Thelma's story
I was brought up in Watford, and although my parents were not Christians, I always felt something stir in my heart when people talked about God.  My sister and I went to Sunday school at the church around the corner, and I listened avidly when my grandmother spoke of her faith in God. All the God stuff fascinated me.

When I went to senior school I struck up a friendship with a girl in my class who attended church regularly and this revived my interest in Christianity.  I went along to a few meetings with her and it was there, in the Church of the Nazarene that I gave my life to Jesus Christ.  I was filled the joy and rejoined my own local church, attending faithfully for some time, but gradually my interest in church diminished as my interest in boys grew. After a while I stopped going altogether, burying my relationship with God under a busy social life.

By the age of seventeen, I was working, engaged and living a very full life, but God wasn’t finished with me yet.  My fiancé and I had become involved in a Christian youth club and there I met a group of youngsters who challenged me by their obvious relationship with God.  They talked and acted as though God was real and you could talk to Him. That was a big shock to me.  The faith I had known when I was younger began to stir in me again, but I was determined to ignore it.  I wanted to live my own life and I didn’t want God interfering and telling me what to do.  My fiancé Keith (now my husband), felt much the same, and we resisted God’s call on our lives for as long as we could. In the end his love was irresistible, and we gave our lives to him in Coventry Cathedral during the Easter communion service in 1966. Now God was real for us too, more real than either of us could have imagined. I saw at once that God had been calling to me since I was a small child, and at last I felt truly fulfilled.

I wish I could say that we have always remained faithful to Him since that day, but that just wouldn’t be true.  There was a period when neither of us attended church, and then for a year I went on my own.  Although we had our struggles, in the end God’s faithfulness drew us back to where we belonged.  With Him.

That was more that thirty years ago, and I can honestly say that my relationship with Jesus Christ has grown deeper and deeper.  It is the most important thing in my life, and it is a joy to serve Him, for He gives meaning, purpose and a sense of destiny to everything I do.

We are grandparents now, and Keith will soon retire, but we are still as busy as ever. In the last few years God has been speaking to me about writing. I have written various different short stories and poems, and you can read some of them here on the website. We are grateful to belong to The Ark, which is a church full of life and I am delighted to serve as part of the leadership team.

Please click here to read some of Thelma’s writing.