Sunday 18 May | Taste and See That the Lord is Good

This morning was something a little different, as our minister shared some of her testimony.

Last week, one of the prayer activities we had set out was a dish of fizzy tablets and a bowl of warm water. We've used this prayer activity several times before, normally with the tablet representing something we want to let go of, something we want to see disappear as the tablet disappears into the water. But last week Eddie suggested that the tablet dissolving could be an image of God receiving our prayer, and so the tablets could represent anything we want to give to God, including our praise. Miriam wanted to have a go at this after the service, so I helped her write her prayer on a tablet, then she dropped it into the water, and we talked about how we could hear the tablet fizzing and we could see that the water was changing colour and we could smell the mango scent it released and we could dip our fingers into the water and we could have tasted it too if we had wanted to. We could engage all of our senses in this act of prayer because worship is an expression of our whole selves.

I think I still had that moment in mind when I started thinking about what to share this week, because the verse that came to me was “taste and see that the Lord is good”. That was what led me to Psalm 34, and from there I started to think about the stories of the Lord's goodness that I could tell, and then it occurred to me that there is no better story I can tell than my own. Not because it is the best story, but because it is my story. It is the one that has been given to me to tell, and it is the one I can tell better than any other. I have been here for nearly seven years now, so many of you will have heard bits of this story over time, but there will be things I haven't told yet. So this is my testimony of how I have tasted and seen that the Lord is good.

To tell my story, I really have to begin with my parents. Neither of them grew up in Christian families, but there was still a kind of latent Anglicanism in the air. Church was not for every week, but it was for hatch and match and dispatch. It was natural then that they wanted to marry in church. There was a difficulty though, as my Dad had been married before, and while the Church of England did allow for the remarriage of divorcees by the time of their engagement in the late 1980s, it really wasn't very common. The parish priest would not even consider it, but another local vicar did agree to meet with them. He told them later that he didn't usually agree to remarriage, and had expected to refuse them, but having talked with them, he agreed that he would marry them in his church. In his sermon, he said that there is no law that can keep two people together, but it is love that does it. He obviously saw that love in my parentsand wanted to honour it and bless it. This is significant to my own story, because if my parents had been rejected by the church at that point, they would probably not have taken me to be christened when I arrived eighteen months later. Even before I was born, my life had been touched by the goodness of God through the grace of the Revd Canon David Salt. 

My parents didn't take me to the church where they had married, but to a relatively new church plant which met in a school hall on our estate. They met with the curate, who asked them what would be the point if they didn't bring me to church. It was a bold move, because they could have said it was a fair point well made and never crossed the threshold of a church again. Fortunately they decided it was a fair point well made and started attending services. And so it was that I came to grow up as part of the congregation of the Winyates Family Service. And it really was a family. We were never more than around eighty, but we spanned ages and abilities and social classes and family dynamics. And Sunday was where the whole family gathered. There were home groups and children's groups and youth groups in the week, but on a Sunday morning we all pitched in together, with the younger members leaving for their own groups only once a month for the length of the sermon. 

As soon as I was old enough to read a few words on a scrap of paper, I helped lead prayers with my family. I took it upon myself to pick the excess wax off the Easter candle and count the coppers in the offering with my Dad. At the age of ten I joined the worship band, which at that point consisted of piano, guitar, flute, clarinet, violin, trumpet and trombone. A previous incarnation had included a french horn, because everyone was welcome with their gift, even if it did make for a slightly odd ensemble. I knew that I belonged to that church and it belonged to me as much as to anyone else. And so I knew I belonged to God and God belonged to me as much as to anyone else. That was a precious gift to be given, and it formed my faith and my understanding of church, and it continues to form my ministry. It is one of the greatest sadnesses of my life that my family left that church in so much pain because of the hurt caused by a new vicar, and I grieve that the congregation which so nurtured us no longer exists, but I saw and tasted so much of the goodness of God in that community.

I've jumped ahead though, because I didn't leave that church until I was sixteen, and other important things happened before that. When I was eleven, I went away to a school residential. I had been away from home for church trips and music courses before, and had always been absolutely fine, but for some reason that week I became incredibly homesick. The only reason I have ever been able to come up with is that things had been unsettled at home because of difficulties in the wider family, and being away from home somehow caused the stress of that to come crashing down on me. I cried so much that the skin around my eyes became tender and bruised, but I was too stubborn to call my parents and ask to come home. By the time I did come home, something in me had broken. Leaving the house caused such great distress that I began to refuse school and church and friends, and shortly after my twelfth birthday I was diagnosed with depression. I can remember that time only in brief flashbacks, but it was six months of the closest thing to hell I ever hope to experience. 

I never stopped believing in God, but I was certain God had stopped believing in me. I knew others were praying for me, but I couldn't pray for myself. And then I heard that my beloved English teacher, who had been in remission from cancer, had been diagnosed with further disease. The idea that I may never see her again was so appalling to me that it flicked some kind of switch. I literally got down on my knees in my bedroom and said "God I need you to do something, because I can't do this anymore". In that moment, I felt a weight lift, and the next day I left the house for the first time in a month. I never did see Mrs Johns again, although I attended her funeral some months later, but I do know that she had been told that I was back in school and had been delighted to hear it. I am certain now that God had been doing something all along, holding me tight in love and grace, it was only that I hadn't been able to see it or respond to it.

It wasn't long after this that I shared this bit of my testimony in a school RE lesson, and I have now been talking about faith and mental health for nearly twenty five years. In the beginning I was confident that I had experienced a miracle, that I had been healed of my depression. These days I still believe that, but I understand it a little differently. I left university six weeks into my second year to avoid what I feared would be my second great depression, and while there was something of an existential crisis to work through, I did so confident that God had told me it was okay for me to leave. Through that experience, I have come to see that my miracle has been management and my healing has been hope. I still struggle with my mental health, although these days it tends to anxiety rather than depression, but with God and with those God has so graciously put around me, I am continuing to learn how to take care of it, and I trust that I can be redeemed from any pit I might fall into.

As I put it in a recent talk I gave at the university chaplaincy: “One of the greatest things my faith offers me is hope, and that is a hope founded on the promise of resurrection. When Jesus walked out of the grave he declared that there is always life and joy and peace on the other side of pain and sorrow and despair. I believe we will find the fulfilment of those things in eternity, in whatever is beyond this present reality, but I also believe we get glimmers of them here and now. And I don't just believe that because others have told me or because it is a nice idea, but because it has been my experience. I have suffered and I have flourished, and I have known the presence of God with me in all of it. My anxiety may not be cured in this lifetime, and I can't be certain that depression will never rear it ugly heads again, but with grit and with grace I can manage my mental health. I can know life and joy and peace in spite of it, and I will know even greater life and joy and peace on the other side of it, and that hope sustains me.”

After I left university, I moved back home and took a job in a department store while I tried to figure out what was next, now that my decade old plan of being an English teacher was off the table. Just before I had gone to university, I had been invited to give a sermon as part of a youth led service at the church my family had by then moved to. It somehow felt like I was doing something I was meant to be doing, so I made a half hearted deal with God that if I didn't get the A level results I needed to get onto my English degree, I would study theology instead. I did get the grades, and so I went off to university, and you already know what happened there. Even when I came back early, I didn't immediately return to thoughts of ministry. That didn't happen until a couple of years later, when my family moved from Redditch to Skipton. That was its own kind of miracle given the logistical difficulties of moving four adults halfway across the country with no jobs to go to, and there was definitely something of the goodness of God in that move and in all that has come from it.

We stumbled into the Baptist church because the Anglican churches in Skipton were higher than we were used to, and I discovered that I had secretly been a Baptist all along. (You can read more about that here.) Having left my childhood church before I was old enough to be confirmed, I was drawn to the idea that I could not just confirm my baptism but choose it for myself, and so I was baptised by full immersion at the age of twenty two. That morning four people said things that pointed towards ministry, including one person I'd never spoken to before who asked me with no subtlety at all if I'd thought about ministry. I realised that God had been whispering for a while, and now was turning up the volume, and so from there began a process of studying and discernment, and ultimately training for accredited ministry. 

It was also at Skipton Baptist Church that I met Mike, and in fact it was because I met Mike that I settled at the church, having not previously committed because I was still processing the trauma from leaving my childhood church. I probably shouldn't say too much about how he has been the goodness of God, for the sake of his ego, but I do think Victor Hugo was onto something when he wrote that to love another person is to see the face of God. And of course it is through Mike that I have known the goodness - and the chaos! - of children. I found out I was pregnant with Eddie the week I started training for ministry, and with Miriam during my first year of accredited ministry, but I trusted that ministry was right and motherhood was right, and so God would find a way for them to be right together. It has not always been easy, but it is good.

That brings us almost up to date. I trained for ministry in Leeds, and then when I entered the settlement process, I was handed a list of churches in vacancy. I can't remember how many pages long it was, but Stoneygate Baptist Church was on it, and in all those pages it was the one that stood out as the place I felt called to. Seven years in I still believe we discerned well together. I have experienced the goodness of God here, I hope I have shown the goodness of God here, and I believe that together we will continue to know that goodness for ourselves and reveal that goodness to others. So thank you for being part of my testimony, thank you for listening to my testimony. I hope it will encourage you to look for the goodness of God in your own lives, and to tell the story of that goodness so that others may see it too.