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"Drawn by traditional music and need for change we moved to Ireland in 1998, to East Clare. We continued to move from place to place, and were living in a mobile home..."
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I am writing to give God the glory in his plan to save sinners.
I grew up in Canada. My parents decided to leave their church background behind when they were married and so I spent the first thirty years of my life in ignorance to what the Bible says. I had developed an enmity towards the Church and Christianity because I believed it was the spiritual weapon used to keep people in bondage. I believed the lie that I was good, and that I just needed to discover “my inner self” to find the power of God within me.
I was involved with the environmental movement and peace protests and lived an “alternative lifestyle”. I went travelling in Scotland and England when I was twenty, searching for meaning for my life and hoped I would find out who I was by finding out about my background. I was certainly a lost soul. I turned to tarot cards and psychology for answers. I met my husband-to-be in Lancashire, although unconverted at the time he knew Gospel . He could not tolerate my spiritual practices and so we learned to avoid speaking about spiritual things. We were married and moved to Canada and had our first two children. Family life kept us busy. We kept searching for the ideal living situation to fill our need for meaning, which meant a lot of moving and changing, as nothing satisfied.
Drawn by traditional music and need for change we moved to Ireland in 1998, to East Clare. We continued to move from place to place, and were living in a mobile home, when God, through the convicting power of the Holy Spirit started to open my eyes to the futility and unhappiness of my life.
I started to realise that I was on the wrong path. I didn’t know what the right path was, but I was sure I wasn’t on it. I started praying to Jesus to help me. I admitted to myself and to my husband that I wasn’t happy and that I didn’t love him. This drove him to another woman and what followed was a very painful process of God peeling away all that I clung to for security. My belief in myself was gone. My family was disintegrating. I couldn’t change and neither could my husband. This fact stared us in the face and made a future together seem impossible. We could never go back to the way things were.
God’s timing is always perfect. My mother-in-law, a young Christian came to visit, unaware of what was happening. It was during her visit that I reached the bottom of the abyss of hopelessness. God was preparing me to receive his offering. My mother-in-law asked if I would pray with her and I got down on my knees and asked the Lord to forgive me for my rebellion and sin and asked Him to save me. The Lord used my conversion to convict my husband and he stopped running from the truth and believed and obeyed Christ. His attraction to the other woman fell away as Christ freed him. Oh what power He has!
We bought a Bible in a second hand store and started reading Job and Proverbs. We went to the Christian Bookstore in Limerick and were put in touch with a church in Ennis. I couldn’t believe I was going to Church. It has been a gradual process since then, which I now know as sanctification, but how wonderful the changes have been. Learning about what the Lord has done and who he is has softened this hardened independent heart and given me the desire to serve him and to live according to His will. Life, new life, with God’s direction has saved us from the path we would have chosen left on our own. His mercy is real. What a Saviour He is.
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Ordinary people in Ireland with Real life Experiences with God
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