In the years leading up to 1991, I presented myself as a typical, conservative public servant; married, two sons, car, dog and a great job.
Yet, under the surface nothing was normal.
I was raised in a secular household; even though my mother called herself an Anglican; and, likewise my father a Catholic. As was the case in the 50s and 60s, my father made the major decisions and I attended catholic schools for my education. All the religious teaching I received at school had no influence on the way I lived my life. In my late teens, I left my home on the South Coast to attend university in Sydney within a few years I was living an entirely hedonistic and selfish lifestyle.
After boarding with relatives for a short time, I then often moved from one student house to another in Glebe; and from there to various places in Kings Cross/Darlinghurst where, I spent about three years chasing after the wind.
During this time, I became mesmerised by a young woman, who I had met at the Wayside Chapel, in Kings Cross. I thought she had all the answers on how to survive in a dog-eat-dog world. I followed her trail as she went down a path of destruction which took her from aimlessness, to working as a stripper, to finally as a street prostitute. (On reflection, the sadness of this woman was that she had one of the best analytic minds of anyone that I’ve ever met and from a very young age appeared to have reached a view that life was meaningless.)
Her knowledge of underworld activities intrigued me, and she appeared to enjoy sharing the very worst of this knowledge with me eventually, the information she shared with me led me to be involved in a number of dangerous situations which I’ve since wished that I could forever burn out of my memory. Yet, from that time, the addiction to the adrenalin rush that these activities produced was not fully eradicated until March 1991.
Relationships with other people were tumultuous and destructive; but there were a couple of people who supported (a thankless) me and perhaps wondered at that time if I would ever turn my life around.
I found myself on a tightrope, stretched somewhere between Nietzsche’s nihilism and Sartres existentialism while using a Kafkaesque mindset to guide me. Life was all about me, and I had reduced my value to nothing.
In early 1970, by a series of ‘chance’ events, I joined the public service, met my future wife, moved out of Darlinghurst and lost contact with the night life and people of Kings Cross. Life took a different turn after I became married with the arrival of my two sons some eighteen months apart. Their births seemed to switch on a different set of priorities. My single ambition was then to have a successful career; and, to give my wife and sons all the material help that they needed.
Yet, whenever I travelled away from home, the call of the night-life to search for the next adrenalin rush – was often overwhelming.
Life moved on to middle-age as I passed my fortieth year; by this time my wife had started attending a local Anglican church (having had a solid Anglican upbringing), and was regularly attending a weekly bible study group.
I often criticised her for spending so much time on church stuff and didn’t make it very easy for her. In my blind arrogance, I also thought I knew something about religion and would argue with her about some of the things she would say, that challenged my selfish lifestyle.
In early March 1991, my wife invited me to attend her bible study group as their ‘resident’ catholic member had left the group. I thought, why not, I would bamboozle them with a well analysed, existentialistic view of life; that there were no absolute truths, there was no meaning to be found in life – there was only relative and changing knowledge based on some poorly understood scientific laws.
However, as all plans of men and mice go astray, in a discussion during the bible study on those close brushes with death that we sometimes have, I mentioned to a jovial character sitting next to me about how I had appeared to have avoided, by chance, such a near death experience when I was living in Darlinghurst. I expected him to try and explain what it meant and I would then launch into a well rehearsed diatribe on the meaninglessness of such events. Instead, he simply turned and said: “It probably just means that Jesus loves you”. His words stunned me and left me in a silent, bewildered and confused state for the rest of the night.
Every day of the following week, the words “Jesus loves you”, went around and around my head. In the lifts at work, while standing at the photocopier, during work meetings or while walking along the corridors; the same words kept repeating, over and over, again “Jesus loves you.”
The following week I had to travel to Brisbane for work purposes to attend a meeting to negotiate for the supply of data for an important computer system which my area was developing. Normally, when travelling interstate, I would take the opportunity to re-visit my past, and see what sort of adrenalin rush was waiting for me in that city. Yet, on that Wednesday, exactly one week after the bible study (which my wife was attending that night), I was still unsettled by the constant looping of those words, “Jesus loves you”; and decided, after an early dinner with a work colleague, not to go out that night.
At around 9 p.m., I was lying on the bed in my motel room, staring at the ceiling trying to make sense of what was happening to me, why was it, that these words were so hard to shake out of my head!
After about thirty minutes of trying to divert my thoughts to other issues, in a form of desperation, I finally said out loud: “Jesus do you really love me?” (Given my past life: and, that I really had thought that my life was without meaning.)
I was suddenly struck by how luminescent the walls of the room, and everything in it, had become. I raised myself up on my right elbow to have a closer look at what was happening to the wall on my right. A feeling of incredible peace came over me as if all the pain, imperfections and anxiety that I held within me was temporarily driven out, the feeling was beyond comparison to the insignificant ‘highs’ produced by drugs or alcohol.
The very next moment, from a position about half a meter behind me, on the left side of the bed; I heard an amazing audible voice, loud enough that anyone in the room would have heard it, say: “I am, your God who loves you.”
My whole being responded in a way that is still very hard to explain. In a moment, my life was given meaning and value; in that moment I knew, that I was created to be, at home, with this incredible loving God. From that moment, I knew that life was serving this God - there was now, no other option.
Everything, then returned to normal, the whole event was probably no longer than a few minutes the room, was again a normal motel room; except I was left, a different person, on my way to becoming a new creation. [There are four possible scenarios or explanations of this event (for obvious reasons, I've ruled out deception by an evil spirit):
1) I've made the whole incident up - that is, I've lied to either impress family and friends or to legitimise my status as a Christian, so that I can speak as one who has special authority and knowledge - to give myself additional credibility; or
2) I'm delusional (insane) - either because of some form of mental illness or a form of drug/alcohol induced psychosis; or
3) It was a type of dream, a creation of my imagination which I believe to be real (should be treated as a subtype of category 2, but for the purposes of this discusssion I'll treat it as a separate category); or
4) It was a real event.]
DiscussionThank God for the Gideons, as it was one of their bibles in the motel room that I poured over for the next few hours words of scripture jumped off the pages into a hungry soul. I was experiencing a happiness that never felt before that night. Around midnight, I decided to get some sleep in preparation for the work negotiations that was scheduled for the next day. An hour later I was woken by a cold gust of wind and a different series of events occurred, which kept me awake to about 5 a.m.
Category 1: By nature, I don’t tend to lie about much, and those occasions in the past it has been more a slip of the tongue which I didn’t correct – I don’t remember any event during my adult life where I intentially lied and maintained the lie over time. At the time of my conversion most of my friends were not Christians and so the event was of no interest to them. Since March 1991, most of my new Christian friendships developed because of my change in life-style, not because of the nature of my conversion – to be honest, hardly anyone has asked me about the nature of my conversion. So, if I was seeking fame and credibility from this event – it did not happen!
Category 2: Always a difficult issue, how does anyone prove they are sane? Well, first off, there is no history of mental illness in my family (grandparents, mother, father or siblings). I’ve held down a responsible job which can be summarised as a very successful career. I’ve tried soft drugs (at University, fourty years ago) and I drink alcohol on a social level – I’ve never habitually used alcohol to the point of becoming ‘blind’ drunk – I fall asleep long before I get to that point! I’ve had experience with people who are schizophrenics and also those with the terrible bi-polar mental illness – none of the types of hullicinations or delusions associated with these forms of mental illnesses bear any meaningful resemblance to my experience.
Category 3: I included this category to deal with one important point – was it a form of a dream/vision created by my imagination? This is the most telling criterion – my imagination had nothing; from my past experiences; either lived, read or seen, to form a basis to what happened. It had no parallel to other peoples’ accounts of their encounters with God – it was not an extension of Greek/Roman mythology regarding illustrations of what God may have been like. What I experienced – and I’ve never disclosed the full details – was totally new, in terms of past experiences and expectations of what God might be like – therefore, from my perspective – what happened could not have been a product of my imagination. That is, there was no raw material based on prior knowledge that my imagination could use to ‘imagine’ the event – if that makes sense?
Category 4: I was fully awake, rational and the event occurred as summarised.
The greatest difficulty in talking about the details of this night is that there is no comparison to any human experience I’ve had or have ever read about. If I tried to make comparisons; “It was like ‘this’ or ‘that’”, there is no ‘this or ‘that’ which can be taken from my experiences to be used for this purpose. The apostle John in Relevation uses different descriptions for Jesus voice: ‘I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet (Revelation 1:10); yet he changes the description in 1:15; ‘… and His voice was like the sound of rushing water.’ . I can understand John’s problem – His voice perhaps did not sound like either, but it was as close as John could get, to compare God’s voice to sounds which would be familiar to the readers of Relevation – but not the exactly the same as what John heard.
In summary, I can say that the most important aspect I can recall was His absolute majesty. When I heard His voice, and I did not dare turn around to look at Him, I can say – I remained motionless as though dead (Revelation 1:17) – the awe and wonder was overwhelming – I had absolutely no intention of moving until I was given permission to do so, in some way or another.
Another point of interest is that those who read my encounter with Jesus; and who are not seeking a relationship with God, cannot accept my fourth category. It’s a spiritual reaction – they perhaps feel anger along with disbelief; and, probably go for a Category 2, type of explanation. Recall the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16: 19-31): The rich man asks Abraham if Lazarus can be sent to warn his five brothers, who were still alive, about the torment of hell. The rich man says to Abraham ” … if someone from the dead goes to them they will repent.’ Abraham said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets (what’s written in the Bible), they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead (and tells them).’ In a similar way – many will not believe what I’ve written, even if they put me through a battery of lie-detector tests; and the tests showed that I was telling the truth – they still would not believe.]
After saying my first prayer, the day proceeded as normal; the meeting I had for work purposes went smoothly and was more successful than expected.
On returning home, I went through the house throwing out all the magazines (the Playboys I had kept for the ‘Graham Green’ articles), books (including all of Sartres works (I had a large collection) and any object, which I identified as being in conflict with my relationship with Jesus. I avoided all the places and people that may have placed my young faith at risk. The people I had wronged in some way, I sought out, and apologised for my previous behaviour.
I became a member of the bible study group and immersed myself in scripture and attended any course that would help me gain a better understanding of how I may best serve my loving God. I prayed for a sound spiritual mentor and within a few days met one of the most enthuastic of Jesus’ followers, who has a recognised gift of teaching. I became interested in the history of the church during the first few centuries, and the split with the Jewish religion. This interest, in the Acts of the apostles, resulted in a couple of trips to Israel which proved to be very instructive in improving my ability in discerning the will of my Father.
My life since, has had its share of problems, bad things do happen to God’s people, but in the worst of times I know that I have a loving God who will always carry me through the impossibly rough bits.
I long to be reunited with Him (I’ve asked my wife to throw a party instead of a funeral service, in recognition of my joy in going home; but that’s her call), but up to that time; I’m content to do His will, to the best of my ability, empowered by His Holy Spirit.
Agape (God’s love) – My Journey
In the years leading up to 1991, I presented myself as a typical, conservative public servant; married, two sons, car, dog and a great job.
Yet, under the surface nothing was normal.
I was raised in a secular household; even though my mother called herself an Anglican; and, likewise my father a Catholic. As was the case in the 50s and 60s, my father made the major decisions and I attended catholic schools for my education. All the religious teaching I received at school had no influence on the way I lived my life. In my late teens, I left my home on the South Coast to attend university in Sydney within a few years I was living an entirely hedonistic and selfish lifestyle.
After boarding with relatives for a short time, I then often moved from one student house to another in Glebe; and from there to various places in Kings Cross/Darlinghurst where, I spent about three years chasing after the wind.
During this time, I became mesmerised by a young woman, who I had met at the Wayside Chapel, in Kings Cross. I thought she had all the answers on how to survive in a dog-eat-dog world. I followed her trail as she went down a path of destruction which took her from aimlessness, to working as a stripper, to finally as a street prostitute. (On reflection, the sadness of this woman was that she had one of the best analytic minds of anyone that I’ve ever met and from a very young age appeared to have reached a view that life was meaningless.)
Her knowledge of underworld activities intrigued me, and she appeared to enjoy sharing the very worst of this knowledge with me eventually, the information she shared with me led me to be involved in a number of dangerous situations which I’ve since wished that I could forever burn out of my memory. Yet, from that time, the addiction to the adrenalin rush that these activities produced was not fully eradicated until March 1991.
Relationships with other people were tumultuous and destructive; but there were a couple of people who supported (a thankless) me and perhaps wondered at that time if I would ever turn my life around.
I found myself on a tightrope, stretched somewhere between Nietzsche’s nihilism and Sartres existentialism while using a Kafkaesque mindset to guide me. Life was all about me, and I had reduced my value to nothing.
In early 1970, by a series of ‘chance’ events, I joined the public service, met my future wife, moved out of Darlinghurst and lost contact with the night life and people of Kings Cross. Life took a different turn after I became married with the arrival of my two sons some eighteen months apart. Their births seemed to switch on a different set of priorities. My single ambition was then to have a successful career; and, to give my wife and sons all the material help that they needed.
Yet, whenever I travelled away from home, the call of the night-life to search for the next adrenalin rush – was often overwhelming.
Life moved on to middle-age as I passed my fortieth year; by this time my wife had started attending a local Anglican church (having had a solid Anglican upbringing), and was regularly attending a weekly bible study group.
I often criticised her for spending so much time on church stuff and didn’t make it very easy for her. In my blind arrogance, I also thought I knew something about religion and would argue with her about some of the things she would say, that challenged my selfish lifestyle.
In early March 1991, my wife invited me to attend her bible study group as their ‘resident’ catholic member had left the group. I thought, why not, I would bamboozle them with a well analysed, existentialistic view of life; that there were no absolute truths, there was no meaning to be found in life – there was only relative and changing knowledge based on some poorly understood scientific laws.
However, as all plans of men and mice go astray, in a discussion during the bible study on those close brushes with death that we sometimes have, I mentioned to a jovial character sitting next to me about how I had appeared to have avoided, by chance, such a near death experience when I was living in Darlinghurst. I expected him to try and explain what it meant and I would then launch into a well rehearsed diatribe on the meaninglessness of such events. Instead, he simply turned and said: “It probably just means that Jesus loves you”. His words stunned me and left me in a silent, bewildered and confused state for the rest of the night.
Every day of the following week, the words “Jesus loves you”, went around and around my head. In the lifts at work, while standing at the photocopier, during work meetings or while walking along the corridors; the same words kept repeating, over and over, again “Jesus loves you.”
The following week I had to travel to Brisbane for work purposes to attend a meeting to negotiate for the supply of data for an important computer system which my area was developing. Normally, when travelling interstate, I would take the opportunity to re-visit my past, and see what sort of adrenalin rush was waiting for me in that city. Yet, on that Wednesday, exactly one week after the bible study (which my wife was attending that night), I was still unsettled by the constant looping of those words, “Jesus loves you”; and decided, after an early dinner with a work colleague, not to go out that night.
At around 9 p.m., I was lying on the bed in my motel room, staring at the ceiling trying to make sense of what was happening to me, why was it, that these words were so hard to shake out of my head!
After about thirty minutes of trying to divert my thoughts to other issues, in a form of desperation, I finally said out loud: “Jesus do you really love me?” (Given my past life: and, that I really had thought that my life was without meaning.)
I was suddenly struck by how luminescent the walls of the room, and everything in it, had become. I raised myself up on my right elbow to have a closer look at what was happening to the wall on my right. A feeling of incredible peace came over me as if all the pain, imperfections and anxiety that I held within me was temporarily driven out, the feeling was beyond comparison to the insignificant ‘highs’ produced by drugs or alcohol.
The very next moment, from a position about half a meter behind me, on the left side of the bed; I heard an amazing audible voice, loud enough that anyone in the room would have heard it, say: “I am, your God who loves you.”
My whole being responded in a way that is still very hard to explain. In a moment, my life was given meaning and value; in that moment I knew, that I was created to be, at home, with this incredible loving God. From that moment, I knew that life was serving this God - there was now, no other option.
Everything, then returned to normal, the whole event was probably no longer than a few minutes the room, was again a normal motel room; except I was left, a different person, on my way to becoming a new creation.
[There are four possible scenarios or explanations of this event (for obvious reasons, I've ruled out deception by an evil spirit):
1) I've made the whole incident up - that is, I've lied to either impress family and friends or to legitimise my status as a Christian, so that I can speak as one who has special authority and knowledge - to give myself additional credibility; or
2) I'm delusional (insane) - either because of some form of mental illness or a form of drug/alcohol induced psychosis; or
3) It was a type of dream, a creation of my imagination which I believe to be real (should be treated as a subtype of category 2, but for the purposes of this discusssion I'll treat it as a separate category); or
4) It was a real event.]
DiscussionThank God for the Gideons, as it was one of their bibles in the motel room that I poured over for the next few hours words of scripture jumped off the pages into a hungry soul. I was experiencing a happiness that never felt before that night. Around midnight, I decided to get some sleep in preparation for the work negotiations that was scheduled for the next day. An hour later I was woken by a cold gust of wind and a different series of events occurred, which kept me awake to about 5 a.m.
Category 1: By nature, I don’t tend to lie about much, and those occasions in the past it has been more a slip of the tongue which I didn’t correct – I don’t remember any event during my adult life where I intentially lied and maintained the lie over time. At the time of my conversion most of my friends were not Christians and so the event was of no interest to them. Since March 1991, most of my new Christian friendships developed because of my change in life-style, not because of the nature of my conversion – to be honest, hardly anyone has asked me about the nature of my conversion. So, if I was seeking fame and credibility from this event – it did not happen!
Category 2: Always a difficult issue, how does anyone prove they are sane? Well, first off, there is no history of mental illness in my family (grandparents, mother, father or siblings). I’ve held down a responsible job which can be summarised as a very successful career. I’ve tried soft drugs (at University, fourty years ago) and I drink alcohol on a social level – I’ve never habitually used alcohol to the point of becoming ‘blind’ drunk – I fall asleep long before I get to that point! I’ve had experience with people who are schizophrenics and also those with the terrible bi-polar mental illness – none of the types of hullicinations or delusions associated with these forms of mental illnesses bear any meaningful resemblance to my experience.
Category 3: I included this category to deal with one important point – was it a form of a dream/vision created by my imagination? This is the most telling criterion – my imagination had nothing; from my past experiences; either lived, read or seen, to form a basis to what happened. It had no parallel to other peoples’ accounts of their encounters with God – it was not an extension of Greek/Roman mythology regarding illustrations of what God may have been like. What I experienced – and I’ve never disclosed the full details – was totally new, in terms of past experiences and expectations of what God might be like – therefore, from my perspective – what happened could not have been a product of my imagination. That is, there was no raw material based on prior knowledge that my imagination could use to ‘imagine’ the event – if that makes sense?
Category 4: I was fully awake, rational and the event occurred as summarised.
The greatest difficulty in talking about the details of this night is that there is no comparison to any human experience I’ve had or have ever read about. If I tried to make comparisons; “It was like ‘this’ or ‘that’”, there is no ‘this or ‘that’ which can be taken from my experiences to be used for this purpose. The apostle John in Relevation uses different descriptions for Jesus voice: ‘I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet (Revelation 1:10); yet he changes the description in 1:15; ‘… and His voice was like the sound of rushing water.’ . I can understand John’s problem – His voice perhaps did not sound like either, but it was as close as John could get, to compare God’s voice to sounds which would be familiar to the readers of Relevation – but not the exactly the same as what John heard.
In summary, I can say that the most important aspect I can recall was His absolute majesty. When I heard His voice, and I did not dare turn around to look at Him, I can say – I remained motionless as though dead (Revelation 1:17) – the awe and wonder was overwhelming – I had absolutely no intention of moving until I was given permission to do so, in some way or another.
Another point of interest is that those who read my encounter with Jesus; and who are not seeking a relationship with God, cannot accept my fourth category. It’s a spiritual reaction – they perhaps feel anger along with disbelief; and, probably go for a Category 2, type of explanation. Recall the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16: 19-31): The rich man asks Abraham if Lazarus can be sent to warn his five brothers, who were still alive, about the torment of hell. The rich man says to Abraham ” … if someone from the dead goes to them they will repent.’ Abraham said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets (what’s written in the Bible), they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead (and tells them).’ In a similar way – many will not believe what I’ve written, even if they put me through a battery of lie-detector tests; and the tests showed that I was telling the truth – they still would not believe.]
After saying my first prayer, the day proceeded as normal; the meeting I had for work purposes went smoothly and was more successful than expected.
On returning home, I went through the house throwing out all the magazines (the Playboys I had kept for the ‘Graham Green’ articles), books (including all of Sartres works (I had a large collection) and any object, which I identified as being in conflict with my relationship with Jesus. I avoided all the places and people that may have placed my young faith at risk. The people I had wronged in some way, I sought out, and apologised for my previous behaviour.
I became a member of the bible study group and immersed myself in scripture and attended any course that would help me gain a better understanding of how I may best serve my loving God. I prayed for a sound spiritual mentor and within a few days met one of the most enthuastic of Jesus’ followers, who has a recognised gift of teaching. I became interested in the history of the church during the first few centuries, and the split with the Jewish religion. This interest, in the Acts of the apostles, resulted in a couple of trips to Israel which proved to be very instructive in improving my ability in discerning the will of my Father.
My life since, has had its share of problems, bad things do happen to God’s people, but in the worst of times I know that I have a loving God who will always carry me through the impossibly rough bits.
I long to be reunited with Him (I’ve asked my wife to throw a party instead of a funeral service, in recognition of my joy in going home; but that’s her call), but up to that time; I’m content to do His will, to the best of my ability, empowered by His Holy Spirit.