Jon sharing some moments where God has been working in his life at our fan the fire service on 11th October 2009

I would like to write about my luck to find God in my life. It was four and a half years ago, when the chance came. When I was about 18, I start working in restaurants as an assistant barman. I loved it and some of my colleagues usually invited me to have a drink, and from the first drink I had, I liked the taste and for many years I enjoyed it, but like everything it is nice that when you drink you don't lose control. Maybe you think I could never lose control of drinking, but oh yes, you will if you have my mentality.

I drank so much that I lost everything that was precious to me, I lost myself self respect I no longer could live without a drink.

To go to work I must have a little drink till the day I must have a quarter bottle of whisky. If I had money I would buy half a bottle, till the day came that I couldn't hold a job. I was sacked from every job I had, City Hospital was my second home, I had been there seven times with drinking related problems. I was so ashamed, because I thought I inflicted the drinking on myself. Oh yes, it was the beginning of my downfall, but after I was a very sick man. I became a slave of the alcohol, the alcohol was my master.

I remember being in hospital seeing spiders coming from the ceiling. I was having hallucinations.When I lost my last job I lost my accommodation as well, I had no place to sleep I ended up in the Salvation Army but thank God, they helped a lot of people like me. I slept in a room with another 19, it was horrible, no money, for the first time I was in the dole. I used to smoke, 40 cigarettes a day but I had no money to buy them. I walked in the streets picking up cigarettes ends from the streets, but remember what I said before I loved the taste of the drinks. I loved drinking, I never thought I would end up an alcoholic. I never thought I would be a liar, a very good one , a thief, a man without manners, no responsibility, a man without a soul.

I never thought of suicide, I was a coward. I never thought reality, I was lost in my world, inside my bottle.

But one day when I felt I was defeated, when even a glass of wine was enough to make me drunk, I knew I needed help. On that day I went to the doctors and I asked for help he was very good to me. I think that he could see I was serious about giving up and he gave me some medicine for my stomach and my shakes.

On the same day I asked my partner to go with me to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. She has lived with me for the last 25 years and I thank God she is in my life because without her I don't know what would have happened to me. Thank you darling.

A week later when I went back to the doctors, he asked me about my spiritual life he asked me if I believed in God, I said yes but for most of my life I had neglected Him. That is when he said to me that they had a lady chaplain there and asked if I wanted to see her. I said yes, that was the best answer I gave because since the day I saw her, my life changed for ever. That lady was Annie Hughes and from then on St. John's church has been my place of worship.

I remember what she said, she asked me about my beliefs and what I was looking for. I told her that I wanted to believe, but I didn't know how.
I told her that I would like to see the light the end of the tunnel, I must say this lady restored my faith in God, this lady gave to me my spiritual life. For that I am grateful.

How rich I am today, I don't have money but my heart is rich with freedom and love. The reason I am telling this story is very simple I know that at the 6.30 service are a lot of young people and I would like to say to them that I was one of them. I never thought that by drinking a pint of lager or two, I would end up an alcoholic. Please never be shy to ask for help, it could save your life.

PS.You are never too old to humble yourself & ask for help .
 

The Older Brother syndrome and the wardrobe full of clothes.

I’m not going into all the details of why I’ve always felt like the older brother- suffice it to say that I was brought up in a Christian family, so have always known something of God’s love. Did I want to rebel and go off and do my own thing? Not sure on that but I never got the chance. Parents watched at home and church, and the Vicar’s daughter just happened to be at the same university so I was in the CU before I’d even unpacked! (Looking back I thank God for all this).

The downside of all this was that I was never quite sure that God loved me as much as He did the returning prodigal- the father was always on the lookout for his lost son and running to meet him, and having a party for him. There always seemed to be great rejoicing over ‘the lost coin‘, ‘the lost sheep’’ the lost son’ but what about those ‘out in the fields’ away form the father but still ‘at home’.

Most of the time this was not a problem but occasionally it seemed to confront me-and so it happened just before Christmas. How could I know that God loved me as much as He loved others?

Was I jealous of them -no - just a bit envious.

So my prayer at Fan the Fire on Dec 14th was ‘please let me know this love’. I knew God was doing something as I was being prayed for but I could not say what it was. But when I got home the Christmas tree lights were on and were really welcoming and it was if God was saying ‘I really do love you and because you’re unique My love for you is unique, welcome to the party’. And the wardrobe? Well that in a sense is a parallel story going on at the same time but serving to emphasize what God is saying and to challenge us (me) to a response.

Before Christmas the words of a song kept going through my head ‘in royal robes I don’t deserve I live to serve Your majesty’. I had read them before but I read again Ezekiel 16 v 10-14 and it was as if God was reinforcing His love for me. I shared this passage with a group on Thursday morning and as I was reading it one of them had a picture of a wardrobe full of clothes just waiting to be worn. I won’t go into all the discussion that followed but picture a child and dressing up and you will have some idea. But the serious challenge was whether we just looked at the clothes or used them.

Perhaps a picture to of the gifts that Tim was encouraging us to ‘fan into flame’

I have bi-polar disorder, which means that I have extreme mood swings. I am posting this testimony because I know that there are many of our church family who have experienced mental distress. We have little opportunity to share encouragements with each other, from our unique perspective. This is why I wanted to share with you part of my journey.

God had been trying to gain my attention for a while.

I had been angry with how I was feeling, and I went over and over all the verses I could find about God as the potter, and me as the clay.

The verse which stuck most prominantly in my mind was Romans 9:20;

"Who are you to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to him who formed it "why did you make me like this?"

In fact this was precisely what I was saying.

After Annie's sermon on 'Meditating on the promises of God' (listen here) I resolved, like her, to spend some time meditating on Psalm 139. I came verses 13 to 16

"For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.

These verses continue about me being seen before I was born, and as I read, I became more and more distressed. I realised the depth of my feelings that, as my disorder is in part genetically determined, I was therefore a mistake! Why would God intentionally make me like this?

This was my response....

Heal my broken heart
That I might look upon you
Believing that the soul you made
Is beautiful in your sight.

How can I see that I am fearfully and wonderfully made
When only the misshapen is apparent to me?
Help me to believe, when I see a mistake,
that I was seen in my beginning
And in my unformed state watched over by you,
That I was not made on a bad day
When you looked the other way.

Help me to believe that this unstable life
Was given to me as an intention
Meant for good and not for evil.

I cry out to you to help me to accept your word as truth
That I am wonderful, that I am lovely,
That you meant for me to be the person that I am
And that it is GOOD!

This is a precious gem in the darkness
Of the long tunnel that I walk,
The gift of love and acceptance.
"When I awake I am still with you!"

I hope that if you feel like me from time to time that this might help.

Bless you

K's story...

When I was younger, and living at home with my parents, I considered myself to be a Christian because I went to church and I believed in God. But that’s pretty much as far as it went. God lived in a box in my life labelled Sunday. I would go to church on a Sunday, and then put him back in the box for the rest of the week, with very little impact on the rest of my life. And if I’m really honest, church was pretty boring. I went because I felt I should.

Then I left home and went to university in Birmingham. I found out about the chaplaincy and started attending the Sunday service there, again because I felt I should, not out of any real desire to meet with God. Things began to change when I went on a retreat with the Anglican Society and I really enjoyed singing worship songs to God for the first time. I spent time with people for whom God was a real person and made a difference to their whole lives, not just Sundays. I decided I really must try harder to get to know God, to see if I could have a little taste of what these other people had. So I bought myself a bible and started reading it every day.

Shortly after this I found myself as an in patient in a psychiatric hospital with a resurgence of the anorexia that had first arisen in my teens. I felt utterly desperate. I had been trying so hard to ‘be a good Christian’, reading the bible, being on the committee of the Anglican Society etc. that I felt so angry with God for abandoning me in such an awful place. I hated myself with such a ferocious intensity that I couldn’t accept that anyone else could love me, least of all God. So I turned my back on God entirely, feeling that was the only thing to do if God had turned away from me.

Looking back on it now, I can see that God was actually really working in my life at that time, as it is through my illness and recovery that I have found the real relationship with Jesus that had been missing for so many years. The process began with a seemingly random phone call from an AngSoc friend. Up to this point I hadn’t told anyone I was in hospital, but when he phoned I felt it was OK to say where I was and what was going on, and said yes when he wanted to visit me. He prayed for me at that visit and suggested I meet with a curate from St John’s Church.

I only agreed because I was bored and lonely, and wanted relief from the monotony of the day. And the first time the curate came, I had tried to abscond from the ward only hours before, so I was being kept in my room and being persuaded to take sedatives! I thought she would give up and not come again, but God doesn’t give up and she duly came back every week or so for a chat. I came to really enjoy these conversations and the things she gave me to read, and continued to visit her when I was discharged from hospital.

I saw the Alpha course being advertised at church and thought it would be really helpful to get the basics of what Christianity is all about, as I felt I’d missed out on that as a child and didn’t understand as much as I’d like to. This was to be real challenge for me, as it involved eating a meal in front of other people, and talking to people I didn’t know. But God was really with me and I felt so comfortable there that I really looked forward to Tuesday nights.

My big breakthrough came at the Alpha Saturday. For months people had been talking to me and showing me passages in the bible about God’s love for me. But as I still hated myself so much, and felt I had sinned so horrifically during my illness, I really could not believe it. I felt as if I was carrying round a really heavy suitcase, crammed with all the awful, painful memories of hurting myself and my family and friends, and I felt so weighed down by it all. That Saturday, I finally accepted God’s love for me and was able to give him the whole suitcase. For years I had strived to make myself as thin and as ‘light’ as possible – that day I felt so light walking home I could have flown. I can’t describe just what it felt like to be free of all the negatives of the past, to have given it up to God and to know that it’s gone. I saw God writing it all out on a chalkboard and then wiping it clean – not like tearing up paper that can be pieced together again, but completely wiped away, so that no one would ever know it had even been written there.

Life wasn’t all easy and straighforward after this day – I still had a lot of work to do to recover from my eating disorder, but it was so much easier knowing Jesus was holding my hand throughout. The verse that really helped me in those months was from Joshua 1v9 – “Do not be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord your God is with wherever you go.” Everything isn’t going to be given to me on a plate, but I know that God will help me when things are tough, and celebrate with me when they’re good.

When I left hospital 6 years ago, I never wanted to set foot in the place again. Now God has given me the strength to go back and spend time with the current patients, encouraging them that recovery is possible, and I hope and pray one day I’ll be able to pray with them and show them how God has made my healing so complete.
 

Having committed my life to Christ as a teenager in 1970, and discipled during a time of an exciting movement of God, my Christian fervour was high, but sadly this dwindled as I entered my career as a police officer with shift work preventing my attendance at church, and new priorities contended for my time. This was the situation when I was involved in a serious car crash in 1977.
 

My car was hit side on by a ten ton truck, pushed across a crossroads and up a lamppost. You could say I truly saw the light, but actually I was unconscious and had to be cut free from the wreckage and removed to City hospital. Amongst my injuries, glass was in my eyes. A particularly devastating blow for someone having just entered the forensic fingerprint branch requiring good sight.

My family were called to my bedside as I regained consciousness. Though they did not attend church, I pleaded with them to `inform the church`. 24 hours later my brother visited again and I asked him whether he had informed the church. Something within me knew it was important, but my family had not. I pleaded again, and my brother decided to drive across Birmingham to St.John`s and if anyone was at church on a Tuesday evening he would tell them and so discharge his duty to his little sister.

What he did not know was that Tuesday evening was the church main prayer meeting called Open to God. He informed those gathered and left. They immediately prayed. Several miles away at 8pm lying in my hospital bed, I started to cry. The medics came asking whether I was in pain from all the injuries, but I wasn`t – I just cried.

They put it down to delayed shock, but on examining my eyes the following morning found that the glass shards had been washed away by the tears and my sight remained perfect. I didn`t even have to wear glasses for another 27 years!
 

A retired minister who had been at Open to God, Rev.Bertie Dolman visited me daily in hospital, and during this time I sensed a very strong Call of God to the healing and pastoral ministry.

This was confirmed time and again, and even now God knows He can get my attention as He draws near bringing me healing, and using me in the service of others.
 

Sometimes when I am sitting in church I rejoice in looking at the stone plaque and meditating on “Jesus is Lord”

And occasionally my mind goes back to a Standing Committee meeting in the 1960’s at the time of the building of this church. One of the things we were discussing was what we should put up here by the Lord’s Table.

Good evangelical tradition says that you should put up the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and I think that possibly the 1662 Prayer Book says the same. Some felt strongly that that is what we should do.

But Bill Leathem who was the vicar at the time, said very gently that perhaps we should consider having just the words of scripture “Jesus is Lord”. There was quite a battle really and one prominent member of the church resigned from the PCC over the issue.

I think actually in some ways it was a sort of seminal moment in the life of our church. It seems almost that we were making a decision as to whether we should live under law or under grace. I am deeply thankful that, as you can see, the ‘Jesus is Lord’ lobby won the day.

So I don’t take this plaque for granted. We might well have ended up with the 10 Commandments. And I continue to rejoice in it and its proclamation of truth

So when we find that a sermon is particularly boring we can look up and see this 3 point sermon in stone

Jesus     Is     Lord

And it’s what we all struggle to live for...
 

My name is Guy, and my wife Ann and I have been coming to St.Johns for the past 15 years.

We've heard a lot about change in the past few weeks, and hopes have been raised of a miraculous change in the world economy by a certain gentleman in America!

But is miraculous change possible in your life and mine?

I'd like to tell you a story:

We have been married for over 40 years and we have 7 children. For the first 30 years I worked as a freelance designer craftsman. If you'd have have asked what did I make, the answer was always the same – I can make anything – except money! From machines to houses, we always had work, and we were always able to put the bread on the table – but only just. There was never more than the bare minimum.

About 12 years ago, after a period of illness and a spell in hospital, the work dried up and we got into debt. It was at about this time that our two eldest sons started out in businesses of their own, and they too found it very difficult to make money. In fact, looking back, we realised that my parents, both gifted artists, had themselves always been short of money.

We began to wonder if there might be something at work that was causing this problem, and we decided to ask John for advice.

John asked me to tell him about my family, and when I told him that my grandfather had been in the police service in India, he felt that that might be significant, and explained that in those days it was quite common for a curse to be put you if you annoyed one of the local people. He said that a very common curse was one of poverty, and that such a curse would then continue on down through the generations.

John then prayed that the curse would be broken in Jesus name.

God answered this prayer in the most amazing way, starting in the following week, when I went into our local milliner's shop to ask about a new hat for my Dad.

'You do carpentry, don't you?' the lady said. 'Can you make me some hat blocks?'
'Certainly', I replied - '...what's a hat block?'

When she showed me this weird and wonderful shape, I wondered how I was going to make it!

'Can't you buy them, I asked?
'Oh, they're like hen's teeth, and the few manufacturer's don't have catalogues, you have to visit and sort through dusty shelves to find what you want.'

Aha – business opportunity!

To cut a long story short, I made her a dozen blocks, took some photos of them and sent them to milliners that we found in the Yellow Pages, then the orders started coming in so fast that we had to stop sending out catalogues!

From this small start, our turnover doubled every year for the next five years, and we went on to start a millinery school, and later to develop information products, to the point where we are now one of the largest suppliers of hatblocks and millinery information products in the world.

The curse that had gone down the generations had been broken, and all our family are now prospering!

So if you ask if change is possible, the answer is: Yes He can!