Category Archives: Testimony

A Dark Testimony VI – Christy’s Story

Insights, Others' stuff, Testimony, Reblogs, Wisdom
This entry is part 27 of 27 in the series The Problems of Evangelicalism
Trigger Warning – Contains stories of severe spiritual and religious abuse and trauma. You have been warned!

Here is a heart-rending testimony from my dear friend, Christy Lynne Wood; a lady whom I have never met in person but nevertheless I count as a friend because we support each other’s online ministries remotely.

Christy came from a background in the ‘Institute in Basic Life Principles‘ (IBLP) group, which I would name as a cult in just about every way[1] and founded by Bill Gothard in 1961. (That’s before I was born!) In common with many other Christians with whom I have had positive online interactions over the last decade or so, Christy is therefore a cult survivor. She has had the courage to identify and name the problem, and to do something about it. And now, she blogs about her wisdom and experiences. My heart always rejoices when I see a notification in my inbox telling me that she has published another blog post!

Christy’s post contains things that parallel closely many of the previous ‘Dark Testimony’ articles in my series ‘The Problems of Evangelicalism‘, and so I have now included it in that series. Although not strictly-speaking an Evangelical church, some of the IBLP group’s teachings have been gradually and insidiously introduced into modern Evangelicalism – such is the cross-pollinating nature of religion, even across different denominations – and so their attitudes have also been incorporated into Evangelicalism, including Christy’s old church, where IBLP principles were held by most of the families in the congregation[2]. That’s another reason why this is relevant to the series. In common with all Evangelical or pseudo-Evangelical groups, these are the sorts of things they don’t want you to know about. And that’s the biggest reason of all why they should be shared in public!

Anyway, Christy is herself an experienced teacher and an excellent writer who clearly and indeed prophetically expresses what is on her heart. Other than this short introduction, I need add no more to what Christy has to say. I’m sure you’ll find her story helpful.

Over to Christy:

Seven Years Ago Our Bubble World Shattered

Yet another story of spiritual abuse and religious trauma in the church
Christy Lynne Wood
March 3rd, 2024

Telling My Story

Seven years ago, on March 9th 2017, our little Christian bubble world finally splintered into pieces. But we were forced to pretend everything was fine for two more months.

This is the first time I’ve purposefully and clearly written about this part of my story. I’ve hinted at it, skittered around it, and gave vague suggestions, but today I’m telling the truth. It’s a weird combination of re-traumatizing and validating.

I’ve had seven years to process, seven years to learn I’m not alone, and seven years to try and pick up the pieces so that I can heal. It’s not just my story though, it’s also my husband’s story and he has dealt with it differently.

So today this is for all of you who have faced spiritual abuse and religious trauma and been able to heal and grow, but it’s also for those of you who haven’t. It’s for those who’s faith has been shattered, who’s trust has been destroyed, and who struggle to step foot into a church. I want you to know that I see you and feel immense compassion for your pain. We all experience trauma differently and there is no “right way” to move forward (despite what the Christianese phrases tell you).

I met my husband at a Christian summer camp. We worked together at camp for a couple of years, so going into Christian ministry of some sort seemed like the thing to do. We were young, idealistic, and passionate about serving God. Four weeks after getting married, we loaded up a moving truck and our junky, little Honda Accord and took off for the state of Wyoming.

The town of LaGrange doubled in size for nine months of the year while the students were in town. In the summer it went back to the original 322 residents plus a few married couples like us. We spent three years in the Wyoming prairie surrounded by more cattle than people while studying at Frontier School of the Bible.

Having met at camp, we originally had dreams of doing camp ministry. Then my husband landed a part-time youth pastor job at a “local” church forty-five minutes away. We did everything as a team back then so youth pastoring a bunch of junior high kids was fun too, especially since the church ran a rustic camp for three weeks each summer.

After graduation, we came back to Michigan and started an internship at the camp where we first met hoping to eventually come on as full-time staff. Three summers and two babies later, we realized—much to our disappointment—that there was no potential for a job there. However, the church we’d been attending for the last couple of years needed a youth pastor. It seemed like the perfect open door, so we walked through.

Full-Time Ministry

Within the first few months there were red flags. But we were young, idealistic, and filled with the belief that this was God’s plan. It didn’t hurt that we’d just been used and abused at the camp where we interned, so the church felt healthier to us. It was easy to make excuses. Maybe we were just misinterpreting things. The senior pastor was probably just trying to make jokes and didn’t mean the hurtful things he said about my husband from the pulpit.

Sometime within our first year at the church, the senior pastor took a much anticipated three month sabbatical. I think he expected the church to fall apart without him around. Instead it thrived. My husband was relational, organized, and passionate. He never meant to try and usurp anything, but there was tension when the senior pastor came back that simmered under the surface for the next four years.

We saw flaws pretty quickly at the church, but we hoped that God would use us to help heal them. We knew that no place was perfect and we were willing to ignore or make excuses to keep the peace. Sadly, I’m much more realistic and skeptical these days.

man in black pants and pair of brown leather lace-up shoes sitting on brown carpeted stairs inside room
Photo by Ben White

There was tension between my husband and our senior pastor within the first year of working together. My husband believes that everything should be done with excellence. He is not afraid to push back when he feels things are unethical or wrong which earned him the nickname of “Pastor Picky.” The senior pastor had been in charge for enough time to want to keep power in his own fist. He didn’t appreciate criticism of any kind and had surrounded himself with elders who were either “yes-men” or solidly on his side. I didn’t know it at the time, but this is a pattern for abuse within the church.

It was never a healthy situation. My husband always struggled. But we loved the people at the church. The youth group was growing. It looked successful on the outside. I think we also like the title of being in ministry. It was part of our identity.

It All Started at Camp

I decided to back to camp for a couple of summers as a health officer. I should never have gone back. I knew how we’d been treated during our internship. I swore when we left that I was done. But I loved camp.

I’d found freedom in Jesus there. I’d met my husband there, my babies had been born there, and my dad was currently working on staff as the maintenance manager.

So I loaded up my two small children and we spent two summers riding around on a golf cart, doing clean cabin checks, handing out meds and Band-Aids, and comforting homesick campers. My husband worked at church during the day and then came and spent the evenings with us. Parts of those summers were amazingly fun! I’d always dreamed of being the health officer. I had a golf cart. My children thrived. I loved supporting the young adults on staff. But there were dark clouds too, especially the second summer.

I should have handled everything differently. But I was not the same person back then. I was still stuffing my leadership gift and passionately avoiding conflict. I was still trying to be sweet and not strong.

I should have confronted the abuse I witnessed. I should have boldly stood up for the broken people. I should have challenged the unethical behavior and the potential affair. But I didn’t. Instead I talked to other people who also noticed. We tried to figure out what to do together. And because we noticed a problem, we became the problem. I was labeled a gossip while the true problems were ignored.

I should have quit half-way through the summer. But I didn’t.

People who were involved in the mess at camp were also from our church, so the summer trouble followed us back. Big time.

And Followed Us Back to Church

I was distraught about what I’d witnessed at camp and also about the abuse my dad had experienced. (Little did I know that the exact same things would happen to us.) Seeing that I was a wreck, our senior pastor offered to counsel me. I use that word in the loosest possible way. For six weeks I sat in his office and spilled everything to him. He took what I said, tried to gaslight me, and then instead of protecting me, told everything to the other person who was at camp with me. I’ve never had an enemy before, but I did after that summer.

We tried—my husband and I. I knew that I hadn’t handled everything perfectly. I’d made mistakes, and I tried to reconcile. But it went from bad to worse. I was still reeling from the spiritual and emotional abuse I’d experienced at camp, still broken by what had happened to my dad and other summer staff members. Still upset that what looked like an affair was being ignored. Our pastor was the only one I could share with because he wouldn’t let me tell anyone else. And even though he was also abusing me, at least I had someone to talk to. Then he went on a mini-sabbatical for a month because they were adopting a child from overseas.

I honestly thought he told me that I could tell our new associate pastor and his wife if I needed to talk to someone while he was gone. And I didn’t tell her about the affair, just about the abuse I’d witnessed. She was a licensed counselor and I thought she might be able to help. Like any sane person would be, she was horrified at what I shared. So she told her husband. Who told the senior pastor when he got back. And I got in trouble.

I was called a gossip again. I was kicked out of women’s ministry with no hope of going back. I was no longer allowed to sing with the worship team. Every Monday, no matter what I did or didn’t do, the senior pastor would yell at my husband about how terrible I was and how I wouldn’t change.

Because he couldn’t break me. I refused to take all the blame. I knew that what happened at camp was wrong. And that what was currently happening was wrong. I refused to stop noticing the problem.

These were the hardest months of my life. They nearly destroyed me. I felt like the woman caught in adultery just waiting to be stoned.

We Should Have Quit

We prayed about quitting. We should have. But we loved the people. We loved the teenagers we worked with. We believed that God could work a miracle in the heart of the senior pastor. So we stayed. Until we couldn’t stay any more.

Eventually my husband was called into a meeting and told that we didn’t have chemistry with the senior pastor and therefore we were being forced to resign. It was March 9th. He was informed that the elders wouldn’t be telling the church until May and that if we said anything before that, or told the truth about what had been happening, we would be kicked out immediately with no severance package.

person looking out through window
Photo by Noah Silliman

We should have quit right then and there. But we didn’t because we were poor, emotionally ragged, and had two small children to feed.

For two months we carried this horrible secret. And every Monday my husband was told how awful I was being even though I was just literally hiding in the church basement making coffee every Sunday. It was the only ministry I was allowed to do. My husband endured verbal, emotional, and spiritual abuse during this year from hell. But we didn’t have the words to describe it as abuse back then.

During these two months, our pastor decided that I was such a mess that I needed professional help, so he sent me to Miriam. At the beginning of the first session I had three questions for her. I wanted to know if she was familiar with Bill Gothard’s teachings, if she thought they were wrong, and if she would promise to keep everything I said confidential from my pastor. When she confirmed those things, I poured out my heart for forty-five minutes. At the end Miriam looked at me and said four beautiful words, “Christy, you’ve been hurt.”

It was the first time someone validated me instead of blaming me. The church paid for eight beautiful sessions with her. I finally realized I was being abused and not going crazy. Sure enough, our pastor called after the first session, but Miriam had heard enough and refused to talk to him.

The End

Eventually they told the church. The senior pastor called a church wide meeting to announce “God was calling us elsewhere.” People were upset and confused. But we didn’t tell them the truth. We stayed quiet. The church originally asked us to stay through July, then it changed to the beginning of June. Shortly after our resignation was announced, we were told to stop coming to church at all because we were too sad and it was making everyone else sad. So it all just ended.

We got our severance, they got our silence, and we lost our community, our friends, our children’s godparents, and our identity.

Why Tell This Story?

There are plenty of people who question the validity of telling these kinds of stories. They push back by asking about motives, suggesting exaggeration, or claiming that we need to stay quiet “to protect God’s name.”

But the sheer amount of these stories says otherwise.

I’ve realized over the past seven years that for every story that goes public, there are probably hundreds that never get shared. For every one pastor who is exposed for being abusive and controlling, many others will go on abusing without being caught or stopped. This kind of thing is an epidemic in the church right now. I’ve read some wonderful and validating books. My favorites are in the picture below.

Not only do we need to tell these stories for accountability, but we also need to tell the stories so that those who have experienced this type of abuse can recognize that they are not alone. Reading Beth Allison Barr’s story of her husband’s forced resignation in The Making of Biblical Womanhood was eerily familiar—to the point where I wondered if they pass around a script. Hearing the stories on The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill validated my own.

It is helpful to know that we are in good company even if we are all a bit mangled.

Stronger than Ever Before

Personally, I’ve risen from these ashes with new strength. I see through lies faster, approach Christianese with more cynicism, and am quicker to call out abuse. But I’m also gentler and have less answers for those who have been through hell and come back. I have more compassion and empathy. I will sit and cry with you and say nothing.

My own faith in Jesus is more solid than ever. But I will also stand up and quit next time so that I can tell the truth. This abusive control we are experiencing is not Jesus and it needs to stop now.

If you have been spiritually abused, I just want you to know that you are not alone and it’s not your fault. You have been hurt.

Looking for God’s Grace

I’m going to close with Miriam’s ask for me after that first counseling session. She wanted me to look for God’s grace each day. It might be in a sunrise, or a baby’s smile, or a small green leaf poking out of the dirt.

That was something I could do.

Can you find it too?

macro photography of green grass
Photo by Emmanuel Mbala

Thank you, Christy, for your gracious and indeed enthusiastic permission to reblog your post! As you will see, I have just copied it and pasted it more or less straight in to my blog  😊

Here is the link to the original article

Grace and Peace to you all ❤️

Footnotes

Footnotes
⇧1 They market themselves initially as a sort of personal improvement course, but this is just the ‘hook’; the ‘gateway’ to deeper involvement and eventual indoctrination, enslavement and abuse – some of which is of course sexual. They call themselves ‘non-denominational’, which has increasingly – to me at any rate – come to suggest strongly that they are some sort of cult. Certainly, the church I wrote about in my recent article ‘I Was A Stranger‘ would claim to be non-denominational. The term always hoists red flags for me nowadays! Although they are not a fully Evangelical group (they differ from Evangelical doctrines in several ways), their methods are pretty much the same in many respects, and so I am using Christy’s story as a parallel to the exact same things that happen in Evangelical churches. In addition, the IBLP are also strongly into home-schooling which, while a valid method of schooling children where the children can’t otherwise access education (say if they are housebound due to a disability or something), in other cases is simply a means of isolating children from the outside world so that they can be effectively indoctrinated without any interference from reality. It seems that wherever humans gather in the name of Religion, these things happen.
⇧2 It might be relevant to mention at this point that the extremely problematic and yet very popular TV series, ’19 kids and counting’ (or whatever number of kids they’d reached at the time of filming 🤣), was about the Duggar family who were/are still themselves part of the toxic IBLP movement.

Grateful

Personal, Testimony

The more I look, the more I am grateful for the amazing Grace of God in my early Christian walk.

I was not pulled in to the Kingdom by the threat of Hell, nor by some street preacher asking where I would go if I died tonight, nor anything like that. What pulled me in was a combination of the music, a definite calling which was what I’d been looking for all those years – I virtually felt God hoick me to my feet and out to the front! – followed by some very specific points where God told me in no uncertain terms how He felt about me. In short, I was brought in by the love of God and the sensation of His Presence. I bless God for that.

And now, looking back at my life then (we’re talking July 1980 onwards), I see all the points where God steered me in my life, where He provided for me, and where He made His presence felt in order to guide me and assure me of His Presence. He helped me never really believe in Hell, although I paid ‘lip service’ to it. He helped me to question the beliefs of others in my church/cult, albeit in my head and not overtly. He made sure that I had an overriding sense of His Presence most of the time, except maybe for those times I termed a ‘Divine Sulk’, when I couldn’t feel His presence; the sort of time where Job’s Comforter Christians tell you you are ‘harbouring’ some ‘secret sin’ or some other such rubbish. Lollz.

So now, when I just happened to look up one of the ‘famous local preachers’ (let’s call him ‘Phil’) in what was then my area (north Leeds) and see that he’s still stuck in the same hellfire and brimstone, judgmental of strangers, still being lickspittled by others of a similar ilk, I am even more thankful – because I never went down that path. Not so much as ‘there but for the Grace of God go I’; more of a ‘I never believed what he used to puke out anyway’. He always made me uncomfortable – which of course in those days was seen as a ‘good thing’. I’m not saying he’s a kiddie-fiddler or anything; just that something about the ‘gospel’ he preached didn’t sit well with me.

I am so glad that God got me out of that area, both spiritually and physically (because if I hadn’t moved to Devon I’d likely still be rotting in that church environment) and gave me a new start. Not long after I arrived in the South-West, I had my ‘Aha!!’ moment on Grace, which led me to fifteen years of the Dark Night of the Soul, which some might think of as a ‘deconstruction’ – although it wasn’t really that per se. Emerging from that, just as a butterfly from its chrysalis, I realised that once the church junk was stripped away along with people like Phil and his beliefs and vomiting, the Gospel was actually more or less exactly what I’d known all along that it should be.

Unfortunately, this twisting procedure in new believers is standard practice. Once a new believer is snatched up from their cradle and incarcerated/incorporated into a local church, the purity of their initial encounter with God is covered up and layered over with church kopros. Effectively, the initial encounter is taken away as it struggles for air under all that rubbish and is eventually suppressed. Only a mighty work of God, which in my case was an effortless fifteen years out of church, can shift that and restore a believer to their first love.

But, because my background is different from everyone else’s, everyone else’s story will be different from mine. We all have different attitudes, biases and wounds that will need to be changed, surgically removed and healed in that Dark Night, and afterwards too. But never again will that believer want to return to that former cage. Once you have seen it from the outside, you realise what it really is, and you’ll appreciate your freedom all the more.

My chains (of legalism) fell off in 1999, and after the fifteen years, I began openly walking with God again what will be ten years ago in a couple of weeks. February 2014 was when all that I had learned in my Dark Night became the key to my new freedom.

And God has held my hand the whole way.

No wonder I’m grateful!

Thoughts and Prayers…

Insights, Personal, Testimony

Yet another tragic shooting in the United States. And it has of course brought out the usual plethora of one group of people saying, ‘Our thoughts and prayers are with you…’ and, predictably, the other group of people who rant on about how valueless ‘thoughts and prayers’ are.

In the very same Facebook group (that I am a part of), I saw two consecutive posts, one saying how useless ‘thoughts and prayers’ are, and the very next post saying that this person appreciated the ‘thoughts and prayers’ that had been expressed for his situation.

Make your minds up, folks.

I know that some politicians and other professional apathists use ‘thoughts and prayers’ as a platitude. And I know that it’s sickening. I know, right?

But I also know that there are many millions of others who, appalled at the violence and suffering, do indeed hold up the victims of these crimes, and their families, in their ‘thoughts and prayers’.

Sometimes, when you live thousands of miles away, ‘thoughts and prayers’ is the best you can do. I’m not trying to be insensitive, but everyone has their own problems and worries and, while we do all we can to help – maybe send money and whatnot – the sheer fallacy of condemning those who ‘have thoughts and prayers but do nothing’ is fallacy indeed. What, do they want us to drop all our responsibilities and fly over to the disaster zone to help personally? What a ridiculous notion. I sometimes think that, in their rage, these people don’t even know what they are talking about; they don’t know what it is they actually want.

And let me tell you something. I have personal experience of the power of prayer. Here’s an example. I know someone who was having an extramarital affair. One night, Fiona and I decided that enough was enough, and we engaged in a thorough prayer battle about that situation, we kicked the enemy’s ass good and proper, and the very next morning the person in question called their spouse and asked to meet up to talk it over. That couple is now back together again and have been so for 25 years or more. The person having the affair ‘suddenly realised’ (at exacty the time we were praying) that this was not the person they wanted to be. Call it coincidence if you like, but it is my firm belief that this person changed their mind because we prayed. I have other examples too but that one will have to do for now. I want to get on with my rant.

My point is that prayer can change things. It is also especially galling that those who decry ‘thoughts and prayers’ are often themselves Christians who profess to believe in the power of prayer. Sorry, but yeah, right. I have actually stopped following one particular person’s Christian blog (and removed it from my recommended blogs/links page) because every third post or so he would continually rant about the worthlessness of ‘thoughts and prayers’.

Listen: Prayer is God’s way of empowering the powerless.

Who are we to say that ‘thoughts and prayers’ are useless?

How dare these people insult the beliefs and caring practices of countless millions of compassionate people, of all faiths and belief systems, all across the world who care enough to think and pray deeply and sympathetically about these poor people who have suffered so? For some of these compassionate people, ‘thoughts’ are the only thing they know how to give. For others, they can think but they can also pray – using the Godly gift that can move mountains. For most, indeed ‘thoughts and prayers’ are all they can give.

So do not belittle the care and compassion of the countless millions who are ‘thinking and praying’ right now for these victims and their circumstances.

You have absolutely no idea how ungrateful you sound.

And you have absolutely no idea what things God is prompting millions of unsung heroes, behind the scenes, to do right now.

Including ‘thoughts and prayers’.

Rant over.

[Edit]: And I must also add that my friend Darren has only today posted on Facebook this very thing:

“Of all the ‘actions’ that you can perform to influence and change another person’s life for the best, secret prayer is the greatest and most effective!”

Thanks Darren! 🙂

How We Met

Personal, Testimony
This entry is part 17 of 38 in the series Fiona

Today, on the tenth monthly anniversary of my loss of the light of my life, my dear wife Fiona, I thought I would share a little about how we first met.

When people ask me where Fiona and I met, I try to play silly-buggers and I usually say,

“Actually, I was sitting on my bed at the time”

Of course, this doesn’t usually go down all that well with some Christians… but there is of course a ‘proper’ explanation 🙂

Would you believe: we met on the Citizens’ Band (CB) radio. And I was sitting on my bed as I was using it. Mystery solved 😉

It was in late 1981 that I bought my first, very basic, CB radio, using some of my student grant (we still got grants back then…) Funnily enough, back then, as I was in, shall we say, a ‘legalistic phase’ of my personal faith walk, I was really doubtful as to whether or not it was ‘God’s Will’ for me to buy it. But buy it I did (oh, the sin of it!), and I installed it in my Mini car. This is the type of ‘Harrier CB’ transceiver* that I bought:

And, despite my guilt-based doubts, it turned out to be instrumental in several life-changing ways.

Firstly, and quite unfairly I thought, the young lady I was dating at the time (and had been with for seventeen months) sat in my car and used my CB, while I was in prayer meetings, to meet ‘someone else’ and then dumped me. I laugh about it now, and we are still in touch and are actually good friends!

Secondly, because I personally always had to understand how things worked, I studied radio theory and eventually qualified for my Radio Amateur’s Licence, after attending night-school and also teaching myself Morse Code. That was in 1984-85, though, after Fiona and I were married.

Thirdly, and most importantly, I met Fiona on the CB radio.

But it wasn’t on my original Harrier CB that I met her… annoyingly, my Harrier rig (CB jargon for the radio transceiver itself) was stolen from my car while I was at a Leeds United match. And I think Leeds lost too, just to add insult to injury. Someone had decided that they deserved that CB radio more than I did, and so they helped themselves to it. And Leeds came out in sympathy 😉

So I replaced the stolen unit with a more mid-range radio (with a few more controls on it)  which I didn’t really like all that much as my voice was distorted on transmission. I therefore sold that rig and invested in a top-of-the-range ‘Harrier CBX’ transceiver, with lots more controls on it, and therefore it was much more flexible. Here’s a picture of the actual instrument, which I still have:

I not only installed it in my car, but I also set it up with a device called a ‘slide-mount’ (which you can see under the radio in the picture above). The slide-mount allows you to remove your rig quickly and easily so that you can put it in the boot of the car, out of sight, where thieves won’t see it. All the connections for the power, the antenna and whatnot, are done with sliding contacts, so basically you can just pull the thing out in a matter of less than five seconds. But it’s also really convenient in another way, because you can also set up another slide-mount in your house, and take your CB indoors with you and use it at home. So I installed a decent antenna on the outside of my parents’ house, set it all up, installed the slide-mount and power supply in my bedroom, and the job’s a good ‘un. Working CB radio in both car and home.

And so, to the story. One evening in the Spring of 1982, at about the time of the end of the Falklands War, I’d had my new ‘Harrier CBX’ radio for about six weeks, and was really enjoying using it. Just before going off to Housegroup that evening, I decided to fill in the last ten minutes before I left with a quick listen on the CB.

Funny how these small actions can change your life.

Sitting on my bed, I switched on the rig, and almost immediately heard a young man calling, somewhat plaintively I thought, for a contact (the phraseology was ‘One-four for a copy!’, meaning that the guy was calling on channel 14 for someone to talk to; a ‘copy’ in CB jargon) So I thought, ‘Oh, he sounds like nobody wants to talk to him’, so I took pity on him and replied, and we chatted for a few minutes. Then he said, ‘My sister’s here, would you like to talk to her?’ And his sister was of course Fiona, and the young man was Graham, who is now my brother-in-law. She’d just that day finished her last ‘A-level’ exam at school, and had wanted to relax a little after all the stress, so Graham invited her out to their dad’s car in which the CB radio was installed. After listening for a while, she decided that she’d like to talk to me.

But, of course, after a few minutes, I had to go. So I said, “Anyway, I’m sorry but I have to go now; I am going to Housegroup”

“Oh”, said Fiona, “That sounds interesting!” Thinking she was kidding me, I said, “What do you mean?” And she replied, “I’m a Christian too!”.

“Which church do you go to?”

“I don’t have a church”

“Well you could come along to mine”, I said. “It’s Guiseley Baptist Church”

“Oh, that’s just along the road from me!”

And so, we arranged to meet up outside the church that next Sunday morning. In the meantime, I had a few more radio conversations with Graham, and even went round to meet him (an ‘eyeball’ in CB jargon) at his house, but Fiona was out.

But on that Sunday in June 1982, I met her, sitting on a bench outside the church, and it was love at first sight, for me at least. Easily the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. I write this with tears as the enormity of my loss hits me again. My first words to her were, “Oh, is it you?” And she said, “Yes!” And so we met. She started to come to my church regularly, and we began to spend time together; to go out for walks together. And we fell in love.

Here’s the front of Guiseley Baptist Church; the flower box to the left of the gate (as we see it here) is where the bench used to be, the one that Fiona was sitting on when I met her. That is the exact spot where I laid eyes on her for the first time 🙂

We were married in that same church in January, 1984. And we had adventure after adventure in the blessed time that we had together. We were inseparable for over 34 years; half a lifetime. And the adventures continued – children, jobs, travels, worship leading, church, friends, dogs, pets, poverty, sufficiency. We learned what life is like both in plenty and poverty, on the breadline, in abundance, with mortgage, with no mortgage, in vibrant health, in inexpressible joy, excitement, and peace; with disease, heartbreak and horror, suffering and bereavement; exploration, grandchildren, holidays, cars, food,  rainy walks, dogs, well, you know. Just Life In General. We went through so much together and we were so close, and madly in love, for all that time. I count myself thoroughly blessed to have shared life’s adventures with my amazing lady. And I loved her more than life.

So, I hope that this little story shows you just how awesome God is, at orchestrating a series of seemingly random events, and in so doing to change two people’s lives forever. Our three children, our two grandchildren, exist only because I bought a CB radio, Fiona’s dad bought a CB radio, I decided to just spend ten minutes on the CB that evening, Fiona needed to relax after her exams, I decided to mention Housegroup…all those factors came together and indeed were brought together as just a small segment of God’s Grand Plan that we are so privileged to have been a part of. All the people whose lives have been touched by our music, by our ministry, by our teaching, by our wisdom; it all came about because of that series of decisions and events that shaped the future so hugely for us.

Wow! It’s simply mind-blowing!

Header picture is one of Fiona that I took in August, 1982,  and just a month or so before she went off to University in Liverpool. This is the first photo I ever had of Fiona; she is eighteen in this picture (and it was taken on a Polaroid camera) and I kept it by my bed when she was at University.

More testimony of God’s timing, including some from our early married life, is here.

*A ‘transceiver’ is a radio that is capable of both transmitting and receiving radio signals. Transmitter/Receiver, hence ‘Transceiver’.

This is Our God

Insights, Others' stuff, Testimony

God loves to surprise His children with wonderful things.

Quite out of the blue, He will pop up something that, for us, is totally unexpected and brings us great blessings. An example from my own life, from two and a half years ago, is here. This sort of thing has happened to me so many times recently that I just can’t remember most of the events. But each time the surprise and delight is real. Some would put it down to coincidence and ‘confirmation bias’, which of course it could be. But these things are so personal, so targeted, that I really doubt that it’s coincidence.

But it’s not just me that it happens to, either. A few weeks ago, I was writing on Facebook about one of my favourite worship songs, and one of my friends came up with this lovely anecdote. I have ‘sanitised’ it of the song and personal details to avoid embarrassment, but have left it unchanged apart from that. Here is the story, just how it was told:

“I know the guy who wrote that song. I was a DJ in a small southern gospel radio station in the south, and I’d sneak in a worship song here and there. One day, I found that song on an album and put it on. A few minutes after I started it, a man came back to my booth, he was a new hire that had just started that day working in the office. He had tears STREAMING down his face, and asked me why I played that particular song. I told him because I’d just found it and previewed it and it brought me deep joy… he was sobbing. 🙂 Come to find out, he’d been struggling with so many things and had been really discouraged. He told me about how he and his wife WROTE that song and how it was just a sign to him that God had not forgotten him… so then of course I was in tears, too! lol, I had to put on a really long cut from the Kingsmen (10 minute song! lol) just to recover. 🙂 “

Wow. What a lovely story, and all because of a song that is one of my all-time favourite worship songs. I have several 😉 … But anyway, here’s the response I wrote to my friend:

“Now that is a lovely story. Wow. It’s one of my favourite worship songs and always has been since first I heard it. I have used that song to bless countless people in congregations large and small, singing it with great anointing and reality. Because for me it’s true. Maybe you could encourage him some more with that. I am going to bed now with my heart rejoicing because of your story”.

I wish I could tell you which song it is, but I want to protect that man’s privacy. Sorry. But really, you could pick any one of the many worship songs I have posted on my blog over the time I’ve been running it, and you can bet there will be similar stories surrounding many of them.

And it’s simply because God is like that. He’s brilliant; He loves His children with a fiery, jealous passion that pales even the strongest natural mother instinct. If He made us to have that sort of love for our own children, how much more is He like that, given that we are made in His image?

This is what He’s like. This is our God.

This Is My Freedom

Insights, Testimony
“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” – John 8:36 (KJV)

About three years ago, I returned to Church life, willingly, and at the direct request of Father God. I say ‘willingly’, because it marked the end of fifteen years of hardly being able to set foot in a church building, and at the same time learning how to live free from deadly church doctrines, rules and expectations. I’d been ‘detoxed’ over that time; I’d learned my freedom. And, you know what, even after I’d gone back into Church, God never once told me that it was time for the freedom to end. (There’s a little more detail on this in my Testimony)

And now I live in that freedom. Freedom from the power of sin, freedom  from the fear of death, freedom from being tied to others’ opinions, freedom from having to strive to please God, freedom to be who I am, free in fact to live life to the full with complete freedom from any kind of fear.

This sort of lifestyle is described really well in Romans 6:6-14, especially in The Message translation/paraphrase:

“Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life—no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus did.

“That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you’ve been raised from the dead!—into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God.”

– Romans 6:6-14 Message

I love that. Never again will death have the last word. Never indeed! Jesus’s Resurrection shows that God was declaring the rule of Death, in terms of its power to destroy and separate forever, was over. In Isaiah 25:6-9, written about 600 years before the death of Jesus of Nazareth, this prophecy is recorded:

On this mountain* the Lord Almighty will prepare
    a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
    the best of meats and the finest of wines.
On this mountain he will destroy
    the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
    he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears
    from all faces;
he will remove his people’s disgrace
    from all the earth.
The Lord has spoken.

 In that day they will say,

“Surely this is our God;
    we trusted in him, and he saved us.
This is the Lord, we trusted in him;
    let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

– Isaiah 25:6-9

*(‘On this mountain’ referring to the hill of Golgotha in Jerusalem, where Jesus was crucified)

I mean, how awesome is that? That 600 years before the death of Christ, the prophecy is that death shall be defeated; that victory was the victory of Christ over death on the hill of Golgotha.

Is it any wonder, then, that I marvel at the immensity of the salvation (the Greek word for this is sōzō, meaning being ‘made whole’) that is offered us in Christ. I wrote about this some time ago but that article still stands. The whole salvation story and the truth of it is starkly real in this age of wishy-washy beliefs, rubbish television programs, terribly incompetent Governments and the like.

This salvation – meaning, as we said above, ‘wholeness’, represents the only real hope for us both personally and as a civilization. But because it is based on the solidity of God and the removal of the world’s main weapon – fear – it alone has the power to change lives and make a real difference to real people today. We are ‘saved’ – sōzō’d – to be free. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free (Gal 5:1) – not to struggle and try, but to rest in His finished work. It is finished! (Jn 19:30)

So remember – if it doesn’t look like freedom – then it isn’t the Gospel!

I leave you with the amazing words penned by Charles Wesley in 1738, from his hymn ‘And Can it Be‘:

Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light!
My chains fell off, my heart was free
I rose, went forth and followed Thee!

This is my testimony. This is my freedom!

My Glory and the Lifter of My Head

Insights, Others' stuff, Worship, Personal, Ministry, Music, Testimony
This entry is part 11 of 38 in the series Fiona
“But thou, O LORD, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.” – Psalm 3:3 (KJV)

I have had a new breakthrough in the area of worship.

Since losing my lovely wife Fiona to cancer last October, my soul should have been downcast (Ps 42:5). But, as I have said in a previous post, yes I have been grieving, and yes there have been heartbreak and tears, but my soul is not downcast within me. That which is ‘me’, my personality, my ‘self’, has not been destroyed. It is well with my soul! My worship life; my closeness to the God of all Comfort, has kept me afloat, kept me sane, kept me in joy. Not that I can claim credit for that; I have to say that the worship is my natural response to His closeness; the initiative, as it were, lies entirely with Him. It’s my choice to worship in response to that love, of course, but how can I not? Being surrounded and, yes, almost ‘padded’ by that Love, what other response can I possibly make?

As a worship leader from the Charismatic renewal era, I have led/sung (and still do!) certain types of song hundreds of times: those that express a longing, a hunger for God, for His presence. I suppose they are, for me, an expression of the longing in my heart for more of Him. Because, for me, He is the Centre of everything, I just want more and more. And yet He’s always right there, all the time. I suppose I just mean with those songs that I never want that Presence to leave me. It’s quite interesting in that God is so ‘present’ (although I know He’s ‘everywhere’) in the places where it appears that there is no God. So, in tragedy, suffering and heartache of all kinds, He’s right there. What we need to do is to develop a consciousness, an awareness, of that Presence.

A couple of months ago, someone at our Lifegroup (housegroup) said, “How can you lead worship like that after all you’ve been through?” And the answer is, really, “how can I not?” Worshipping Jesus has kept my focus on Him and that’s been my lifesaver. And so, like in the story I linked to above (here it is again), I have had those heavenly worship times where everything just fades into the background in the Light of His Presence. The troubles and grief are still there, but they are put into the correct perspective by the worship; I am reminded again of the primacy of Jesus and the sovereignty of God; I know He is in charge and this is just so profound.

But now, the worship seems to be taking a new course. Rather than simply affirming the worship of Heaven in my life, and showing me in some small way what Fiona is experiencing in the Presence of God, He’s now letting me see more and more of who I am in Him, Who He is to me, what He’s done for me and what I have in Him. 2Pet1:3 says, “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness”. And He has. He gives power for life, He gives freedom from sin, He gives the peace that passes all understanding. He’s lifted my head, and He continues to do so. All the things that happen in my life now, I face from a place of complete rest and confidence in Him. This is the state of Grace; where God’s undeserved favour (in that I have had to do nothing in order to ‘gain’ or ‘earn’ it) is present in blessing and Divine Presence.

And He is the one Who is indeed the Lifter of my head. When the grief and the sadness make me want to drop my head, chin to my chest, He’s the One Who lifts it back up again, to let me gaze on His Face. He’s the One Who lifts my aching heart and fills it with such indescribable joy, bubbling over; the reassurance of His Presence. And this is all so real to me; it hardly seems fair that one man should be given such blessing. As a friend of mine said a few years ago, we had such a life-changing experience of God in our early Christian lives that for Fiona and I, this was the norm. When worship was happening, we were in the thick of it. The Presence of God is so real, so tangible, it’s simply amazing.

And so I want to share this brilliant Terry MacAlmon song, My Glory and the Lifter of My Head. Especially magnificent in this song is the spine-tingling solo by Liz Gustafson, “When the terror of the enemy | Seems to rise all around me | Still I, I will not be afraid | Oh, For there is One greater | He’s my shield and my defender | And He will stand beside me till that day!”

For the reader who does not yet know what it feels like to be in God’s Presence, may I encourage you to ask Him to make Himself real to you today. Be a part of this. Enter into this joy that is just so available to you. Let this song minister the truth of the reality of God into your spirit; let Him breathe his new life into you.

Here we go, then. This is a really great song. Be blessed as you listen!

You’re my glory
And the lifter of my head
You’re my glory
And the lifter of my head
For Thou, O Lord, are a shield for me
My glory and the lifter of my head

When the terror of the enemy
Seems to rise all around me
Still I, I will not be afraid
Oh, For there is One greater
He’s my shield and my defender
And He will stand beside me till that day

Do Animals Go To Heaven?

Insights, Personal, Ministry, Testimony
This entry is part 10 of 38 in the series Fiona

Six months ago today, one of this world’s brightest lights went out when my gorgeous wife Fiona left us.

In the light of my former post in this series, in which C. S. Lewis describes ‘Sarah Smith from Golders Green’, a saintly lady in Heaven who had amongst her train of followers many animals that she had loved and befriended during her life – and who reminded me of Fiona – I thought it time to address the problem: Do animals go to Heaven? The Bible is silent on this issue, so what does happen to them? And my daughter lost her pet rat this month, when he lost his battle with a probable brain tumour. So, for us, it’s a pretty topical subject.

And, as we are an animal-loving family, I thought it might be an idea to discuss on here whether indeed animals will join us in Heaven, especially those who are our animals.

Why is this post part of my ‘Fiona’ series? Well, a few weeks before my wife Fiona died (can’t believe it’s six months ago today that we lost her), she had a real-life, solid waking vision of what was awaiting her when she passed away. I will not go into details, but I will say that the vision involved animals. Part of Fiona’s reward includes animals, very much like ‘Sarah Smith from Golders Green’. And Fiona loved her animals, and would it not be fitting if her animals were waiting to welcome her when she arrived there? Because I am indeed convinced that she went to be with her animals as well as with her Lord, I have today published this blog post. In this piece, then, I examine ideas about our animals being with us – and with Fiona right now – in Heaven.*

This is the majestic and regal Bruno, our third Shepherd, in 2008. He passed away a year later, in his prime, at the early age of 8, due to spinal problems.

Certainly the Bible mentions animals in the Kingdom. Things like, ‘the lion shall lie down with the lamb’ and similar passages speaking of the peace of the Kingdom to come. And, while the Bible is very quiet on the ‘eternal fate’ of animals, there is the sense from reading the Bible that hints that, as humans are redeemed, so Creation as a whole is redeemed too on the back of our redemption. It’s all a bit mysterious, is that, but the concept certainly is there. Like in Romans 8:19, “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.” It’s as if, once the saints come into their inheritance, Creation follows suit. I think Heaven is going to be full of animals!

In my research for this piece, I found many websites that kind-of abstract the whole thing about animals in Heaven. They talk about animals not being able to ‘accept Christ’; not being able to ‘understand salvation’, all that kind of thing. They miss out entirely the idea I mentioned above, that creation longs for the sons of God to be revealed. For the time when everything will be made right. In a sense, we understand salvation on their behalf, and it is through our life in Christ that they too are ‘saved’. Clearly, many of these writers have never known the love and affection of a devoted family pet, or the close relationship of a working animal with its master. Like a draft horse, a Police dog, or similar. When Jesus said that ‘he who loses his life will keep it for life eternal’, there is a hint there that everything you are, everything that formed a part of you, everything that your animals were to you, everything good about your life here on Earth, all that will somehow be caught up and included in your life in Heaven. And so it is my belief that this fully includes your animals. The animals to whom you show love and self-giving, with whom you form a loving relationship.

Bruno

Also, the great Christian thinker and writer I mentioned above, C. S. Lewis, wrote that in his opinion, the ‘higher’ animals, such as dogs, cats and horses, almost seemed to have a ‘soul’. And therefore, at least some of the animal kingdom would be in Heaven. They have characters; they have personalities. They have intelligence, they have emotions and feelings. Sammy, my daughter’s rat, had a bright, sunny personality; he could do tricks, he knew his name and would come when called. He loved my daughter and you could tell that he knew she loved him. There was real intelligence and, yes, consciousness there. In other words, these animals are, in their own way, persons, and as such, that is what is redeemed. And the redemption idea was what Lewis was strongly hinting at in the ‘Sarah Smith’ passage quoted in my article. Zeus, my German Shepherd dog (he’s the dog in the header picture) is a person – there’s no doubt about it. Those who would sneer at this and accuse me of anthropomorphising Zeus’s behaviour (superimposing human traits onto an animal) don’t have a clue; they have never met him. He’s a person all right. My daughter, in fact, pointed out today that actually animals are, in a sense, far more Godly than we are because they love unconditionally, and forgive easily. And that they don’t have the same ‘walls’ that we have, whether self-erected or not. I read once – it may have been in Lewis, it may not – that animals live actually in the constant, conscious awareness of God. That’s something we cannot know, of course, but I do think there’s something in that; this is maybe why dogs and other pets are used as therapy visitors in hospitals, where they have such marked positive effects on the patients they visit.

And there’s more, this time from personal experience. I remember when we lost our first German Shepherd dog, Jasper, in 1994 (as mentioned in this piece). Fiona had a vision of him jumping up into Jesus’s lap and licking His face. (How Jasper got away with that, I don’t know; we never used to let him lick our faces!). As with all of the visions Fiona had, it was very real, almost like a solid vision, a ‘real dream’. But she saw it, all right. I saw her burst into tears of joy when she saw that picture…it wasn’t until after the meeting we were in that she told me what she’d seen. I’m convinced it was a real God-given vision, by its fruits of peace, joy and hope that it produced. We will see Jasper in Heaven. Well, we have already seen Jasper in Heaven!

This next bit is relevant, so bear with me! Christians speak about ‘Judgement Day’. For most, this is a terrifying concept where everyone’s secrets are laid bare so that God can ‘smite’ (whatever that means!) people for what they’ve done. Let me encourage you, then, for in fact the very opposite is true. God’s justice is, actually, everything being in right relationship, in its right place, ‘The way things should be’, we could say. And God’s judgement is not a heavenly court-room where we are all tried ‘for our sins’; instead, judgement is the means by which God’s justice is achieved; the process of righting all wrongs so that His justice comes into full fruition. That’s what Judgement and Justice mean.

God’s justice and His judgement are therefore restorational concepts, not punitive ones.

Like all Kingdom concepts, it is happening in the here and now wherever Christ’s followers bring Him into a situation. It is also what will happen at the ‘Last Judgement’ and at that point it will be brought to its completion. This is why I look forward to that judgement; I look forward to everything being restored to its proper order and in its proper place, with everyone in right relationship with God and with others. I look forward to everything that was ever wrong being made right, and every injustice set straight. I look forward to everything being ‘the way that it should be’. When viewed in that manner, ‘Judgement’ and ‘Justice’ take on a whole different meaning from that of the angry god taking out his ‘wrath’ on people, to one of a loving God who wants nothing less than peace and wholeness for everything He has made.

Why is this relevant to whether or not animals will be in Heaven? Well, you see, death is one of those things that is ‘wrong’; that needs to be put right. It’s just so hurtful, so damaging and so painful. And permanent too.

Except that it isn’t. Because Jesus rose from the dead, literally came back to life after being dead for days, it shows that in fact God has declared death defeated. Death no longer has the permanence it once had. ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory!’ (1Cor15:54 and Isa 25:7-8). And so death itself will be one of those ‘wrong’ things that will be done away with, for ever. So there is nothing to prevent all that our animals were to us, all the love and affection they gave and received, from being given back to us in the next life. Death is defeated; why should this not extend to our animals? God is just that kind of God, Who would do really ace stuff like that! 🙂

And so, if all that was ever wrong is put right, surely then the ‘wrong’, undeserved, sometimes untimely deaths of all these pets will be put right too. My daughter’s pet rat Sammy was only sixteen months old when he died. Rats are supposed to live for two to three years. It’s all wrong. But that too will be put right.

A very poorly Sammy, a few hours before we had to have him put to sleep.

What about animals that were not our pets? How about animals bred entirely for use as food? What about bugs, bacteria and whatnot? Where is the line drawn? Well, we can’t know for certain, of course. For an animal that does not mean all that much to us personally, like, say, a wild animal; an animal that does not ‘belong’ to someone as such; such an animal might be in Heaven, but not actually linked with anyone. I really don’t have any ideas on that, I’m afraid.

But let’s stick to what I do believe. I personally think that people’s pets or working animals – shall we say, ‘conscious’ animals with which we formed a mutually-beneficial relationship – I firmly believe that animals like those will be raised up with us as part of our inheritance as saints.

And finally, there’s this vitally important point too: God will wipe away every tear from their eyes (Rev 21:4). This means that everything that ever upset you, everything that ever hurt you, everything will be made right and things will be just as if the bad stuff never happened! I have written about this before, and the same principle applies here. This is part of God’s restorative justice. It’s part of what will happen. The Bible is full of God’s promises to restore – “I will restore the fortunes of Judah and the fortunes of Israel and will rebuild them as they were at first.” – (Jer 33:7); “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten” – (Joel 2:25). Granted, many of these prophecies were regarding the restoration of Jerusalem after the exile in Babylon, but the heart of God is still to restore. Restoring: putting things back where they belong; giving them back; restoring relationship – including those with our beloved pets.

So, animals in Heaven. Why not? Given the generous and, moreover, restoring nature of God, and that He loves to surprise us and bless us with every good thing, and given that Heaven will be better than anything and everything we could ever have dreamed, why not?

Do our pets go to Heaven?
Yes! They do!!

*And part of the reason for this post is that, in this series, I explore various ideas about the ‘afterlife’ and the grieving process of losing a loved one. Animals too are ‘loved ones’, so I felt for both reasons, and more, it was fitting to examine this topic as part of this series 🙂

The header picture shows my magnificent German Shepherd dog, Zeus. He’s a gentle giant whom we adopted at fifteen months old. When we got him he was a bit of a sad case who was terrified of men (we think he’d been abused by his previous owner), he hadn’t been socialised with other dogs, and he was generally not well-trained at all. After four to six months with us, he’d turned into the most placid, gentle, obedient dog you could wish for. He now gathers a fan club wherever he goes; everyone wants to stroke him and have pictures taken with him (especially Japanese people for some reason). He’s 9 now and weighs in at 55kg, by far the biggest German Shepherd we have owned, even bigger than Bruno. Here he is again, on the beach at Porthcothan in north Cornwall (and the photo is clickable to magnify it):

[Edit] – A shortened version of this post was also published on the ‘Unfundamentalist Christians’ blog on the Patheos website. Click here to see it on that site.

[Edit 24th June 2017] – yesterday, our beloved Zeusy went to be with his Mum. He died completely unexpectedly; in the morning he was welcoming visitors and doing his walk and stuff, and within twelve hours he was gone. Naturally we are heartbroken but, as I am sure you’ve worked out by now, we believe that he’s gone to be with Jesus and his Mum. I look forward to the exuberant welcome he will give me when it’s my turn…

 

The Grey Rain-Curtain

Insights, Others' stuff, Worship, Personal, Ministry, Testimony
This entry is part 9 of 38 in the series Fiona

This is another ‘spontaneous’ post; one written and then published straight away, like the one I did on what would have been Fiona’s and my wedding anniversary.

I don’t normally ‘do’ calendar festivals; I don’t particularly think of any day as being ‘special’, whether Christmas, Easter, my birthday… but sometimes these ‘recognised’ festivals do get me thinking along the lines of the things they are trying to ‘celebrate’ on those days. Which, when you think about it, is probably a fair part of the idea.

So, today is Easter Sunday, and I have just got back from Church where, as often happens there, I was completely lost in worship. We’d just finished a song, and David, the saxophonist, just continued to play a haunting little riff… and within a few seconds, the congregation were singing in the Spirit, a beautiful sound of blended, harmonised voices, with what could be heard as discordant counterpoints and undercurrents but because of the dynamics (relative volumes) they did not clash but enhanced the whole song. Quite the most beautiful Spirit singing I have heard in a long time, and only really possible with a largeish congregation because of the way the harmonies worked.*

Actually that’s not entirely relevant for today’s article, except that this article is about Easter Sunday. The day where Christians all over the world celebrate that Jesus of Nazareth, having been dead for a couple of days**, is resurrected. He came back to life; not just the same life as He had before He died, but risen to an entirely new kind of life, thus modelling our own resurrections at the ‘end of the age’.

Death had been beaten. Up until then, death was seen as The End. There were a number of ideas floating around like some sort of afterlife, but up until then, nobody had come back again after having been dead for that long. Isaiah 25:7-8 says:

“On this mountain He will destroy
the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
He will swallow up death forever”

…and this idea is covered again and again in the Bible. The promise that death would no longer be the terror and threat that, up until the Resurrection of Jesus, it had been.

1Cor15:55 says:

“Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?”

This is Good News! It means that Death is not the end. I have had close acquaintance with death and its effects, over the last six months since my wife Fiona died. And I have to tell you that death no longer holds any terror, any fear, for me. This is, and has been, my personal experience. Because I know, because God has shown me, that death is not the end. He has shown me what Fiona has now. And I have seen an amazing woman of God face death with utter calm, peace and serenity – because of what she knew to be true – that again death is not the end.

God showed me lots of really deep things of the Spirit last night (I was in the bath, actually!), one of which was that Death is no longer the worst thing that can happen. He showed me that while at the same time pointing to the last six months, where I have lived in a certainty (not simply a denial of the facts!) that there is a life beyond the grave; Fiona is there, and she is safe in Jesus’s company. I cannot even begin to tell you what an incredible source of comfort and reassurance that is. This knowledge is, quite literally, a Life Changer.

I’ve always had a great passion for the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien; I have posted before on themes related to his work. Now, the following quotation is indeed from the last of the three epic Lord of the Rings movies ‘The Return of the King’; however, these actual lines were not written by Tolkien himself, but by the scriptwriters for the movie. The scene is in the beleaguered city of Minas Tirith, where the forces of Mordor are about to break down the last gate and destroy everyone within. Gandalf and the hobbit Pippin are awaiting their fate as the gate begins to splinter:

“Pippin: I didn’t think it would end this way.

Gandalf: End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.

Pippin: What? Gandalf? See what?

Gandalf: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

Pippin: Well, that isn’t so bad.

Gandalf: No. No, it isn’t.”

– From the movie ‘Lord of the Rings – The Return of the King’

As I said, the quotation was from the movie, but the inspiration was actually from Tolkien himself. In this first quote, the hobbit Frodo is dreaming in the house of Tom Bombadil, early on in their adventure:

“That night they heard no noises. But either in his dreams or out of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running in his mind; a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey rain-curtain, and growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver, until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before him under a swift sunrise.”

– ‘The Fellowship of the Ring‘, Book I, Chapter 8: “Fog on the Barrow-Downs”

This is mentioned again at the end of The Return of the King, when Frodo departs on the Elven-ship:

“[T]he ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.“

– ‘The Return of the King’, Book VI, Chapter 9: “The Grey Havens” [emphasis mine]

One of the main reasons why Fiona wanted the Annie Lennox song ‘Into the West’ played at her memorial service was because she saw herself as fulfilling that promise; she would be going ‘Into the West’, with her Jesus. What an awesome thought.

Here then, I re-present the life-memories video that my daughter made for her Mum’s memorial service, with that song in it. This is the life of a great woman of God, whose confidence in her Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was unshakeable, that He would carry her through the grey rain-curtain and on ‘into the West’:

No, as Gandalf said, “the journey does not end here”. The ‘shroud that covers all nations’ (Is 25:7-8) has been destroyed. Our physical death in this world is simply the transition from our present life into the even greater, fuller, and more complete Life, beyond the veil of death – beyond the grey rain-curtain, if you will – and into the light, love, power and glory of Heaven. The ‘white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise’. How can one fear Death when you realise this sort of thing – despite being quoted from a fantasy story – is real, that it’s true?

I claim that it’s true. How can I prove this? I can’t do it empirically. I can’t, except to give my personal testimony as to what I have seen, what God has showed me. I do hope it comes across as a transferable idea, that is, that you as the reader can derive some benefit from it. I know it’s difficult when it’s someone else’s story, but hopefully the testimony of someone who has been through this fire, and seen all the things I have seen, will help you in some way if you are struggling with the loss of a loved one, or indeed with life itself. Let me encourage you that the promise of the Kingdom of God is not, in fact, primarily concerned with the ‘afterlife’ – though of course it does indeed concern that closely – but also and especially it concerns bringing the power and life of that Country into our present world.

You see, when Jesus said, “Your Kingdom come; Your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven”, (Mt 6:10) He meant it. And He demonstrated it; by performing all the miracles He did, He demonstrated that in fact the power of the Kingdom can indeed be brought into this life, and our lives can be lived in the knowledge and exercise of that power. Because the fear of Death has been defeated by Jesus’s Resurrection.

The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is something that has been transmitted down the ages as something that is true. Granted, that of itself doesn’t make it true, but there is also the testimony of countless Christian witnesses down the centuries, all of whom have claimed that in fact Jesus Christ is alive and living within their hearts by His Spirit. The presence of the Holy Spirit within them, and their real consciousness of His presence, convinces these people (including myself) that this incredibly weird, far-fetched and too-good-to-be-true tale is, in fact, completely true. (And when you hear spontaneous, supernatural singing like that which we had in Church this morning, that just adds to the convincing evidence for me).

Just think about it like this: the one greatest fear, the most powerful natural force in history, the one thing that most humans spend their entire lives in fear of – Death – is no longer the power that it was. Its power – its ability to damage, to take away, to destroy forever – has been taken away because Death is no longer the end. Jesus said, ‘The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy; I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.‘ (Jn 10:10 KJV)

Living in the truth of that awesome fact – instead of fear of Death, Life More Abundantly – absolutely has to be one of the greatest keys to receiving the ‘Peace of God that transcends [goes beyond] understanding’ (Phil 4:7). This stuff is true; it is real, and I have lived it.

Peace to you.

The header image for this post is Gandalf and Pippin’s dialogue transliterated into the Elvish script known as the ‘Tengwar‘, as developed by J. R. R. Tolkien for his extensive development of the languages of Middle-Earth. You wouldn’t have seen this in the movies, although they were a beautifully detailed (and in my opinion accurate) representation of Tolkien’s fictitious world. There is so much richness in the Tolkien books; a whole world invented by the genius of that one man.

*For a good example of this kind of singing, take a look at this video from about 4:44 onwards.

**Most Christians think of Jesus as rising from the dead after three days. I have a problem with that description of the time gap: Died Friday, rose from the dead Sunday. No way that’s three days…there are a number of different ideas about that timescale which I won’t explore here, but suffice to say He’d been dead longer than a mere half an hour, which is the longest kind of time where we have records of people whom we thought were dead but actually they ‘recovered’. Drowning victims, that kind of thing. He really was proper dead and He was resurrected. Wow.

The Power Of The Cross

Insights, Personal, Testimony
This entry is part 2 of 38 in the series Fiona

There’s an odd, fairly obscure little Scripture, found only in Matthew 27:50-53, that describes how at the moment Jesus died, an earthquake broke open the tombs of ‘many’ holy people who were, at the same time, raised from the dead. After Jesus’s own Resurrection a couple of days later, these people were seen by many people in Jerusalem. Here’s the Scripture:

“When Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, He yielded up His spirit. At that moment the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked and the rocks were split. The tombs broke open, and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After Jesus’ resurrection, when they had come out of the tombs, they entered the holy city and appeared to many people.” – Mt 27:50-53 

I’ve always understood this as happening because of the sheer power and Life that pulsed out from the Cross* as Jesus died. Somehow, however the ‘mechanism’ works, sin and death had been defeated and history had been changed. Nothing would ever be the same again. Life had been released into God’s Creation in such a way that had not happened since He first said ‘Let there be Light!’. And all this was because of the death of the most righteous Man Who ever lived. It’s no wonder, then, that all those people were raised by that power. And, when a Godly person dies, in a similar way that same power is released, bringing life to those who will receive it.

Most of my regular readers will know that my incredible wife, Fiona, passed away a couple of weeks ago. And in a similar way to that Life that poured out from Jesus’s death, I believe that I have seen this Life radiating out from from Fiona’s loss too. She was, without exception, the most Godly person I have ever known.

Within a day of her passing, just like when Jesus died, so much good fruit was released. There were fruits of joy, laughter, reconciliation. Fruit of healing. People felt a light-heartedness, despite the heartbreak of her loss, that could only be explained by remembering her as she was through her life and her final illness. Always radiant, full of joy and laughter, always looking for the joke, that was my Fiona.

And then at Fiona’s memorial service in our Church, every single one of the people who got up to speak about her said about how full of fun and joy she was.  As I’ve said, she was always looking for an excuse to laugh about something. Mark, our Vicar, commented on this and said that she was so full of fun, joy and laughter – yes, because that was the way she was made, the way she was ‘wired’ – but that she was also so full of that joy because she was also so full of God. And she was indeed 🙂

fionas-memorial
This is the candle table at Fiona’s memorial service, at which people were invited to place a candle in order to say goodbye to her. The lovely floral arrangement was the piece from the top of her coffin, which had been taken to the funeral at the crematorium earlier that day.

At the memorial service, many people – who were not all necessarily people of faith – were uplifted by the stunning testimonies of her influence on people’s lives. People I know who are not necessarily people of faith have been touched by the obvious light of this amazing lady’s life, character, friendships, life and death, and also by the shining faith and love manifested in lesser measure by those left behind. In this way, Fiona’s loss has radiated out new Life into people’s lives and hearts, in life-changing power. People who knew Fiona in life were, knowingly or unknowingly, being continually touched by the Love of Christ that was her driving force and the core of her being. At her memorial, even people who hardly knew her were moved deeply and felt something that they’d never felt before: the immense love of Christ that came from her life and ministry. The Presence of God filled that place and some people hadn’t felt that before. That’s much of the reason why it was so moving, because the testimonies to Fiona’s faithfulness and qualities were backed up by the actual Presence of God. Some might put this down to emotion or similar, and I agree that there was a lot of that about. Of course there was. But there was something more: the real Presence of Jesus right there in that place. If you were there and you felt that, and you were wondering what it was, hopefully that explains it for you. And that is partially why it felt as if Fiona was there with us, because Jesus’s Presence was so much of what you felt when she was nearby. I don’t think that anyone who was there went out of that place unchanged, in a good way.

So then, in Fiona, the life of Christ was made literally tangible because, as I have said previously, she was Jesus to others. And even in her death, that Christ-Life was still pulsing out in all its radiance and bringing Resurrection Life to those in that place, whether they realised it or not. It’s no wonder that people were finding the service so incredibly moving!

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of His saints – Ps 116:15 (KJV)
Finally, I would like to share with you the brilliant life-tribute movie that my daughter made to be played in the memorial service. It shows Fiona with her family in various places. The music track is ‘Into the West’ by Annie Lennox, from the Lord of the Rings movie ‘The Return of the King‘. Fiona always wanted it at her funeral….

*By ‘The Cross’, I refer (as does St. Paul in his writings) to, not specifically the actual wooden scaffold on which Jesus was crucified, but to the history-changing events that happened when Jesus died and subsequently rose from the dead. The self-sacrificial death that Jesus died is the single most powerful event in all of history, and that’s what I refer to when I talk about ‘The Cross’.

In the light of this article, here is another piece about coping with the grief of losing someone dear.