Categories: uncategorized
Date: 17 August 2008 17:58:53
By the age of 15, I was in another youth group at church, albeit with a slightly less ridiculous name than the others. This one was called '83' (because it was at the youth leaders' house, which was - yep, you guessed it - number 83) and largely consisted of people who were a bit older than me, and a lot of them were Tina's contemporaries; there never seemed to be an upper age limit, people just left when they felt it was time to move on (I'm sure there was a guy in his early 30s there). Despite being quite young and immature compared to the others, I felt really welcomed and enjoyed being part of the group. And this was where I finally made the step for myself and became a Christian.
I'd grown up with church stuff all around me, but I never really made the decision properly until one spring evening at '83' when we were listening to a tape of a preacher talking about the pain Jesus had gone through on the cross. And then he said, "now stop for a moment and imagine that it was you on the cross instead of Jesus", and it hit me - if Jesus could give up everything for me, I should do the same for him. So I prayed and prayed and wept buckets, and although I didn't have one of those magical "woo! Everything in my life has changed now!" kind of things, I definitely knew that God was real and He was with me and loved me. Even if I was a lazy slacker (and I was, as shall become apparent shortly).
Due to my birthday falling so late in the British academic year, I'd already taken my GCSEs and got my results back before my 16th birthday. Considering that I had long since given up on concepts such as homework and revision, I was quite pleasantly surprised to come out with an A, four Cs and two Ds. So what was I going to do now?
Well, forward thinking was never a strong point in my life, and rather petulantly I finished my statutory school years with a sense of, "I've done twelve years of this crap, I don't want to do another two and then possibly another three after that". Even though I seemed to be fairly bright, I just never felt that school worked for me. So, while my sister had gone on to sixth form, and would later go to uni, I just wanted to get out of classrooms and into the real world. Then, once I got into the real world, I realised I didn't really want to be there either.
The next few years were a bit of a mess, all told. I thought I wanted to work in a shop, so the day after I turned 16 I started on a YTS-type scheme working in a large and well-known clothes shop (without giving too much away, it has an island and a river in its name). However my expectations were quite different from the realities of shopwork, and it was quite clear within a few weeks that I wasn't enjoying it and subsequently wasn't putting my all into things. Of course, it didn't help that the training arrangement of my contract meant that I was working for about £1 an hour, which even in 1994 was terrible. So my boss and I had a chat, and my two-year training programme was terminated by mutual consent after seven weeks.
With no idea what I wanted to do, I managed to stay at home doing nothing for a couple of months, until Mum told me that I couldn't carry on doing that. So I ended up doing some voluntary stuff at the Romsey Mill, a Christian-run community and youth centre in town. I was familiar with the place already - I'd been to a couple of holiday clubs there as a kid, and had then tagged along with Tina and her mates when they went to youth celebration events - and spent about six months or so running the coffee bar on Wednesday mornings, which largely consisted of setting up the coffee machine, then standing around all morning eating chocolate. Oh, and serving and chatting to the occasional customer (mainly the Mill staff and a few single mums coming to a weekly group). And then packing up the coffee machine again. I was involved on and off at Romsey Mill over the next few years, becoming a holiday club leader and then helping to run a lads' group on Monday nights (when I say "helping to run", what I really mean is "helping to facilitate a giant basketball match each week").
Meanwhile, I was also getting more heavily involved in things at church. The '83' leaders had set up a coffee bar / youth club type thing at church called The Pickled Parrot (it might be best not to ask), and at some point this mutated into another similar youth club type thing called The Point (for some time afterwards, if anyone was heard to ask "what's the point?", you could guarantee someone would start quoting our promotional blurb - "The Point is a new youth club on Friday nights..." Yeah, very funny...). Despite being just a teen myself, I got involved in the teams running these clubs, and soon realised I really enjoyed working with teenagers and youth. And what's more, it felt like a real gift from God. 'Hmmm', I started to think, 'I wonder if there's some way I could do this for a job...?'
Well, somehow I ended up getting onto a sixth form course the following September. It was an NVQ course in Health and Social Care, and the college had suggested there would be stuff in it which would be useful to me in wanting to pursue youth work. After a year, I hadn't found any of this useful stuff; the whole course was pretty much geared to training you to become either a nurse or a social worker, and neither of those were my forte. Plus, the old "can't be arsed with homework" thing came up again. Needless to say, I dropped out at the end of the first year (reportedly, so did three quarters of the other people on the course, which may mean it wasn't just down to my laziness).
So what next? I went on a year out type project with a big Christian missionary charity which involved me spending a year doing youth work in Staffordshire. Despite some challenges, particularly with adapting to being away from home, I loved it; so much so that I asked if I could do another year, and they said yes. This time I was sent a bit further north, to Rochdale on the outskirts of Manchester, and I hated it. What was so different? In a nutshell, the people I was working alongside. The Staffordshire team had been really supportive and encouraging and had helped me to grow and mature and flourish. In Rochdale, I never felt accepted by the team; I became quiet and withdrawn, to the point of extreme introversion. Now, I'll often be quite quiet when I first meet people, and allow more of my personality to come out once I feel more comfortable around them, but here I never really reached that point. Between one thing and another, I prayed and really felt that I should leave, so after four months I went home. And I really truly believe it was the best decision I ever made.
Not that it felt that way at the time, however. I was now unemployed, with no qualifications beyond my GCSEs, no idea what I wanted to do, and a CV which showed me having left early from the last three major things I'd done. I had to trust God that something would come up... but what?