August, 1985.
“God I promise I’ll commit my life to you, if you will
bring my mother back.” The prayer was answered instantly!
The first thing the following morning I got up, washed, shaved,
and had breakfast. I was ready! I could feel it in the air - something
had happened the previous night. Then the phone rang. It was my
sister, Rosemary. “Mum walked into the New Zealand embassy
last night! She will be flying out tomorrow! The arrangements
have all been made and they will allow her to travel unescorted.”
“That’s fantastic!”
“She will be in New Zealand in about three days.”
I tried to tell Rosemary what I had done the previous night but
she wasn’t listening, so I stopped. She continued with the
other arrangements of her picking Mum up and taking her straight
to hospital and then she hung up.
“Praise you Lord. Praise, praise you Lord!” I said out
loud, and then thought, I am yours now!
I can totally understand where my sister was coming from to write
this off as a coincidence; any normal, thinking person would do
so, not knowing God or the circumstances leading up to this.
It sure took a bit to bring me to this stage. In fact, since fifteen
or sixteen years old, I can clearly remember praying to God to
show Himself. In the following years He did so, placing His hand
over my life - how else did I survive? But I was looking in the
other direction. When I was sixteen, I was in the process of lowering
a bucket over a thirty foot cliff collecting shell fish off the
rock bellow when the strap on my sandal broke, causing me to loose
my balance and fall over the cliff. I can remember grabbing at
various objects as I went down, missing everything. I braced myself
hands forward, as I slammed face down into the rocks below. My
only injuries were a dislocated left shoulder and a bone chipped
in that elbow, now requiring a pin.
I had just started my apprenticeship, and while test-running a
refrigeration system, my hand slipped off the screw driver and
into the contacts. I can clearly remember electrical power running
all the way up my arm and into my chest just before I was thrown
off. Any further and it would have been into my heart.
Around that same time, I was a passenger in the back of a van
after a social club binge. These were the days when most vehicles
didn’t have seatbelts. The driver misjudged a corner and
slid into a powerpole, hitting the pole exactly where I was sitting.
I was thrown across the interior of the van, smashing a wooden
crate filled with bottles with my head. I woke up, getting pulled
out of the wreck by an ambulance crew.
When I was eighteen, my boss asked me to pressurize an old Norge
fridge with a dangerous gas, as he looked on. The Norge fridge
had double layers of steel panel on the back. As I was pressurizing
the fridge, I had my hand on the top of the motor (compressor).
The motor exploded, peeling open like a banana, throwing shrapnel
in all directions. The top of the motor that I had been holding
was blown straight through the top of the fridge like it didn’t
exist, and into the ceiling of the building. I in turn was thrown
several feet, landing under the workshop bench, with the two panels
of steel blown off the fridge and wrapped around me. Shrapnel
tore through the first layer of steel, and dented the second layer,
with only one piece of shrapnel striking me, causing a minor cut
to my ankle. I had skin blown off my face and hands and both eardrums
were perforated, but with time it all healed.
When I was 23, I worked in Papua New Guinea. Only twice in my
life have I missed flights and both times they ended up a major
blessing. On one occasion I had a job I needed to get to in the
Highlands of PNG. Due to various reasons I was half an hour late,
missing the flight. The next flight, several hours later, took
us over the wreckage of the first flight - no one had survived.
Through all this, I still turned a blind eye, saying I had simply
been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I had never acknowledged or recognized the Lord in my life and
had reached the point of writing Him off, even though as kids,
my two sisters and I had been sent to an Anglican Sunday school.
We were brought up by our mother, our father having left us when
I was four. Mum had many interests, most connected to her main
interest, yoga. This is based upon the Hindu religion, and like
many people, Mum was drawn into an interest in this as well as
other eastern religions, and their connected philosophies. Through
mum’s influence, I tried to see if God was real by searching
through various eastern religions along with the Mormons, Jehovah’s
Witnesses, etc. But their views weren’t mine, and I saw things
that just didn’t add up.
During the period of 1979-80 I got involved with a man named Mike
from a local church, but all it meant to me was a filler-in of
time, easing some of the loneliness I felt. Unfortunately, I disagreed
with some of their views, left their church and went seeking God
elsewhere.
By the beginning of 1985, my life, my business (refrigeration),
everything I felt secure in had come crashing down around me.
Totally isolated from my family, with five workshop shifts in
two and a half months and a smashed vehicle, I ended up owing
over forty thousand dollars, had an apprentice under contract
and no work. Also, my mother had a serious breakdown and was lost
in England for over six months.
It all began when I lost the lease on my workshop. I had to shift
back to my mother’s home unit where I was also living, and
set up a workshop in her garage and home! We lost a substantial
number of our customers. I stayed at my mother’s place for
about ten months. She then decided to take a trip overseas, at
which time I located a shop out of town at a place called Papamoa,
and began negotiations for the lease. I shifted into the shop
before the lease was drawn up, paying a week’s rent in advance.
I had to build an office straight away as temporary accommodation
with the landlord’s agreement.
In this time I still hadn’t written God off. When a pair
of Mormon missionaries turned up at my shop, I again opened myself
up to their religion and became involved. I was now genuinely
seeking the Truth, but not through Christianity. One of the things
that interested me with the Mormons was the way they looked after
each family within their church, and generally supported each
other. They showed more love and sensitivity than do many so-called
Christians.
But things just did not add up in their theology. Three times,
as I started reading ‘the Book of Mormon’, I found things
that I felt weren’t right. Each time, when I pointed these
out to their missionaries, they couldn’t answer me straight
away but had to go away and pray for an answer.1 They would return
several days later with an answer, but finally said the best thing
for me to do was to pray that the truth of the book would be revealed
to me. And so that night, I prayed to God to put me on to the
right religion.
‘Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock,
and the door will be opened to you’ Matthew 7:7.
Within a week of that prayer, instead of Mormons turning up, Mike
showed up, along with Kelly - a friend I had know since we were
five years old. Kelly had brought me a Bible. I genuinely started
reading the Bible for the first time, and this time I started
in the New Testament, which I had never read previously. Unlike
what I had just been reading in the ‘The Book of Mormon,’
I found what I read to be accurate to known history. In the weeks
that followed I continued reading the Bible most nights.
Circumstances forced me to shift again - twice!. During this time,
I took my truck to a garage for repairs. During a test run, my
truck was smashed, costing over $2,500 for repairs. Although the
truck was covered by insurance, I had to hire a van for more than
a month, and the cheque for the rental was lost. (Later on it
was found, but at the time it added to everything else.)
Without my knowledge, Kelly started praying for some proper
accommodation and a decent business location for me. Within a
week, I had a cheap house to rent and a shop in a perfect position
- on the main road, with amazingly cheap rent. In a period of
two and a half months, the workshop had gone through five complete
shifts, until I was able to get this permanent location.
Work started to pick up. Several weeks later, Kelly arrived and
told me about the prayer, and asked me when I got the shop and
house - if I had gotten them at the same time as he had prayed.
I lied and said it wasn’t, and again went ahead and did my
own thing. I allowed pride to get in the way. I wanted to show
that I was capable of providing for myself with no one else’s
help including God’s. Work totally dried up again, to such
a degree that I couldn’t afford the low rent on the house
I had been renting ($60 a week), and ended up living illegally
in the back of my shop. All the time, I was reading the Bible
but not making any commitments or recognition of God.
I was working till two or three in the morning, trying to set
the shop up and straighten out the books. After each night’s
work, I would leave my truck at my Mother’s place and bike
back to work, because if the vehicle was left overnight at work
it would be too obvious what I was doing. This continued for a
couple of months and there was very little financial work. Eventually,
my business got to the stage of owing over $40,000.
Quarter to six one night, I received a call from an uncle. He
informed me that mum was missing in England with a nervous breakdown
and hadn’t been heard from for several months, except for
once, when she was found in Nottingham but had disappeared again.
Since the time I had left my mothers house, I had been completely
isolated from the family, except for the uncle who secretly informed
of my mothers condition. Everyone had lost touch with her for
over 3 months in England, and had placed her on the missing persons
list. It reached the stage where we had almost written her off
as dead. I was drinking heavily and smoking pot. Everything was
coming apart at the seams (the consequences of doing things my
way, instead of God’s). I was desperate, with no one to turn
to except Jesus and a bunch of Christians I had come to know.
One evening several weeks later, Kelly bounced into my new shop,
his normal joyful self. He inquired ‘How are things going?’
I uttered, ‘Work’s dead.’
Before I could reply, Kelly slapped a hand on my shoulder. He
prayed a brief, almost childlike prayer, asking for work for me.
Usually, after working late into the night, I would get up and
start business around 8.30 in the following morning. But the following
morning - 7.30 to be precise, there was a scraping, banging noise
outside the shop and then a knocking on the door. Before I had
opened up, people were dropping off fridges to be serviced outside
the shop! And that was just the start of the day.
Being a bit slow on the uptake, I wrote the whole thing off as
coincidence, and two weeks later I was back to the same stage
with the work dead and me into heavy duty escapism from reality.
Again Kelly turned up at the shop, and again he prayed for more
work. The following day a person phoned who gave me enough work
for two and a half months - a man I had never met, who had no
connections with any of us. Plus other work came in that day.
Things started to come together and I began to consider seriously
the possibilities of God. I returned to Mike’s house group
that week and asked the group to pray for mum. That night, as
a non-Christian, I felt the Lord speak to me and say that mum
was alive, but I had to get things right with my family (two sisters),
before He would bring her back. I was so convinced, that I phoned
my sisters - who hadn’t spoken to me for about four months.
I told them that if there was any way I could be of assistance
I was there and available. They were wondering what my motives
were, but I didn’t mention anything about the previous night
and just left it at that. I also felt that the Lord had shown
me that when mum came back, her garden would be full of flowers.
With mum having been away now for four months the gardens were
overgrown, with no flowers whatsoever. I started mowing her lawns
and looking after the place every weekend. I also began attending
church every Sunday and even got involved with Mike’s group
who were organizing a Christian float to enter the city’s
annual ‘Orange Festival Parade’.
On a number of occasions, I asked the Lord’s forgiveness
for the mess that I had created, - Believe me, I sure had created
some. I now believed in God. About a month and a half after this,
about two and a half months after I had first felt the Lord speak
to me, I had been continuously reading the Bible every day and
night and attending church. My sisters were now speaking to me
and keeping me informed about mum, although there was little news.
After a good day’s work, as I biked back to the workshop
that morning, I was very depressed. I felt I had done everything
God had requested, and I thought God had promised that when I
did these things, Mum would come back to me. I had felt this way
for several days, since I first noticed the garden now to be flowering,
and then it came to me! I got down in the middle of my shop and
offered to God my life for Mum’s. I had never, ever seriously
given my life to God before this. The prayer was instantly answered,
with Mum back in New Zealand in three days.
The Lord started instantly cutting away the things of my past,
and one of the first things He started at was to teach me about
His Father - my Heavenly Father. I was invited by Kelly that day
to a men’s camp that weekend. Unknown to me, it was all about
fathers and one thing I never had was a father. Mine had left
when I was four years old, and I didn’t see him again until
I was about fifteen. At the camp I found it to be a real breaking
point. It’s amazing how He knows way beforehand what’s
going to happen and how He arranges things to suit our needs.
I went through some testing times, much of it relating to my attitudes
toward God, as He later revealed to me. I was treating my relationship
with Him as simply a business deal that I had made with Him and
was therefore following through with it. I still owed forty thousand
dollars, and I was getting to a stage with the trials that, even
after all the Lord had done, I was beginning to think it all a
coincidence and I was just kidding myself.
After an exceptionally testing day, I went to see a member of
our church who prayed for me for greater faith. The following
day, I found out that ten air-conditioners that I had asked Kelly
and his company to install on my behalf were actually different
types - four of one type and six of another and it was critical
where each was located. Due to various reasons, none of us had
been aware of any differences. To top it all off, they had been
thoroughly rearranged before installation To relocate them was
a major job, and I could see the business owing up to seventy
thousand dollars. To put it mildly, I was freaking out! I prayed
that every one of the air-conditioners would be in the correct
place, and as I entered the building I prayed again. I don’t
know how to describe the feeling of nervousness as I lifted each
ceiling tile and checked each unit. Every one was perfect!
I also had to remove some refrigerant from one system due to it
being slightly over charged and increase the charge in another.
I found that the full gas bottle had been removed from the van,
leaving me with no gas, so I prayed to the Lord that there would
be enough gas in the overcharged system to top up the undercharged.
You guessed it - perfect!. Praise the Lord! The problems we were
having with the systems we found out later were due to the owner
and the design engineers.
There were six months left in that year and I was able to pay
the entire forty thousand dollars back during that period and
even made a profit ! That doesn’t mean that I ended up making
heaps of money. The beginning of the following year I felt the
Lord speak to me through my pastor when he said he “felt
the Lord was speaking to one member of the congregation where
the Lord was going to supply this person all his needs and he
was not to go and chase it as He is going to teach them about
trusting in Him.” This is fairly rare as the Lord usually
expects us to do something about bringing in what’s required.
The next week at my house group (which was from a different church),
we separated up into little prayer groups - three members in each
one. The other two members in my group both prophesied, and came
up with the same thing for me!. In the two years that I remained
in business, I never advertised, except twice to let people know
of a change in the phone number.
You don’t need to believe anything that I have written
here; I know that it is easy to explain everything away as coincidence.
Look carefully, and bring the known facts together regarding the
life of Jesus Himself. The very basis of the New Testament is
the resurrection of Jesus and from this point, everything else
must fall together. I find that Robert D. Linder expresses my
thoughts perfectly in his introduction for Eerdmans’ Handbook
to the History of Christianity, when he describes the difficulty
he has believing that Christianity could have ever existed without
the early Church being certain beyond doubt of the bodily resurrection
of Christ. He goes on to say that this confidence alone could
have motivated a small band of frightened, disillusioned disciples
to boldly spread their faith throughout the world, regardless
of the consequences.
Indeed, Paul himself says in his first epistle to the Corinthians,
“If Christ has not been raised, then your faith is a delusion
and you are still lost in your sins.” (1 Cor. 15:17) This
immediately does away with religious groups that deny Jesus’
literal, physical resurrection from the dead. To believe in God,
you have to believe in the crucifixion, death and resurrection
of Jesus, and all that they entail as they shine the reality and
true loving character of God forward.
‘It is a difficult thing for someone to die for a righteous
person. It may even be that someone might dare to die for a good
person. But God has shown us how much He loves us - it was while
we were still sinners that Christ died for us’. Romans 5:7-8.
Each of the early apostles willingly gave up their lives furthering
the spread of the gospel because of their complete confidence
in the reality of these events. From recorded history, we learn
that each of the twelve apostles except for John were martyred
(often brutally) and John died in exile on the Isle of Patmos.
Is Jesus real? My experience, along with countless millions says,
“Yes, He has to be.” But the choice to believe, and
what you do with that belief, are yours to make!
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