Graham – my God story

My parents were Christians and took me to church where I learned about Jesus. I remember at about 5 years old being in my bedroom reading a book called “Tell me about God”.

Well it was more like I was looking at the pictures because I don’t think there were many words. Whether it was actually the book or just my own thoughts but I remember being scared about God judging me and I called out to my parents who were in another room and said “what do I need to do to be saved from my sins?”

And they said something like “you need to say sorry to God and ask Jesus into your life.” I did that, I prayed a prayer, and from that point I thought I was a Christian.

I certainly did believe, and I prayed quite often for God to give me things or help me in tricky situations! But apart from going to church, it wasn’t making a massive difference to my life and I was pretty much the same as all the other people at school and got involved in some really bad behaviour.

When I was 16, I went on a weekend with a church group and I remember coming down from my room one morning and there was a prayer meeting going on in the lounge and through the door I could hear people praying for me by name to become a Christian. The shock to me was that they obviously assumed that I wasn’t a Christian. They must have looked at my life and not seen much evidence of following Christ.

It was a massive moment when I realised that I had Jesus as a ticket in my back pocket to keep me out of hell and let me into heaven. But I needed to follow him as Lord of my whole life. From that time, I started taking being a Christian more seriously. I got baptised and joined a church and slowly began to hand over the keys for all the rooms of my life to Jesus – a process that’s still ongoing.

God has been so kind to me since then, teaching me so much from his word, giving me opportunities to serve and blessing my family in ways more than I can count and all the honour goes to him.

(I was asked to type something up for a radio interview in January and thought it might be good to share)