1st July 1973 - my story

It was 47 years ago.

Well, not exactly. In actual fact it all came together in my mind a fortnight previously. It just took me two weeks to make my final decision.

But, I am going to fast here. An army kid I was born in Germany in 1956 and moved three weeks later. My friends say I have been moving ever since! I was brought up in the Anglican Church, which was both fun and colourful while Dad was stationed in Ghana. You have to love the way so many African nations worship and Ghana was no exception. It had me enthralled. And I thought this was normal.

Then we moved to Northern Ireland and our first regular church attendance was a Church of Ireland (Anglican) church in a farming community, where everyone went to church - either to the Church of Ireland or the Catholic Church in our village.

The shock for me was the difference in “church”. Gone was the colour. All the men wore black or grey suits (me included, out of obedience to the custom), and the women seemed afraid to be colourful too. There was no dancing nor swaying, because the music was sombre and often discordant with the choir doing their best to stay in tune and the organist trying to keep us all in rhythm. Gone were the heavenly harmonies of the Ghanaian voices. I wondered what had happened to church. It was a challenging hour for a young boy, to be braved motionless, except for the occasional kneeling to pray and stranding to sing.

Although the minister at the time could not make up his mind about what he believed, and therefore what to say, his sermons from Sunday to Sunday ranged from poetic thoughts to philosophical positions that were not only above my head, but seemed to be contradictory to the Sunday before.

However, there was one Sunday. I think I must have been about 7 or 8 years old. The minister began to talk about the suffering and the pain that Jesus bore on the cross, and as I looked at the stained glass window in the front of the church I was overwhelmed with the fact of God’s love for me and the lengths He went and would go to pursue my heart.

But it wasn’t my life transforming moment. That came later in my teens. It was the beginning moment of my really experiencing the personal relationship God the Father wanted with me.

My shock at the difference in this church with my Ghana experiences led me initially into believing God must be boring. When my Dad told me about certain individuals who went to our church who were in and out of prison or town drunkards that he had to constrain on some nights, I wondered where else I could find “the truth”.

At the age of ten, four years into my first boarding school (Headfort School in Co. Meath in Ireland), I made a conscious decision: “I don’t think that truth can be here (in our church); let me check out the one they call ‘the enemy’”.

And so began a search in the occult in many forms. My search for truth led me in my second boarding school (St. Columba’s College in Dublin) to asking truth questions of ‘the spirits’ of the ouija board, in a craze I helped start at the school. I would ask questions about the existence of Heaven, Hell and Jesus, and the answers were all surprisingly accurate. However, my room mates and school friends were only interested in asking about boxing match results (like who would win the match between Cassius Clay and Henry Cooper) and other such pursuits, which I felt were inappropriate and a waste of time.

Soon I had led my closest friend into the occult, and he and I delved deeper and deeper while my friend also led me into drugs. Both of these pursuits were expensive and beyond the reaches of my pocket money, so I began stealing.

When the stealing came to light quite some time later I was on the verge of being expelled from school and this brought a crisis in my life. Thankfully the headmaster believed in me and, by the grace of God, I was allowed to stay in school.

Next I had a teenage crush on a girl who had recently come to school, but who was a senior. I was still a junior and the bridge was therefore huge between us. However, my best friend, was sick of my being lovesick and, being more brave than I was, he went to talk to the girl about ‘the problem’.

Soon after this he had a radical, deeply searching and, for him, terrifying experience of the presence of God in his life, after which he was completely transformed by Jesus into a completely new person. Instantly, he was off drugs, off cigarettes and had no interest in occult pursuits.

Of course, I was devastated and alone. When I felt the power this girl had (“Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world”) I was stunned as I had never seen such power. All the demonic stuff I had seen paled in significance to what this girl had through the Holy Spirit. At times, when she talked to me, I literally felt pinned to the wall, and it had nothing to do with my lovesick condition!

As she and my best buddy, Grant, told me more about God, and answered all my questions, I became more and more convinced. Then she took me to her church. Now that was an experience! As a good Anglican all my life to this point, everything was very predictable and organised. Her church terrified the life out of me, and I wanted out of there. Partly because of its extreme Pentecostal nature I never knew what was going to happen next. And partly because of the power I was sensing in all the people around me. What was in my life did not like that. However, whenever I left the place, I just wanted to be back, because I knew the Omnipotent God was there and He loved me. These wildly crazy people had something for which I was searching!

Realising that these two friends of mine and the people in her church had found God (like I had read about in the Bible), and were seeing miracles happen all the time, I suddenly knew that if I was to believe in this Gospel message of Jesus taking my place and dying for my sins so I could have relationship with God, then I needed to spend the rest of my life telling people about Him.

This was two weeks before I came to know Him personally. I spent the next two weeks ‘counting the cost’ of what was about to happen and then on 1st July 1973, while smoking in the school maintenance team’s canteen, Grant prayed with me and I gave my life to Jesus and said ‘Yes'!’ to His call to take the Good News to every nation and people where He would have me go!

That was forty-seven years ago today.