As a child, the thought of sitting and listening to someone speak for an hour was the strangest thing to me so I never really paid much attention to what was being said, nevertheless, God was giving me a knowledge of the foundation gospel through the church. As a family, we used to go to a place in the summer called Capernwray Hall which is a Bible School during the year but during the summer they do Christian family holidays and once I was old enough, I attended the teenage youth weeks. During one of the camps, something happened which changed my life.
During one of the meetings during the summer of 2008 when I was 14, God spoke to me and convicted me of my sin. It was so clear that I was in a state of sin and on the road to hell. I knew this to be true from the years of faithful teaching I had been given at my church but up until that point I had refused to listen before the Holy Spirit melted my heart of stone. I can remember walking out of the meeting building and praying to God and asking for forgiveness for all the sins I had committed and that I wanted to live my life for Jesus. The first thing I did was to call my mum and dad in tears telling them I had become a Christian.
To begin with, everything was going well, but once I was back to school my desire to please God began to diminish rapidly. I ended up going week by week to church half listening and then back to ‘normal life’ during the week. Each summer I would return to Capernwray and have the fire lit once again and think to myself, this year is going to be different. I am really going to try my best. But this was my biggest mistake, I was trying to do it myself and not surrender fully to God and let him be Lord of my life.
After I finished college I went off to study at University and this was the start of a big decline in my walk with the Lord. I studied for a total of 4 years which seemed to go so quickly and besides the odd trip home where I would go to church with my family, I was living my life to please myself. At the end of 2016, I finished University I managed to get a job at a sports technology company that I still work for today.
Sadly, my job became my number one priority in my life, and it was all I ever was thinking about. Into my second year of work, I moved to Cheltenham and just before I went my mum suggested I book to go to Capernwray the following summer and I did but more to keep her happy than anything else. My main priority was my job and to understand how obsessed I was I can remember that in the early part of 2018, I worked for 4 straight weeks including evenings and weekends. I was addicted. After the novelty of living in Cheltenham quickly went away, I began to realise how unhappy I was.
Then as the summer of 2018 came around 2 things happened. Firstly, while I was on holiday at Capernwray God spoke to me and made me realise how foolish I had been living. Secondly, by God’s providence, I was diagnosed with a condition in my left ear that required an operation.
Through this time God was working out His purposes and the operation I needed was going to take place in Manchester and I was going to need some time to recover following it. God provided an opportunity in my company for me to move back home and in September 2018 I moved back and had the operation in November. Since then God has been working in my life and he has transformed everything. I was baptised in September 2019 (would have been earlier but had to wait for my ear to heal) and now I am trying to live my life as a servant for his glory.
Try God
Also Read:
- Men in the Bible: A Man of Considerable Goodwill
- The Myth of Omnipresence (1): The 5 Places God Always Is
- Overwhelmed
- Great Truths Adults Learned
- I Passed a Professional Exam and Got a Job After 10 Years
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