I guess I could start off by saying that I grew up in a Christian home. My Dad was a minister for a long time in various Pentecostal churches while I was growing up, and later on even pastored a number of churches himself. So, I guess you could say I’m no stranger to the Church. My folks have believed in Jesus since before I was a zygote, and some of my best childhood memories include our time in Papua New Guinea when my father served as a missionary through one of the Four Square Bible colleges there. I was 4 then.
After we returned in ‘85 I was enrolled in a Baptist school in the suburbs of Sydney were I completed the majority of my primary eduction. Christianity was my entire world. What I mean by this is that while I knew there were "heathens" I just assumed the world broke down into those who liked God, and those who preferred Rock’n'roll.
I remember saying a prayer with my Dad when I was about six or seven, asking Jesus to come into my heart. I even asked if I could be baptised that night, and my Dad did so right there in our family bathtub. I think I did this more out of a desire to please my Dad, rather than out of any real awareness of the gravity associated with the commitment. I was pretty good kid, and liked making my parents happy.
In late ‘91 my folks packed up the family and moved to Queensland. The place they said we’d be moving to was called "Toowoomba". I wasn’t surprised when I later learnt that Tooowoomba means "the swamp". I was bummed. I liked Sydney, it had trains, buses, big shopping centres, arcades, and pretty girls. Toowoomba, well, it had zip. Actually, it had more churches per head of population than anywhere else in Australia, but by this stage I was more interested in playing computer games during Church than listening to the minister. Church was a bore.
The school my sisters and I were enrolled in was, again, a "Christian school". The people at this school were very uncool, well compared to my friends in Sydney anyway. I’d been in a small, tight-knit school where everyone pretty much accepted you. Teasing and manipulation didn’t exist where I’d come from, and the only thing you had to worry about was getting rolled by natives, but then you’d always have your mates around to help you out if there was trouble.
Things were so different in Toowoomba. There were no trains, and at the time limited public transport. There were no big shopping complexes, and it felt like walking back in time 10 years. I made a few friends, but the way the school was geared was so different than what I was used to. Sherwood Hills where I had been attending in Sydney was a Baptist school. We were taught about Jesus, we attended chapel every morning before school, and things were straight forward. Toowoomba Christian College, or TCC, was a very different kettle of fish… it was of the charasmatic stripe. I don’t remember getting taught much from the Bible at all while I was in primary school. The closest we got was singing songs before class each morning, and although we’d sing songs encouraging reading the scriptures, all you’d actually see being read was the occasional scripture at assembly each week.
No, TCC was more interested in spirituality. "How’s your relationship with Jesus?"…."What has the Holy Spirit been speaking to you lately?" These kind of questions annoyed the crap out of me as I often wondered where they expected me to hear God speaking to me except from the Bible? And really, how often did that book ever get dusted off? These folks were more interested in hearing directly from the Holy Spirit, rather than seeing what he’d already said in the scriptures… or at least that’s how it seemed.
No, it was a "Christian school", but only in name as far as I was concerned. So often I wished my parents would pull me out of the place, for me it was a living hell. Most days involved constant teasing and psychological manipulation by fellow students, but nothing could be settled like it could in Sydney, if you tried to beat someone up you’d be expelled. Teachers were aware of what was going on in our classes, but by and large they did nothing to try and stop this kind of thing occurring. Until my mid high school years I was often afraid to go to school each day out of mere dread of facing certain people. People who confessed to have a relationship with Jesus, people who also seemed to take delight in making my life hell. This is where my cynicism was born.
Things weren’t helped along by the fact that the school was very emotionally based in their beliefs. Kids were often encouraged to participate in "prayer meetings" and "worship sessions" which boiled down to little more than the same people constantly going forward for prayer, being "slain in the spirit" and week after week recommitting their lives to Jesus… as if the first 300 times hadn’t quite stuck. Personally, I never ever went to the front during an alter call. The whole thing seemed completely ingenuine to me, and I’d often find myself left alone in the isles while the rest of my friends "experienced God". I didn’t consider myself terribly knowledgeable regarding God’s nature, though I new inside that he wouldn’t resort to weird phenomenas like barking like dogs to teach us who he was. I knew what I was seeing was simply an elaborate act, or better yet I realised that if there was a God, he’d have to be above such stupidity.
I soon began to drift further and further into an apathetic attitude toward all things God related. Eventually I reached the point where I hated Christianity. I didn’t want to be a part of something that seemed so hypocritical. This isn’t to say that I gave up believing that what my parents had taught me was true, after all your parents are so smart that nothing they say could be wrong, right? It was more that whatever form of Christianity was being represented at the school wasn’t something in which I wanted to be included.
School became a breading ground for my hate and cynicism. On the teasing front I soon learnt that I had a humorous wit that could be used in defense of those who came against me. So while I couldn’t beat the hell out of those I hated, I became good at leveling the score on a psychological level, in the process making a few enemies, and to my shame hurting a few of my friends.
Towards about grade 10 I started to gain a bit more interest in the scriptures. This was by and large due to seeing my Dad’s conviction in action and by having discussions with him about many things. Dad taught me nearly all I knew about Jesus, and I’m glad that he didn’t leave this part of my education in the hands of my school, who knows where I’d be now if that were the case. Anyway, in the Christmas of ‘95 my folks gave me my first study Bible, a Dake’s concordance.
Soon I was listening in at church again and doing what I thought at the time was working out what I believed. What I was actually doing was seeing if I could make what my Dad had taught me sit well in my head. This I managed to do quiet easily, as most of what Dad had taught me made a lot of sense. Needless to say though, I hadn’t come to those conclusions on my own and what I thought was a relationship with God was purely head knowledge.
This is the way things progressed until I graduated high school. University on the other hand was a whole different scene. No longer was I within the confines of a "Christian" environment. I was free to say, think and believe whatever I wanted. I loved it. It didn’t take long though before I was roped into getting involved in Student Life, a Christian group on campus that held Bible studies, prayer groups and services. This lasted long enough for me to make enough new friends at uni to start feeling comfortable in my own social abilities. I got jack of Student Life pretty quick though, as they wanted nearly every waking moment of my life that wasn’t assigned to classes and study to be spent contributing to their activities. Oh, and they also wanted what little there was of my money. Typical I thought.
Soon I stopped attending any Student Life meetings, and moved out into other social circles, taking with me a few of the friends I had met there, but more of less disassociating myself from the others. Hell, I’d spent 12 years of my life being in a controlling environment, now that I was free I didn’t want my space being cramped by more of the same hypocrites.
The rest of my non-productive university life was spent trying to make a positive influence on my non-believing friends. I full-on loathed those who called themselves Christians by this stage, but if you had have asked me I still would have told you I believed in God. I would call myself a "Liberal Christian", though I hardly knew what the true sense of the phrase meant. This disenfranchisement, I think, was due to the fact that all I kept seeing was instance after instance of "Christian" people saying one thing, but doing another. For crying out loud, all the prissy little "Christians" would only ever sit in one part of the refectory between classes, and you’d never, ever, see them leave their clique and converse with a non-Christian. To me, non-believers became entirely more appealing than those i had grown up with. They didn’t pretend to be anything other than the way they were, they taught me a lot about life, and they always accepted me for who I was. Those "Christians", I thought, could learn a lot from these new friends of mine.
Over the few years I was at uni, my non-believing friends had more of an affect on me than I had on them. Looking back on those times I wonder how I ever managed to make any positive representation of Christ, but my mate Ian assures me that if it wasn’t for our friendship he would probably still be lost. I’ll take his word on this and console myself in the knowledge that even God can use half-baked believers to engineer his Will. As I said, my non-believing friends had more of an affect on me than I had on them. Soon Ian was growing in leaps and bounds spiritually, and before long was in what I felt was a much better place before God than I could have hoped for myself. You see, my perspective of Christianity had bottomed out. I’d virtually given up. What I realised was that my faith was centered around Christians being good people. When I came to the conclusion that this was anything but true, my faith dissipated. This wasn’t helped by the fact that there was a lot going on in my life during this time.
My Mum was diagnosed with cancer, my uni studies were proving unsuccessful, and I seemed to pretty much luck out in every avenue that I put effort into… the largest of these being the pursuit of women. Basically I felt scared that my world was falling apart, and also that no one would ever love me other than my folks. Part of my problem, I thought, was my standards. I was taught in school that God apparently dictates that as a believer I wasn’t allowed to have sex until I was married, so I figured this extended to the girl I would be looking for. As you can imagine, my field of possibilities was drastically cut down. I was also told that God would provide me with a girl I could love, one that held the same "beliefs" as I did, and that I wouldn’t have to have my heart broken a million times over in order to find her. This unfortunately, wasn’t the case. After being strung along by some beautiful but considerable more screwed up girls than I care to number, I began to give up hope.
Around this time Ian, Dan and I decided that we would join a Taekwon-do class being held at the university gym. Through TKD my circle of friends was expanded to include another subset of non-believers. By this stage I was totally closing myself off from any fellowship with Christians, except those I had long-term friendships with such as Dan, Ian and a few others. Martial arts was very good for me. I took to it like a fish to water. It was a great way to channel my frustration and anger with the world, and God, into something constructive. Soon I became really good friends with my TKD instructor, Paul, and we would come to spend a lot of time together parting and living the real "Student Life".
We’d drink, we’d go clubbing, we held parties to all hours of the morning and got totally off our faces on cheap alcohol whenever given the opportunity. How’s that for classy? It was the most fun I had ever had, yet it was also the most lonely and desperate time of my life. One night though we had one of our friends bring along some single chicks from his residential college to one of Paul’s parties. That’s where Paul and I met a girl.
Paul had his eye on this girl from the minute she arrived at that party, and pursued her right up to the point of being told she was actually interested in me. Now, we all know the unwritten laws of mateship. You never go out with a girl that your friend has ever been interested in, it’s a no-go zone. Paul took another stance on that. Although he was disappointed that the girl he liked didn’t reciprocate his feelings, he wasn’t gonna let his mate pass up the opportunity of starting a relationship with her on account of him. Paul is a good mate like that.
So here I was. I knew for a fact that a gorgeous, witty, half-Filipino girl with a great body was interested in me. All I had to do was say the word and I would finally have a girlfriend. I was torn though, because although I knew she liked me, I also knew that I would be transgressing everything I had stood for if I was to start a relationship with her. She wasn’t a Christian, though I doubt I could hold much claim to that title myself at that stage, she obviously didn’t believe in the same things I said I did, and I didn’t have any real feelings for her beyond being mesmerized by the fact that someone was actually interested in me.
Not letting reason stand in the way of my heart’s desire, I went for it. That following Friday night we all went out clubbing together. After a few drinks and some fun dancing the night away a few of us ended up back at her university dormitory, hanging out. It didn’t take long before it was just us two and Paul left. Paul had driven me there and couldn’t go without me, so he conveniently "fell asleep" which gave us two kids a chance to get to know each other better. We stayed up all night talking.
That next morning before Paul woke up from his night on the hard floor, she lent in and kissed me… my very first kiss. I remember sitting there, analyzing the moment for minutes thereafter fully awestruck by the power that a simple kiss, not even a pash, but a soft kiss on the lips could instill in a guy. That moment I felt more alive than any time in my prior 19 years. That’s when our relationship started. The 8th of June, 1999.
It didn’t take me long to fall in love. This girl’s endearing nature made it all too easy. I had told myself that what she believed didn’t matter to me. I even consoled myself with the fact that she classified herself as a Roman Catholic, even though I know it was a nominal label that had nothing to do with what she believed. She told me that she respected my beliefs, and even said she would help me uphold my commitment to save sex until marriage. That didn’t last long however, as the closer we got to crossing the line, the more things got blurred. We eventually got to a point where we’d gone so far that I thought we may as well go all the way. I lost my virginity shortly before my 20th birthday.
In short it was rebellion. I was angry with God. Angry for the fact that my Mum had got cancer, angry that my Dad was making life tough with his drinking, and angry that life wasn’t turning out the way I had expected. Before meeting this girl I was badly depressed, and she was the first positive thing that had entered my life in so long that I wasn’t going to let that escape, beliefs be damned. So for the next 2 and a bit years I turned my back completely on God… Not that in hind-sight I was ever fully facing him to begin with, but now there was no doubt.
Not long after our relationship started life began to get better. Mum’s cancer went into remission, I got a job and my relationship with this girl blossomed. Soon Mum and Dad moved away to the Sunshine Coast and we shared the house with my sister Beth until it sold. On a personal level I was very happy with myself. I had a girl, a job, no debt, and a great social life. Although everything was going swell I wasn’t entirely happy, as much as I’d try and convince myself otherwise. I’d estranged a lot of my friends through lack of effort and attention, and the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that they put in as little effort as I did. My mind would often turn back to my shattered beliefs and I’d often engage my woman in religious debate, hoping that although my life resembled nothing that I would say I believed in she would change her mind and come about. I guess that although I wasn’t living, or necessarily believing what I had been brought up to believe, I knew that in the back of my mind I wouldn’t be able to be a god unto myself forever. Deep down I guess I knew I was sinning, I just didn’t want to acknowledge it.
One night Paul, his new girlfriend, and the two of us went out for a night on the town. Paul’s chick got completely off her face and the night turned ugly. During the melodramatics of the evening a lot of things were said by Paul’s girlfriend that my girl had entrusted to her to keep secret. Things which she felt about me that I was totally unaware of were brought to light. From that point on I couldn’t really trust that when she told me she loved me that she really meant it. She probably did, but it didn’t sit the same anymore.
Our relationship got to the point where I knew it wasn’t going to last. Combined with the distrust was the issue that I knew I wasn’t living according to God’s holy standards, and day by day I felt a force drawing me toward repentance, and subsequently further and further away from my girl. I was convicted, entirely, that I was a sinner in need of a Saviour. I knew that the path I was following was one of my own making. What I needed was to follow someone else’s path, someone who had a clue, someone the polar opposite of myself, someone righteous.
I still hated Christianity, or I guess you could say that I just hated Christians. In spite of this, I knew deep down that Jesus was the only one who offered salvation from my sins through his death for mankind on the cross, and as much as I hated to admit it, the very people I hated were the ones who had the answer all along.
For a while I still resisted the tug of the Holy Spirit on my heart. Eventually though I fell into a deep depression. My heart was being pulled in two directions. On one side was the girl I loved, on the other was Jesus, the God I didn’t. I tried to explain how I felt to her, though she mostly seemed to take what I said as an attack on our relationship. I also tried to explain what I knew about salvation to her, but she wouldn’t recognise what I was saying, she didn’t want to believe in Jesus. I think most of it had to do not with her disbelief, but more so with her Father’s stance as a staunch atheist. I didn’t push the subject too hard, as the last thing I wanted was to push her to the point where she fained belief in order to save our relationship. I simply left the matter open, explaining that I couldn’t see a future for our relationship, though continue it did.
Over the next few months my depression grew more intense, and little by little my feelings for my girl began to fade. I was still dealing with a level of distrust, and was finding it impossible to escape the reality that the relationship, as it stood, wasn’t where God wanted me to be. Pretty soon it became apparent that I didn’t have feelings for her anymore. Actually I didn’t have any feelings at all by this stage, except for those of pain and sadness caused by my depression. More than anything I felt like I was broken. Like something was fundamentally wrong with me, that thing was sin. I was separated from God. This depressed me.
Eventually I thought enough was enough. I had been running from the tug of the Holy Spirit for so long, and living life my own way. I knew this wasn’t right, I knew I was lost, and I knew more than anything that I needed a Saviour. I knew this because as hard as I tried I couldn’t save myself through my own strength. The one reality that I was aware of more than anything else was my debased sinful nature.
One night after my folks had sold the house and I had moved in with my Auntie, I was lying in bed thinking about the state of my life. My depression and desperation was at a climax and I felt I had nothing left to do except surrender my rebellion and commit my life, truly, to Jesus. That is the point where my beliefs went from simply being head knowledge to becoming a matter of the heart. Despite growing up in and around the church, this is when I surrendered, right here is where I picked up my cross.
Shortly afterward I made a decision to return to fellowship with other believers. Ian was a real help to me during this time as he had also been in a relationship which hadn’t worked out real well, so it was very helpful having a support there in him. Not long after these events I tried to end my relationship with my girlfriend, which was difficult. I didn’t feel capable of maintaining a relationship given the state of my head at the time, I needed time to get myself straightened out. We were on and off for a few weeks after I initially told her it was over. Eventually some spanners were thrown in the mix and the combination of the suicide of a friend with the loss of employment brought me to the point where I couldn’t do it anymore. It’s really hard ending a relationship after you’ve been intimate with a person. It’s like that line by Gianni in the movie Vanilla Sky, "When you sleep with someone your body makes a promise whether you do or not." Pain is caused when promises are broken. What I found most difficult was seeing her deal with her own pain in the separation, it sucks hurting someone you care about. Despite the fact that I wasn’t in love with her anymore and hadn’t been for a while, I still cared for her deeply as we had been together for a long time. She taught me how to love and be loved, and that’s one of the most important lessons I have learnt.
I guess I was real lucky. The friends that I had abandoned over the two years I had been in a relationship were right there to pick me up after my world started to crumble. After a couple of months I managed to work through the depression and get a grip on things. During this time I got stuck heavily into the study of the scriptures and worked hard at settings aside the things that I had been told as a kid, and investigated the scriptures in order that I could build my beliefs from the ground up based what God’s Word actually said.
It didn’t take long before God blessed me abundantly by bringing Mellissa into my life and providing me with employment. Having had dealt with similar issues herself our friendship blossomed quickly and it didn’t take too long before we fell in love. I knew from early on that Mellissa was the one. It was the strangest feeling I had ever experienced, but I can only explain it as being like vivid knowledge, if that makes sense. An unexplainable knowing sensation that I had found the one God had destined for me. After 10 months we were engaged, and 8 months later we were married. September 6, 2003.
And that’s pretty much where my blog picks up and takes over in detailing the journey of this sinner, saved by the might grace of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I’ve been through many tough times and made a lot of mistakes along the way. It’s during these times though that in retrospect I realise, that like the story of the footprints in the sand, I too wasn’t alone. I had my Saviour carrying me.
Things still get pretty rough from time to time, and there have been instances where I’ve gone through crises of faith. I’m learning to recognise that this is the time when I have to knuckle down even further into the scriptures. Because as it says in Romans 10:17 "… faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God."
I still deal with a lot of issues related to my upbringing and have a love/hate relationship with my brothers and sisters in Christ. I have, however, moved away from the point were I failed to recognise that I too was part of the problem, and now revel in the fact that this only brings more glory to God since it’s his shed blood that saves us all from our wretchedness.
The last thing I’d like to leave you with is that as many mistakes I have made in my life, and there have been many, I would not change one bit of anything I have experienced. For even through these trials, troubles and mistakes I have learnt and grown and come to be a person who’s life hopefully bears testimony to the power of God’s saving grace, a person continually sanctified by faith in Christ Jesus.