Saving Grace

I started work on Chapter 2 of my book about the grace of God last night and it seemed a good place to share about my coming into relationship with Jesus.

Here is the story:

I was born in England in the industrial city of Wolverhampton. My parents were solid working class people as were there parents before them.

My younger brother and I attended the local Catholic school and our family members were at church most Sundays. I attained the status of altar boy and seriously expected that I would one day be a priest.

In February of 1969, my family moved half-way across the world to Sydney. My parents were aware that the industrial foundations which their lives had been built upon were rapidly crumbling and that their best hope of building a future for themselves and their children lay in Australia.

This was a truly courageous leap. It was also absolutely the right thing to do. A few short years later much of the heavy industry which had supported that whole region of England started to collapse under economic reforms.

In the turmoil of international migration, many things changed in our lives. In adopting a new lifestyle we picked up many new things and dropped many old things. in the process of adapting, we just did not connect with church.
As I went through High School, I excelled in many academic areas, particularly in maths and science subjects. Along with this, I was developing a reputation as a hard-line and vocal atheist.

Strangely though, most of my friends were christians or at least from active christian families.

I decided to go to Sydney University to study Chemical Engineering But I could see a looming problem. In those days, engineering courses were 90% male students! Hearing my friends talk about the “hot” girls who went to the Methodist Youth Group, to everyone's surprise, I decided to check it out.

So it was that although I was determined to keep the God stuff at a safe distance, I was also attending Youth Group with a not-so-secret agenda.

In May of my first year at Uni, my best mate Robert McKean had to stay at home for exams while his family went off to holidays. He invited me to share the house for the week, then join his family at the beach after we had finished our exams.
It was during that week that I met Jesus.

One night as I was lying in bed, not quite asleep, I had a vision. In this vision, I saw myself climbing a huge mountain The mountainside was almost vertical and I was dragging myself up using my hands as well as my feet. As I was scaling the mountain, I saw a bright light glowing from beyond the mountain. Finally, I arrived at the peak and could see the source of the light- Jesus larger than life and radiating not just light, but love and peace which flowed over me in a way I had never known before.

I wasn't sure what to do with all of this, so I said nothing to anybody, but I did start attending church. Many years later I found out that Robert's mother had been praying for me for years to find Jesus.

I was saved by grace- overtaken by Jesus at the very time I was running away from Him.