Author Bio

Quick Profile
Christian, female, British, early thirties, languages major, infp, started this blog about 10 years ago and haven’t updated it much in the past 5. Many of my current ideas have moved on since writing the individual posts, but I still cherish them, like my babies, even if some of them do embarrass me a little.

How I Became a Christian
I became a Christian aged 14. My  background was not Christian, but I had been baptised Anglican according to the traditional custom at that time, and had heard things about Jesus from my surrounding (British) culture. I spent my childhood either not really knowing, or being dead set against Christianity – with a few vague sentiments of piety interspersed between, which I liked to impose on others in a pretentious fashion. I became a Christian in the proper sense by the example set by a Christian classmate, by a sense of grief at the inadequacy of people and support networks to be all that I had needed them to be as well as an awareness of my own hopelessness, and by the experience of the first time I had voluntarily and independently gone to church and been prayed for by elders. Upon this occasion the head-knowledge that I had accumulated about God was accompanied by a new and sudden awareness that this God was actually a real and living person and force. It was an encounter. In the midst of my troubles and disappointments, I suddenly and inexplicably knew the peace of Christ; it satisfied me in a way that other people had not been able to satisfy, and this had been completely unexpected. Although I was good at getting grade As at school, this knowledge was not an intellectual sort of knowledge – but it was a knowledge that grew alongside intellectual knowledge. I have wavered and doubted over the decades and my beliefs about peripheral doctrines have changed in form and expression in some areas, but the Spirit of God is still palpably in me and in Christians I have known (and not known), and in the words of the Bible, like a pilot light radiating peace, and I know that He is there.

Today, in 2019
My current interests are amateur theology, ecumenism and the persecuted church. Since the past 10 years for me have involved moving from country to country, where even denominations of the same name differ massively, I don’t really have a denominational ‘home’, so to speak. The mark of the Christian person – the true Christian, not the nominal Christian, the hanger-on, or the church tourist – is the particular kind of love that I see in them. It’s not the same kind of love as that which I’ve seen in any other group of people. It hasn’t mattered if they were Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox; United Reformed, Baptist, Pentecostal or independent Charismatic; Anglican or Methodist or Mennonite; Reformed Evangelical, Anglo-Catholic, Jesuit, Carmelite, Franciscan, Taizé brother or anything in between – or even if they were converts from countries where Christianity is rare or persecuted to near-extinction, who had met Christ in dreams, believed in him, and not known what to call themselves. The love in the individuals I have met is of the same kind and character: there are a handful of them from this church denomination, and a fistful from that. They’re the ones whom the love of Christ and man shines out of, and when you see it in them, it becomes what ‘denomination’ they are. And oddly, sometimes even against the doctrines and dogmas of their own churches and denominations, their personally held beliefs and convictions on many things converge, where the theological fault lines of their affiliations normally ought to divide them. It’s a glorious, confusing mess, arising from other mess that’s centuries-old, which I’m observing and not quite understanding, or able to believe my eyes when I see it.

“Everyone will know by this that you are my disciples–if you have love for one another.” John 13:35 (NET)