages surrounding the water and fisherman fishing on small wooden boats, all framed with lush vegetation at sunset, I again repeated that I had nothing left, that I could not make God make sense and was done trying. A few minutes later I felt a deep and tranquil peace, but having finally ended months of trying to work through my objections to believing in God, I figured that the feeling was merely some long overdue mental relaxation and relief.
Later that evening a rather loud preacher came in shouting and screaming about banishing demons from himself and people yelling, ‘Hallelujah!’ and ‘Amen!’ He then laid hands on people and everyone seemed to immediately fall backwards onto the ground and many started crying. When he prayed over me I felt nothing. As he kept on repeating it- including blowing on my face- I decided to just end the drama and fall to the ground also. Suffice to say I found the whole episode rather fake and a bit disconcerting, confirming my suspicions that Christianity was merely proof of the psychosomatic power of the imagination.
Sunday morning everyone was congratulating each other on a life changing weekend but I felt rather disappointed. We finished the weekend of activities with a little questionnaire which was supposed to identify our spiritual gifts. I ended up the only person getting ‘Stimulating the Faith of Others’. This made me even more depressed that the whole thing was ridiculous since how could I stimulate the faith of others if I didn’t have any faith myself? “This is truly absurd.” I thought.
We arrived back at our local church by the early evening and by the time I got home I was exhausted both mentally and emotionally. Really wanted nothing to do with thinking about God for the first time since I arrived in Sri Lanka, I just threw on a DVD of some Hollywood action movie and sat back to relax.
After a few minutes I suddenly felt that divine presence again though this time it was particularly strong. Despite feeling fed up with it all, I decided to once again get on my knees and pray for that presence, if it was God, to be made real to me. Looking at the clock on my computer it was 6:26pm on March 26, 2006.
Kneeling down I closed my eyes to pray but then realized I felt quite hot. Looking down at the tiles on my bedroom floor which at that moment looked particularly nice and cool, I thought I would lie down. As I did, I felt myself shivering a bit and then started to breathe deeply. The shivering intensified along with my breathing until I found myself trembling so much that I was almost convulsing on the floor, “Now this is really weird, am I doing this myself?” I thought. I then felt an overwhelmingly intense physical force in the core of my body and started to breathe much harder, almost hyperventilating. As I exhaled it was almost as if I started mumbling. And then as the force I felt in my body became even more intense, that mumbling became words. But not English. Not any language I knew or had ever heard of.
After a few moments of desperately and insistently chanting what seemed to be repeated words, I felt that the feeling welling up inside of me was so intense that if it didn’t stop I would burst. Forcing myself up I said, “God, if this is you, then you have to stop, I can’t take this.” And instantaneously the feeling stopped. Sitting on my floor in a state numbed shock I thought, “I…think…this means…that God exists. The God really actually exists.”
My first reaction was to go immediately to the church to talk to the priest. Leaving my house I kind of went into or realized I had gone into some type of altered state. My head felt perfectly clear, but suddenly things looked a bit different, and I felt incredibly different. Walking down my street I resisted the urge to run to the church so as to not make a scene. I reminded myself to smile at the soldiers on the corner and wave like I always did so they wouldn’t think anything strange was happening.
As I got to the church only the priest’s wife was there and as I walked in the door I blurted out, “I just talked in tongues and God is real!” “Praise the Lord.” she said, “We have all been praying for you so much.” As I managed to collapse into a chair I again was overwhelmed with a physical force and began trembling. But the feeling as before was wonderful. Despite having experimented with my share of drugs in college, I had never felt anything like this. It was the best feeling I had ever had. It was the most amazing feeling I ever could have. After some time of basking in the power of what I knew at that moment to be the living God, I decided I should go pray by myself. The priest’s wife showed me into a small guest room and shut the door. On the wall in the sparsely decorated room was a picture of Jesus. Looking at it I felt myself saying, “Jesus, if you had to die so I could feel this good, then…thank you.” I then let myself fall on the bed and felt myself starting to come to tears, overwhelmed by the realization that I did not deserve to feel this amazing, to have this experience.
Looking around the room I saw lots of Christian literature, including some with Bible verses. At that moment I was struck by the knowledge- not the thought, but much deeper and more immediate, really knowledge- that it was all true.
I then spent the next few hours, still in this altered state of perceiving God, having dinner and talking with the priest (who had now returned home) and his family. However, they did not seem to fully appreciate the momentousness of what was happening to me. They seemed to not fully understand the shattering of my worldview that I did not believe in God before and suddenly…now I did. At about 9pm I excused myself to return home.
That night I could not sleep but was overwhelmed by joy and was filled with one epiphany after another. I also felt overwhelmingly Jewish, stunned that the God I had always pushed aside as an irrelevant part of my Jewish heritage was truly real. I sang the Sh’ma, I wanted to wrap myself in a talis, I wanted so badly to be in a synagogue.
I also started reading some of the books on my bedside table. The first was an introductory book about Christianity. Going through it I was overwhelmed with the knowledge (again not the thought but knowledge) that the author of this book had experienced what I was now experiencing. I then picked up a copy of the Quran I had been given and reading it, had this same sense of knowledge that while it referred to the God I was feeling at that moment, that that God was in the book, while recognizable, somehow the description of God was significantly different from what I was experiencing. Finally picking up my copy of the New Testament (which coincidently I had finished reading that morning) the parts in the gospels where Jesus was speaking almost leapt off the page. As with the light I had ‘seen’ when talking to Gavin in England, it was not quite a real hallucination, but rather a deep impression. Going to the epistles I was again filled with an amazed knowledge that what they said was true and incredible, but was not quite as incredible as the gospels where Jesus was speaking. I also was filled with a sense of knowledge that they were written by someone in the same state I was in. Written while the author was experiencing what I was experiencing.
I did manage to sleep an hour or two but woke up before sunrise. Still in this state of perceiving and feeling God, I went outside as the sun rose and looking around was overwhelmed by the fact that we lived in a world where God was real. I kept saying to myself, “God EXISTS. God IS.” It was like magic, what a stroke of luck! How incredible that a real God really was real! How much more amazing the world suddenly was! Walking around the block it struck me that even the ancient Mayans who worshipped their local deities mostly had it right. They sensed and thought there was a Something. I thought there was nothing. They were right.
An hour later, now the morning of Monday March 27th, I got ready to go to work, still feeling like the barrier between the seen and the unseen had been folded back and the power and reality of God was beating down on me with incredible force. Arriving at work people kept asking me how my weekend was and deciding that it probably was not professionally acceptable to say, “Oh you know, pretty good, God revealed Himself to me. How about you?” I managed to get in my office as soon as possible and close the door. Sitting at my computer I still could hardly breathe, still filled with an overwhelming spiritual force and revelation. Needless to say, analyzing export data seemed at the moment to be a rather trivial task.
After a few hours, by about 11am I felt that I could not take it, I could not be at work and had to go talk to someone about this. Being as an old Anglo-Catholic church was directly across from my office I first went looking for a priest there. Walking in, I noticed all the crucifixes and statues and felt a deep sense of knowledge that whoever created all this had definitely experienced what I was experiencing at some distant point. It was a deep sense that the experience of the God I was experiencing was at the core of all this and that the expression of faith represented by this church grew out of a collective experience of what I was feeling. However, I also sensed that the personal immediacy of the experience I was in the midst of was made muted by time and the visual expression of God used in this church. The priest was out of town that day so I next went to a Methodist church down the road that I passed daily on the way to work.
Asked to sit in the anteroom, still trembling and feeling stunned by the presence of the living God, after quite some time out of the corner of my eye I saw an older white man walking over to me. I had a deep conviction and knowledge that he was there for me to talk to. It was an emotion unlike any I had ever had.
As he sat down he said, “How are you?” in a soft Irish accent. I looked at him and quite haltingly asked, “You aren’t by any chance a minister are you?” He responded that in fact he was an ordained minister but was now working as an aid worker in the east but was back in Colombo for a few days to renew his visa. “Why, what’s up?” he asked.
I then proceeded to tell him my whole story, saying. “Last week I was reading Bertrand Russell and thought he was pretty much correct! Do you know who he is?” “Yes I do.” said the minister. “But as you are now feeling, God is not a label we put on the mystery of the world, God is not an intellectual hypothesis, or a superstitious legend. God is real. But coming from a Jewish atheist background this must be rather traumatic for you.”
It is hard to express, but somehow, those were exactly the words that I needed to hear. He understood.
I returned to work and by about 2pm or 3pm in the afternoon, some 20 hours after it had begun, the sensation that I was directly experiencing and perceiving God had faded away. I called up a couple I had met the previous week at church (having very randomly woken up quite early that Sunday and just as randomly decided to go to church.) That evening, feeling suddenly terrified that the feeling was gone and that I would never experience it again, they prayed for me, and sinking back into their sofa I felt the deepest sense of tranquility one could imagine.
The next day the questions started. “WHAT just happened to me?” My first thought was that I had perhaps experienced a rather intense psychotic episode. However, having unfortunately seen people firsthand in the midst of psychotic episodes, I felt my experience was very different. First, psychosis overwhelms and disorients those experiencing it. The trauma is they are not aware that they are acting psychotically. In my case even as I was speaking in tongues I was able to step outside of the experience and say, “Woah, I am speaking in tongues.” I was able to walk outside and decide not to run since that would make the soldiers on the corner think something was wrong and I was able to talk to people at work without revealing what I was experiencing. Therefore, I was able to judge how my actions would appear to others and adjust myself accordingly. This does not seem like reasoning ability someone in a psychotic episode would have. Psychosis is also negative. It dehumanizes and harms the person suffering from it. My experience was overwhelmingly positive. At the same time it was not a manic episode associated with bipolar disorder because I did not feel like I was God, and despite the overwhelming joy I felt, was rather humbled. Neither was it a depressive episode as the experience was pleasurable in a way I had never before imagined possible. Lastly, I did not feel out of control at all. I was able to make the force inside of me stop by simply asking it to. It therefore seemed unlikely that what I had gone through was a psychotic episode.
I next wondered if I had ingested something or had some wild drug flashback. However, I did not eat anything out of the ordinary that day and again, having tried a variety of drugs in my past, realized that this was a wholly different feeling. Also there was no hangover of any sort the next day. No moldy rye bread explanation seemed to make sense.
It then struck me that the experience happened at the first moment in months that I was not thinking about religion at all, so it could not have been some kind of mental state I worked myself into. Furthermore, the experience did not start the Saturday night when everyone else was falling on the ground and crying- and mine was a very different experience to what I saw- so it was not some religious frenzy, power of suggestion or herd behavior that led me to it. I was left with no other logical explanation but that what I had experienced was what I had originally felt it was. God.
In fact it was the perfect experience to convince me that God existed. Had I had that experience while in New Jersey I would have had no one to talk to since all my friends and family there were Jews and/or atheists. Had it happened when I first got to Sri Lanka it would have made settling in impossible and I would still have had no one to turn to to help make sense of the experience. Had it happened during the weekend retreat I would have wondered if it was just my mind playing tricks on me.
It did happen at the first possible moment that it would be a wholly positive and perfectly convincing experience to me. It honestly seemed and still does seem, as if someone with knowledge of what I was going to be doing in the future… had planned it.
As Peter says in chapter 1, verse 16 of his first letter, “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” And as strange as it seems to this recently atheist Jew to say, as John so accurately puts in chapter 1, verse 3 of his first letter, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus [the Messiah]. We write this to make our joy complete.”
More Confirmation and Formation
An experience which happened in the first week of June deeply confirmed my new faith. I was lying in bed one night reading ‘The Story We Find Ourselves In’ by Brian McLaren. I was reading his beautiful discussion of God’s work at the moment of Creation when I suddenly felt and remembered the sensation I had during my experience on March 26 (which some weeks after it happened I found out was a quintessential experience of what Christians call being ‘baptized with the Holy Spirit’.) It was a sensation and deep impression of perceiving God as an absolutely overwhelming and sizzling, black, dense cloud. Not only that, but at that moment all the doubts I had about doctrine and identity- even the concept of religion and different religions- seemed to fade away, and the only thing that mattered was that God exists, and that we exist in relation to God. I leaned over and wrote on a scrap of paper, “God IS”. The impression lasted just a few seconds. I then realized that not only had I felt this same sensation and impression of God on March 26, but it was the same as the impression of God I had in my dream the night before having lunch with Gavin in February.
Several weeks later on June 26th, I was reading the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) for the first time and got to the description of the revelation at Mount Sinai in the book of Exodus. A few moments after reading the passage I wrote an email to some friends describing what had just happened. I started off by quoting an email I had written earlier in the month just after reading the McLaren book. The quote from that email was:
“And then I did meet God…and my intuition of God was exactly that of my dream. God as a black (perhaps colorless is a better word) cloud (though without clear borders, maybe infinite cloud) of amazingly dense, sizzling energy. Conscience energy.”
I then added in what I had just read in Exodus, writing:
“From Exodus which I read today.
Verse 9. "Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after."Verse 16,17. "On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled. 17Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God."
As God revealed himself to the Jewish people so did he reveal himself to this Jew. The God I had perceived was quintessentially Jewish.
Realizing this, the next day I was feeling particularly stressed about believing in Jesus- being a Christian- and really prayed to God for some confirmation that Jesus was in fact the Jewish messiah. During the middle of the night (around 3am the morning of June 28th) I woke up and as I did so it was almost as if I was saying out loud to myself, “Ephraim says, don’t fear of me, for you have awaken to the glory of the Lord.”
Thinking it must be some Bible verse I went back to sleep. The next day however I could not find any verse even similar to that. For about a week and a half I wondered what had happened, and then on July 5th I was reading an article by Larry Brandt on the Jews for Jesus website about the Old Testament background to the doctrine of the Second Coming. He discussed how traditionally there are two biblical descriptions or literary pictures of what the messiah will be like, one suffering and one victorious. The victorious messiah (the one Jews were and are awaiting) is called in Hebrew, Messiah ben David. The suffering messiah- or the suffering version of the messiah- the one that Christians claim Jesus of Nazareth to be, is sometimes called Messiah ben Ephraim. In this context, the sentence I found myself hearing or speaking, “Ephraim says, don’t fear of me, for you have awaken to the glory of the Lord” was the Jewish name for the Jewish suffering messiah. This Ephraim was speaking in the present tense, using a name which reassured me of the Jewishness and messianic identity of Jesus, as well as addressing my fear of Jesus as a 'stumbling block' for me on my spiritual journey. It was truly an (immediately) answered prayer.
On July 17th I went to another Alpha Course session I was helping with at a different church, this one with updated videos from the Alpha Course I had participated in. During the video presentation, the speaker read a letter from a woman saying, “Although I always thought of myself as a thinking kind of person, on the Holy Spirit weekend I was overwhelmed with a physical experience of the Holy Spirit that I didn’t think could exist. During the experience, although I didn’t initially enjoy them, I had one of the worship songs we had been singing running continuously through my mind.”
Funny enough, I too considered myself to be a thinking person and a skeptic until I had an overwhelming and undeniable physical experience of the Holy Spirit. Like the woman in the letter, I was not a fan of the worship songs either- yet had one coursing through my mind throughout my experience. Someone else on the other side of the world at another time and place had experienced exactly what I had. It was incredibly confirming. After all, how many people go insane in an identical manner?
On July 23rd, at a helpers’ meeting preparing for the Alpha Course session the following day, I was told about ‘words of wisdom’ for the first time. They which were defined as, “a picture, impression, or words formed at the tip of your tongue.” I realized that I had had pictures (of the beach and eternity as well as of God as a thick dense cloud), impressions (of a beam of light when talking to the chaplain as well as the name of Jesus leaping off the page of the Bible), and words formed at the tip of my tongue (Ephraim says…) All these experiences I had in the weeks and months before first hearing about words of wisdom, yet far from being random signs of mental illness, these seemingly supernatural experiences were quintessentially Christian.
At the session the following day one of the participants on the course invited me to attend his Assemblies of God church that weekend. Having settled into my Anglican church after quite a few weeks of trying different churches, I thought it might be interesting to again explore another denomination. Arriving at the church on Sunday, July 28th, it turned out that the congregation was having its monthly healing service. After a lengthy bout of very enthusiastic worship music (I was still holding on to my disdain for it) the worship leader invited people up to be prayed for by a prayer team lead by a visiting preacher. It turned out the preacher was the same preacher who had been at the Alpha Course weekend I had attended in March. When I got to the front I was somewhat relieved that it was another person who prayed with me, as I was still feeling a bit annoyed at the preacher for blowing on my face, trying to push me over, and generally freaking me out that evening of the retreat some months before. After being prayed for, I then decided that I wanted to say hello to the preacher just to tell him that I had come to faith.
Walking over to him he was surrounded by a large group of people he was praying for but we made eye contact and he very happily said that he remembered me and wanted to pray for me. “Oh okay, why not.” I thought. Unfortunately, I was not the only one he wanted to pray for so I had to wait for almost 20 minutes for him to get up to me. He started by putting his hands on my shoulders then after a moment moved one hand down and put it firmly on my abdomen. After the prayer I walked away wondering why he had done that. I had had a queasy stomach when I arrived at church due to a fun night out the previous evening, but I had not mentioned it to him and did not think I had made any physical indications that my stomach was hurting. It then occurred to me that my stomach actually felt much better. Still not so sure about all this talk of miraculous healings, I concluded that really there are only so many places to put your hands when praying for someone (head, shoulders, arms, chest, stomach) so that his choice of my stomach must have been random and the change in my stomach condition was probably just from having had a few more hours in the morning for my hangover to wear off.
A week or so later I had a piece of birthday cake at work with icing on it, and after eating it my stomach felt fine. This was strange because I had suffered from a lifelong and rather severe lactose intolerance. In the following weeks I kept noticing that when I would eat things with a bit of dairy (bread with bits of cheese baked on top, a piece of milk chocolate, Indian curry with a cream base) my stomach would feel almost completely fine afterwards. Over the next weeks I began testing the situation by eating slightly more milk chocolate, having a slice of pizza, eating a small bowl of ice cream, etc. I then on a few occasions had several slices of pizza or a large helping of cheese curry, followed by a massive bowl of ice cream or some other creamy dessert. Still, essentially no stomach problem whatsoever (beyond that which accompanies stuffing yourself with pizza, cream sauce, and mass amounts of dessert.) Writing this in late November, almost four months later and still being able to eat large quantities of dairy with no problem, I have to conclude that my lactose intolerance really has disappeared.
But why did it disappear? Being as I was lactose intolerant from birth, through puberty, adolescence, university and beyond, I do not think any physiological change occurred which could have played a role. Having spent several months in Sri Lanka previously eating the local food and still being lactose intolerant I have no reason to think that Sri Lankan dairy is somehow lactose free or interacts with my digestive system differently. While I do not know for sure that I was healed by God, this sudden medical change did occur immediately after I was prayed over at what was billed as a healing service. Was it the placebo effect? Arguably, but the fact of the matter is the placebo effect works when you believe you will be healed of something. In my case I was skeptical of the service to begin with, I was skeptical of the service after I was prayed for, and my only thought was that perhaps it was my upset stomach due to a hangover which might be cured. It never crossed my mind that my lactose intolerance would be cured until I started to notice that it actually was.
After all these events, months of conversations, reflection, reading and studying, I decided that the best explanation for all I had experienced and for the start and continuation of the Christian faith, as well as for the existence and content of the New Testament, is that God exists and this Christian story about God is true. I decided to get baptized into the Anglican church on September 7th, 2006.
Given leeway by my very kind priest to personalize the baptismal liturgy, I was able to put together a very meaningful service reflecting my path to faith and Jewish identity. Using the Anglican baptismal liturgy as a guide, I chose readings which had been very influential in my journey to faith. However, the liturgy also called for a psalm to be read at one point during the service. As of the night before the baptism, I had yet to pick one that I felt really had meaning for me. With these thoughts on the back of my mind, on the night of September 6th at my weekly Bible study my friend Dorothy suggested we try to doing ‘lexio divina’. This devotional exercise was completely new to me. Meaning ‘spiritual reading’ the practice derives from a form of ancient monastic worship and spiritual reflection. The method is to repeat a small verse of Scripture, meditating on it and listening for God to speak to you through it. Before starting, I suggested we ask God if he had a particular verse for us to study. After a few moments of prayer Dorothy said that Psalm 16 had come to her mind. Reading it through, every verse spoke to me about my experiences and my thoughts. It summed up my path to faith and feelings at that exact moment. It was perfect.
During the quiet repetitive reading, I also had an image come to mind of being in a small boat with lots of short ropes holding the boat close to the dock. I felt at that moment that throughout my experiences I had tried so hard to remain objective and critical in everything, so scared was I of drifting into superstitions or platitudes about God. In doing so however, I had not really let myself set sail so to speak. I then had a picture of just cutting the ropes and letting the boat go free. In my minds eye I saw myself sailing on a wonderfully smooth and clear ocean with Jesus holding the rudder, a huge bright sun watching overhead, and a special wind filling the sails. I felt that it was God saying to me, “Let go, don’t fight this, don’t be afraid, trust me, and let this voyage begin.” The next day I was baptized.
On October 12th I ran across a sermon by Gavin which had been posted online. In it, he described life in God’s kingdom as us putting up our sails at the beginning of each day and giving God permission to push and direct us as he desires. My mental image involving the boat happened the night before my baptism (which symbolized my entry into God's kingdom) and weeks before I heard Gavin (of all people!) use a practically identical metaphor to describe life in God’s kingdom. While perhaps it was a coincidence, it was just the type of thing God would want me to know at just that moment, and confirming it in a way which resonated with me personally. As God first used Gavin to open the doors to a life with God for me, so it seems God used him to confirm that it was right and it was good, as I officially walked through those doors. During my walk (probably closer to a stumble) to and with God, I have slowly learned that speaking in tongues as well as ‘charismatic’ experiences overall are a bit of a sensitive topic. However, speaking in tongues is mostly something that I choose to do or not. But every once in a while- and it has only been a handful of times- it just happens when it prayer, it just pours out. It just flows from my mouth.
On September 8th, the morning after my baptism, as I woke up I kneeled beside my bed to pray and said, “Well Jesus, here I am, right or wrong I have thrown my lot in to follow you. So I guess it is your turn now." Just at that moment, I had that little full body shudder that has become more and more familiar, and I started praying from my soul.
Epilogue
In the last few weeks since my baptism I have fully realized that the dream I had in February before meeting the university chaplain in England perfectly foreshadowed my spiritual journey. As in the dream, first I could kind of feel God, what I called a 'divine presence' in the months before and first month in Sri Lanka, but only if I tried. I could make believing in God make a bit of sense, but only with lots of mental gymnastics. This was the hesitant and tenuous flying. During that same phase I was reading lots of books (highway signs) trying to find my way, though with little success, and was writing to my friend I had discussed God and eternity with. But in real life as in the dream, he never wrote back, he truly was silent. After some time I gave in and tried to follow the advice of Christians I knew (the police) who were encouraging me to follow God in a very specific and certain way. But even then I could still only feel God (fly) with much effort.
Then I did meet God. As in the dream as well as my feeling when reading ‘The Story We Find Ourselves In’, my perception was of God as a dense and dark cloud.
After that encounter I did feel that I could fly spiritually, but as in the dream not in some wild over the top way, but just skimming the earth. Slightly above it but part of it. I realized the 'bends' in the tunnel in the dream were my objections and confusions about religion. Even though they were still there, now that I had met God, I could move around them without stopping flying. This is true in my life as well. Knowing God now has not meant that I have no theological questions or confusions, arguably the reverse, but I now can deal with them immeasurably better than I could before.
As for the ice floor of the tunnel in my dream, for a long time I was very unsure of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. One day however, I read a metaphor about the Trinity that as water, ice, and steam are all one collection of molecules of H2O, so is the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit all one God. I found this metaphor incredibly helpful. As with H2O, I always think of ice as solidified water and steam as gaseous water, not water as liquid steam, thought that also is accurate. Similarly, I think of God as the Father as the 'main' form of God and Jesus as the solid form of God the Father (ice) and the Holy Spirit as the more vapory form of God the Father (steam). So maybe this was foreshadowing how the Trinity would start to make sense to me as well as to show that it was by skimming on the surface of ice- the solid form of God, Jesus- that I could fly.
Then with the bright movie poster filled room where I started zipping around after emerging from the dark tunnels, I realized that after my baptism (which signifies raising from the water ‘born again’ to a new life and light in Christ) that my core doubts about the existence of God and the importance of Jesus as the Jewish messiah really have faded away and I sense the presence of God almost continually. Of course at the conclusion of my baptism service I received much congratulations and was welcomed into the family of believers (which reflects the part of my dream where I was being congratulated on becoming a flyer).
As for the movie posters, I was first filled with the Holy Spirit while watching a movie on my computer, and a few weeks earlier when still in the US I was walking through the lobby of a movie theater (watching the Chronicles of Narnia) when I felt that pressure on my shoulders and had my first burst of knowledge that God exists. So the room lined with movie posters makes some sense.
As for the next scene of walking onto a stage in dazzling sunlight, surrounded by cheering people dressed in shimmering white? Well, I am not there yet, but God willing one day I will…
As Peter says in chapter 1, verse 16 of his second letter, “We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” As strange as it seems to this lifelong atheist Jew to say, the writer of 1 John 1:3 sums it up perfectly when they say, “We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus [the Messiah]. We write this to make our joy complete.”
-
Rob Colvin
Rob Colvin
Age: 25
Location: London
Occupation: Law student
Leaving my Boarding school in England at the age of 18, for some reason I thought I should probably get my life back on track. I knew somehow that I was not at peace with the way I was living. My brother, a few years older than me, had taken a Gap year before University, and had travelled to India and Thailand to work with children. Feeling a sense that somehow there was more to life than public exams, letters after my name, and a house in the suburbs I decided to do a similar thing. Basically I ran away to Africa...not the first of places that comes to mind. But I was given a 3 month placement in Mozambique working for a Christian Organisation called Iris.
Iris, established in the early 1990s by a couple from California was a massive Orphanage full of children who couldn’t stop smiling. In stepped a pampered private school teenager who couldn’t see why. These children had nothing to their names, some had been physically abused and abandoned, and had no idea of where they came from or who their families were. But for some reason they were the happiest people I’ve met, and the most secure people I have ever met. I had the most fantastic job of coaching soccer to the 5-10 year olds in the Children’s centre. One man I became particularly close with during this time was Domingos, who was 21 years of age. Domingos was a Mozambican pastor, and ran visits to the local hospital in downtown Maputo, the capital. One day I felt I should go along with him. We were allowed into the hospital by bribing some of the nurses with food, the remainder of which we gave to patients that were mostly dispossessed by their families and starving on hospital beds.
Domingos had a love for these people who he barely knew. What I saw in him really moved me. Walking through the stench of a poorly ventilated hospital, endless stretchers of rotting, dying people lay in despair; hundreds of them who had no hope. Domingos led us to each one of them, introduced us, and we chatted. Many wanted prayer for their sickness and hurt, and Domingos didn’t stop offering it. We stayed in that hospital for four hours. The last person we visited was a child of four years old, who had the body of a 2 year old. Alfredo had a condition called hydrocephalus, his head was as big as a soccer ball, and there was nothing the Mozambican doctors could do for him. As I stood there I couldn’t hold back the tears, not just at Alfredo’s dyer situation, but mostly how help had really come to Alfredo s side in the form of Domingos.
Domingos travelled to the hospital three times a week, to pray and visit these people. Unmarried at the age of 21, Domingos has now adopted Alfredo. I returned that night to the church that was run by the volunteers at the Orphanage, and sat down with a boy called Adam, who I had become friends with. Adam obviously saw I was a bit torn up. As I balled my eyes out in the 40 degree heat Adam just wouldn’t stop hugging me. It never felt so good to be so completely drenched in sweat. At the end of service – there was a call for people to be prayed for at the front. I felt like I probably needed to work through some things, and was nervously pondering weather or not I had the guts to go the front. So I turned to Adam, to ask if he was up for it as well. But before I could say anything he grabbed my hand and we are half way there to the stage. What amazed me was that it wasn’t just us, and then a trickle of a few more people who came up. No. All 600 of them sprang forward and knelt faces on the concrete at the front. It seemed like there was nothing more that these kids wanted than to be up there. There were no half measures. These kids had nothing and were desperate, they were parentless, but they knew that they had a father in Heaven. And that he loved them, and they knew there wasn’t a limit to how many times you were allowed to go up for prayer.
The strange thing is, is that I have been a Christian for my whole life. I have attended church since I can remember. I know the Lord’s Prayer and I could recite the Apostles creed backwards. But nothing had ever moved me like what I had experienced that day in the arms of a loving poor African. This God that I knew was not just something to be picked up and put down. He was no longer the cold deity of church pews, Sunday suits, and the smell of old ladies perfume. God was active. He was more real to these underprivileged Orphans than he had ever been to me.
That shook me. It challenged me to rethink what it meant to be a Christian, and it made me realise why what I thought was living with God wasn’t such a hot craze with my friends growing up. God was a father, a father who loved these boys more than their earthly fathers ever could have.
With little contact to home, at the age of fifteen I found myself enjoying life. At school I was popular, had academic and sporting success, but not much of a conscience for God or what he wanted from me. On the weekends, I returned to London where the party scene was raging, and I began with a couple of friends to regularly smoke pot. I knew that God loved me, but always wanted to put off his plans for my life. For three years I was having fun, and I didn’t want to stop. Soon I became involved with a girl from school, who was not a Christian and I began to loose sight of God’s plan for intimate relationship, and what he intended for marriage. I began to overstep physical boundaries with her, I continued to smoke weed, and regularly got drunk at school. I have never felt so much pain, as knowing the truth, but denying it in the way that I lived. Toward the end of my school career I became depressed, and began to indulge in self harm. It was then that I first recognised the destructive force of evil in my life. I knew what it was to deny love that was pure. It tore at me that I knew what I was doing was wrong yet I had no power to turn away from it. It seemed that God was holding an umbrella over me, yet I continually walked out from underneath it to stand in the storm. It was at this point that I realised something needed to be done. Leaving school I needed to get back on track….I left for Mozambique because I knew what was true, and I could not deny it any longer. After many years of running, I returned to the embrace of a God that had loved me from the moment I was born. I found that embrace in the form of Adam, a seventeen year old Orphan who barely knew me.
I can honestly say that looking back on my life that the fondest memories have always been when I’ve chosen to seek God. It really hit me that if I believed that God created life, surely he would know the best way to live it. I knew that God was calling me to live with him, not just believe in him. Shortly before leaving Africa I was sitting in a friend’s living room before going to bed, and I wrote this poem, which seemed to sum up just where I was at:
Amid cloudy thoughts and confused skies,
He found me weeping in the dark.
Raw and bloodshot from those old snake eyes;
He stretched his sword to glance my arm.
The touch ran deep: a spinning
Light which cut through the shaft.
Then bright rays came to hit,
Transcending the corners and pits:
Together we stood. And with
Blazing lungs of fire we proclaimed
‘Our redeemer lives’.
The crimson Cavalry bore horsemen of light;
And the multi-winged cherubim guided their path.
This legion of glory ran under my skin and up my ribs.
And the tears of my father poured from my eyes,
As I heard him cry:‘This son of mine was dead
And is alive again; he was lost
And is found.’For some reason, God thought it was best to take me to Africa to see a clear picture of who he was. I now realise that his love is too rich, his compassion to strong, and his arms too open for me to deny that he has no place in my life. He does. Having been through the extremes of rejecting him, and accepting him, I can honestly say that I am so glad that I know God: who met me where I was at, who accepted me while I still rejected him, who forgave me, and who now I walk with daily.
There was once a story of a father whose son left home, taking his inheritance, and living a life that gave him instant gratification. He spent his dad’s money on wine, women and food, until he had none left. Soon the money ran out and he became poverty stricken. He dreamed of returning home to the house of his father. Meanwhile his father longed for his son to return because he loved him more than anyone could ever describe. One day seeing his son on the horizon he ran out to the boy who weeks previously had shoved him aside. With tears streaming down his face he kissed his dirty and dishevelled son. The father cried out: ‘This son of mine was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found’. I was once this son. The father described was the God I was rejecting. The best decision I ever made was to come home.
-
Jamie Lincoln
Jamie Lincoln
Age: 26
Location: London
Occupation: Runs his own glazing business.
My name is Jamie and I am 22 years old. Here's how I came to Christ.
I grew up on a rough housing estate in south London. I had two sisters, who are both older than me, and I had good parents. We were not rich or poor but we survived.
When I was growing up there was no religion where I came from - not in my family, neither in my friends. I loved Arsenal football club. I was always playing football, for school and my estate.
But as I grew up on my estate, which is a breading ground for criminals, I started being bad at school. I was never in the classes, always standing outside the headmaster’s office. Then I became really violent towards society: breaking into building sites, damaging property - just wasting my days, writing my tag on walls and smoking fags.
As I grew up and went to secondary school I met the wrong people and started to commit crime and in my third year at Ernst Begin I was excluded for stealing from a boy which wasn’t me. But I was always in trouble at that school - fighting on the first day I went there, bunking.
The big year, 1999, is the year that I became a criminal. I use to go out in groups stealing mopeds, sneaking out at night (putting pillows under my covers so my mum and dad thought I was asleep). But one night I got arrested and that’s when they new I was committing crime.
So the gang I was in went up the ladder – burglaries, robberies. I was 14 years old when I started selling drugs for myself and others. My house used to get raided by police a few times I was in Briton police station and my relationship with my family was gone.
I had a friend who came to my house one day and said I stole his brother’s drug money, which I did not. Cut a long story short he took me to his house and punched me in the face. Probably the next 4 months this guy made me go on the streets and commit violent robberies which was a burden to me as I find I was a coward. This guy turned me into a monster.
One day my bags were packed and my mum was taking me to social services to take me away. I wanted this, but the burglary squad came to my house and arrested me just as I was going to leave. So the next day at court, I was still 14, they tried to lock me in a young offenders but the courts said I was too young, so I ended back on my estate.
I became distant and I tried running from this guy but what I ran into was crack. I just turned 15 years old and when I should have been in school I was roaming the streets of Briton piping crack in crack houses with prostitutes and men old enough to be my dad and the police where on my back.
I was walking down Brixton road and the robbery squad jumped out and started filming me saying they suspected me of loads of street robberies.
Somewhere in my life something was going to happen and it did. Smoking crack on roads, stairs and empty buildings, walking up and down the front line just to escape my messed up society and one night I bumped into this guy. But I left him later and I planned that night I had to get away from him, so I decided to try and get a life sentence. Murder was on my heart, but I ended up just getting 18 months for attempted burglary. I served 1 month in a place called Stamford house but I had a fight there and smashed up my cell and the riot police came and dragged me out of there, so the courts sent me up to Sheffield for two months.
Then the 5th of May 2000 at Inner London crown court at the age of 15 I was sent to prison for 18 months. I stayed in Feltham and the first week was painful. I now know why people take there lives. But I was moved to Huntercombe, which is where I grew up. But I still got in trouble - I was always fighting with the officers.
On the 4 December 2000 I was released and shortly after I had a new life. I moved areas and I managed to get a job cleaning for a little while. I saved up my money and went legal and bought a moped.
Then I started a new job as a trainee glazier and when I was just turning 17 I met a girl and I started going out with her. I ended up becoming an alcoholic and losing my job. Them days were when I was lost. I had nothing: no money and I started stealing again and I became so violent towards everyone. Because when I drunk all I could remember was when I used to commit crime. I really hated life and wanted to die. I was always searching for life but I never found it in the alcohol. Anyway I managed to get my job and I moved back home with my girlfriend and things started looking up.
The doorbell went on the 5th of January 2003. Streatham CID arrested me for robbery and I was charged at Briton police station. The next day at court I thought I would get out. Little did I know if I got sentenced I would have got 6 to 8 years - especially as the case went to the old bailey for a trial.
I spent 2 1/2 months in Highdown and 2 1/2 in Belmarsh but I was found not guilty because the witness refused to come.
I went back to glazing and then I turned my attention to cocaine but after three months I ended up in Feltham for three weeks for theft. When I got out of there I used to take ecstasy and go raving getting into fights, going up to the west end chatting up women - just causing madness. One day I got on a train totally off my face. I didn’t have a clue and got punched in the face by a member of the London underground service. I got 5 months in a young offenders even though I was the one who ended up in hospital.
I spent 2 months and a bit in Reading, then the last 10 days I got transferred to Wales where a day felt like a week. 2 days before I got locked up there, my girlfriend of 3 and half years dumped me. She found love in Spain. I had to deal with heartbreak in there and that’s when I started to loose my mind because I really loved my girlfriend, even though we hit each other - she was my best and only friend.
When I got out I started to see a counselor at the Maudsley hospital and I was given medication. I told him I felt like killing people and myself and I started mixing drink with my medication and bang I was out of control. I had lost my mind - I was a cannon that had been fired. I lost my job and I tried to get sectioned but the psychiatrist said no because I was a good lad.
I ended up being on the run from the police. I committed a crime up Reading - a violent robbery on a man and I was arrested and I was close to taking my life. I remember wearing that white suit smoking a fag, thinking about my messed up life.
I had been out of prison for a second and I could be back. I knew if I got locked up I would have killed myself. I had a police officer outside my cell watching me all the time because I threatened to kill myself.
I was taken to court under a fake name and that’s when the first time in my life I prayed in a court under my breath, not shouting, just in my heart: this is what I prayed: ‘If there's a god please give me bail and I will do good.’ They gave me bail.
I returned to London sleeping on peoples floors, taking pills, committing violent robberies, in fact, the worst crimes in my life - stealing from men, taking their credit cards, buying drink, fags. My life was gone - I was a nothing. I lost my girlfriend, who I loved, my job, everything. I was just a lost soul who knew I was going to prison.
Just before I went away I manged to get another glazing job and with the money I used to buy drugs and go to nightclubs and sell drugs with my sister. I wasn’t good at that - I sold everything and when I was near where I was staying I lost the money.
On the 25 of July I woke up, drunk my last beer and walked in to Briton police station and gave myself up. I just wanted a better life; I wanted out of this misery.
In Bristol prison in October 2005 I was watching TV and a Christian man was shot and he survived and he said live on TV, ‘Father God, please forgive them.’ For about 30 seconds I asked myself ‘Is there a god?’ and there and then I accepted God into my life and planned to turn from evil.
I was moved to Wandsworth prison and I had a dream there and in the dream a man or angel or the Holy Spirit said God is clearing the way for me - then I read a scroll and it said I am Your Lord God and other things.
Then I was doing a cross word and scripture was spoken in my mind and what it meant is to get baptized and so I did and two weeks later I woke up in my cell and something told me to read Ephesians chapter 2. I said if this is you God let me read it later and the next time I read it I ended on that chapter and I believe god said I was forgiven.
On June 30, 2006 those big gates opened and I was finally free. All my painful memories are gone I am not the little boy trying to escape. I have freedom now.
Dear God, Lord Jesus Christ.
I want to thank you because I never believed in you and I said bad things about you. I rejected you but you God set me free, you gave me the life I always been looking for. My words can’t explain how much I love you and thank you.
Now I believe God is calling me to be a minister and the process has started.
-
Dominic Muir
Dominic Muir
Age: 33
Location: London
Occupation: Founder/leader nowbelieve Ministries
Watch Dominic tell his own story on
The Cowlick Years
I had a happy childhood. When I remember my early years I think of birthday parties and presents under the Christmas tree and fighting with my brothers for the last Penguin in the pack. I had a dreamy time, I often got what I wanted, without wanting much, and really the only time I was unhappy was when I couldn't do a simultaneous equation or pluck up enough courage to tell a girl I fancied her.
I have two brothers and a sister and Mum and Dad would take us to church most Sundays. My Dad is a Catholic and my Mother is an Anglican so we would hop between the denominations and therefore never really became affiliated with one church. Going to church was never about the people, it seemed to be about the ceremony. The churches we went to were very traditional and pretty stuffy. I had a vague appreciation that a man called Jesus had claimed to be the son of God and that he had died on a cross for our sins but I didn't see why we had to go and stand in an echoey and cold museum to recognise that. I didn't really see the connection between Jesus and God; Jesus was a man with long hair, a beard and a slightly silly name who died hundreds of years ago. I knew that God had made the world and that we could therefore pray to him (I don't know how I made that connection) but I didn't get the formal bit, the need for church. It was boring, inconvenient and routine and only ever happened on a Sunday before lunch when I was uncommonly hungry. I used to pray at night by myself that Dad would get home safely from business trips abroad and that I wouldn't fail my exams. If my heart was involved at all, that was it.
Church was there but God wasn't. When I went to boarding school at fourteen I wanted to be confirmed a Catholic because it was slightly different. I felt it would give me an edge, a sort of mystery and depth. Catholicism, to me, always smacked of holiness and naughtiness at the same time and I liked the image that I felt it was fostering for me. If I'm honest my attitude to God at the time was that He was most probably out there somewhere but I certainly didn't have any form of relationship with Him or sense that He loved me and had my best interests at heart. I suppose I was getting a little older, feeling a little more worldly and learning about other things. I was wide-eyed at the rich tapestry of opportunity that lay before me. I liked the idea now that I could be a mysterious Catholic Intellectual, not confined to one God necessarily, one creation story and one way of life. I wanted experience - I wanted to expand my mind. Strangely, boarding school provided the perfect arena. There was a group of us into Trance, Indie and Brit Pop and for those of us who valued their so-called integrity this came with a side order of drugs and clubbing. We would experiment with class A's, discuss religion, ethics and worldviews, all the while secretly desperate to get laid.
Hormones and Amphetamines
So at 16 I was taking acid, ecstasy, cocaine, speed, dope and drinking like a Lord. It was exciting in a kind of, 'aren't I against the grain?' 'naughty but holy' kind of way. I would bomb up to London on the train and get high. Suddenly this mind alteration freed me to explore, it seemed, the possibility that God didn't exist and that He was just something I had been taught, just as I had been taught not to take drugs. I was taught not to take drugs because they were bad for me and now I realised they were fun and when taken sensibly simply not dangerous. How much else had I been taught that was barricading my life from fun and that was apparently not true? Drugs were fun and interesting and most importantly a crucial part of a sort of 'enlightenment' rites of passage that I certainly didn't want to be left out of. They were more real than this far off God who people claimed lurked in and around dusty alters. Anyway by this stage it seemed that even more people couldn’t agree on who God is or was. Not only did Christians disagree but what about all these Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus? Not to mention the millions of other religions I just kept hearing about. It was all man made and impossible to know for sure, therefore clearly not worth worrying about. And anyway science had disproved God years ago. Or at least that is what my GCSE Biology book suggested.
In my apparent intellectual freedom I suddenly felt as though I needed to free myself from the man made crutch that professed a Creator. Then the possibilities would be endless and intriguing. Oooohhh, I remember thinking that suddenly I had walked into a tremendously exciting and alternative moral and ethical philosophy. Was there a right and a wrong? Who knew anymore? That didn't matter either, because I was fast becoming my own boss.
'Being my own boss' served up some hard lessons. In the year before my A-levels I had a terrible experience on LSD. A whole bunch of us had gathered for a party at a friend of mine's parents' country house. There would be no girls, little alcohol and the menu seemed to consist of hard drugs, coloured light bulbs and drapes. Even as someone who took drugs recreationally I remember thinking that this seemed a little excessive and tunnel-visioned. Everyone was on different drugs and my selection of a blue microdot (particularly strong LSD) proved disastrous. Having come up extremely quickly with orgasmic rushes I was fast transported into another consciousness. I lost all rationale, developed terrifying paranoia, and was unable to look at anything without hallucinating. For eight hours I was deprived of all the things that provide stability; relationship, love and the concept of space and time. Instead I was met with what seemed like accusation and fear from the friends I most loved and a genuine belief that it would never end.
Maybe those guys who came to school to preach about the dangers of drugs had a point. Maybe they were doing a little more than appeasing the authorities’ so-called narrow mindedness. Indeed the lessons continued to come. I suffered from terrible paranoia from this one experience for at least six months and this was further exacerbated by a good friend in my year being taken from school suddenly one afternoon and admitted to a mental hospital. We were playing cards and his voice started going funny and making high-pitched squeaks and this terrible fear came over him. Excess marijuana had brought on an apparent predisposition to schizophrenia and that was the last I saw of Neil for many years. I saw Neil recently, nearly ten years after the event, and his condition has not improved.
Temporarily chastened, I picked myself up, stiffened my upper lip and got on with it. The following year I was made a school prefect and head of house. I was also in all the teams and everything I touched seemed to turn to gold. I ruled, and people (13-year-old boys with Lamborghini posters on their walls) started to worship me and follow what I did. I had power, just so much power! I started to imagine how this power might develop throughout university and into my career. Surely it was all about me and what decisions I made - my destiny was in my own hands. Just go out and get it Dominic, I thought.
Happy Clappers
I went to Newcastle University having under performed, at least I felt, in my A-levels (no offence to the great university or its talented alumni). The wind had slightly come out of my sails and I had spent the year previously developing my interest in art whilst doing some travelling. I lost my virginity in Sarasota, Florida to a girl whose name and face I can barely remember. But at least it was over and I could speak qualitatively, if not that quantitatively, about what was such an important issue to my friends and I. I hadn't stepped foot inside a church for at least a year and my Northern student life was a cocktail of cheap lager, unappreciated lectures and pulling women in order to 'get as far as I could' with them. I no longer trusted any girl that liked me largely owing to having had my heart broken a year previously. I thought 'I'll have sexual conquest, some mind alteration drugs and four lectures a week please.' Apparently, certain previous lessons had already worn off.
In my first year I was an inmate of Castle Leazes Halls of Residence. I had my own little room that neighboured the head of the Christian Union. I forget his name but I remember he absolutely epitomised what I had come to see as this new and slightly pathetic brand of Christian that actually prayed in groups on a week day, had 'fellowship' (an unacceptably repulsive word) and, wait for it, 'loved Jesus'. How could any self respecting male of the species, love the bearded tunic wearer? I'll tell you how: get a dodgy haircut, an ill-fitting sweater from 'The Sweater Shop' and smile when there's nothing to smile about. It was, he was, inconceivable to me. In fact, often we would pass each other in the corridors in our dressing gowns, clutching our tasteless wash bags and I would treat him a little like an escapee from a zoo. I would be curious, slightly unnerved and careful not to pick up too much of his scent.
University life, as I led it, began to wear. In my search for something to satisfy I bumped into more smiley Christians and sucked them into my slightly empty world only to spit them and their copious books out like boiled sweets that lose their appeal. Their keenness to share their faith was not only patronising but made me feel nauseous. Fuelled by an increasing fear of the job market and the importance of my success within it, my third year became all about milk round applications and the Robinson library. I did internship after internship (rather amusingly I am doing one right now) and for the first time in my life put in some hard hours at the books. I scraped a first class degree by the skin of my teeth and was finally back in the driving seat. Yes, I was now ready for the big wide world and it would have to get ready for me. I saw money, prestige and power just waiting to be seized!
From "How do you do?" to "What do you do?"
My graduation arrived at the peak of the Internet bubble, in the summer of 1999, and so, like red rag to a bull, I joined the first IT company that promised an imminent IPO with healthy share options. I saw myself being catapulted, eighties style, into wealth and glamour. A sort of executive, corporate, business card and conference suite glamour - if such a thing ever existed. My life fast became about sharp suits and guest lists. I was never mad keen on the business side of things but longed to present in front of the board, about what it didn't matter, before tearing off to a night-club to demolish fifteen vodka red bulls. And that's exactly what I did! The internet industry at that time was spiralling out of control and adolescent funsters like myself, who only weeks previously had learned to send an e-mail, were suddenly revered in the media world simply because they were still likely to grow out of their new black Gucci loafers. My spirituality was at an all time low: I now saw church as an opiate for the people and not nearly as good as the real thing.
Staring at a screen in a corporate environment was never really me though. I suppose websites, the end product, easily failed to justify the means. Soon it didn't matter how much my salary was raised and what my business card said - I was just bored. I spent more and more of my work time surfing the net for purposes that were simply not work related and began to develop an interest in Internet pornography. Like most addictions that won't stand still I wanted more and quite soon I was immersed in chat rooms, Internet dating and then Internet swinging. It was the most exciting thing I had ever been involved in, but it was that dark excitement, far from the innocent, childlike excitement that seemed more and more out of reach. It was all behind closed doors and arrangements and meetings were risky and illicit. My office and social life became an intoxicating combination of 'Eyes Wide Shut' and 'Wall Street' or at least that was my goal. It felt strangely glamorous and I was quite impressed with myself. I was lost and beginning to slip, in many ways actually, but the only way that mattered to me at the time, was in terms of my career.
So I left what in retrospect was a lust for power and money, albeit with a perfectly respectable guise, and turned my hand to the film industry - the mouth-watering prospect of creativity, glamour and fame. Now, I must stress at this stage that my motivations for entering these industries were my motivations. I'm sure it goes without saying that you readers involved in these industries do not have the same motivations. So forgive me if I'm apparently offending your vocation and your integrity! I'm not - intentionally, anyway. But I can only know myself and what was at the root of my actions. I had always had a creative instinct so I genuinely thought that this might catch fire at a film course at NYU. If it didn't then there was always the hotbed of Manhattan to fall back on. Indeed my time as an Englishman in New York was alien to the nightlife I had grown up in. It was electric and it never ended. I was sky high on the buzz of the Big Apple for four months and returned to London champing at the bit for a job in Soho.
I did however pick up some terrible habits in New York. Gripped by financial dire straits I would steal sandwiches from the university union canteen. For some reason, I easily justified this daily 'liberty' upon quick reflection of the astronomic university fees and the fact that this poor, hard working student was also having to work four nights a week as a waiter. I sometimes wonder if there might have been something lurking in the thrill of getting away with this petty theft. I'm not convinced though. I want to stress that I am not using this testimony as a confessional! This is simply an explanation of how I got to where I am spiritually and what proved pertinent in that process.
I had started to make short films in my spare time, was watching foreign films avidly for homework and really thought that my ship had finally come in. I just sensed for the first time that I had found a career that matched my passion. Following several weeks of aggressive and imaginative job applications (even if I do say so myself), with a healthy slice of nepotism, I landed a job in one of the best film production companies in London. I was employed as a 'runner', and would relish delivering cups of tea to revered film directors. These guys were so cool that I quickly realised I was moving and shaking with a different species of human. On my first day of work I was offered a line of coke off the board room table by the managing director, which I duly accepted, conscious to pass any initiation test with flying colours. Soon I realised that my wardrobe would need to have a serious make over and then finally my 't's' would have to go if my accent were not to deny any inherent talent or creativity I might have lurking behind my privileged, ex public school exterior.
I worked amazingly hard in my bid for fast promotion. And it worked. Within six months I was pulling together film crews and was on first name terms with award winning film directors. I was partying with them and worshipping them, snorting and drinking at the altar, inadvertently chasing after that heady mix of inebriation and fear. I remember vividly the moment when the film world came off its podium. It was a devastating realisation that the one man whom for me had begun to encapsulate perfection should let me down. He represented the film world because in my eyes he had everything it was about, inspired ideas, creative flare, radical philosophies, good looks, sex appeal, hip dress sense, and every film producer, writer and media company pining after him. All this and yet when I casually asked him what his plans for the weekend were one Friday evening he replied, "Well I'm not going to a country house like you no doubt." As quick as a flash I was transported back to my primary school play ground and suddenly my whole world seemed meaningless. My world had become about people like him and suddenly he was just a normal guy, if a little sad. If he was capable of making comments like that then what was I doing devoting my entire life to pleasing him? I had lost sight and perhaps had never really arrived at an understanding of why I was working in the film industry. I realised it wasn't really film that was in my blood. I wasn't in film for the sake of it, I was clearly looking for something else. Sure, despite being relatively underpaid, it was an okay way of earning money, and really fun at times, but I sensed my soul thirsting after something more. So, the icing on the cake arrived following a row with my boss and I was fired and went on holiday to Mallorca - as you do.
It seemed as though my job always left me unsatisfied. And in a way I realised at that moment that since university my life had revolved around my career. I have always been lucky with friends and have many old friends whom one doesn't need to make that much effort with. My social life was a given, it wasn't going anywhere and didn't need to, so I had invested this part of my life with copious hours in the work place in order to get everything nailed down as it should be. Sure, I was into women, but despite every romantic intention of developing a loving relationship, I seemed intrinsically incapable of getting beyond the physical. The truth is I had begun to worship certain women, mainly those I couldn't get, whilst treating others as a means of sexual relief.
True Idol
In the summer of 2002, aged twenty-six, a number of rickety old paths converged. My career was looking patchy, for the simple reason that the workplace no longer inspired me, relationships with women were dysfunctional and the fun of caning it every night had long since passed its sell by date. My acrimonious departure from the streets of Soho, in more ways than one, warranted and brought about on my part some deep reflection for the first time in my life.
What really was the point of any of it? It always seemed to be about me and what I could GET. What was the point of me? Why was I even here? Why was I on earth? What was the point of anything? All these questions just came at me in a flurry. It was as though once the distractions of the aforementioned had been taken away there was no where else to hide. I had to try and find out. So in the summer of 2002 I set out to try and find the answer, the truth to life. Saturday November 23rd 2002 was to become the most important day of my life.
Okay. So what about religion? Surely Darwin had murdered God years ago? Surely in the age of the electric light bulb anything that conflicted with rational thought was pie in the sky? Religion was irrational, it seemed only to provoke division and killing and had never done anything for me in the past. It was man's attempt to feel good about the world. A sort of feel good invention for life's losers who needed a crutch. And it was all about rules and it was boring as well. Well, I wasn't a loser, I wasn't boring and I didn't like rules. Or so I thought...
But who was this Jesus? Who was this Jesus whom this particularly pretty friend had recently confessed to 'follow'. Why would this perfectly sweet and intelligent girl with whom I had always agreed concerning the smugness and aggression of evangelical Christianity suddenly become a born again Christian? As far as I knew that only happened to naive, unintelligent people with little going for them. And why did I have to really fancy her right now and therefore have to look into doing that swear word course 'Alpha'? Sure, Jesus is arguably the most famous person who ever walked the earth. It was only right that I should be able to write more than one could fit on a postage stamp about him, but why did I sense that He was the place to start?
So I secretly enrolled on an Alpha course at my local church and was delighted to discover that I was the youngest in my 'small group' by at least ten years. This meant that I could distance myself somewhat from my fellow 'seekers' and not have to see in them my reflection - what I had come to think of as a slightly sad searching for meaning in life that clearly indicated personal weakness. Conversely, I was also rather proud of myself on two accounts, such is the sad irony. First, I was 'taking on' the course that everyone else seemed scared to go on for fear of indoctrination and secondly I was re-embarking on the admirable journey of intellectual enlightenment that had alluded me for a good few years. Sure, it was only a ten-week course, one evening a week, but such was the ludicrous melting pot of emotions and thoughts I battled with nearly three years ago.
Wednesday Evening Pilgrimmage
I remember loving Alpha. I would look forward to it all week. I just loved chewing over the meaty issues of life, discussing life and death, evolution, purpose, ethics, science, the supernatural - you name it. If it was profound then I had an opinion and I wanted it heard and listened to. I wanted my questions answered and more often than not I found that they weren't so much answered as new questions arose and old opinions, some of which I had lived by for years, just died. I started to read voraciously around the subject and thrived in this gracious arena in which I was encouraged to mouth off as much as I wanted to. I started to like the people in my group and care about what they thought and what had happened in their lives. It was just SO interesting. It felt like real life again, for the first time in years.
The mood of the place and the 'Alpha team' conjured up another interesting paradox, the paradox of course being something that I have become wonderfully aware of in my Christian walk. On the one hand the seraphic smiley faces were out in force and jarred with my moody and proud scepticism, but on the other hand I came to appreciate the tangible sense of goodwill and generosity that flowed throughout the evening. The course was free, the food was surprisingly good and we were waited upon hand and foot. I didn't lift a finger and despite having the opportunity to contribute a suggested and pitiful donation for food, my wallet remained comfortably at the base of my pocket, as it had done in church for most of my life. Church and money were a non-sequitor and as far as I was concerned I was still doing them a favour by turning up.
The Alpha course opened my eyes to questions I suppose I had been wilfully avoiding for many years. If there is a God how would He show Himself? What is love and why do we need it? What happens when we die and can we know? Is there a point to life, a point that transcends human existence? Can Christianity be looked at rationally and intelligently and not just with babyish, rose tinted glasses? I remember being slowly captivated by the person of Jesus as the weeks progressed. It was as though He started to live and breathe the more I heard and read about Him. He was a hero and He was real. He wasn't just a softee, He was hard and He did get nailed to a cross and die. That was a historical fact, as far as we can appreciate any historical fact. Why? Why did that happen and why had He had such a frightening impact on the world? He was frightening and beautiful. He was so wise and humble. He became intoxicating and seductive to me.
This person whose birth we measure time and history from. This person, the only person, who has ever claimed to be the Son of God and actually bothered to back it up with selflessness, world changing wisdom and miracles. It's a big claim isn't it, to say 'Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father'? (John 14 v 9) It was a claim, which started to jar. It jarred because I saw so much truth in Him, in His teaching, that it made me feel uneasy that He would lie, or indeed those writing about Him would lie (most of whom were executed for what they believed through witness, not just faith), about the things that seemed more unbelievable to me. He said: ' I am the resurrection and the life, he who believes in me will live, even though he dies.' (John 11 v 25) It didn't make sense that these beautiful stories, drenched in truth and love, should be underpinned by what was essentially a big lie and a con.
I had spent most of my life quite comfortable in the view that Jesus was a great moral teacher and maybe divinely anointed in some kind of cosmic way. But He was still just a man. Now I was faced with what some people have termed 'The Jesus problem'. As C.S.Lewis writes, 'A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.' He would either be insane or else he would be the 'Devil of Hell.' 'You must make your choice,' he writes. Either Jesus was, and is, the Son of God or else he was insane or evil but, C.S.Lewis goes on, 'let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.'
But maybe it wasn't about Jesus being a liar or insane? Maybe we should just leave Him out of it? After all, Jesus never put pen to paper. Maybe the Gospel writers were the ones who should take the blame? One big fantasy had been at play all along, the conspiracy to end all conspiracies. But that argument didn't sit with me for long either. The atheist John Stewart Mill asked this very important question: who among Jesus' disciples was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus? Or imagining the life and character revealed in the gospels? Jesus seems to have a character so original, so complete, so uniformly consistent, so human and yet so far above human greatness that is it really possible to regard him as a fraud or a fiction? It might be said that it would take more than a Jesus to actually invent a Jesus.
Proper Surrender
The Alpha weekend away quickly approached. Despite my increased enjoyment of the course, I had come to dread the weekend. I revered it as the weekend of change, the moment when the Demon Headmaster would say 'loooook intooo myyyy eyeeees chiiiiild.' I would leave on the Friday in a pair of Adidas trainers, smoking a fag, and return on the Sunday wearing a pair of those awful walking boots with a vacuous grin on my face. By this stage I had started to see the point of the cross. I had caught the slightest glimpse of what it might mean to be forgiven for my sins and what this might mean to a Holy God. If God is holy, if God is love, then maybe my sin might be a problem. Maybe sin and evil in the world had a point, in the divine scheme of things? I realised that I had done stuff that had hurt people and hurt myself (and maybe God) and I guess it made sense that perhaps Jesus on the cross would provide an answer. Maybe life without sin, or at least turned away from sin, might be the life that God had intended? I just remember having this gentle conviction that perhaps it all made sense. So despite every excuse to miss the weekend away, I went, wearing middle of the range loafers and determined to adopt an ambivalent, carefree approach to all that was thrown my way.
The thing is, I quite rightly feared the weekend because it revolved around understanding and experiencing the person of the Holy Spirit. As far as my cereal packet Theology would stretch, this meant the power of God here on earth. The Spirit was God's way of touching us physically, emotionally, you name it - MOVING on earth. I agreed with all the teaching that I had heard about the church denying, forgetting about or sidelining the Holy Spirit. My experience of church had indeed been God the Father focussed, with a little bit of Jesus and next to no mention or allowance of the Holy Spirit. I had never seen any supernatural power in church. But that didn't mean I was ready for the real thing or indeed ready to know for certain that there wasn't any power in God on earth. I had always been safe in the hope that He might be there, if worst came to the worst. Surely If I asked Him to move and then He didn't it would be generally worse than if I just trundled along for another ten years in blissfully hopeful ignorance albeit with a slightly more informed half faith that I could share at intellectual dinner parties.
As the weekend progressed these thoughts and feelings tossed about in my mind like smalls in a tumble dryer. At lunch time on the Saturday I remember fighting with my vicar, mentally not physically you might be relieved to hear, over the issue of pride and how it was a cop out to be a Christian - it was the easy option. Yet clearly it was difficult to relinquish control? I was at the stage where intellectually I was there, I was sold, but the idea of being a Christian still made me feel sick. It was a cop out to admit needing help and forgiveness and would mean that I would have to attach a metaphorical sign to my forehead, in pink neon, that alternately flashed 'looser/crutch boy' to the whole world. Charles Marnham, my vicar, replied with a thought that was to be instrumental in my shift in attitude and continues to hold more and more truth to this day. He explained that on the contrary life as a Christian was increasingly difficult in this day and age and that it was anything but the easy option. I had failed to see how I was contradicting myself. Yes, I had failed to spot another Christian paradox. On the one hand the world often sees Christians as people who take the easy root, who are 'needy', but on the other hand, in their doing so it's made anything but easy to be one. Alice Cooper illustrates the point amusingly: 'Even the addicts are saying, "It doesn't matter how many drugs I take, I'm not fulfilled. This isn't satisfying." There's a spiritual hunger going on. Everybody feels it. If you don't feel it now, you will. Trust me. You will... Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that's a tough call. That's rebellion.'
As I walked off my nervy and meagre ploughman's lunch I remember laughing on the telephone with Dave, a friend of mine, about how our group was about to ask the Holy Spirit to come and that when he next saw me I would be a changed man. Despite my propensity for sarcasm and the cynical embers that remained nestled within my character, I did genuinely believe that something big was about to happen. I felt it in my spirit.
That Saturday afternoon, in a parochial, converted barn thirty miles outside of London, I prayed the prayer. I prayed from the bottom of my heart for the first time in my life. I thanked God for Jesus and for the cross, I asked for forgiveness and really meant it and asked to be filled with His Holy Spirit. It's funny; because looking back I remember very nearly not praying anything. I had a clear choice and my first decision was 'no'. It was as though I didn't want to take the risk. My feeling was that I would leave it a while and maybe think about it some more. You see, I was jostling with issues of self-identity still and was worried that God would change me into some sort of preaching freak who never had any fun (no irony intended). But then I remember recognising this typical attitude that I had adopted for so long now. This kind of non-committal, diluted, easy approach to my life, a life that in so many ways carried less and less meaning. I realised that I never committed properly to anything. There was always a caveat, a get out clause, and most importantly an escape route for D.L.Muir Esq., the master of his own destiny. So I took a hold of myself and followed my heart.
I knew that I was really saying to God, 'If you're there I'm yours'. If God existed He knew this prayer was real. He knew that if nothing happened beyond a sort of mental and academic acceptance of a religion, that pretty soon I would be off for good. On November 23rd 2002 the Holy Spirit filled my heart and body. At the risk of sounding trite and irreverent I am loathe to put into words what God does to you when He tells you He loves you, that He is real, that He has been there for you all along. It is different for everyone. But I will say that it was like electric waves of liquid love that left me in no doubt that the God of the Universe had visited me personally and reassured me that I was part of his plan here and beyond. It felt like He was smiling at me and saying, "I've been here all along, I'm so glad you've come." I choked back the tears and ensured that any collapse was prevented by a dignified slump on to a neighbouring sofa. I got myself outside and by myself as quickly as I could. I walked out into a world that Someone had made and that was being looked down upon. I half expected to see a canopy in the sky that God was looking through - like that film 'The Truman Show'. It was that bizarre. Totally different. Like black and white to colour, dark to light. I didn't say a word to anyone for several hours. On the way home I saw a magpie by itself sitting on a telegraph pole. Normally I would have saluted it feverishly lest its solitude bring immediate and guaranteed sorrow into my life. This time I just smiled gleefully, overjoyed and truly free for the first time in my life.
God found
Here’s a simple prayer which you might like to pray now, like the one that I said a few years ago….
Lord Jesus Christ,
I am sorry for the things that I have done wrong in my life (take a few moments to ask his forgiveness for anything particular that is on your conscience). Please forgive me. I now turn from everything which I know is wrong.
Thank you that you died on the cross for me so that I could be forgiven and set free.
Thank you that you offer me forgiveness and the gift of your spirit. I now receive that gift.
Please come into my life by your Holy Spirit to be with me forever.
Thank you, Lord Jesus. Amen.
-
Ashley Archer
Ashley Archer
Location: Southampton, UK
Occupation: Artist, Housewife and Mother
For the most part my early years were endurable. My mother, an Anglican, stayed at home with my sister and I until we started school, then returned to work. My father seemed to always be at work and didn't figure much in my childhood. The road on which we lived was full of children and we roamed freely in and out of each other’s homes and lives, we had adventures, rescued stray dogs and 'ran' away from home on more than one occasion. Church was something altogether different, it was quite stifling, a place where you had to pretend you were happy to be. Even though the services were little more than an hour long, I yearned to be at home, helping my dad in the garden. He stayed home, so it seemed unfair that we were made to go. We had no friends there and neither really did my mother, not ones that really knew us, anyhow.
I think that was the start of my twisted belief that you could hide things from God. It seemed to me that putting on your 'Sunday best' implied more than dressing in your smartest clothes. None of my everyday friends went to church and it bore little relevance to my life. I didn't develop a personnel relationship with God, I wasn't even aware that I could.
When I was about 10 yrs old, my sister started attending a bible based home group, run by her (and later, my) history teacher. He was soon welcomed into the family and had his feet firmly under our table. This was my first introduction to life impacting Christianity, although it was tainted with a perversity that was to haunt me for many years to come. The teacher who led this charismatic group was later exposed as a pedophile, when one of his students came forward, fearing she may be pregnant .Unfortunately this wasn't the only deviance that snuck into our household, cloaked in religion. My mother's best friend, a staunch Catholic man, developed a very unhealthy relationship with me from an early age. He would insist that my mother and I attend his church whenever we had to go and stay with him, an activity I hated almost as much as I did him. My life continued to be blighted by the sexually depraved, when in my final year at primary school, my teacher singled out myself and several friends. We were given particular attention and frequently taken on hikes and camps with the expectation, on his part, of alternative extracurricular activities. He is currently serving a prison sentence somewhere in the north of England.
It seemed that I couldn't escape it, that perhaps I invited it! I figured that I had to be pretty darn unlucky or stupid to let this happen so often. Self rejection set in, but also denial, I subconsciously decided that if I didn't think about these things, then they didn't really happen. As I hit adolescence my internal anger went from a steady simmer to a rolling boil. Usually it was my family who bore the brunt of my ferocity; I hated them for not knowing, for not protecting me. I hid it well from friends and went on with life as best I could, but I became very introspective. My escape was the world inside my head, my dream world were no-one could hurt me and I could be whoever I wanted to be. I distrusted men and became timid and aloof, any attachment to the opposite sex stayed firmly in my imagination, where I could control the outcome. Any possible suitors would have found it impossible to match up to the fantasy that I had created, of the perfect relationship.
After a few years I started going to the church that had emerged from the ashes of my sisters ill fated home group, but only because I was told to. I remember hearing one of my sisters friends, speaking in tongues at a meeting, and thinking ' Gosh, she's good at Latin!' I then proceeded to recite 'Tu es pulchrissima' at every meeting after that, thinking it must be the 'thing to do'. I began listening to teachings on the Holy Spirit, they at least held my attention for a while, long enough for me to ask to be baptized at the age of 14.
By the age of 16, life outside of church was looking much more interesting. My best friend and I started college, were being invited to numerous parties and for the first time I allowed boys to get within 3 ft of me. Having pushed all my past hurts and anger deep, deep down I found it easy to fall away from church. Again, no-one really knew me there and I figured God was probably better off without me. I was tainted and to my mind, pretty much worthless. So I submerged myself in a life of parties, concerts and artistic expression. I dabbled with the occult and became obsessed with dark music; I even took to writing poetry in my own blood. As a young child I had always been terrified of the dark and disturbed by frequent, horrific nightmares, but now they seemed to intensify and apparitions appeared in my room.
About a year after starting college, I met my husband. From the moment that he drunkenly lurched over to kiss me, at a party, I knew that I would let this one closer than the rest. In fact, he didn't give me the opportunity not to let him. He invaded my every waking moment, much to annoyance of my best friend, and after 3 weeks of spending every day together he told me (in French) that he loved me. His persistence and huge puppy dog eyes had stolen my heart and I loved him back. We were an incredibly intense couple, he seemed to calm my fears and I felt safe with him. Even though I loved him, I did everything in my power to test his love for me. I would drive him to the brink of insanity to see whether he would turn on me or leave me. We broke up many times, on my insistence and I saw other boys, but I always felt the need to go back and he always accepted me.
Roughly a year later the apparitions began to increase, they would walk over to my bed, kneel on my chest and attempt to strangle me. My dreams got worse and things in my room moved of their own accord. If this was Satan’s attempt to convince me that I belonged to him, then it had the opposing effect. My attentions were drawn back to God, though I didn't have the audacity to ask him to help me. I felt that I'd bought this upon myself. I began lurking at the back of church meetings, not wanting in, but still feeling that pull on my spirit. This went on for months until I eventually succumbed and went back to church. I was curious and couldn't get enough of God's presence, much to my boyfriend’s disgust. He was an atheist and wanted nothing to do with my God. We muddled through for a while until I finally gave him an ultimatum. We had already decided that we wanted to be married, but now I was saying that unless he shared my faith we would have to split up.
It was around this time that Graham Cooke moved to Southampton with his family and joined our church. He soon became a close family friend and took a keen interest in the youngest member of the family, who seemed to be rather prophetic in nature (yours truly). I reveled in the attention, which seemed odd to me as I'd always been wary of older men. But there was something different about Graham, a purity that gave me hope. He became a real father figure and invited me to attend one of the first School of Prophecy courses that he'd just started. He also offered to impart his knowledge and wisdom into my life and I gleaned every bit I could from the times we shared. My boyfriend had since ' miraculously' become a Christian (long story and his to tell) and Graham offered the same counsel to him. We learnt so much from him over the years and he gave the address at our wedding. I still miss his mellow Mancunian accent and cheeky sense of humor.
So, we were married, we were both Christians and working together in the theatre, life was good so I thought. But I still hadn't dealt with the demons of my past and they were about to manifest in the most alarming way. Although I felt I loved God, I hadn't ever given him every area of my life. There were things, too dark, that I refused to acknowledge and it didn't even occur to me to let God go there. It wasn't until I reached 24 and was half way through a degree in graphic design that things came to a head. At church we had given sanctuary to a young woman, whose mother was the high priestess of a witch’s coven. She had been sent to our church with the pretense that she wanted to escape the coven and join us, when in reality she had been instructed to break up the marriages of the leaders. This she proceeded to try and do until she finally confessed that indeed she did want to get out of the coven and asked for our help. My family housed her for many months and the backlash from this impacted our lives enormously. But God was to give life to what the enemy intended for death and destruction.
As a result of helping this girl, a young man who attended my college was assigned the task of seducing me and breaking up our marriage. As soon as he introduced himself to me, I was oddly drawn to him. Whilst in his presence, I couldn't wait to be out of it, once away from him I felt compelled to be with him again. He would orchestrate times when we could be alone and tell me about dreams that I would have, he seemed to be able to read my thoughts. His predictions were alarmingly accurate and he fascinated me. I was soon hooked and we embarked upon an extremely disturbing relationship.
I strangely felt little guilt, I suppose I kidded myself that this too, was hidden from God, something he wouldn't want to know about. Although I felt unable to keep it from my husband. I told him everything and waited for the torrent of abuse that never came, he calmly told me that he wanted to fight for our marriage for which I will be eternally grateful. We went away for a week and when I returned to college, I found that this man had formed an attachment to me above and beyond his brief. When I told him that it was over, he threatened my husband’s life and I had no qualms about the fact that he meant it. His parting comment to me was that Satan wanted me dead too. You would have thought that I would have woken up to myself by then, but no, I was to go one step lower before hitting rock bottom. After this disastrous affair, I was yet again seduced by another student, after drinking too much at a party. This just about tipped the balance, what was wrong with me? Why was I acting this way? Was I able to keep up the pretence that I loved God, my husband or myself? No, I loathed myself; I had sunk as low as I could go and I knew then that I needed help. Again, my husband forgave me and together we asked an incredible couple in our church for counsel.
That began a year of transformation, intense pain and anguish, but also incredible relief. Everything that I'd ever been through was exposed, nothing was left hidden. I won't attempt to convey the shame I felt, the only word that summed it up was wretched, I felt utterly wretched. If a body could ever be physically turned inside out, that was how I felt. Slowly and with much trepidation, I began to trust God with my secrets and eventually realized that he'd been there all along. He knew all the disgusting details and saw me as I am and loved me, he loved me with a passion that I had only ever half heartedly accepted. For the first time in my life I felt whole, one complete person, not a girl broken into many pieces as I'd previously felt. Not a girl who had to lock things away in compartments in her life where others couldn't find them. It didn't matter anymore if people knew, the fact was, God knew, He always had and He loved me. I felt his heart break for me many times over the course of that year, I discovered his true nature and felt cleansed in his presence. He was and still is the only truth that I want to cling to, my rock of salvation. I wholeheartedly gave my life to him, and he has restored everything that the enemy tried to steal, I was now free to love him with ALL my heart, mind and strength.
-
Jack Gormley
-
Testimonies
tes⋅ti⋅mo⋅ny
[tes-tuh-moh-nee, or, especially Brit., -muh-nee]
–noun, plural -nies.
1.
Law. the statement or declaration of a witness under oath or affirmation, usually in court.
2.
evidence in support of a fact or statement; proof.
3.
open declaration or profession, as of faith.
4.
Usually, testimonies - the precepts of God.
5.
the Decalogue as inscribed on the two tables of the law, or the ark in which the tables were kept. Ex. 16:34; 25:16.
6.
Archaic. a declaration of disapproval; protest.
Origin:
1350–1400; ME < L testimōnium, equiv. to testi(s) witness + -mōnium -mony