My story

Men of God. Catholic. Husband, father of 2 children.

I was brought up as a Catholic in the UK and was close to God until my teens when I started to question my faith, until then I would have said that He would speak to me sometimes and occasionally I had a sense of His presence but I managed to convince myself that it had all been my imagination.

As I entered my teens I started asking questions of other Catholics, like “if God is so loving why does He send people to hell?” At the time I received no answer that satisfied me, just an assertion that we couldn’t understand everything and had to have faith. The same response came when I asked about the Trinity and about why He allowed suffering etc. However when I asked scientific questions I felt I received meaningful answers even if I struggled to understand some of them, so I began to believe my faith was illogical.

Also as a teenager I was struggling to live a holy life as the call of my faith seemed to conflict with the desires of my heart and the forces of peer pressure etc. Trying harder to be holy just didn’t seem to work and so I looked at the other members of my church to see how they managed it. What I found worried me, it seemed that there were some holy people there but they were all old, the families I knew looked good on a Sunday at mass but I knew that their family life was like mine, full of shouting and arguments and very little holiness. So I figured there was two options to holiness, wait until you are so old that you didn’t want to sin any more or hypocrisy, ie pretend you were holy on a Sunday and just get on with your life during the week. The idea of hypocrisy appalled me and the burden of my failure and feelings of guilt were getting too much to cope with especially when intellectually I suspected that faith had no logical base.

The final straw was just after I had really started noticing girls I heard the teaching of Jesus that if a man even looks at a woman with lust in his heart then he is guilty of adultery! I had never heard of the old self/new self teaching but did realise that I couldn’t be holy just with the will-power I had available to me.

As a result I thought I would be better off, not believing in God and instead only believing in what I could prove to be true and living with all my power by that. So at the age of fifteen I set about not believing in God, although this was harder than I had expected it would be! A curious thing happened shortly after I made this decision, I remember distinctly the impulse or internal suggestion on several occasions whilst I was alone to blaspheme God. Since I didn’t believe in Him this would have been foolish, but when I responded internally with this, the thought re-asserted itself again and again, “do it anyway!”, I didn’t believe in evil spirits at the time so this internal battle struck me as very strange.

Eventually not believing in God became easier and I was able to indulge my old self more comfortably even though I had become convinced that embracing my fundamental selfishness would logically result in me acting broadly as Christ suggested but simply without faith. However at university I realised I was no more able to live by my logical principles than by the religious ones of my childhood faith, because of this fundamental selfishness. This led me to hurt many people and to a total lack of wisdom in my relationships, my self-esteem began to plummet and I began to hide my true self, living behind a mask of self-confidence and indifference whilst inside I was shrivelling up sure that if anyone could see the real me they would be horrified by my moral ugliness. Studying science and philosophy led me to intellectually accept the necessity of a First Cause that was self-existent (to start off the universe), self-giving (or there would only still be this First Cause and nothing else), and outside of time since it would have had to have existed before time began (time simply being an aspect of space). At this point I was looking at Taoism as a description of this force but was unclear how to become aligned with it. However I didn’t believe this force or energy was a person, a being who would be interested in me. My mother challenged me on this point, asking me what proof I had for it since proof was my guiding principle since the age of fifteen.

The question wouldn’t leave me alone and so eventually I decided to get the proof I needed once and for all that this “Source-of-all-things” (my name for the First Cause) was not a person and consequently not interested in me. When no-one was around I said out loud “Source of all things if you are a person as my mother thinks and you are interested in me then show me in a way that will totally convince me and I will give you my whole life, but if you don’t I’ll know it is all nonsense and I’ll get on with my life and never worry about this again, I’ll have my proof.

”  To be scientific about it I decided to take this “experiment” seriously and so take some time off my work as a software engineer. At this point out of the blue an old college friend, Susie, rang me and invited me to go on Student Cross, a week’s pilgrimage, in the week before Easter. An odd thing for her to do since she hadn’t been in contact for a few years and the last time we spoke I was an “evangelical atheist”! I agreed to as long as the organisers knew that I wasn’t a Christian and were ok with that.

On this pilgrimage to Walsingham (a Marian shrine) I must have stood out like a sore thumb, 20 young students, Christians from a variety of church backgrounds, though mostly Catholics, and me. I wore a long black cloak, hand-made black leather trousers, and an arm guard covered in studs.

Every-day I helped them carry their 3m high heavy wooden cross but my only prayer was a private one “If you’re there, let me know”.

Four days in and no response, it was a Wednesday afternoon and we had just had what the group called a “station”, which was a break at the side of the road, where after some prayers, one member would share some spiritual insight followed by half an hour of silent prayer as we walked on. My only prayer didn’t take too long to say so I started to say it in different ways, “If you’re there, let me know”. “If you’re there, let me know”, “If you’re there, let me know” after  20 minutes of this I began to think, “this is crazy, I could be on a beach now, this is my holiday”. Then it started to rain and all the Christians pulled on their anoraks, I was too cool to have an anorak so I started to get soaked.

I decided that at the next village where we were to stop that night I would call a taxi and go home but at that moment something strange happened. I felt like I walked into a wall of warm air, like the hot air blowers you sometimes find above the door of posh shops. Despite the wind and rain on this road with no shelter on either side the pocket of warm air seemed to be hanging there, what’s more it seemed to be getting stronger. The feeling of warmth was tangible, I began to feel like I was being held.

I hadn’t felt like this since I was about three years old when my mum would bath us in the kitchen sink and then wrap us in a towel she had warmed in front of the fire to lift us to the floor and dry us, it was exactly that feeling. I looked at the guys next to me, they were walking along in the rain with their heads bowed in prayer like none of this was happening. Just as I thought “Blow the silence rule I’ve got to ask them if they are feeling this too”, the feeling jumped inside of me, all of a sudden it wasn’t only a feeling of being held but there was someone else inside my head. I had lived for years behind a mask until it felt like I was locked inside my own prison walls and now there was someone else in there with me. He looked at me with a look that said “I love you” so clearly that there could be no misunderstanding it. I was overwhelmed, soaking in this love when all of a sudden an unpleasant thought crossed my mind, that if He was here on the inside with me then He could see all the ugliness of my life.  Like that thing I had done just a few weeks before, I can’t even remember now what it was but it horrified me at that moment, but incredibly I realised that not only did He already know all about it but He was actually there at the time it happened and even more amazingly His love for me hadn’t changed! Then something else came to my mind that I had done and again I knew that He had been there as well and His love for me still didn’t change. This repeated itself again and again, through all the stuff that I had hidden away in the dark corners of my heart and mind, right back into my childhood and every time the guilt and self-loathing and shame was replaced by His unconditional love. This love was being poured into me until I was filled to overflowing and it began to spill over in tears, this might not seem odd to you but I didn’t cry, ever, crying was for girls and here I was walking down a road with a bunch of Christians with tears streaming down my face and I didn’t care at all. To be fair it was raining so hard they probably didn’t notice. The next thing I was aware of was sitting in a church in the pitch black as the love faded enough for me to look around. We must have come into the church to say a prayer at the end of the afternoon in the light and the rest of the group then gone out to the hall leaving me sitting in the church as the sun went down. If the love hadn’t faded out I would have happily sat there forever sunbathing in the golden glow of His love, I felt totally comfortable and although I must have come in wet I was now warm and dry.

It took me 20 minutes to grope my way around to the door and the starlight outside in this little village, from there I could hear the rest of the group in the church hall. As I made my way towards the double doors I became aware that I had a huge doped-up grin on my face, I tried to put my “mask” back on, the “hard” face I had worn all these years but it had gone, all the hurt and anger and bitterness was no longer there.

To get rid of the grin on my face I even tried pulling my cheeks down with my hands but realized this was not going to work so I took a deep breath and pushed open the doors. The talking and laughter all stopped at once and everyone in the group laying out their sleeping bags and unpacking their stuff turned to stare at me blinking in the light like the scene in the westerns when the baddie enters the saloon. Here was this guy who didn’t believe in God who had been out in the church for hours standing there in the doorway with a big grin on his face and his eyes all weird-looking (actually from all the tears), someone mimed to the person next to him, “he’s doing drugs!”. My friend Susie called to me from the back of the hall, “Hey Dom, I’ve laid out your stuff” so I walked through the group towards her and all the guys pretended to carry on talking but were all secretly waiting for me to say something drugged up and crazy. When I got to Susie she looked up at me and said in her cockney accent “You alright Dom?” I could feel all the love sloshing around just below my eyelids and knew that if I tried to say anything I would begin to cry again and this time I didn’t want to do so with all these guys watching so I clamped my mouth shut and nodded wildly. She looked at me again and then did something she had never done she gave me a big hug. Again nothing strange you might think but I didn’t do touching, my body language made it clear, “keep away!!” and Susie knew that, she had never hugged me in all the time she’d known me. I couldn’t understand how she knew then that I had changed, now it’s obvious to me as it was to her at the time.

The rest of that week was strange, I had a million and one questions, I was a philosopher after all but most were personal. “Since You are real where were you when I was suicidal the first year at university? Where were you when my marriage fell apart?” But also I had questions about heaven and hell and suffering generally etc. The amazing thing was that although I asked these questions in my head the answers started to come through coincidences.

For example the next day one of the group approached me with an open bible and said I think the Lord wants you to read this, offering me the bible. I told him I didn’t read the bible and he said “not the whole thing, just this line here” pointing to a verse. I read it a bit suspiciously and it was the answer to one of those questions I had been asking.

This went on all week, for example one answer came as a scripture carved above the door of an old church hall we went into for lunch. Finally at Walsingham on the Saturday evening before Easter we were sitting in the pub and one of the girls suddenly came out with some comment about God. I said out loud “That’s a coincidence!” and started to laugh. They were all confused and started to ask me why I was laughing and what was a coincidence? I explained that I believe God had been answering my questions through coincidences and then half of the group said yes that’s how God speaks to us and the other half were saying that God doesn’t speak any more. I realised that despite the fact that all these guys were Christians half of them didn’t know that God still speaks to us. From that moment on my life changed dramatically. The following year I went back on the pilgrimage and the only thing the Lord said all week was “Feed My sheep”, although I didn’t understand what this meant at first

The Boss eventually reminded me that I’d promised to give Him my whole life if He revealed Himself to me in a way that totally convinced me. He invited me to abandon my career path (PhD and then AI research etc.) and to come and work for Him. This was the best decision I ever made, from church youth work to my current job as a carpenter/locksmith for a couple of prisons I couldn’t have had a better Boss.

He has provided everything I needed and more and today it is my delight to help others to hear more clearly from Him, through dreams, visions, signs and His direct prophetic word.