After a certain amount of thought, I’ve decided to share the personal testimony I gave on Father’s Day 2008, immediately before I was baptised at Boston Road Baptist Church.
Testimony
Those who come to faith, do so at different times in their lives and for a variety of reasons.
While I had always counted myself a Christian and accepted the core beliefs of the Church of England from a child through to adult years I had never taken my understanding and commitment further. Like so many, my life was bounded only by what was before my eyes – home, mortgage, work, holidays, spare time interests and the other relentless demands of the physical world.
It was a Saturday morning like any other. The phone rang. It was my mum. She said she was in Croydon and asked if Laura, Michael or Josh wanted anything as she wandered in and out of the shops. We chatted normally. As we wound down and she prepared to go there was a pause. “I’ve been told I’ve got cancer”, she said. The precise words that passed between us are lost to me now but it was clear that the diagnosis was extremely serious. I knew she was depending on me for a calm response and I told my mum that from that moment on she had to believe with absolute conviction and sincerity in her total recovery, irrespective of what others might say along the way.
I had grown up in an environment of domestic violence, in which I had witnessed my mum being systematically stripped of the confidence and self belief necessary to take up a life away from the abuse and subjugation she was made to endure. To live that life, only to find some forty years later that cancer would overtake and govern her future was, to me, the cruellest of injustice.
I began to pray. I did so every day. I asked Him to cure my mum. I told Him that I believed with all my heart that she deserved this.
It was Boxing Day, 26 December 2006, approaching three years since my mum had first been diagnosed. My youngest brother Jason, had defied my dad’s insistence that the house be turned into a silent morgue, even while my mum clung to the edge of her life and invited the whole family over, including all the children. My brother wanted to fill the house with life and happiness and we agreed. Ruth and I turned up about midday with Laura, Michael and Joshua. My mum was asleep in the bed provided by the hospice; not in a coma I believe but just deeply asleep. We all kissed her. I told her I loved her. I can’t be certain if there was just a flicker of recognition from her closed eyes.
I was in the front room playing with the kids when my brother Nick came in, clearly upset and said they thought mum had died. He asked me to confirm their belief. It was about 2.30pm.
I did what I knew I could do to check. I was totally calm. When I said I was certain mum had been released from her cancer my brothers feelings began to spill out. I made no conscious effort to resist being drawn into the emotion but simply felt overwhelming peace. I calmly agreed things for two of my brothers to do. One to call a doctor to examine mum and verify death, another to quietly tell the adults in the front room to take the kids over the park while the necessary formalities unfolded at the house and so on. I felt nothing but gladness for her. She had died with the sound of her grandchildren playing happily together in the next room. Having been the longest witness to her suffering (of her four children) I gladly gave her up to death in the hope that she would pass into God’s eternal love, who would keep her safe for me until I can see her again, restored and happy. For that you need to have faith…
I continue to pray every day and ask Our Lord to surround and fill my mum with His peace and love. I thank my mum here today, in front of you, my witnesses, for leading me to faith. She gave me my physical life nearly fifty years ago, never knowing that she would be the catalyst for the greatest gift of all – the spiritual acceptance of our Lord Jesus as my Saviour and the beginning of a lifelong relationship with God.
And there laid the seed of faith in the intervening years. I continued to pray every day and knew and was glad that I was finally spiritually awake. Fiona, our Minister, asked me when the decision to request baptism occurred. “Between Junction 4 and 5 of the M1” I replied, “Immediately before the Watford turn-off”. There could hardly be a less spiritual venue for such a moment but as they say ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways’.
Thank you to everyone who has helped lead me to this moment.
