Real Life Stories
John Puttock
I became a Christian in my mid teens at a Billy Graham live link from an evangelistic crusade he was conducting in Manchester. But before mentioning that event may I share a little bit of my background. My mum was a Christian but sadly my dad was not, so it was not a particularly strong Christian or religious home. However, I was sent off to Sunday school at an early age and progressed through the church youth organizations including joining the church choir. The Sunday school teachers and youth leaders were faithful and taught the basics of the Christian faith and explained the gospel. What was missing was any response from me. Some time before the events in June 1961 my sister had become a Christian and was praying that my brother and I would also be converted. Her prayers were answered for both of us.
On the evening I went to the Billy Graham meeting I was on a bit of a high having played on the winning side in a cricket match. At the meeting I realized that this really counted for very little against the eternal issues of life and death. I can’t remember much of what Billy Graham preached on that evening but do recall him telling the story of a motorbike accident that had recently happened resulting in the death of the biker. Billy asked the question of the audience if they knew where their eternal destiny lay. I knew I was not sure and that my sins separated me from a holy God. I hadn’t done anything outrageous during my life, I was probably seen as one of the better boys, but I still knew I was a sinner and wouldn’t be going to heaven without Jesus Christ becoming my Saviour.
So as the meeting ended I met up with a counsellor and after talking for a while committed my life to Jesus and asked him to come into my heart and be my Saviour.
Over the following weeks there was a growing sense of peace with God and an assurance of salvation. An inner joy. All the things that I had been taught over the previous 16 years moved from being head knowledge to a reality in my life. The bible became alive along with reading Christian books. The priorities in my life were changed. This has impacted on all aspects of what has happened during the past 50 years and has affected home life, work, money, and leisure time. One of the foundations for these changes was being part of a group of teenagers and early twenties who regularly met with the Vicar and subsequently one of the Curates, at the church I went to in Worthing. We spent many happy hours studying the bible together and getting to grips with its message.
Over the years I have found there have been, and continue to be, three major ways of strengthening my Christian life, none of them new or different to any other Christian. They are by reading the bible and Christian books, by prayer both individually and corporately and being with other Christians. It’s fair to say that at times personal bible reading and prayer have not been as strong as they should have been. I have had to learn that as in any relationship you have to invest time and energy into it for it to flourish. Bible reading has always been easier than prayer and I have been grateful to be part of a prayer partnership that helps to stimulate my prayers. I have also needed to learn that, as at the beginning of my Christian life, from the words of Jeremiah the prophet that, ‘You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart’ Temptations have come my way and there have been struggles with sin for which I have had to seek forgiveness and to remind myself of Jesus’ words that if you love me you will obey my teaching’ To build my relationship with Jesus I have to continue to learn from the words of that lovely children’s chorus to ‘Trust and obey, For there is no other way, To be happy in Jesus, But to trust and obey’.
James Potts
1) What was your attitude towards Jesus growing up?
I think God was very kind to me in giving me Christian parents who encouraged me to read the Bible and to be a part of the church. But really my attitude towards Jesus was at best indifference, and for much of the time I was quite ashamed of the fact I went to church, as it didn’t seem to be something that was generally acceptable. I did believe in God, but I think only in the same way that I believed in everything else around me, it was just part of how I understood the world to be. I think as I grew older I became aware that somehow you had to make a response to Jesus, but I didn’t really understand how or why and I really didn’t like change, and so I just found ways to avoid this.
2) How did you become a Christian?
When I was 18, I went to university in Reading. At university I was suddenly confronted with the opportunity to do basically what ever I wanted (within reason), and so of course I was confronted with the question of whether to reject Christianity or whether to continue showing an interest in it. I decided it would probably be good to keep going to church for a bit and made some friends there. And it was through spending time with one friend in particular (another student) and having another look at the Bible together that God showed me the many things that I’d misunderstood about Christianity. One of the key things was the revelation that what Jesus offers is fundamentally a relationship, an invitation to come to know God, rather than just a way into heaven (though that is part of the relationship). But it took a fair while before I was willing to do anything about this, as I was reluctant to lose out on all the things I wanted to do at university. I guess I didn’t see how good it is to know God. It was a question that Jesus asked in the Bible that finally persuaded me how good and how important it is to know God. He asked “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul?” (Mark8.36) Or in other words, it is better to know God than to have everything else, but not know him.
3) What difference has it made following Jesus?
The Bible tells us that when we come to know him, he comes and lives within us, and changes us. And I think one of the ways that God has begun to change me is to show me just how much I’ve misunderstood what the world is really about, and principally how little I actually realise who he is. And I think as I have been corrected and have come to know God better; it has begun to affect my life, the decisions I make, my attitudes towards things. I still get things very wrong though and still reject God in innumerable ways. It is only because Jesus was punished for my imperfect life and has given me his perfect one that I can still know God. Not because I now deserve to know him, or ever have deserved to.
Julian Haddow
Setting the scene
I had the joy and privilege to live in Austria from the age of 7. I lived in Tyrol with all its affluence and tourism. Many of my school friends had hotels or B&Bs in the family which they would one day inherit. With that in mind many of them went to school, studied gastronomy and in a slightly morbid way just had to wait for their inheritance to kick in.
Austrians are a fun loving, hard working, party people, with much of the time spent entertaining the tourists. As a teenager I joined in this party lifestyle, the tourists want a good time whilst on holiday and we knew how to show them one. By the age of 15 I had dabbled with many drugs and started drinking almost daily up to the age of 17.
I was training to be an indoor design cabinet maker at the time, but along with some of my colleagues, the regular drug taking and drinking made the company go bankrupt. By this point I was making some money from the occasional drug deal with contacts in different countries, so the unemployment didn’t hit me too hard.
Crunch time
There was one problem with this lifestyle, it was empty and pointless and I knew different.
My dad, you see, was a missionary and had brought me up in a Christian environment. At the age of 9 I had made a simple, but never the less real commitment to following Jesus. But I was knowingly choosing to live life my way and not in a way that would please God.
I should have known better, but God caught my attention loud and clear when I was 18. He convicted me of the wrong of living a self centred life, whilst ignoring my loving creator.
The difference knowing Jesus has made
- the willingness to leave my old lifestyle of drug taking
- moving away from the temptations of my old lifestyle and living in a new area
- joining and becoming an active member of a church
- it made me want to find out how I could help others
- it made me eventually move back to England
- I had a desire to work full time of Jesus
- it made me become a missionary in 2002
- it taught me the importance of marriage
- it changed my life and gives me joy and meaning
- it gave me eternity to look forward to
Ian McCaffrey
“Sometimes you need to be rescued from a storm. And sometimes the storm rescues you.”
I spent a large part of my life as someone who considered themselves to be vaguely Christian. I can’t say I thought about Jesus much, but if you’d asked me I would have said that he seemed like a good man – a wise teacher who had said many commendable things. And while I rarely went to church, I still liked the idea of sending my kids to a nice church school like Aldrington. And that was probably about it.
That complacency was shattered on the night our twins were born in 2005. They arrived three months premature after a difficult pregnancy. Max weighed just over one pound and Lily three pounds. A few hours later Max’s lung collapsed.
As doctors fought to save him, I did what many people do in desperate times. I got down on my knees and prayed. Max eventually pulled through and after two more months of highs and lows the twins were finally well enough to come home.
My prayers had been answered. And something inside me had changed. When the twins were a year or so old we started coming to BH. After a while I joined a Christianity Explored course to find out more about Jesus. It wasn’t what I expected. For starters, the Bible seemed to be full of people either moaning about God, or just plain ignoring Him. In other words, people just like me. And yet it said that God still loved them. And that Jesus connected us to God.
I’m paid for a living to look for truth in stories. For me, suddenly, truth seemed to pour out of the Bible.
Adam. Eve. Apple. Temptation. It struck me the stories were true then and they’re true now. Temptation happened then and it happens now every day in our own lives.
A teaching about Jonah has stayed with me. Here was a man so determined to ignore God that he got on a boat to go in the opposite direction to where God wanted him to go. It was only when the boat was being tossed about in a storm that Jonah came to his senses. It showed me that sometimes you need to be rescued from a storm. And sometimes the storm rescues you. My storm happened when the twins were born. Two-and-a-half years later, one Sunday here at BH, up in the balcony, I put my trust in Jesus properly for the first time.
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