My name is Jamie and this is my story.

I was born into a nominally Christian family and was christened at the local Anglican Church in the east end of Vancouver BC. While I was young, I attended the United Church of Canada, which had a congregation not too far from where we lived. And when I was about 6 or 7 years old, during a Sunday school Christmas play, Christ came into my life and called me His own, and I began to understand who God was and what it meant to be loved by Him. But being young and untutored in the Way, I didn't understand anything of salvation (though I was beginning to learn a lot about sin). Without guidance, and exposed to the very real hurtfulness of a dysfunctional family, I began to think that this love of Jesus was unreal or a chance encounter at best. As a youngster I became quickly confused, because what I was seeing all around me, up close and personal, had very little to do with the Kingdom of Heaven that I was hearing about in church. (There was love in my home to be sure, but also a lot of shame, anger, and guilt.) Whatever the final reasons, I did not stay in the church long enough for confirmation and within five years, I had turned my back on the church and (so I imagined) Jesus.

When I was growing up, there was a man in our neighbourhood, by the name of Murdo Mackenzie and he had a passion for Christ. He was a dedicated evangelist, small in stature but great in the Lord. He and his wife took a shine to me and hardly a week went by when I could not be found in their home sharing some tea and cookies or else sitting on the edge of a seat listening to Murdo talk about Rebirth in the Spirit, and quoting from John chapter three. This man helped to keep Jesus alive for me through my early teens and he showed me how love can be shared with others without fear.

But in spite of Murdo's best efforts, as I grew older my heart became hardened and I became an opponent of all things Christian. I fixed my thinking on the all too human weaknesses and injustices that have been so much a part of the Church since apostolic times. I used the imperfection of Christianity and the Church as an excuse to hate it. In fact, what I was angry about was that the individual Christians I met all seemed to be motivated by love to an extent that non-Christians were not (at least so far as an immature, angry adolescent could tell). There was a huge amount of simple envy behind my self-righteous contempt. Yet behind all my objections and my self-righteous indignation, behind my outwardly-directed anger and behind my attempts to find an alternative spirituality, stood the quiet figure of Jesus: waiting, always haunting me with His compassion, His love, His mercy and His patient strength. Oh how often I did not want to love Him! Through the years, during my many vicissitudes, He was there and would not go away, no matter how much anger I felt, no matter how many people I hurt. Though my heart was hardening and becoming harder with the passing years, still I had a deep yearning and a holy longing that would not go away. I felt alone and abandoned, forgotten. I began to seek solace where I could, all the time rejecting God’s solace, for which I so desperately wished. Inevitably then, by the time I was in my early twenties I had turned to alcohol as a way out of my dilemma, and had already determined my fate as an alcoholic. Booze did not fill the void in my heart, but it helped dull the pain.

Nevertheless, I grew to a semblance of manhood, fell in love, married and started a family. However, I was still too proud and too frightened to see that I had been known and loved even before I was born and that God had a plan for me, a plan to prosper and not to harm. The ache in my soul would not go away, and when I was not medicating my despair with alcohol I searched and searched. I tried Sufism, Kabala, Tarot, Yoga and Buddhism. At one point, I gave serious thought to becoming a Buddhist monk, running off to a Zen monastery in California. And because I had this yearning that nothing else could fill, when all my attempts at self-salvation failed, I came to the conclusion that there really was no salvation to have, no truth to understand, no higher love to live. It was all just a big lie or worse, a joke. So over the years I gradually drifted deeper and deeper into anger, depression and alcoholism. On the outside, I managed to hold it all together, but on the inside, my soul was becoming a bottomless pit. Things got progressively worse. By the time my son reached his middle teens our family had started to come apart at the seams and I was powerless to do anything about it. Without a strong spiritual centre, my family was unable to find the healing it needed. As despair gained more and more ground in the landscape of my life, my wife Aryn was trying to be strong for all of us, keeping things from going entirely to Hell in a hand-basket. However, she could not provide the spiritual core that was missing from all our lives.

Finally, one day a few short years ago, after a growing state of anxiety only partially relieved by prodigious amounts of whisky, I found myself rendered completely helpless, in a daze. I remember a morning sitting on the end of our bed in a condition of frozen panic, half-dressed, unable to function at even the most basic level. I really thought I was dying. But Aryn, wife, best friend and supporter through all our difficulties, took me to the emergency ward of our local hospital where the ER doctor on duty diagnosed my condition as severe panic disorder. There I received some drugs to help me sleep and rest. And casually, the ER physician asked, "Do you attend church?" To which I replied "No." Then he said, "Well, maybe you should."

Soon after this, I began to see a psychiatrist as well as my family doctor. And as part of a program for overcoming my depression and severe anxiety, as well as my addiction to alcohol, I began seeing a very compassionate psychologist who was also a wise and patient man. I had seen him only a few times, and one day he challenged me to participate in a kind of psychological game of self-discovery. I had by now nothing to loose. However, Jesus had a different agenda. Instead of discovering myself that day, I lost myself. Instead of discovering my own identity, I re-discovered Jesus. Instead of being cured by psychology, I was redeemed by Christ. During my session that day, I seemed to understand that He was with me, talking to me. It seemed as if He reached out and said to me "Take my hand, I will not fail you. I have been with you all your days, and in all that time you have been mine though you knew it not." It was then that I began faintly to realize what God had intended for me all along and I knew whom I truly was and for what He had saved me. So on that day, May 24, 1999, I threw away all my hesitation, all my fear and all my pride. I knew that Jesus had claimed me this last time. I could no longer deny Him, I could not turn away from Him a second time. I could no longer live a backslider’s life. He had come to claim His own, He who had died on the cross in order that I might be reconciled to God.

I took the Lord's hand immediately and I have not let go since. He is with me now and will stay with me through whatever trials life will bring. He will not abandon me but will lift me up, yes, even on the wings of an eagle, for I am His and He is my beloved and my heart's delight. For I was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.

Thank you Jesus!