Introduced to the Bible

I grew up in a Christian family but left the church as a teenager. A-levels, gap year, and university brought me new friends, new horizons and freedom, but there was a niggling and growing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Having always been a thinker, I really struggled to see the point of it all. Say I enjoyed the best it had to offer, which at the time meant a glittering career and a fantastic lifelong relationship, then what would it actually achieve? Careers end and people die. There had to be something more.

I lived at the time in a student halls opposite a little church with a big blue sign on it saying ‘God is Love.’ Feeling like I needed some love, bored of the student hedonistic life and friendships which couldn’t give me the big answers I was seeking, I started to sporadically attend. Very early on a middle aged lady there gave me a book by Charles Spurgeon, a Baptist Preacher from the 19th Century, called ‘Morning and Evening.’ The idea was you read a page in the morning and a page in the evening, each with a bit from the bible and explanation of what it meant and how it applied to our lives. The lady was very careful to emphasise when she gave it to me that, ‘This is a good book, but make sure you read the bible itself, that is where God really speaks.’

There followed a period of about a year where I did just that, off and on. I would read my evening page, or flip open my bible at a random place. I was amazed at how relevant the passages seemed to be to me, and how perfectly they described the situation I found myself in. It did seem like God himself was speaking directly to me, gradually explaining the meaning of life.