Living a life to please Jesus has not always been easy. Especially when I was young.
I've mentioned before that in the small village I grew up in there were only 2 boys my age. There was also 2 younger than me and 1 older. They would all get together (except for the boy my age who didn't play with the other boy my age...how complicated for 3 kids!). I would join in and play with them on the Junior School playing field after school or on the weekend. Sometimes we went camping together in a local farmers field.
One year my parents decided to go to something called a 'Bible Week', it was going to be in the New Forest. I think it was around 1979, which would make me 11 years old.
I'd now been baptised in water at the Baptist Church at the top of the road. me and another boy called Phillip Wild, who was one of the sons of the Sunday School teacher. I didn't have a lot of idea what was happening, even though it was explained very thouroughly to me by the Minister. I was only about 9, and just knew God wanted it to happen, so I did it. That was really the level of my understanding.
I think it was the following year that the Church hosted something called a Youth For Christ team. This was a bunch of teens and twenty somethings who had given up a year of their life to come and help our snall village be evangelised. It sounded interesting so pleaded with my Mum if we could put one of them up. What was amazing was she said yes and we ended up for a year with the leader of the team, Hugh, staying with us.
It was a very incredible year.
As the year progressed and we had some really fun times with Hugh and the team, who started a youth club in the holidays and took us on midnight hikes with soup at the end, and took us into Newport to play funny disguise games. Hugh also started taking us into Cardiff where we'd heard there was some amazing meetings being held in the Park Hotel. We started going along and found people a lot different to the Baptist Church.
Please hear me on this. The Baptist Church had some good people in it. They tried to walk a Godly life, though it was a very somber one. It fell apart though shortly after the events I'm describing.
At the Park Hotel, there were lots of happy people, they played tamborines, danced! and spoke the Word in a very different way to what I was used to. they would all sing in different languages as well, which apparently was the gift of tounges from The Holy Spirit.
My Dad was particularly taken with all that was going on, and it wasn't long before he was baptised in The Spirit, then a couple of others were from the Church until there was about 10 of us all filled with the Spirit (not me yet though).
After that Dad had real problems at the Baptist Church. They did not like him raising his hands in worship, and pretty much rejected what he had experienced of The Spirit. So, unfortunatley we all left and started a house church.
I'm not sure how we ended up at the New Forest bible Week, but we did.
And this post has gone on a lot longer than I was expecting so I'll pick up the story later.
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