Categories: uncategorized
Date: 12 July 2007 12:50:25
In order for this tale to unfold properly, I need to take you back to the beginning - i.e. my childhood. Some of you may know that I pretty much qualified as a misfit and outsider as a kid. It is not that I was dreadfully abused or anything, I guess I would have been called 'harmless enough' by those who knew me. In my experience, that means that someone is a bit odd and sometimes difficult to be around, but that they are not a real problem in any way. After all, it is easy to ignore a harmless person! This may seem irrelevant, but it did give me insight into how it felt not to belong or to be valued in any true sense. This is not uncommon, I am sure, but you defitnitely do not forget such feelings in a hurry.
This was my experience until I reached the 6th form of secondary school. A number of things happened then which, not to overstate the case, changed the course of my life. One of the key ones of these was that the mental health issues that had been bubbling under for most of my early years came to a head. They exploded in the form of a severe psychiatric illness. This could have marked the end, rather than the beginning, of any meaningful existence for me. However, I was provided with saving graces in the form of some faithful Christians and a group of quirky people in my 6th form class who made me feel like I had a place in life, possibly for the first time.
As a result of the love of the Christians and the acceptace of my mates, after a fairly arduous time nonetheless, I somehow moved from having a vague kind of faith to accepting the whole gospel message about Jesus. I am not one of those who can point to a 'conversion experience' but I do know that I passed from death to life at some point. I hesitate to use that 'death to life' expression but, out of all the trite and hackneyed ways one can refer to coming to faith (there's another!), I think that this way of phrasing things is the most appropriate for me.
As many of us know, though, deciding to ally oneself with Christ does not mark the end of our troubles. Quite the opposite in fact. To find out more, keep watching this space...