Making Sense of a Born-Again Experience

I was 27 when I had a radical full on conversion experience.

I had years of mocking Christianity and Christians.
Of all the religions it seemed to me the most irrelevant.
Christians were people who had found the world too hard a place to live in and had used the absolute `certainties` of Christianity to hide from the reality of a random, `nasty` world.
It was the abandonment of truth that I found so hard.

I had dabbled in the New Age for ten years and it had suited me fine thank you.
It was universal, you design a relative moralistic spirituality that suited your personality.

It didn't contain hell, everything, and everyone would ultimately be okay and `you` were the centre.
Most importantly, sin wasn't something you had to feel badly about.

Obviously that is almost trite in it's shallowness as an explanation of the New Age, but that was my tiny corner of it.

I had true spiritual experiences, met incredibly lovely people ,and felt more and more enlightened.

Christianity was housed in 19th century buildings, full of very old people.
And those born-again happy-clappy types, I don't know,
they could actually turn my stomach; almost along the same lines of the Stepford wives.

I remember an incident in a care home where I worked.
My friend Sandra and I were both into the New age and one morning she came in terribly upset.
A close friend of hers had become a `Born-Again` Christian.
I distinctly remember being horrified with her.
It was as if some malign force had somehow tricked her, it felt almost like a kind of abuse.

I had been working in a wine-bar as a chef and one of the paid musicians. I loved my life and had loads of friends.

Through spirituality and counselling I knew, like everyone else I was a broken individual and I was really searching for Spiritual truth.

There was a Christian coffee shop 50 yards from the wine-bar where I worked.
I used to go there for a bacon-butty.
They were really nice, normal looking people but they all carried that guilty secret.
I knew it, they weren’t actually hiding it but I knew they had it in for me and any `non` Christian that came in.
The manager, now and then tried to engage me, I was into Nicheren Shoshu Bhuddism at the time, and was polite but firm in declining his advances.
They never pushed it and the food was very good.

My sister, on her way back from working in Australia, stopped off at Hong Kong.
She found herself at a Church service; Sam was not a Christian, either.
In the service a missionary, Jackie Pullinger was prayed for.
She had a ministry helping young men come off heroin and also helping prostitutes.
Sam was greatly affected by her story.
When Sam returned to England she told me about this `amazing` person and said that there was a book about her life `Chasing the Dragon`, and that I should read it.

Next time I was in the coffee shop I noticed the book on one of their shelves, (they sold lots of Christian books).
I bought it at once, don't know why, and read it that night and the following morning.

The next bit is the subjective bit, in that I can only share my experience of what happened, and my interpretation.

While I read this book, very quickly I realised I believed every bit of it.
I was changed reading it, or probably more accurately `I` was revealed by reading it.

This 24 year old woman wanted to work for God.
She bought a one way ticket to Hong Kong
This was the country she had blindly stuck a pin to on a map. Not very reasonable!
When she left the ship she was nearly immediately deported for her lack of money and no real `concrete` purpose for being there; the port officials assumed she was a prostitute.

The book went onto describe her incredible adventures in the walled city, a place where the rule of law was not in evidence, run by triads.

Prostitutes and addicts made up a huge amount of the population there and there was no electricity or running water,and there were huge open sewers inhabited by very large rats, yet it was massively overcrowded.
She began by following an obnoxious young addict until she won his confidence and helped him off drugs.
One by one, with compassion and love in action, she began to make a difference in the lives of hundreds of people.

However the most controversial aspect of her success were the extraordinary, seemingly miraculous things that began to take place in the lives of these addicts and prostitutes, who had been hated and forgotten.
Addicts who had been addicted for years were coming off drugs with no withdrawal symptoms.
This happened in a very strange way.
Jackie would pray for them and the Spirit would fall on them and they would recognise a change of heart and that it was Jesus.
Then would begin to pray in a new language.
Whilst they prayed in this new language they had no side effects or `cold-turkey`.

This was the book that opened me up, I knew I had to make a response, but I also knew the cost.

It was a Friday morning, I got out of bed and fell to my knees, this was my heart felt prayer.

" God there is no way I'm becoming a Christian, Cliff Richard and all that it's so un-cred!!"

My first real prayer.

Suddenly I put my head down and knew I wanted to speak, to utter something but not from my mind but my heart.
I opened my mouth and fluently, scarily and easily, I started speaking in a foreign tongue.
"Piss-off, bloody psycho babble"

I knew I had just been reading about this and it was all bloody auto suggestion.

Despite my conclusions I began speaking again.
It was fluent, beautiful and easy.
I could think in English whilst this river of words started to pour out of me, and got louder and louder.
The joy, in the experience, was so extreme,
and suddenly I had very real revelation about what had just happened to me.

I felt that I was home.
I suddenly knew God had always been real to me (What!!!)
I suddenly was overjoyed in the fact that there was a reason to love, to be good, a reason for our conscience.
There was a wrong and a right, a good and a bad.
I ran upstairs to my best friend and said those classic words.

"Oh God there's a God!!"

I ran to the Christian Coffee shop and asked to speak to Dermot, the manager.
We both went upstairs.

"Have you heard of this speaking in Tongues?"

"Yes"

"Well what is it?"

"It's a small gift from the Holy Spirit"

Can you `do it`?"

"Yes, I can pray in tongues"

"Well, go on then, do it!"

"I'm not going to just `do it`! I'll pray for you in tongues if you like"

"Go on then!"

And he did and I quickly left the shop, distraught, elated and confused.

That weekend I was praying for hours at a time.

I would walk the streets in the late hours of the morning pouring out my heart in this incredible language that just flowed so effortlessly out of me like a bubbling fountain.

Sometimes it was Italian and Spanish and even though I don't speak these languages my mind was immediately translating them. (That's not happened to me since).
As a musician I had smoked kilos of dope but this was different,
the high made my pupils take over the whole iris.
The joy of being known by someone you hadn't really even considered made every past experience of the emotion of love seem ridiculously lacking in substance.

Sometimes God's presence, (I so `knew` it was him, I knew in my Noah!!)was so strong I became terrified and I would have the worse goose-bumps and my the hair on my body was standing up, and I have a lot of hair on my body.

On the Monday I went back to the Coffee shop and had another `audience` with Dermot.

"What's going on with me? I'm going mad!"

"You called out to God and He answered"

"What can I do?"

Suddenly as Dermot began to drone on about all things pertaining to my experience, he began to fade into the background.
In my mind's eye I began to see a procession of images of me in my various new-age guises.

I knew, `somehow` that I had to expunge them.
If you had seen me on the stool I was sitting on you would have thought I was going for a...toilet,
groaning and pushing my Spiritual past out of me.

When I was, with great relief, finished, I said to Dermot that I needed to give my life to Jesus.

I fell on my knees and prayed the following prayer:

"Lord Jesus, forgive me of all my sins, I believe you died for me on the cross I want you to come into my life and be in charge, be Lord of my life from now on!"

What!?

Where did that come from? I was terrified I knew I really meant it, what would happen now?

The room began to be in proper focus and I could actually hear what Dermot was saying, (he hadn't stopped talking the whole time I was having my weird experience).

Then I realised I felt clean, pure in fact, spotless.
I hadn't even realised I had been unclean.

Something inside me began to get very warm, I was being loved on the inside.
I had the sudden realisation that God not only really, really loved me but also liked me, He liked the cut of my jib,
He knew me and still liked me!

All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born etc.

So in essence what started me on this 17 year love walk was an incredible paradigm shift.

I had the classic `born from above ` experience as recorded from saints down the ages.

A completely subjective experience that utterly transformed my thoughts, feelings and emotions forever.

The greatest miracle was that I saw the condition of my own heart. I always had seen myself as a generally decent person.

Revealed to me was someone with a winning relational style who was as capable as anyone else of being an absolute selfish, self-centred swearword. I saw my ability to judge easily and indiscriminately and yet give myself such rope.

The most peace restoring thing was that I could once again rest in the truth of being the created one, not the creator.

The New -Age was all about God consciousness and revealing your own God head.

The truth I found was much more liberating.
He's God I'm not.
I'm weak, He's strong.
I'm made in His image,
but through sin was in need of redemption and forgiveness.

Forgiveness is so great, I didn't realise how much we need to feel forgiven.
Gosh.

The walk has been incredibly hard but I love Him, Jesus so much it's mad.
Even if it was all baloney, just the idea of Him would be worth dying for!

Hallelujah,
praise God and other assorted praise words.

Finally, that's what `I` bring to the table.