“The valley’s deep and the mountain’s so high, if you want to see God you’ve got to move on the other side.” Barclay James Harvest – ‘Hymn’
We were stuck. My friend Keith and I had been walking on a footpath in the Swiss Alps from Wengen to Grindlewald, when it suddenly disappeared under a thin covering of snow. It was late afternoon by now, and we had come too far to go back the way we had come. We really couldn’t see any way downhill. The footpath had come to a dead-end; its way hidden by the white blanket of snow. I walked on a little way ahead of Keith, and I sat down and did something which until then, I had never done before in my life, at least, not conciously. I prayed. I guess you could say that I talked to God, because it was as simple as that. Quietly, for fear of Keith overhearing me, I asked God to help us. My prayer went something like this: “Well, God, if you really exist, if you can really hear me; then please help us to find a way down from here, because we’re stuck. Amen.” That was all. Immediately, I heard some shouts from below. Keith, having the vantage point on the hill above me, said he could see somebody lower down. With renewed hope, we ran down the hillside and found two locals, who spoke neither English nor French, but one mention of ‘Grindlewald’ was enough. They nodded vigorously, “Ja, ja!” , and they led us down a steep and winding path, which we would never have found on our own as it was hidden from our sight up the hill. A couple of hours later at the bottom, after a steep but exhilarating descent, we exchanged firm and very thankful handshakes and went our separate ways. As our two rescuers wandered off into the sunset, I plucked up the courage to tell Keith that I’d prayed back up there, and that at that very moment our help appeared. He said, “When I saw them, I thought they were our guardian angels!”
This was the spring of 1984; the year that George Orwell said that ‘Big Brother’ would be watching us. But instead, I was soon to discover that a BIG God was watching over me, and was about to introduce himself into my life. It was a simple incident, but it was the culmination of a journey that, at times, I hadn’t even realised I was on. This story proved to be a pivotal moment in my life; a hinge of the door that would open up a whole new world to me – and life as it really is. The speed of the answer to that prayer was alarming for me. It had been too quick to be passed off as just a coincidence. It was yet another confirmation that the road I had recently begun to explore was actually going somewhere.
During the previous months, whilst in the midst of my depression, I got talking to a friend at work who was a Christian. She lent me a book by a pop singer, Cliff Richard, called ‘You, me and Jesus’ I smuggled it home, as if it were some illicit material. Initially, I felt embarrassed to read it, but then I was intrigued to find that parts of it were beginning to speak to me. He wrote about things that had been troubling me during my depression, having lived a bit wildly in his youth. A lot of it I could relate to. It made a big impression on me.
As I discussed what I’d read with her, she was straight enough to tell me that I needed God in my life. More than that, she told me that Jesus was my only hope. I still wasn’t convinced, but I started to listen to her. She seemed to be more together in her life than myself, and other people that I knew. I asked her some really awkward questions as I sought to pull the Christian faith apart; such as “Does Jesus save animals? Do animals have souls?” I guess I was still affected by the traumatic episode of my budgie’s death. Then I went to the library and got books out on religion. This was a big step for me, but I felt I had to look into it a bit more. I discovered some books by Richard Wurmbrand, who’d been imprisoned in Communist Romania for his faith as a Christian. They really got me thinking. Here was someone who was willing to be imprisoned and even tortured for believing in Jesus and telling other people about it. Why? What was it about Jesus that would make people follow his way of life – even to die for it, if need be?
Months passed. I continued to search for meaning in my life. By now, I’d decided, as a sort of experiment, to go tee-total for a while, much to the amusement of my old drinking buddies. They remained convinced that a good beer was all that I needed. They were concerned that I was going all religious on them. But I was unrelenting in my determination to find something of value in life. It was the Easter of 1984. I was at home alone and had nothing better to do, so I watched an old religious film called ‘King of Kings’ (starring Jeffrey Chandler) which was about the life of Jesus Christ. I’d never really thought much about Jesus, probably since my childhood. If you’d have asked me back then what I thought of him, I might have said that if he had existed at all, he had probably been a sort of politician who knew a few tricks and could easily persuade people, but I was never really convinced as to what his motives were, as he never seemed to make a lot of money out of it; unless, of course, he was doing that secretly. Interestingly, most of my belief was based on the fact that I knew very little about him. I was not prepared for what was to happen. As I watched this film unfold, something in me started to break up. I couldn’t stop myself. By the end of it, when Jesus was crucified, I found myself crying buckets and couldn’t really understand why. I was weeping my heart out over a film about someone who, to most people, including me, was a fictional character.
I don’t know why I became especially interested in the Christian faith. Some people in times of crisis go down all sorts of spiritual avenues – why did I end up in Bible Boulevard? I could so easily have wandered into Buddhist Street. For a while, I even looked into Christian Science – but it just didn’t feel right. I can only say that, somehow, unbeknown to me, God was guiding me exactly where he wanted me to go. I wanted to know the truth. My friend always encouraged me to read the Bible, just to be sure that she (or Cliff Richard) wasn’t making it up. I suddenly remembered that I had a Bible! I went rummaging around in my cupboard to fish out the very pocket Bible that Brigitte, from Paris, had given me during my travels in France, some four or five years before. The one I’d dumped at the bottom of my rucksack and had forgotten all about, and which had been tucked away on my dusty bookshelf ever since…
After my answer to prayer in Switzerland, which was in May, it was as if a candle had been lit in a very dark room. Things started to take on a different appearance. Had I not prayed to God? Hadn’t he heard me? It was a bit of a shock to have a prayer so immediately and dramatically answered. God now had my attention. I also felt a new sense of purpose, and after all the reading I’d done I’d finally come to a conclusion about my beliefs. I now had no problem believing that God was real and that he could hear me. It wasn’t just this dramatic answer to prayer; there had been a gradual change in my thinking. The issue for me now was this; “Was Jesus really who he said he was…and is? And if so, what does that mean for me?” I still couldn’t make up my mind.
Worth more than many sparrows 