OUT OF THE GUTTER

For as long as I can remember I have suffered rejection and ridicule from my family my peers and my teachers. I have been misunderstood most of my life which caused me to withdraw socially. As a small child I was beaten and molested by my father, who beat my mother in front of me. My mother said I stood in the corner and wet myself with fear. Most of what happened in my early childhood is a blank in my memory. I think that I must have blotted much of it out of my mind, but there are fragments that I can still remember. My Father touched me in an inappropriate way. This memory started coming back when I was about eighteen. Some of my story I have managed to piece together by what members of my family have told me because I simply have no clear memory of what happened. My father was into occult practices such as consulting the Tarot and the I-ching and he also did Astral Projection which means travelling outside your body in the spirit, through meditation. He practised Tai-Chi which is a martial art that develops the life-force in one’s body, which gives great power. Martial arts aren’t just a system of fighting. There is a whole form of spirituality behind them which is based on Taoist principals and Buddhist philosophy. It focuses on the development of self and an impersonal God-Force. He used the ability he gained from this on my mother and used to throw me across the room and on the floor. He would get on his knees and break down crying and ask my mother for forgiveness after assaulting her. His behaviour was unpredictable and unstable but my mother said he was never malicious. He had sudden changes in his personality. He never had any help so I could never really know. Doctors would class it as mental illness but I am totally convinced now that his mind was in the grip of demonic forces. He became more and more violent until, my mother was in fear for our lives and she left with me in the middle of the night. It was actually a neighbour that helped us get out in the end. My grandmother has told me that before we left he had beaten her black and blue with a metal vacuum cleaner pipe. We got a taxi to a woman’s refuge. We weren’t there for long because the other kids bullied me and my mother decided to get us out of there. All this was before the age of 3 and a half. Because of the abuse I was seriously traumatized and developed behaviour problems. My mother was very insecure and looking for a father figure for me. We moved in with some friends at a temple, where she met an American man called Paul who married my mother shortly afterwards. He seemed OK at first up until my brother was born, then he got bored of me and became very cold towards my mother. Nothing she did ever pleased him and he blamed her for getting pregnant. Early on he was shouting at my brother who was only a baby. Later on he began to hit me when my mother wasn’t present.

My mother Denise grew up near Cambridge, She was a teenager in the sixties and was into Rock bands and started going to festivals. There was a lot of fighting in the home. Her mother and father were at each others throats. She told me that there was a point in her teenage years when she was suicidal. She stood by the river Cam thinking about throwing herself in. She smoked a lot of dope back in those days and lived a studenty/hippieish type lifestyle, going to festivals like the Cambridge Folk Festival. A bit later on she gave these things up as she had met some Hare Krishna in Cambridge and decided that it was a way out. I can understand this because she was desperately unhappy and it was a form of salvation to her at the time. She joined them and went travelling with them in Ireland. Like many religions, apart from Christianity, there is a clever cocktail of truth and untruth mixed together, I have learned a bit about various religions and can see glimmers of truth but it is not the whole complete truth which makes it a half truth. Although, of course, there is no such thing as a half truth, something is either true or it isn’t. Therefore it must be a counterfeit of the absolute. This is the divine plan for the whole of mankind at the cross where Jesus died and then was raised from the dead. I grew up with this stuff about Hare Krishna and various elements of New age soup as I call it. I was “initiated by a guru” at the age of ten while I was in India. I did this just because it was the done thing. I went and threw myself before him because I needed approval and someone else said I should. I could see that a lot of the philosophy in this religion was true but somehow did not apply to everyday life. It didn’t make a blind bit of difference to the rejection I felt inside or the deep pain and bitterness and anger within me. Something was missing from my life. My life was empty because it had no real love in it. Everything was based on sentiment. A lot of these people lived good lives but many others didn’t; they were into new age ideas that incorporated elements of many different philosophies. A lot of them are into eastern astrology. George Harrison from the Beatles was into all this and The Beatles were disciples of the Maharishi who began the transcendental meditation movement. I felt ashamed of this religion because it was something I had been brought into and I wondered what the other kids would think if they found out about all this Harre Krishna stuff. Maybe I would be bullied even more. I tried my best to cover it up and I desperately wanted approval. This was not normal. All I wanted was to have what I thought was a normal life but it never happened.

My mother took me to a psychologist and other specialists trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Being taken to all these doctors just felt like more rejection and ridicule. Over the years I built up so much anger and bitterness and hate it was like a cancer inside me that turned me sour. I hated authority because of being abused and I saw people that were bad as role models.I hung around with the naughty boys at school because this made me feel important and I was constantly trying to impress them, but they were a lot less naive than I was and they told me to do things that were wrong. I found it impossible to know the right way to behave because I had come from such a horrible background. They laughed and joked when I got into trouble. I found it difficult to understand right and wrong because of the madness of the world. I desperately wanted to be like everyone else. I felt alone in the world, ridiculed by other kids and misunderstood by adults. I tried so hard to fit in but nobody ever accepted me. I became completely withdrawn and didn’t trust anybody.

When I was 9 years old I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, which is mild autism. I had a statement of special educational needs. I disassociated from this idea, and I have been in real conflict with it because before this point I had been seeing a child psychologist and my mother had taken me to psychiatrists to try and figure out what was wrong with me. The doctors kept saying “Emotional Trauma”. My mother couldn’t cope with this. She needed something more to help it make sense. I have since done a bit of research on this subject and found that the word Autos means self, therefore autism means that a person withdraws into self because they see the outside world as a threat. This is not an illness; it is a cognitive pattern of thinking which can be adjusted through the right sort of therapy. However I never really got any help in this regard. Even If I had been offered help maybe I wouldn’t have accepted it anyway because I was full of rebellion and I wouldn’t let anyone inside the bubble I had created around myself. After my diagnosis my stepfather treated me like a bad smell or a stain. His favourite words for me were ‘retard’ or ‘imbecile’. It seemed as though he didn’t see me as a child anymore. I associated this label that had been put on me as another dig at me. This meant that I was different and in my subconscious mind and this meant more rejection; I had to fit in. I started lying at an early age because I thought it would make me more popular, and I could impress other kids so they would be my friend. I used to run away from home and find myself a hide-out anywhere and fantasize that I was in my own little world away from all the misery. I also ran away from school towards the end of my primary school years. I often wished myself dead and wondered why I had been born. I was unhappy at school because I was severely bullied and none of the teachers stuck up for me, plus I was being treated coldly by my stepfather at home and my mother was too weak to help me. I don’t blame her any more. She has had a hard deal in life. I didn’t know where to turn and I ran away from home a few times. Every time I ran away I either went back because I didn’t know where to go or my mother called the police, who picked me up and took me home. I always tried to be like everyone else to avoid being bullied but it was no use; I didn’t belong anywhere and I felt trapped.

It wasn’t long before my twelfth birthday and that was quite a bad year for me. My parents had lots of their friends round and I felt like they always had time for everyone but me. I was arguing with my mother. Nothing I said could ever be right. I had been going to a gymnastics club In Dulwich called Fun Movement. This made me feel silly because it was for people with special needs. It was so hurtful to me that my mother was always deciding that I should go to these type things. I was being put in the same category as people with Downs Syndrome and other disabilities. Not that I think anything is wrong with disabled people but I clearly wasn’t like that. I was a disturbed child that needed love and balanced relationships in order to develop properly, but instead the distorted image I had of myself and the world around me was being made worse because I was being treated like there was something wrong with me. In the end my mother took me out of school because I was being bullied terribly, and was fed up with the teacher’s lack of understanding. The last straw was when the head teacher stood up in front of the class and declared that I had special needs. I wanted to disappear, I hid under the table and the other kids laughed. Life was so confusing, I didn’t understand why anything happened the way it did. For a while I went to a tuition centre but didn’t really feel like I got anywhere with it. I just couldn’t focus my mind on anything.

It was just before the summer holidays I was nearly thirteen, I was looking forward to the summer holidays. I had just started a Secondary School in Forest Hill called Brent Knoll. I was in my second year. Things seemed to be looking up at this time. My stepfather called me downstairs I didn’t know anything was going on. At first he said we are going out and I noticed that all my belongings had been packed into bags. Somehow I knew something was wrong. He dragged me to his car and then he drove me to Social Services. I was dumped there and they were left to pick up the pieces. It turns out my mother and stepfather had been speaking with Social Services for quite a while and I knew nothing of it, it seemed very convenient for them. When we got there I was left In a small office room on my own. There was a load of children’s toys scattered on the floor. This was the first major time I completely lost it. I flipped and the anger and the frustration and pain bubbled up to the surface like a volcano and then erupted.    I hurled chairs about and smashed the toys. I lost control and I hated everything. I was angry at the whole world.

 When I lived at home I was pretty sheltered from the outside world. My mother wrapped me up in cotton wool. She hated me going out on my own and she said I was in my own world, but in reality I was trying to escape from the world which she had created for me. But when I got put into care It seemed that I was thrown out on my own and I didn’t know how to cope. They put me in my first foster home in Northfleet near Gravesend. The foster carers seemed nice enough but I was pretty aloof to them. No one could replace a mother and father. All I wanted was a loving family. These people were ok but I couldn’t fully accept them. I knew this was all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I felt my parents didn’t care about me at all, I blamed my mother for letting it happen, he was never my father anyway.  I got into trouble for lighting fires and doing other stupid things like making prank calls to the fire brigade. I wondered about with my foster brother and we got up to all sorts of mischief. I got caught trespassing on private property and we hung around with other teenagers in the local park. We also hung around at a chalk quarry in which people used to dump their household waste. We went down there to build bonfires. I had been caught on camera around the estates and the police knew what I was up to but I never got arrested, I only got warnings. They had much worse problems to deal with. I carried on going to Brent Knoll while I was there. I was taken to school early every morning by a special taxi service. I was driven up the A2 into London every day. I got on with the woman who drove me, her name was Modge and she listened to me. Very few people had ever done that. I was a victim in primary school, but when I entered secondary school they tried to bully me. I realized I had to become tough in order to survive. Now I fought back. Subconsciously I had said to myself “right I am not going to let anyone get to me”. I wasn’t bullied like I was in primary school because I had begun getting hard inside. I didn’t want to be bullied any more. I went out of my way to score points against the teachers and on a few occasions someone had said something I didn’t like and I just turned around and punched them almost by reflex. I was quite big for my age as well so people left me alone most of the time, I acted jack the lad in lessons, to impress my class mates.

Then I was moved to a residential boarding school down in Brighton where I felt completely isolated. It was full of people with disabilities, some severe, some mild. There were very few people I could relate to. I got mixed up with some other lads that had very mild learning difficulties such as dyslexia and problems reading, that sort of thing. I was very lonely and they were the only ones who were on my level. but they were more ‘of the world’ than I was and they lead me astray. By this time I was 14. I thought I was on my own when I went into care but this was even worse. I had nobody to guide me apart from myself and other lads who were into all sorts of bad things. I thought the only way I will survive was to win the friendship of people who were more street-wise than myself and watch them closely. I could find out their ways of dealing with things. After this things went downhill all the way. By the age of 14 I had started drinking strong beer and smoking pot and it wasn’t long before I was trying all sorts of drugs. I was in a permanent escapism but drugs just bring you up and you fall back to reality with a crash. I spent a lot of time on the street getting drunk and smoking dope. One time Charlie and I went over to a mate’s house to get wrecked. Alex had got hold of some purple skunk grown with hydroponics. It was the strongest stuff I had ever smoked, I think it was soaked in something. I tripped out on it and my mind was gone. I felt so faint like a ghost and I had no sense of time at all, things were moving at a different speed. I saw zombies walking past the window, somebody was talking about body bags. Was I imagining it? I wasn’t sure what was real or what was in my head and I had intense feelings of panic and a sickening paranoia. It took about two weeks before I felt normal again. I spoke to a doctor and they told me this was a drug induced psychosis. Eventually my placement at the boarding school broke down because they knew I was taking drugs on the premises. I got moved up to a semi-secure unit in South London. It was a horrible place full of violence. Many of the young people had spent time in young offenders institutions or secure units. I hated not being allowed out without supervision. In the end it drove me round the bend. I was in so much anxiety that I was chain smoking and in the end I was removed from there because I had been absconding. One night I kicked of because a member of staff wouldn’t let me go out so I threw a chair at her and it hit her in the head she was concussed and I was arrested for assault. Later they dropped the charges but wouldn’t have me back there. I was moved about to various places in London, but the last place I lived at there was a children’s home. I had some pretty heavy connections by this time and I was smoking weed and drinking every day. We made our own bongs out of plastic bottles and empty drink cans. I was taking ecstasy pills and we were going to wild parties. I knew people that worked in the club scene so we were used to partying and getting wrecked. By the age of 16 I’d say I was completely dependant on alcohol and I couldn’t function mentally without it. I felt insecure and had panic attacks. The compulsion to drink in my mind was too strong for me to control. I was in denial about how bad things were and I was drowning myself in oblivion. Because of drugs and alcohol my personality became more and more unstable I had mood swings and a violent temper. I didn’t trust authority because people had abused their authority over me. I rebelled against the system and was often in trouble for criminal damage or Assault. It was me against the world. One time I got done for assaulting police officers. They bundled me, kneeing me and hitting me with their truncheons. I fought back with all my strength and I injured some of them but they managed to get the cuffs on eventually and they dragged me to the meat wagon with officers holding both my legs and arms and pushing my head forward so that I was in a hunchback position. In the end my placement broke down there because my behaviour was so out of control. Afterwards I moved in with my mother in Edenbridge for a short while because I had nowhere else to go. By this time she had separated from my stepfather. Twelve years living under the same roof with no relationship. Our relationship quickly broke down again because I was suffering with depression. My mum couldn’t cope with this, especially since she was down herself, after the breakup of her marriage. She tried to get me to snap out of it but she just made me feel worse by nagging me and we ended up arguing. The drugs and the booze were making me more ill. The amount of dope I was smoking was ridiculous. She smoked it with me at that time but she was shocked at the amount I was loading into my spliffs. I stayed up half the night getting wasted until my body couldn’t take any more and I just passed out. I was spending a lot of money on drugs and alcohol. Most of mine went on it and I was spending my mothers money on top of that. She moaned that she was worried about me moving drugs on the trains to and from London yet she couldn’t really get decent stuff anywhere else so she gave me money to supply her with it. I went to pick Up ‘Skunk’ and Sensimilia and large amounts of Hashish. The neighbours complained because I was playing loud music in the night, to add to the effect while I was getting out of it.

At the age of 18 I was a raging alcoholic and an emotional wreck. I had been seeing a psychiatrist for about a year and was on medication for depression and anxiety but I mixed the tablets with the booze and it just made me even more ‘out of it’. By this time I had left the care system and was staying in supported lodgings. I was never on a full care order which means my parents still had legal responsibility for me until the age of 18, but Social Services had to accommodate me until I was 21. The people I stayed with kept on calling a doctor to see me because I had been self harming, cutting myself with broken glass or taking overdoses on my tablets. I exaggerated it sometimes to get attention but it just made me feel worse afterwards. I never had any peace. I was violent on the booze because I had so much emotional turmoil inside, and the drink brought it out. There was so much rage against ‘the system’ because of how I had been treated. Eventually the couple I was staying with moved house so I had to move on. An emergency placement was found near Brands Hatch. The couple I moved in with are Scottish and are Christians I tried to fit in with what they were doing but I was addicted to alcohol and I was covering it up. I snuck off to get booze. I went to Church with them because I didn’t have any friends and these people offered me friendship. They didn’t judge me despite the state I was in. However I couldn’t wait to get away so I could have a drink. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Once I had one I couldn’t stop I grew to hate it yet it had taken control over my mind. I was also so depressed that I wanted to drink till I passed out. Not long after I moved in with them I told Bob that I had a problem with drink but he didn’t realize how bad until later on because I covered it up. My bottles were hidden everywhere; whisky, vodka, rum, beer, cider. It didn’t matter to me, I just wanted to get wasted. I couldn’t cover it up for long because the police took me back practically unconscious after members of the public had reported me lying on the pavement or in the gutter. There was a car park behind the local parade of shops where I sat and mixed my own cocktails of alcohol. The local kids took money out of my pockets and several times I was ripped off for a bit of dope because I didn't really know people and I didn’t have my wits about me. Bob talked to me about the love of Christ and I got angry because he quoted scripture at me and it really wound me up because I thought he was Bible bashing me, but gradually I realized that he was living what he preached. I had pretty much given up on myself but they never gave up on me. One day Bob said to me I could not go on the way I was, otherwise I might end up dead or something. He invited me to go with him to a healing and deliverance ministry in London. I agreed to go. As far as I could see, I had nothing to lose. I certainly didn’t have any reputation to protect. I was wearing a long jacket and had a bottle of whisky in my inside pocket. I had been drinking it before we left. When we got there it just seemed like an ordinary service but the singing was beautiful. Towards the end a man got up and started playing a guitar and sung a song called ‘The Man of Galilee’. It was so beautiful. The speaker had been preaching about salvation and what happens after we die. He preached about Jesus delivering people that were possessed with Devils and healing the sick.

He said He could bind up the broken hearted. At the end I went up to the front and repeated a prayer with the preacher asking the Lord Jesus to take control of my life. And then there was prayer ministry and people acting very strangely. People started howling and writhing about and other strange activities. I found out later that these were demons manifesting through people as they were being cast out. I asked people to pray for me because I couldn’t stop drinking. They put their hands on my shoulders and prayed for me. I don’t know why but up until that point I think I had gone through the whole service without having to go out for a drink. But now I suddenly had to go out, I felt pressure in my mind. Bob was worried because he had seen the bottle in my inside pocket because my jacket kept on coming open, but The Lord spoke to him and told him to leave me be. When I went outside I tried to drink the scotch but somehow I couldn’t. I was caught in a battle inside. The compulsion to drink was still there but some force within me was stopping me. It was almost as though I froze. I now know It was the Holy Spirit that stopped me from drinking that alcohol. I had unscrewed the lid of the bottle and the smell was driving me wild, but I couldn’t drink it. Usually the pressure only went away when I gave into it which is why I was so disturbed. I became frustrated and I put the lid on then I started smashing the bottle on the wall but it wouldn’t break. I went and threw the bottle in the bin and then I got it out again. Eventually I went back inside and I explained to them what was happening.They prayed for me again and this time I felt the pressure and the anxiety, leave me. I felt a warm glow flow through my whole body, and the next minute I started swaying and fell to the floor. I couldn’t move but It didn’t feel forceful. It was almost like sinking into a comfortable bed. I felt completely safe and I sensed God’s love all around me. I knew that I had been touched by God. I was in the arms of Jesus and He had made me a new person.

I have fallen short in many ways, but the Lord’s grace has been sufficient to make up for all my shortcomings. I thank the Lord for what he has done. He has provided for all that I need. Most of my life I have been obsessed with myself. I felt I had been treated unfairly in life and I spent most of it wallowing in self pity. This lead to alcoholism and an obsession with altered states of mind. This was partly because I wasn’t happy with myself. I didn’t like the way I felt inside so I tried to make myself feel different. I was into many forms of escapism. I hated my life so I got high on whatever was going at the time. I gradually became addicted to alcohol and was drinking dangerous amounts of spirits and other drink. I did have a bad childhood, but my reaction to it was a selfish one. Instead of seeing other peoples suffering I only saw my own. The Lord set me free from my addiction to alcohol and cleansed me of my sin. He has delivered me from many things since. But it has been a battle within me. The Devil did not want to let me go. He tried to make me destroy myself, ( There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death. Proverbs 14: 12) I very nearly committed suicide by setting myself alight. I could have burned to death. I ended up with 2nd degree burns over 20% of my body. I was taken to a special burns unit in East Grinstead. It only took about four weeks for my body to heal and about 7 weeks in all for me to fully recover. For a short while I was put on a psychiatric ward in Tonbridge Wells. In a moment of madness I had tried to take my own life but the Lord had other plans for me. A good friend of mine from the Norwood Christian Fellowship sent me a card and in it was written this message:" I will not let the word of God depart from before my eyes, for it is life to me for I have found it and it is health and healing to all my flesh". Proverbs 4: 21-22.    Lots of people visited me when I was in hospital which cheered me up. The nurses said it was amazing how quickly I healed. Now I am so thankful to be alive. I believe the Lord let me go through that experience to make me realize my folly and to teach me that I am nothing without Him. The burning incident had been reported to the local newspaper so Greensands tried to cover up their negligence in letting such an incident happen. I was evicted and Sevenoaks council felt that my behaviour was intentional, so I couldn’t find other accommodation in the area because they classed me as intentionally homeless. Recently I tried to obtain a copy of the eviction notice, but there was no record of it!

My family felt that The Boulters was the right place for me as they already new me and in fact I shouldn’t have been moved out of there in the first place. The place was in Sittingbourne. I agreed to go there against the advice of friends in Sevenoaks who were trying to get me into a rehabilitation unit near there. I had lots of different people telling me different things and I didn’t know what was best to do, but I agreed to go to Sittingbourne because I didn’t want to leave there the first time and the alternatives didn’t look very promising. My uncle spoke to the local MP and pushed to get me moved back to the Boulters. 16+ had to agree to the funding, so in the end Mr Boulter lowered the fee. Things had changed a lot since the first time I was there. They had several supported flats scattered around the place. I moved into a small bedsit in the centre of town. It was supported accommodation and they were paying to have someone visit me every day but I wasn’t getting the support I needed. They didn’t visit a lot of the time and I got bored of sitting around on my own and I used to wander about town looking for things to do. I was very vulnerable and lonely, I felt insecure being on my own. I needed people’s company and It was so depressing sitting around in the flat on my own. I soon crossed paths with people outside that weren’t good for me and I started hanging around with them. I needed someone to understand. I felt I had been let down by the system so I went wayward. One day I decided that I didn’t need my medication, it wasn’t solving anything. I remember thinking medication cannot mend a broken heart. I believed that the Lord could help me fight the illness, so I got all my tablets and made a bonfire out of them. I hated being on them because the side effects were horrible. They made me feel physically sick. This may sound like a stupid thing to do but the Lord protected me and has gradually made me well. I had started going to a church in Sittingbourne but they didn’t really seem able to help me because they couldn’t be around all the time to keep an eye on me. They lead busy lives and they couldn’t baby-sit me all the time. This created an emptiness in my life. I knew the Lord had set me free but now He seemed very far away. Soon enough things that dragged me down came in and filled the gap. I spent less and less time at my flat and more time hanging around with dodgy people. Because I was living outside a lot of the time and had started drinking again my mental state steadily grew worse again. Once I had an outburst and was arrested for criminal damage. I wasn’t really looking after myself properly. Before long I had someone staying in my flat. They were taking advantage of me. The neighbours knew that I had a know drug addict staying on the premises and they complained because we were making a lot of noise. They reported it to the landlord and I was given a 7 days notice. The Boulters rented the flat from a private landlord. They told me it wasn’t the end of the world because they had B + B accommodation in Dover and I jumped at the chance. I mean what choice did I have? 16+ hadn’t found me anywhere. It’s really hard to explain but I had lost everything yet somehow I had the feeling that things were going to be alright. I couldn’t understand it. A member of staff drove me there in the car and on the way I saw a rainbow over the motorway and I had a real feeling of excitement because I knew the Lord was speaking to me. This was a sign of confirmation that it was to be a new beginning. I was going to a place where I had no connections. I could start afresh. It was very scary to begin with. When I first arrived in Dover I was having anxiety attacks but beneath all that I knew that the Lord was in control of my circumstances and it gave me a peace that surpassed all understanding. I had ended up in a mess before because I hadn’t trusted the Lord I had looked to people to make me feel complete and it doesn’t work, however the Lord has used my mistakes to teach me important lessons. Things had to be different now.I had to find a good church. Bob prayed with me about it. I spoke to the minister in Sittingbourne on the phone and he directed me to Dover Baptist Church (Salem). The way ahead seemed completely uncertain. This sudden chain of events was very unsettling, but my peace really did come from the Lord. He had upheld me in that difficult time. I believe if He hadn’t done so I would have gone over the edge again. The B + B I was living in was a dingy place with no light. I had no wardrobe space and I was kept awake at night by a drunk slamming about and using bad language. I was locked out in bad weather a few times. I just kept to myself while I was living there. I wasn’t unfriendly to people but I didn’t get too involved either. I quickly became part of the fellowship at Salem. I felt this was a time for building me up spiritually and also a time of recovery. I soon made friends there and people gave me a lot of encouragement. I dived in head first.I started going to all the prayer meetings and bible studies. I knew that I had to grab this opportunity with both hands. the Lord had given me a new life. I had to get as involved as possible otherwise I would drift again because of my weakness and a combination of loneliness, boredom, depression and lack of purpose. Before, I felt completely alone, no one understood me and I had no one I could really talk to properly. I have since learned that Jesus understands perfectly the pain I have been through. He was rejected by his friends and put to death by the people he came to save. I thought about my burn scars and it made me think of Paul when he said “From now on, don’t let anyone trouble me with these things. For I bear on my body the scars that show I belong to Jesus.” Galations 6: 17 NKJ.

Since I gave my life to Christ there has been a war on for my soul and I have the scars on my body to show it. The devil tried to make me destroy myself with fire which is the fate of all who turn away from The Lord. I knew the devil would try again so I had to trust the Lord, this time instead of doing it in my own strength, I trusted that He was in control of my future. He has a plan for me in Dover and the Lord has honoured my obedience by blessing me greatly. I don’t consider myself worthy but the Lord is merciful and has saved me because of His grace and because He has a higher purpose for my life. At times I have thought about this and have meditated on the perfection we see in the creation. The Lord is perfect, therefore His design and plans are perfect. I have discovered that the number 7 represents perfection and I thought about that rainbow I saw when I first came to Dover and I realised that the rainbow has seven colours which combine as white light which represents purity. The lord made his creation perfect. It is us that spoil it because of our sin. The creation has been spoiled because of our fallenness. Before the fall we were perfect because He created us in His own image. Another thing I have realized is that the Lord was directing me all along. I know He has a purpose for me in Dover. I didn’t come here by accident. if my placement in Sittingbourne hadn’t broken down then I wouldn’t be here. He has been in control the whole time and has been with me even through my blunders in life. He has been leading me in a definite direction even when I wasn’t conscious of Him. It was all to bring me where I am now. I’ve picked up lots of baggage along the way but He is gradually changing me and this is all part of a relationship with Him, He works out all the problems and He is always faithful and trustworthy. His Word is better than any therapy it is medicine for the soul.

God Bless.

Matthew McFarland