Saving Grace
I started work on Chapter 2 of my book about the grace of God last
night and it seemed a good place to share about my coming into
relationship with Jesus.
Here is the story:
I was born in
England in the industrial city of Wolverhampton. My parents were solid
working class people as were there parents before them.
My
younger brother and I attended the local Catholic school and our family
members were at church most Sundays. I attained the status of altar boy
and seriously expected that I would one day be a priest.
In
February of 1969, my family moved half-way across the world to Sydney.
My parents were aware that the industrial foundations which their lives
had been built upon were rapidly crumbling and that their best hope of
building a future for themselves and their children lay in Australia.
This
was a truly courageous leap. It was also absolutely the right thing to
do. A few short years later much of the heavy industry which had
supported that whole region of England started to collapse under
economic reforms.
In the turmoil of international migration,
many things changed in our lives. In adopting a new lifestyle we picked
up many new things and dropped many old things. in the process of
adapting, we just did not connect with church.
As I went through
High School, I excelled in many academic areas, particularly in maths
and science subjects. Along with this, I was developing a reputation as
a hard-line and vocal atheist.
Strangely though, most of my friends were christians or at least from active christian families.
I
decided to go to Sydney University to study Chemical Engineering But I
could see a looming problem. In those days, engineering courses were
90% male students! Hearing my friends talk about the “hot” girls who
went to the Methodist Youth Group, to everyone's surprise, I decided to
check it out.
So it was that although I was determined to keep
the God stuff at a safe distance, I was also attending Youth Group with
a not-so-secret agenda.
In May of my first year at Uni, my best
mate Robert McKean had to stay at home for exams while his family went
off to holidays. He invited me to share the house for the week, then
join his family at the beach after we had finished our exams.
It was during that week that I met Jesus.
One
night as I was lying in bed, not quite asleep, I had a vision. In this
vision, I saw myself climbing a huge mountain The mountainside was
almost vertical and I was dragging myself up using my hands as well as
my feet. As I was scaling the mountain, I saw a bright light glowing
from beyond the mountain. Finally, I arrived at the peak and could see
the source of the light- Jesus larger than life and radiating not just
light, but love and peace which flowed over me in a way I had never
known before.
I wasn't sure what to do with all of this, so I
said nothing to anybody, but I did start attending church. Many years
later I found out that Robert's mother had been praying for me for
years to find Jesus.
I was saved by grace- overtaken by Jesus at the very time I was running away from Him.