Cherished

Until last August, I had never really been inside a church, except maybe for a wedding or a christening in the wider family; my parents certainly were never church-goers, and so neither was I. Neither was I looking for God. My life was good, I was happy with who I was - why would I need to complicate things by getting religious all of a sudden?

Well that was what I thought anyway. You see, until about a year before I was baptised, I was looking for acceptance, attention, and love, in relationships that were never really going to provide it. They provided an imitation of those things that was good enough for a while, but it wasn't until I spent some time with a couple of Christian guys I went cycling with, that I realised there was more to have. I could see that my Christian friends, far from being tied up in a huge list of rules and things they couldn't do, had this sense of satisfaction with their lives that I had simply never been able to find. So, yeah, I was curious.

And they must have known that, because, when another of their friends had to drop out at short notice, they offered me his ticket to Momentum 2010. And would you believe, I was able to get the time off and go?

So I went... I went along to the seminars and talks - at first I was just curious, but surrounded by all these people that it really meant something to... I felt I had to pay attention. Work out what was so special about this whole religion thing.

It was in one of the main evening sessions - I can't even remember now what the talk was supposed to be about, but somewhere in it, something hit me, and afterwards I asked my friends to pray for me...

The rest of that evening is a bit of a blur now. That was the day - 23rd August 2010 - that God spoke to me. I can't tell you the exact words - or even if there were words, as such - but the gist of it was that it didn't matter what I had done, or what sort of person I thought I was, God knew the real me, the person I could become, and would help me become her. And He loved me. I wish I had words to what that felt like, to suddenly know, for the first time, that you are so loved, so cherished, that someone would willingly die in your place...

I don't have words for that. It's a feeling that surpasses language. What I do have is tears of joy every time I think of it. You are cherished. That is about as close as I can get. That's the phrase that stuck in my mind afterwards. And that was what I could never get from the kind of relationships I had pursued in the past - and, truth be told, what I had given up on ever finding.

And now, as I look back, I can see that for a long time before that day, things had been building up to that point. My attitude towards relationships, sex, and life in general had slowly been changing over a period of time. Christian people had come into my life, I had become friends with them, and heard their views on my changing attitudes over a beer on a camping trip. And someone I did not even know donated his Momentum ticket to me.

I was never looking for God, but it's pretty clear to me now that He was tracking me down.