I became a Christian about a month into my first term at university, on Remembrance Day 1973 – an easy date to remember! – after nearly three years of searching, asking questions, and talking to anyone who would talk to me about their experience of faith. That period of questioning was triggered by my father’s death when I was just 15 – he died unexpectedly a few months before his 50th birthday – because it made no sense to me that someone who had been so very much alive, a lovely man who loved his family and was loved and liked by so many people, could suddenly disappear without trace, and that that was all there was to life. If that was the case, I thought, then why didn’t we all just give up now? There had to be more to it than this.
I had had faith of a sort before that time – been to Sunday School, got confirmed at 13, went to church occasionally after that – but it was as if my father’s death, which was a tragedy for my family and changed my own life completely, somehow kick-started a different type of awareness and belief in God which hadn’t been present before, and which then culminated in my conversion nearly three years later. After the various conversations I’d had with friends and strangers, when I arrived at university I started attending the college chapel, ostensibly just as a way of meeting people, and there I found a group of people my own age who talked about God as though they knew him and had a shared experience of him. That, I realised, was what I wanted, and eventually God made it possible for me to say ‘yes’ to him instead of holding him at arm’s length, which is what I had been doing up to that point.
So why do I still believe today? Why, some 42 years later, am I still trying to pray, reading the Bible, going to church, spending time with my Christian friends and trying to serve God in whatever way he might ask me to? That’s a harder question to answer. Though in many ways I have been extremely fortunate in how my life has turned out, it has still had its ups and downs, its sadnesses and disappointments, its share of things that don’t seem to make sense – and that early tragedy still casts its shadow. But none of these things alters the fact that God is there, that he is reliable and he loves me, and that he can be turned to in sorrow and in joy, not to wave some sort of celestial magic wand and make the difficult things go away, but much more importantly, to be the rock that I can cling to and lean on no matter what happens. I guess that sense of being on solid ground is one of the things I lost the night my father died – it was as though a chasm of fear and uncertainty opened at my feet, and it stayed there for years – but God has filled that hole, that gap, with himself, and though I still miss my father, and the way I miss him changes as I get older, I can cope with that, and with whatever else may come, because my heavenly Father is there, and underneath are his everlasting arms.
I had had faith of a sort before that time – been to Sunday School, got confirmed at 13, went to church occasionally after that – but it was as if my father’s death, which was a tragedy for my family and changed my own life completely, somehow kick-started a different type of awareness and belief in God which hadn’t been present before, and which then culminated in my conversion nearly three years later. After the various conversations I’d had with friends and strangers, when I arrived at university I started attending the college chapel, ostensibly just as a way of meeting people, and there I found a group of people my own age who talked about God as though they knew him and had a shared experience of him. That, I realised, was what I wanted, and eventually God made it possible for me to say ‘yes’ to him instead of holding him at arm’s length, which is what I had been doing up to that point.
So why do I still believe today? Why, some 42 years later, am I still trying to pray, reading the Bible, going to church, spending time with my Christian friends and trying to serve God in whatever way he might ask me to? That’s a harder question to answer. Though in many ways I have been extremely fortunate in how my life has turned out, it has still had its ups and downs, its sadnesses and disappointments, its share of things that don’t seem to make sense – and that early tragedy still casts its shadow. But none of these things alters the fact that God is there, that he is reliable and he loves me, and that he can be turned to in sorrow and in joy, not to wave some sort of celestial magic wand and make the difficult things go away, but much more importantly, to be the rock that I can cling to and lean on no matter what happens. I guess that sense of being on solid ground is one of the things I lost the night my father died – it was as though a chasm of fear and uncertainty opened at my feet, and it stayed there for years – but God has filled that hole, that gap, with himself, and though I still miss my father, and the way I miss him changes as I get older, I can cope with that, and with whatever else may come, because my heavenly Father is there, and underneath are his everlasting arms.
RSS Feed