While on holiday recently, I gave my testimony at a Baptist Church in Papamoa but the tape didn’t work so I haven’t got a copy of it. I found this transcript from years earlier which I am sharing with you today. Hopefully I will get another chance to record that message and share it with you as it has things in there that I feel are important. These are just some points that lead me to Christ.
I was born at a very young age in a beautiful part of New Zealand called New Plymouth under the shadow of Mount Taranaki AKA Mt Egmont. On the day I was born my father was away fishing somewhere up the coast leaving my mum all alone and didn’t find out until the end of the day that I had been born. I don’t think mum ever forgave him and even at 80 still mentioned it.
Mum wasn’t expecting a red headed baby and said ‘Oh no I have a wine coloured pram and he won’t match.”
As a child, my mother sent my sister and I off to Sunday school, which was in a Boys' Club Hall up Mangorei Rd, run by the Anglican Church. I can’t remember ever hearing the gospel but I do remember having a wonderful sense of peace as I walked back home one Sunday morning, which I later realised was the presence of God. My mother and I also used to sing Christmas Carols together around the piano and this sometimes brought tears to my eyes.
My parents were a fun loving couple and had lots of friends and were always partying. Dad was a very clever radio technician and built us a TV before most people could afford one. He and his friends built our holiday Bach at Mokau where we used to go most weekends and holidays to fish. My sister and I had a great childhood up there and in New Plymouth where all our cousins lived. At Christmas time we would have a great big party at our house in Awanui Street which went on all day and everyone used to come and eat drink and be merry. It was in an idea location next to farm land but sadly there was no celebration of our saviours birth.
As I entered my teenage years, my life went downhill morally and I pushed the limits on how far I could go in everything bad without being caught. I lied, shoplifted, smoked, stole, got drunk and even vandalised things. When I think of all the bad things I did in those days I cringe. When alone I felt so lonely, unhappy and empty. I would often think, “What is wrong with me?”
God tried to get through to me and one Friday night I was walking with friends down town, and a street preacher looked at me and began witnessing about my need of salvation. My response was that of a fool, in that I swore at him, telling him to “rack off” and get out of my face. I walked off without the slightest twinge of conscience and he most likely thought how evil and hard hearted this generation had become. On an earlier occasion the Lord sent an old primary school teacher, Mrs. Slyfield to witness to me at home. I had been quite a naughty young boy at junior school and this teacher had not liked me and given me a hard time. She had become a Christian and decided to come around to my home after school one night and speak to me about Christ. I refused to come out of my bedroom to talk to her, and left her alone with my parents for the evening. I wasn’t a nice chap at all in those days.
I loved trout fishing, playing golf and finding golf balls which were expensive back in the day. I would go out in the rain, cold and shine to find them, going into the lakes, rivers and thick bracken where no one would go and then sold them to buy cigarettes.
I was very good at art and later did cartooning for newspapers, painted landscapes and worked as a commercial artist.
When I left school I went up to Auckland and got a job at Farmers Trading in their Advertising Department. I found the Big Smoke to be a lonely place and had some dark times while there. Once when I was feeling really down I walked past a Spiritualist Church that was having a meeting at the time and was going to go in when I really heard a voice say ‘NO,’ and it must have been God, for I would have been tempted to follow that path at that time.
God wasn’t giving up on me yet for He arranged an amazing thing for me when I went surfing in the Papamoa with my parents. This was an unusual situation really, for most teenagers would never go surfing near their parents. That would be too “naf.” Dad and mum were fishing while I surfed on a small break next to them. It was a beautiful day with a light offshore wind. The sea was very blue there and the sand lovely and white, which is far different to the rocky, rugged shore line and black iron sands of Taranaki. I had recently bought a pair of fluorescent board shorts. “They attract sharks,” my friend Alan Gargan had said, as a joke....I think. I dismissed this as an old wives’ tale, but it did scare me a little, as I had known of a girl at school who had been killed by a shark off Oakura Beach. “Come and get something to eat,” shouted my mother, when the waves had died down a little, so I paddled in feeling rather peckish. Mum made a mean bacon and egg pie that could bring anyone in from the surf. As I picked up my board and walked up the beach, a 9' shark grounded itself in the sand behind me. It had come in after me. “Boy that was close”. I always thought they never came inside the breakers, as they’d get sand up their gills or something. If I'd have stayed out there a moment longer I would be a lot shorter today, or maybe dead. I thought to myself, “How lucky I am.” Little did I know that this was the hand of God protecting me.
I saw a hypnotist once at a local theatre and was intrigued at how he could make people do things. I decided to go to the library and read how to do it. I decided that I would try and hypnotise myself to be happy but it didn’t work. I also tried to hypnotise myself to give up smoking but that didn’t work, but I was able to get people to get drunk on a glass of water and get high on a cigarette. I was the life of the party but was dabbling in things I didn’t know about and don’t condone it now.
In few years later I left for Australia and while in Sydney I was feeling very depressed and saw a Salvation Army Officer collecting for some cause on my way to work. I could see Jesus in him and wanted to talk to him about the emptiness I felt inside, but chickened out. I think the uniform scared me.
I had been dabbling with drugs thinking they would make me happy and went as far as taking LSD on occasions. Once while in Kalgoolie, Australia, we decided to take a trip on LSD which was laced in blotting paper. As I began to rip off a piece of paper to swallow, I suddenly had a pang of fear come over me and a big ‘NO’ inside, so I ripped the piece of blotting paper and only had half. We went out to the Mine Dumps to mess around, while the drug began to take effect, and it seemed as if nothing was going to happen at all. After awhile we went into town and it was there that I began to hallucinate, and it wasn't a nice experience at all. “All that I had feared had now come upon me,” I thought. Everyone I saw looked as if they were out of the cast of the “Munster’s” or “Adams Family”. They all seemed deformed, and “butt ugly” as they loped down the street. Next I thought that everyone could read my mind, and that freaked me out even more, because of all the bad thoughts that I was now thinking. I couldn't get across the street either as it kept growing wider or wider as I attempted to cross. My friends realised something was wrong and took me home. They switched the TV on and played some Rolling Stones music, to maybe calm me down. As I sat there and watched the news, the announcer began to “morph” before my eyes and began to look like me. Then as I watched, the person began to grow old and grey and then started to decay. “I'm getting old, I'm getting old!” I screamed, to a concerned group of hippies. They decided to take me away from the TV and shut me in a room, hoping that this would settle me down, with no distractions. As I lay on the bed, the walls started to become dark and alive with bats flying out of the wall paper. This was my worst nightmare as I was having a bad trip. I wanted it all to stop and regretted what I had done. I could see myself going insane and being put away in a mental home or something. I felt sorry for my mother, who would find me in this state, and began to cry out in despair! God must have thought I was calling out to Him, as He quickly came to my rescue and the trip instantly stopped. When I woke up the next morning I was not tripping anymore and never have done since. The danger of LSD is that you can have flash backs for the rest of your life, but I never have had any. I always wondered what would have happened if I had taken the whole dose? Although I didn’t have any flashbacks, I did have a major problem with fear and paranoia from that day on, and also had trouble thinking straight on occasions. I’d lost a screw somewhere.
The next day we were pegging mineral claims out in the bush and I had this profound sense that someone was watching over me. It was someone wonderful and kind, but I didn’t know that it was Jesus.
When I was smoking grass I often used to draw pictures of all sorts of things. As time went by, one honest person told me that my drawings “sucked” and were looking evil. This worried me quite a bit. I do remember though drawing a picture once while high, of myself kneeling at the feet of Jesus. The Spirit must have been speaking to me, without me being aware of it, a long time before I was saved.
After my time in Australia I left with a friend for South Africa. I’d heard the ‘grass’ was great over there, but God had other pastures for me to live in. Once I was walking alone up to Hillbrow in Johannesburg, South Africa on a Friday night. I met a young man who asked me for 50c, which I knew he wanted to use for buying “hash” (drugs). I gave it to him, and he told me of a place in Hillbrow called the "Narnia," which was a Christian Coffee Bar. He said it was a cool place to go and that there were nice chicks there and of course there were "Jesus Freaks." It wasn't a hard place to find, as it was an old two storied building sandwiched between high rise offices, and all painted up in psychedelic colours. All around the building were heaps of young people, but what impressed me most about the place were the beautiful girls. They looked so different, not like the girls I was used too. They seemed to have such a peace and serenity about them as they moved or should I say glided around the coffee bar room. They had beautiful shining hair and long flowing colourful dresses, looking just like Angels. They seemed to be moving in slow motion, at a sort of 33 and a third revs per minute mode, and glowed in the dark. After I’d sat down with my free cup of coffee, a tall young bearded man came over and sat at my table to share his God story. He told me of how he was once addicted to hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, and used to often find himself lying in the gutters of Hillbrow in the early hours of the morning, not knowing how he got there or what had happened to him the night before. While in this state, a young person gave him a tract and invited him to a meeting at this Coffee Bar Church. He came along and was marvellously saved, handing his life over to Jesus, and kicked the drug addiction for life.
What impressed me most about this guy’s testimony was that he seemed to have a real, living relationship with God, a God who was a real person. And that person was Jesus Christ. I had never heard of Jesus being a friend like this before. This person was someone who promised to give me the peace and freedom that I so desperately cried out for. He was the Prince of Peace who would break my chains of sin. I had heard about “Church”, and all the “does and don’ts” of religion, but I had never heard about Jesus and His great love for me. I listened intently to him speak and desperately wanted to have what he had, but was too proud to admit that I had a problem. Afterwards I went out into the night alone and smoked another joint in the park. Later I went back to this place again, but still couldn't commit myself to God or talk to anyone about my problems and fears.
A little time later as we neared the Christmas of 1971, Elaine, a girl from the Chevron Hotel invited me to sing Christmas Carols with the group of young people from the Narnia Coffee Bar, on the back of a truck around the streets of Johannesburg, and I agreed. As I sang all those carols again, wonderful feelings of peace came flooding back to me again, that I had felt after Sunday school, some 12 years earlier. That following Sunday was Christmas day, so I went to Church with her with a promise of a lunch at the Pastor’s house afterwards. I don’t know exactly when I got saved but sometime before Christmas I became a Christian. I was now alive. I was now “Born Again”.... “Saved”, as the Bible puts it. I'd been touched by Jesus and shall never be the same again. It was like stepping out of darkness into light, everything looked and smelt so different. Colours looked brighter; smells fresher and a great burden of sin had been lifted off my shoulders. I started to read the bible avidly and loved all the stories about the life of Jesus, and the ancient proverbs of Solomon. I’d always liked reading musty old books that had been dug up by someone from centuries before. Well here was a book that had truth in it that was thousands of years old that had radically changed men’s lives through the centuries. I was so hungry for God, for reality, that when I heard this truth, the gospel, I knew deep down that this was it and that the truth would set me free, and it has. Praise God. Psalm 107:1-21