What God is doing in my life...

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Jan 06, 2008 - Amanda

2007 was an amazing year for me.  My life has always been a bit of a battle.  I was born into a Christian family, however we never practiced.  I was married for nearly 10 years and was a practicing catholic with my husband and albeit that I was a devout catholic and I used to go to church religiously with him and when we split up   I moved to a house just up the road and I was searching for something but didn’t know what it was. 

 I did end up going to a church up the road, but I just knew it wasn’t right for me so I stopped going.  So I wasn’t actually going to church for a few years.  I saw Haven arrive on Priory Rd and I thought that looks like a place I’d like to visit but I just wasn’t brave enough and so for years I just used to pass it in the morning and then passed it again on my way home in the evening.  I thought I really need to go in there but just never had the courage to do it.  

Then I met a friend who had just started to go to church and who was telling me how his life was changing and realised I wanted this for myself and I really need to find a place to go.  I thought I really must go and visit Haven so I was running during the summer trying to stay fit and I thought if I just jog by I might see somebody and then might be able to ask what goes on in there.  Didn’t know what time it started, didn’t know what time it finished so I thought I would just go and wander on by and see what happens. 

So I jogged on by to the lake, jogged round the lake, jogged back – still no sign of anything happening.  Jogged back home, jogged back down again, still no sign of anything going on but could hear the sound of glorious singing and walked around the back and as I stood at the back, could hear all the glorious worship. I thought I want some of that, I need to go in.  I thought I can’t just walk in, everyone will stare at me,  I stood outside for a while, went back home, jogged round the lake again, came back again, still no sign of anybody.  So I thought I will go back home, get changed and then walk back down again.  Still no sign of anybody.  So again I walked to the lake, walked around the lake and walked back again and then saw someone.   So I said ‘Excuse me is this your church?  Could I speak to somebody?’  So he brought me inside and I think introduced me to you Chris who told me that I was more than welcome and invited me to come along on Sundays.

 So I came along and my first full Sunday blew me away.  Coming to Haven after having been at catholic church for 12 years blew me away – people were giving testimonies and I found myself in floods of tears and I asked myself ‘What is going on here?’  Whenever I come into church I feel this incredible warmth and heat which is amazing. 

One thing I do need to say is that when I came in this morning and I saw the haze, I thought O my goodness, maybe I do need to do my testimony now.   At the end when all the chairs were moved, I thought, Oh we’re packing away now and everyone’s going home, so I picked up my coat, picked up my bag and had no idea what was going on.  Then Chris said, will you come and pray with me and I have never experienced anything like it in my life. 

My life has changed dramatically albeit that I didn’t see it at the time. I felt I was on a roller coaster; a sea that was so tumultuous but I now have the most amazing peace in my life.  Things do go wrong and crappy things happen.  I had this great big hole in my heart, and I’d been striving so long to find I don’t know what but I am at peace now, and I am so grateful to Him.

Jan 06, 2008 - Matt

 It’s been a good end of the year for me, but the last fortnight has been quite up and down.  I was part of the group that went out to Toronto and we had a fantastic time there and when we came back, for weeks and weeks I felt fantastic and everything was great. 

Then all of a sudden at the end of October, suddenly I didn’t feel so great any more all that wonderful contentment and everything feeling great suddenly stopped dead.  I felt lousy really and just very unhappy and all this stuff started welling up inside.  I just started to unravel and all the control mechanisms that I put in place, and I was very good at keeping in place just started to unwind really.  I was really really angry at myself, really angry about a lot of stuff, a lot of things that Jo has said actually – really about the whole Christian existence – such a waste of effort and time. 

 So all this stuff was coming out and I was feeling very frustrated -  I think it was at the Worship service on Halloween night, that I was last asked to give my testimony and I can remember saying that I like peoples testimonies when they are totally  honest and real.  Well that night, I walked in a bit late and had just walked round the corner to that door and actually wanted to turn round and go back home before Chris and Lori had spotted me.  But Chris had seen me and I thought ‘O darn’ and she said ‘ Oh come and sit on the front row’ and I thought that is just the last place I want to be.  I was then picked upon by Lori to do a testimony and that was just the last thing I wanted to do in the world.  I had my best ‘don’t pick me’ face on that night and I felt just horrible and so I got up there and said that I felt crap and really unhappy and I don’t know what God is doing inside me but I don’t really like it at all and then I handed the microphone back before I said anything else really. 

My wife had been saying to me during this angry phase ‘I wish you’d stop swearing all the time’ because I just poured out all my frustration and anger that was pouring out all the time all over the place.  I managed to hold it in when I was at work – which obviously you don’t have a big explosion at work but Sue was very much getting a lot of it.  So anyway, I have had a lot of help from Chris and Lori and they’ve coped with me venting my frustrations at them really. 

Quite a lot of years really, a lot of buried stuff.  I had a lot of frustration within myself but felt that I had to conform almost to a different personality type.  I am very quiet and an introvert really and I always thought that an introvert was a failed extravert.  That was a perception I have in me and I don’t know where it comes from but that’s just how I felt about myself.  So I’ve always kind of struggled to be a bit more like other people – whoever they might be – family, friends, people you sort of see and work with.  This pressure to be someone I wasn’t was driving me mad and it takes a lot of effort to be someone you’re not.  But I have now got to the place where I am now happy to walk around being me inside.  I am introverted and I’m actually quite good at it.  And that’s OK.  What else was I going to say?  As for this anger stuff, I had to go through a whole list of things I was angry about and just about everybody else it seemed and I’ve gone through a lot of forgiving people it seems.  I’ve vented a lot of frustrations as I have mentioned and I found myself getting in touch with lots of feelings that were stuffed down and bottled up and locked away and they keep coming up as surprises really because I’m not used to feeling stuff.  Silly things like I’ve been watching strictly come dancing with my daughter and it’s become a regular thing where we would sit down every Saturday evening and she had made an attachment to one of the competitors, Matt Viangelo and we were on this sort of roller coaster ride where one week it’s been really good and one week it’s been rubbish and one week recently where we were sitting there and she was biting her nails because she he was so desperate for Matt to do well and I’m finding myself saying ‘ O please God, please make him dance well!’.  And then one week he bombed and the next week he did this fantastic dance where he got 4 tens and I was out of my seat starting to cheer and I nearly catapulted my daughter through the wall.  And she was sitting on my knee and I remember thinking gosh where is all that coming from. Because before I would have kept it all very even but things were really going off inside and I was thinking, gosh that’s really not me.  But there are a lot of things like that where I am just starting to get in touch with how I am supposed to be.  And that it is actually valid to feel like this rather than locking it away that I have done through various circumstances over many, many years.  There was a 6-8 week period when things were not good, but it’s ended really well.  And the way it’s all come together is just fantastic and sorry just 2 other little good things.  One good thing is throughout the whole process of what God was doing and the forgiveness issues, it’s the little offences that happen between myself and Jo and myself and my mum.  Our relationships have been good but just stuff going back, I don’t know, 15 or 16 years or so, really small things, but I’ve left them undealt with and I would dare say that from your point of view it was still there and Jo would probably say the same.  But they were there and they just prevented relationship from being what it should have been.  And I felt stirred by God to actually deal with these things and actually sort them out – and I don’t know – I had a chat with Jo and a chat with my mum and sorted things out and I’ve moved on and I feel that already the relationships we have now are already better than what we had before.  We have gone from good, and everything’s good but that’s not really good enough.  It’s just got better and it’s great.

Jan 06, 2008 - Jo

I am beginning to understand that, like an artist would take time, God took time creating me and that has been something that I have tried to keep coming back to.

The other thing that really hit me and keeps striking me because I think it’s something that went quite deep in me was when I had the children.  I had a daughter and then a son, then twin boys.  I had so many people saying negative stuff about when they grow up you lose your boys but you keep your daughters  – but I was thinking: ‘But I’ve only got one daughter . I have four children that I am pouring my life into, but I had this unspoken rule that people spoke over me which was that I was only going to keep one of them.  The others were going to go off with their wives who wouldn’t accept me or who wouldn’t like me.

One Friday night I was with Samuel.  He was hugging me and was under my arms and as I was worshipping, I had a physical sensation of Sam growing, from being under my arm to being like Pat is here and I felt God saying: You’re not going to lose your boys.  They’re not going to go.  And particularly with Samuel, that sensation that one day, I am going to be standing there with my grown up son and he’s going to have his arm around me and we are going to be close and that I’m not going to lose my boys.

So those are two things worth mentioning.  But I’ m sorry if I sounded negative at the beginning but it’s just kind of where I was at this week.

I could probably have preached a sermon on the unconditional love of God and the grace of God. I probably could have done quite easily but it’s a different thing from saying it and meaning it and knowing it in your heart. Chris and Lori have had me a couple of times in that prayer room and challenged me whether I really know God’s unconditional love and the grace of God and if I’d never done another good thing, that God would still love me just the same.

 When I first heard and sang  ‘True love’  –‘ let me know the kisses of your mouth and touch of your embrace’ I found it the most cringe–worthy song that could have been sung in church and I absolutely hated it.  If ever the words went up on the overhead projector, (this was in my old church) I just used to think: ‘Not this cringe-worthy awful song’. But somebody told me it was all in the Song of Solomon.  So I read the Song of Solomon and I thought: ‘I’m never reading that again!’ ‘cos all I could think of was: ’Why on earth has God put something so sexual in the Bible, something so creepy!’ It just made me feel horrible and I thought: No,  I can hear all the rest of the Bible, even Leviticus, but not Song of Solomon. It just made me cringe because that wasn’t my God.  My God wasn’t the sort of God that wanted to be my lover.  My God was the sort of God who was dictating to me and telling me: ‘You’ve got to go to church, you’ve got to lead the house group, you’ve got to do the children’s work.  You’ve got to be the best mother in the whole world and you don’t have issues; put your Sunday face on and you look great.  You look after everybody else and you don’t show your real self - you don’t have sex before marriage - you don’t do this and you don’t do that. It was a complete list of hoops I had to jump through and a walk I had to walk that was so tight and so rigid for my life that actually, falling off was easier than walking on the rope.   Even though, in all the big areas, I kind of had done the right thing, I was still on a guilt trip. And my life was still a whole list of things I probably wasn’t doing right and a whole list of things I could be doing better and I wasn’t ever really going to please God 100% and even then my attitude probably wasn’t right.  That was my understanding of Christianity - there were a lot of boxes I had to tick and perhaps I wasn’t really ticking very many of them, even though on the Sunday morning front, it looked good. I knew the inside of me and I was so harsh on myself, because I had had an awful lot of condemnatory preaching over many many years.  So anyway just for me learning this grace of God over my life, I suddenly realised a couple of weeks ago, they’d started singing that song again and when it first went up on the overhead projector, I had that first: ‘Not THIS again!’  It went out of fashion and it stopped being sung and I thought:’ That’s OK’ but when it went back on here, I thought: ’How do I feel about this now?’ and I thought:’ No just go with it.’  In my mind there was a little battle that I was playing and as we were singing, I thought: ‘Oh, I can sing this now’.  When we sang it a second time, I thought: ‘I’m not only singing it, I can feel it, I can accept it, and you know, it seemed to be a like a comforting song, a meaningful song to me now rather than one that made my skin crawl. And yet now, I do feel that I have come to the place where I can see God very differently.  I definitely feel like a work in progress on a lot of areas but I can definitely see that I am changing and that’s probably why Chris asked me to testify.   And asking me to testify was good because I did need to stop and think to remind myself of what God has done.   I sometimes think we get so tired and overworked in our life that you can get just naturally run down with what you’ve got on and then all the devil has to do is whisper a few lies and you start to spiral down.  Neil was saying to me this week, think about this and try the other - it’s not so bad to have doubts so long as you know that you come back to God. But of course for me, the very fact that I was having any doubts was like a massive sin and you know I just felt such a worm.