I suppose most of us sometimes wish our stories were more exciting than they are.
That goes for the stories of how God first brought us to faith in Jesus Christ; we sometimes wish – foolishly – that the contrast with our pre-conversion life might be more dramatic because we had sunk into deeper depths of sinfulness before our conversions than we did.
Only later do we learn to thank God for preserving us from some of the painful scars that other forgiven sinners carry around with them until the day they die.
Teenager in church
My conversion was very dull – in human terms – but astonishingly wonderful in the sight of God. I was a teenager from a nominally Anglican home, educated in schools where formal Anglican religion was part and parcel of daily school life (in a way that is almost unheard of today).
I suppose I assumed I was a Christian and that Christianity was probably true (or at least not obviously not true). I was aware of a few enthusiasts in my school, including a chaplain who seemed to speak with conviction and even a measure of excitement about Jesus and his good news.
I found this faintly surprising, but it hovered around only in the peripheral vision of my teenage awareness. And then a friend invited me to a Christian summer holiday, at which either I heard for the first time or – perhaps more likely – listened for the first time to the gospel. As I listened, and as I watched the lives of the leaders, God opened my heart and I bowed the knee for the first time to Jesus as Lord and Saviour. It was very unemotional but, in the kindness of God, it was very real. I thank God for those who were sent by him into my life to bring me this good news of priceless value.
I will go anywhere
Like every truly converted young Christian I found myself saying to the Lord: ‘I will go anywhere, do anything, for you and the gospel.’ And I meant it. Like all of us, I have needed to do this more than once, and I still need to have those times of conscious, intentional, unconditional, bowing of the knee. But – and I guess others will echo this – joining the dots between this (genuine) willingness to go anywhere and the actual decision to go somewhere depends hugely on the Christian subculture to which one belongs.
Back to school
In my case, I was nurtured in a small subculture in which the keenest believers either were ordained into church pastoral leadership or went to teach in a school with a view to reaching schoolchildren with the gospel. At the time I could not even imagine myself being ordained, so I volunteered to teach Maths in a school – well, two schools by the time I had finished. As it happened I did not at all want to go to my first school, not least since it was the school where I had been as a schoolboy! But I had a strong conviction that I should go and I suppose I would say that I was conscious of being sent there by God.
I taught there for eight years. God was astonishingly kind and some of the schoolchildren were converted; I know of some who are serving the Lord Jesus in ministry today, and I thank God for sending a reluctant schoolteacher there, not so much to teach them Maths (which they might have learned anyway), but to bring them the gospel.
Ordination and Cornhill
After 12 years in teaching, I finally surrendered to train for ordained pastoral ministry, and have been in such ministry ever since, in one way or another. During this time, I served for some years on one of the then regional Councils of OMF International, travelled to visit a number of cross-cultural mission partners, taught and kept in touch with gospel workers in many countries through the Cornhill Training Course, and found myself wishing I had been a cross-cultural missionary here, there, and everywhere. In fact, whenever I visited, prayed for, or kept in touch with mission partners, there has been something in me that wished I had been them!
But it is no use wishing the Lord of the Harvest had sent me somewhere else. I need now, as I have needed all along, to resolve to serve in the harvest fields where God has actually sent and placed me.
