The time is mid-1989 and at present I have not had any boils or infections and the staph infection that had run riot throughout my body is now dormant. I have come to a place in my life where the Lord has healed me but I did not know or understand the reason why.

Since I was a young man I always believed in the existence of God and had grownup with some attachment to the Church of England. I was baptised a child and confirmed as a teenager and believed that our Lord Jesus Christ was in fact the son of God. However I realise in my present situation that that belief was only head knowledge and held nothing meaningful for me. I can remember as a young man growing up that I was drawn to the church and felt that my future lay in our Lord’s service. It was this realisation that I only had head knowledge of our Lord and even though I believed in the existence of God and the son of God it held no personal meaning for me.

As a result during my late teens and early 20s I drifted away from the church and from our Lord. Even though I had attended Christian Fellowship meetings at Port Kembla during my teenage years during which I had the fortunate opportunity to meet my future wife. Alison was attending a different Fellowship held at Shellharbour and we would visit them occasionally as a group. Despite all of this I still had no personal commitment to a relationship with our Lord.In other words there was no ownership, I had nothing invested in their relationship and I asked little yet in reflection received much.

I was married at the age of 19 which was very young for those days yet I had met my soul mate and wished nothing more than to spend the rest of my life with the woman who I loved. My wife Alison was only 18 and a couple of weeks when we got married yet here I am some 39 years later and am very much still in love with the same woman. We have had a wonderful life together experiencing both the happiness and joy of raising three children. I mentioned that I came from the Church of England background, well Alison came from a Catholic background and we met and fell in love for life.

This becomes important as during the years that I worked long hours to provide a home and lifestyle for my family Alison had remained at home and raised three children. She to have an underlying belief and desire to know more about our Lord and to understand her place in his creation. We had been able to give our children everything that we had wished to give them and had held nothing back fulfilling for them all those things that we ourselves had not been able to experience or enjoy as children. I think every parent tries to give their children the things that they feel that they missed out on as a child.

It was some time during 1986 that Alison had started to go back to church because she felt that she needed the help of God to experience a completeness and to fill a void within a heart. She would take the children along with herto an Anglican church in Tamworth. However with three children tagging behind her she found it difficult if not impossible to be able to sit through any service without being interrupted and made to withdraw because of crying children. (This I believe is more common amongst young women with children than we like to believe.) As a result of my experience of being healed by our Lord I too began to accompany her to the services. Unfortunately at this stage the only time I had available was of a Sunday night, so we would attend the evening service at the Anglican Church in Tamworth. These services were quite often brief, lasting less than half an hour and failed to fulfil the basic need for teaching and learning how to have a relationship with our Lord. This is not a criticism of the church per se but rather and admission on my behalf that I particularly needed more of an understanding not only of God but of myself.

I had reached a point in my life where there was a deep desire to know and understand all about our Lord and how I could serve him. Not as payment for healing me but rather to fill the basic emptiness that I experienced in my heart. What many call the God Hole, that part of ourselves that knows there is more to life than just existing. It is that emptiness within me that was driving me forward on a path which I now believe was guided by the very hand of God himself.

I should mention that during the preceding 15+ years I had become a very angry person. I was not angry at anybody in particular but would find myself gradually being wound up like a spring only to explode at some time and place that was not usually of my choosing. Usually it would be due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control. I had for many years hated myself for this particular quirk in my personality, feeling that I deserved no less than to be punished in the extreme. I had often sought help from GPs as to why I will gradually wind up and explode however it wasn’t till around this period of 1987-88 that I finally met a doctor who could explain to me the processes going on behind the scenes in my body and mind.

I had since the age of 13 been taking antihistamines for a sinus condition that was exacerbated by the partial obstruction of the drainage canal of I right sinus cavity. This resulted in constant allergy induced fevers or sinus attacks which were very prominent in my life as a young man. I can remember that when I played football on Saturdays that there were many occasions on which I had to have a antibiotic injection the afternoon before to help reduce a fever. In fact I still suffer from this condition today like many other people find myself with the whole gambit of sneezes, runny noses and bleary eyes.

As I said I was fortunate to meet a doctor who could explain to me how these antihistamines had affected my body and mind. It was this knowledge and the understanding that came with it and how components of these drugs were used to treat illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that finally set me free. I realised it was these medications underlying the outbursts and that they were something that was beyond my control (no excuses). I was however given the strength to overcome them as time went on. I reduced the amount of antihistamines that I took until finally after several years I was able to control it. I held myself in contempt and could not initially forgive myself because the memory of these outbursts plagued my conscience. It wasn’t until the time of my healing that I realised that our Lord had placed before me not only the opportunity to experience physical healing but also to experience an emotional well-being which I had not had before or at least not for a longtime.

I could write a whole book (and I may) about anger because I consider myself an expert on the topic. Not so much as somebody who has all the answers but rather as somebody who had fought with had finally conquered anger in and of itself.

I will digress and returned to the story at the point where Alison and I were travelling into town on Sunday night to attend the evening service at the Anglican Church. You might gather that we lived out of town and we did. We were fortunate enough to find and purchase a lovely house about 6 km from Tamworth on the northern side. It has been the old church block and the previous two owners had dismantled the old church and build a home where it used to stand.

It was on one of these many Sunday night trips into town that we realised as we went past the Baptist church in Carthage Street that they were there worshipping not only as we went through but also on our way back home. Our two boys had become involved with the boys Brigade held at the Baptist church one night each week. Alison had met some of the people as she would drop off the boys and then wait to pick them up afterwards and she commented to me about how friendly they were.

It was this experience of Alison knowing some people there and the fact that both of us felt we needed more spiritual input into our lives that made us finally agree to attend an evening service at the Baptist church.