​I have been fortunate to have been brought up in a loving Christian family, so I have always known about God and had the freedom to explore Christianity on my own ground. Although I was never pressured into coming to church, I turned up to pretty much every Sunday school session without fail or questioning up until I was about 11 when I started to think about what Christianity was all about. I realised that I couldn’t get my head around a God who could not be seen or touched yet was real, or a God that allowed suffering.  At this age I suffered from what I call ‘not being cool enough’ phobia which I believe most teenagers suffer from. I realised it wasn’t cool to be a Christian I distinctly remember my friend asking me if I was one of ‘those’ Christians and I said NO in a very dismissive way. Due to this and further stereotyping I became very embarrassed about the idea of being a Christian and decided to give up church altogether. From being a regular member in Sunday school I became a non-existent member in the youth group Pathfinders.
Although I would love to say my faith grew from here it only got worse as I got older when all the real pressures kicked in: alcohol, gossiping, sex, boyfriends, beauty. This is the age cool is no longer a straightforward definition of not being a teacher’s pet, it’s a whole other dimension which is extremely hard to follow. At this point I was weighed down with all these pressures:  I wasn’t pretty, I didn’t have a boyfriend and I wasn’t popular so therefore in my eyes that  amounted to not being good enough. The idea of church was now a distant memory, my Sundays were filled with pretending to do homework instead of church in order to have a lie-in or a TV veg. I wasn’t anti God or Christianity though, I could see my parent’s passion for Jesus and I knew it couldn’t be all made up, but I chose to ignore it in order to fit in.
So why do I believe? Basically I got into the wrong crowd when I went to Sixth Form, they pulled me into their clique, but I ended up becoming one of them, obsessed with guys, parties, alcohol and I thought it was fun at first, I thought I had finally reached “cool” and this satisfied me for a while until I realised I wasn’t happy. These girls didn’t know me at all, they didn’t care for me but I stuck with them to fit in, I was trapped. My only escape from this was my Wednesday afternoons at Christian Union, where I was welcomed and listened to and not pressured to be someone I wasn’t. I could dare to be myself and fully explore this faith. Eventually this love and acceptance gave me the strength I needed to leave my group of friends and the pressures behind. For a while I was alone and that was hard, but somewhere inside of me I trusted God and decided to pray to him. I prayed that I would find true friends by the time I left Sixth Form this wasn’t answered straight away but I didn’t mind because I found the most amazing friends by the end of my first year. They were from my Christian Union, they challenged me to be a better person, to be comfortable in my skin and to dare to be a Christian in today’s selfish materialistic society.
From then on I have been a follower of Jesus, I know the Lord will provide, and that feeling of not being enough is slowly fading away. I feel free and I have realised that to say Christianity is restricting is extremely wrong. I’ve never felt more liberated. That doesn’t mean I don’t still struggle with these pressures from society, but this time when I struggle I know whom to rely on. 

And the scales fell off...
 
People come to faith in many different ways.  For some, it is through finding a sense of peace in reading the Bible.  For others, it may be a family thing. For others, it is feeling God’s presence in one of the “thin places”, where heaven and earth are only separated by a gnat’s whisker.  For others, fewer I suspect, it comes through wrestling with God in a very Old Testament way, and that’s how it was with me.

But let me backtrack.  My mother and father were not Christians.  If put on the spot, my mother would have said that she was C of E.  My father might have done.  My maternal grandmother was a regular church-goer and organ-player, but I never asked her about her faith, because it wasn’t the sort of thing we ever talked about. But I was a cub and then a scout, and I went to church, because there was a three-line whip on church parades.  Probably as a consequence of that rather flimsy connection, I was confirmed.  It didn’t change my life, but it did give me an oversensitive conscience and a sense of guilt.

During university, teacher training and for the first eight years of working life, I went to daily services (three on Sundays), because I sang in college choirs and then cathedrals.  The Word and the words literally went over my head every day; they stayed in my memory, but not in my heart.  With the benefit of hindsight, I see that I was searching for something, but I didn’t know what or how to set about finding out. From time to time I would meet clergy who inspired me and with whom I had in-depth conversations, but, at the critical moment, I always shied away.

Fast-forward several decades.  I reached a crisis point in my life, which turned out to be a point of no return.  I must have been a particularly hard case, because I wrestled with God (or at least I thought I did) for two whole nights, separated by a few months, and finally he broke me into submission.  Thy will be done!  I then started to examine my former life and tried to work out what my new life in Christ was (as though you could do it unaided and once and for all).  I was turned upside down and inside out.  I hardly knew how or what to think or how to put one word after another.  I lost my sense of humour, too, because I didn’t know what was funny anymore.  And it took a very long time to be put back together again.  The remarkable thing was that my old self did come back, except that it wasn’t my old self, but my renewed self.  The old personality was still there, the old abilities, but softened, remoulded and re-orientated, refined, as only God’s fire could refine.  The change soon spread into all aspects of life: family and work, not least.  And it was very hard for my three sons who couldn’t understand what was happening to their dad.

I also experienced the scales falling off my eyes, whenever I read the Bible.  So, it wasn’t just for singing to a handful of people on a Monday night –it was for all day, every day, and it did actually mean something!!  And it wasn’t just for life, it was the stuff of life itself.  Amazing (as I kept saying to myself for several years).

I needed to know more and no time to lose.  I went to a home group, but I was confused, because there were two translations of the Bible round the table and they did not sit comfortably together.  How could this be?  I decided I had to go back to the original.  I studied modern languages at university and taught Latin for a time, so I enrolled for Greek in a Week at St. John’s, Nottingham, and have read the New Testament in Greek regularly ever since.  You may have already guessed the next step.  Yes, Hebrew!  That’s a really steep learning curve and I’m still on it (I don’t think you ever get off!). The study of these ancient languages has shown me how much we miss in translation today and how important it is to look at scripture in its context first in order to find its application second.  God took my gift for languages and channelled it in a new direction.  Amazing!

I have now grown used to the fact that I won’t always sense God’s presence as deeply or as often as I did in the first flush of faith, that prayer is really hard for everyone (not just for me), that faith is a muscle that needs to be exercised even if, metaphorically, you’re not feeling like getting out of bed, and that I still make mistakes and go wrong.
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And that faith is a journey.  It’s exciting, it’s scary, it’s challenging, and we’re all on it.  Together.
 
 
Chris Knowles is married to Julia Fletcher and they moved to Ely in August 2015.