Hi Ethan, thank you so much for your testimony, it is much appreciated!
My journey was quite different, I grew up in a Christian home and attended Sunday School and a Church of England Church regularly when I was quite young. When I was twelve I was presented with a KJV of the Bible with really thin rice paper pages.
I started reading that Bible then and thoroughly absorbed parts of the Old Testament and the whole of the New Testament.
In high school science we were taught that evolution was a theory of how the diversity of life came to be, but it wasn’t rammed home as a fact, it was presented as a possibility. Nevertheless, I accepted it into my worldview and just thought, evolution is the tool that God used to create the diversity of life on Earth.
Since I could read, I have always believed that the Creation week was six normal days and Noah’s flood was global as that is precisely what the Bible said and I trusted the Bible as God’s Word.
But I had accepted evolution as the means that God used to create the diversity of life on Earth, thus I de facto believed in the millions and billions of years, and as it subsequently turned out, I fell away a bit from the Lord in my late teens; life got in the way and I stopped going to Church. I still believed in the existence of God, but didn’t read much of the Word of God anymore.
Then a friend I was surfing with, said that he had heard there was a free movie at a local community hall one day after we had been surfing in a massive swell on the Australian East coast in the early 1970’s. He didn’t know what the movie was called but it was free and so we drove to a community hall on our way home from the surf; the movie turned out to be “The Cross and the Switchblade”.
At the end of the movie a man got up out the front of the hall and started preaching about Salvation through Jesus. What he was saying resonated with me and he invited people to come out the front, I’m generally a quiet person who doesn’t like to be in the spotlight and I did not want to go out the front, but I found myself walking down the central isle to the front and knew in my heart there and then that God was present, and I was standing before Him, I saw myself for the first time as I really was, i.e., an utterly worthless sinner that was as filthy rags before His Holiness, and not worthy of His great love for me, I was filled with the Holy Spirit and saved there and then with many tears of repentance and joy.
The young Church pastor was a true man of God who went on in his ministry to lead tens of thousands to Salvation in the coming decades from that time.
When I was in my early twenties I had returned from working on a prawn trawler in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia, I was walking up the main drag of a very busy shopping street, in suburban Sydney at about 10 am on a Saturday. There were heaps of people on the footpath going up and down right and left, and I was handing out small mainstream Church ‘tracts’ that spoke of the Salvation of Jesus. The Holy Spirit was with me, I saw all the people around me as amazing eternal beings who God loves, rather than the human throng that I would normally see. I was way down the bottom of the hill end of the shops on the street, as I slowly made my way up the hill toward the Railway Station.
I had handed out quite a few tracts and when I was about two hundred yards from the Station end, the hundreds of people on the footpath momentarily parted and I could see a man sitting in a wheelchair in the distance. The Holy Spirit was with me, and I was praying silently in my head as I walked southwards up the gentle hill.
The man in the wheelchair was looking straight ahead across Victoria Ave to the opposite footpath, I was praying when I saw him and instantly his head swung 90 degrees to the right and he was looking straight at me. I was a bit shocked, as I somehow knew in my spirit that he was looking straight at me. Then the crowds of people closed the line of sight and he was gone from view. I continued walking up the footpath handing out the tracts and praying.
Again the people parted momentarily and the man in the wheelchair had his eyes fixed on me. The crowds moved and he was gone from view again. This happened more as I came closer and the distance decreased, when I was about 50 yards from him, there were less people and I could see that he was watching my every move, I could also see that he was severely handicapped, he had a tray in the front of his wheelchair with something on it that people were taking and dropping money into a tin he was holding. When I reached him, I could see real terror in his eyes, I did not know what to do and I just walked past, with his contorted gaze fixed on me his head turned as I walked past. I turned and looked back and he was still watching me, and only me, out of the hundreds of shoppers all around. I was just ordinarily dressed, nothing special, nothing to make me stand out except that I was walking in the Spirit, and I believe his spirit recognized that.
Looking back from so far in the future, I now know I should have stopped and prayed for him, but I was young, probably a bit embarrassed as young people like me can tend to be. Anyway, I later went home that day, but always clearly remember that as it is something that doesn’t usually happen to anyone let alone me.
Years went by, and I remained a Bible believing Christian. I went to different Churches over the years as my work moved me around, including Church of England, Presbyterian and Baptist Churches in different towns I lived in for a few years for work.
I got married and had children and we bought our first little house. We later discovered after living there for a little while that we had a retired missionary and his wife next door, he had been a Methodist Minister and missionary in India for many years.
After a few years, I fell away from the faith a fair bit just through being so busy raising a family and working long hours paying off a mortgage.
At some point my next door neighbour, Gordon, gave me a book called “The Transforming Friendship” that jolted me back to thinking more about what really matters in this life, the Lord God, Jesus who I knew was real and true, and Loved me, so I started reading the Bible again and shared with my wife (who was raised as a Christian and who always believed in Jesus), and our children about the Lord.
Then one day I went surfing with a another mate at Copacabana Beach, NSW Australia during a big cyclone swell averaging roughly 15’ plus.
I haven’t told many people ever about this because I guess they may think I’m nuts.
The beach was deserted with driving rain and a bit of wind.
I was out in the surf with a mate and we had surfed and surfed for hours catching monster waves all to ourselves. My mate decided to go in as it was getting late, it was still driving rain, overcast, dull and well after 5:00 in the afternoon. My wife was at home with our children who were infants in Primary School.
Anyway, I decided to get a few more waves by myself before I went in.
I saw my mate drive away in his Kombi van leaving only my car in the carpark facing the surf. I was all alone out there, and a nice big set of waves came, so I caught one and had a brilliant ride. As the wave hit deep water again (because it was breaking way out between the distant headlands of Copacabana and McMasters Beaches and then reforming for a massive shore break of about ten foot with a hugely thick lip that pounded into the sand like a sledgehammer), I decided I’d had enough for the day and I paddled towards the deserted rain swept beach.
I was wearing a steamer, so I was quite warm but tired from the constant paddling because the currents were very strong. I arrived at the shore break and decided that I didn’t want to go over the falls with my board strapped to my leg, so I took my legrope off and thrust my board onto the next wave to come past. The board disappeared then appeared up on the sand and swung around as the wave receded, but the fin grabbed on the sand and it stayed on the shoreline.
All I had to do was take off and body surf to the beach. So with a few freestyle strokes I was onto the next wave that came through, out I went into the air, then with a washing machine crash I hit the very steep dredged sand beachside and got dragged down into dark deep turbulent aerated water that didn’t afford buoyancy until it has finished fizzing.
Finally after what seemed like an eternity I popped up a little further out than where I had taken off from, about fifty yards further down the beach from where my board was still washing around on the edge of the water. So I tried again and again, I don’t remember how many times it was but each time I was weaker and getting very tired treading water, to stay afloat. I tried again, I was half way to McMasters headland and over the falls I went, then down into a very deep channel of aerated water, then dark water with a down current pinning me ever deeper despite my struggle to fight my way to the surface for air, it was pitch black and cold and I had no energy left to struggle anymore and it hit me.
I fully realised that I am going to die right there and right now. The thing that remains with me the most about that moment is that I was not at all afraid, I was curious to see what happened next, I was sad that I wouldn’t see my little family anymore, but at the same time I was interested in what was about to happen.
The water was all around me and I was being carried out into even deeper water because I could feel the pressure on my ears, I knew that I couldn’t hold my breath for much longer then like a light being switched on out of somewhere within me, I cried out in my mind, “Jesus, help me!”
As soon as I had thought those words, I felt an enormous wave of water lifting me somehow from the deep dark depths that I was in, then after a little while I burst into the dim light of the late afternoon sky and was then hurtling half in the wave and half through the air and then I hit the sand and grabbed it, digging my hands in as I had done each time previously but this time I stuck, the dredging water let go of me and receded and I was left far enough up the sand with screaming lungs soaking in the air. I lay on the water’s edge sucking in air for a few minutes recovering then got up and slowly walked northward back up the beach to my board that was still swirling around on the edge as waves hit it again and again. I collected it and walked up to the car, knowing that what had just happened was more than chance or coincidence.
I know that I was saved that day by my Lord and Saviour, Jesus.
I was not sure about how to interpret parts of the Bible I wasn’t sure about, and I prayed for the Lord to give me wisdom. Some time went by and some good old kind and honest friends that we hadn’t seen for years, who were in the Salvation Army came to visit the farm that my wife and I had bought, and they left us with three Creation magazines, that was in the early 1990’s. I read the magazines thoroughly and realized that the Bible was saying the exact same thing, that the Earth was about six thousand years old, the Creation week was six normal days and Noah’s flood was global that perfectly explained how most of the vast continental scale extents of sedimentary strata and fossils came to exist.
My eyes were opened and I saw evolution as the intruder that had deceived me for so many, many years.
I eventually subscribed to Creation Magazine and sought out more information on this subject. I have a science background and understand the basics of physics, chemistry and biology, thus I was able to gain an informed view of the issues in contention by those who hold to evolution.
I have come to understand the meaning of the Scripture in this present time:
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Ephesians 6:12
and I know that many of the world’s most powerful economic, educational and mass media organisations are ultimately controlled by darkness that seeks to deceive as many as it can from the Truth and Salvation offered by our Loving Lord Jesus.
As I have stated many times, this is a battle for the hearts and minds of people who will interpret what they see in accord with and dependent upon their worldview.
May God Bless, you Ethan,
jon
