...started with wonder and a sense of the numinous and faithful 'always there' God. Was consecrated in baptism, through the love that Christ first had for me. Was built up through the rhythm and routine of liturgy and worship in the choir: six years of Sunday services and singing practices and that backdrop of awe and presence and participation. As I grew older I felt drawn to the wild places, to the vastness and the quietness. In the wilds of Scotland I had a personal conversion, an experience of being 'born again' and a little later of 'being filled with the Spirit' of God. In those years I found benefit and support from people in the charismatic movement, and fellowships like Holy Trinity Brompton and their summer house parties. I was opened to the power and reality of the supernatural. Having said all that, what followed was years of rather tense and dogmatic faith and an attitude to the bible that in my case was 'fundamentalist'... which broke down in the end, in the breaking down of my own controlling psychology... to become a less intense letting go into the waiting love of God.

I took this picture of my church at dawn, December 2009

Journey with God never ends because God is so deep and mysterious, like an unexplored continent stretching inland from familiar coastlines. For me, as a Christian, it becomes the Way of Jesus Christ: that repeated death to self, and way of the cross, by which we open our hearts to trust and grace and love, daily. Like a flow that carries us if we let it. A flow of the gentle kindness of God. And we are held by God, as a child is held close to the breast of her mother, forever known and loved. And in that trust and safety, forever held, we can afford to love and hold others too. To open up a little to the great love of God.