Foreword

My Search For The Truth

(And Subsequent Finding Of It)

Foreword

The following is an attempt to explain the thought processes behind the decisions I have made in my search for religious Truth. I am not trying to make scientific arguments, accuse anyone of anything, or label any person, organisation or belief as wrong. I am only recounting the experiences I had and explaining the effect they had on me. Some names have been changed to protect identities, but everything you are about to read in these pages is, unfortunately at times, true. And that means that there are subjects touched upon which may be inappropriate for certain readers. I have been brutally honest about my experiences in this work, because it all played a part to make me the person that I am today, and teach me the lessons I have learned.

1: Seeds

I don't know how old I was when my mother bought me The Bible For Children. It was there in my earliest memories, when I was not much bigger than the book, the bright colourful pictures, the big fancy headings, and the exciting stories about people named Adam and Eve, Noah, Moses, David, and Jesus. I didn't like looking at the Jesus part much when I was younger - someone did some mean things to him and the pictures all looked very sad.

My mother also purchased at some point in my early childhood a small silver frame to sit on my bedside table. It had an embossed profile of a young girl kneeling, and the words, "Now I lay me down to sleep / I pray the Lord my soul to keep". My mother taught me the rest of the words: "And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." My child's mind made its own addendum early in the piece: "God bless Mummy and Daddy, and all my Aunties and Uncles, and cousins, and friends, and animals, and teddy bears."

Thus my mother instilled in me the importance of prayer at the end of the day, and through her large picture book, the message that God was not "something up there", but a real being, with a name, a Son, and a story to tell.

Separate and apart from my mother's influence however, I earnestly in my heart desired to please God. I remember reading in that large book that we must love God. I also read that we cannot lie to God. I remember looking up at Mummy, holding my white teddy bear, with big tearful eyes, imploring her to teach me how to "love" God when I couldn't see Him or touch Him. In my bedtime prayers I remember trying to say "I love You God", and then being scared because technically, it was a lie, as I didn't know how to do it. My mother did not know how to answer my questions, and I remember hitting on a formula my infant mind thought infallible: as I clutched my raggedy teddy bear at night, I said to God, "I want to love You God, but I can't see you, so all this love that I am giving to my teddy bear, is really for You, because he's not real, he's just a toy."

Looking back now, I honestly believe that God had His arms around me from my earliest years. Because feelings like this were not taught to me by my mother, and certainly not by my father.

My mother, like all her peers in their small outback town, attended Sunday School as a child, and then when entering High School, did not need to go anymore. That was it. They had paid their dues, their names were written in Heaven, they had no need to think about Church or God or Jesus any more in their entire lives.

My father went through the same ritual, almost nine years earlier than my mother, but his parents were of the same persuasion: the kid's done his Sunday School, he's going to Heaven, that's all he needs to do. His attitude towards the whole topic however, was very different to my mother's: Mum talked fondly of her days at the back of the Church, of the hymns and the beautiful stories. Dad thought the whole concept was stupid, and no child of his was going to be put through the same thing. Besides which, their Church didn't even exist anymore: the Methodist Church, where all good Cornish children were brought up, had merged with the Presbyterian Church to form the new Uniting Church In Australia, just a couple of years before I was born. So not even the nostalgic idea of me going to the same place they did was ever an issue.

The extent of the education my mother received from the aforementioned Sunday School became evident to me when I entered High School. Two things stick out in my memory from that year: first, that a group called the Gideons came to my school, made us all line up in respectable lines, and handed out tiny copies of the New Testament to each and every student. It was my first look inside a real adult Bible. I noticed on the back page, there was a space to sign your name and write the date of the day you "accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour". I felt conflicted at the time: I wanted to please God, and I understood that signing my name on that line meant some sort of big commitment to Him. However, my thirteen-year-old brain didn't feel ready to confine myself to a lifetime of "being good". So I tucked the little book into my bag, and carried it around with me for the next six years before taking it out and looking at it again.

Secondly, that year was the first time I "learned" something that conflicted with what my big picture book had taught me as a child. The first few pages of my Bible For Children had glossy pictures of the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve. They were the first human beings that ever existed. However, my Year 7 History class gave me rough photocopies of ape-like creatures that changed slightly with each picture until the last picture was a man in a suit carrying a briefcase. These were the first human beings that ever existed, my history teacher told me.

I pedalled home fast after school that day and showed the picture to my mother. I remember saying "what does this mean Mum? Were Adam and Eve monkeys? Why don't they look like the picture in my book?" My mother looked flustered and said something to the effect of "I don't know dear, no one really knows anything about all that."

I was crushed. The first seeds of doubt had been planted. I went to bed that night thinking that only a few years earlier, I had felt a similar sense of doubt about the Easter Bunny, and upon enquiry, discovered that there was no such thing, that it was all a trick invented to make children behave themselves. A year later, the same thing with Santa Claus. I resigned myself to the fact that in a few days, I would probably be getting a similar "talk" concerning God.

The "talk" never came, and I pushed the confusing thoughts out of my head. With no other, or indeed, any, religious influence in my life, it was not difficult to find years flying by without giving God a second thought. That changed however when I was 19.

2: Friends

As a child, the rental property next door had many different tenants. For a large chunk of my Primary School years, it was occupied by a very nice family called Robinson, who had children my age and younger. The first memory I have of them is the girl, Sarah, asking me over the fence one day if I was a "Jehovah's Witness".

I would have been around 5 years old, and had never heard the term before, but instinctively shook my head. From that point on, I found it fascinating every time the subject came up: no birthday parties, no Christmas presents. I felt awfully sorry for the poor children, but they never seemed to mind their plight, or even notice it. A happier family I have rarely seen.

I remember a game with the youngest boy when I was about 7 and he was about 4. We were pointing at various things in his Dad's shed and saying "who made that?" The answer was invariably "Daddy made that" with a few "Mummy made that" or "Uncle Jack made that" thrown in as well. Then I pointed to a tree outside the shed and said "Who made that?" Without missing a beat, he said "Jehovah made that!" Who made the sun? Jehovah made that! Who made the grass? Jehovah made that! Then one of our parents came along and bundled us away before the conversation could get any more conspicuous.

When I was almost 10, my uncle, who had been living with us since I was born, passed away. Among the stream of relatives who brought packages of food into our house, our next door neighbour, Mrs Robinson, brought in a plate as well. I remember talking to my mother about it a few days later. What are these people? What is a Jehovah's Witness? Who is this Jehovah?

My mother explained to me that these people were in a "sect", that their God was not our God, that they believed in a different God, named Jehovah. But does that mean they are not Christian? Well, yes, she explained, but they are still nice people. See, when Mrs Robinson brought that banana cake in when Uncle Colin died, she was being a Christian then. But in essence, no they were not Christian, and they would not be going to Heaven. It was all very confusing.

Another confusing moment in my childhood came at my home-away-from-home, Bankstown, in Western Sydney. My father's sister lived there, and every second school holidays were spent at Aunty Betty's house. I played with the children who lived next door to her, who happened to be Muslim.

I never heard the word during this time, and their religion was never spoken of. All I knew was that at certain times of the day they had to go home to pray. I guess I just thought they were very good Christians, who liked to pray together during the day instead of reciting their prayers at night, like my silver picture frame compelled me to do. Only two things struck me as "different" about this family: one, the little girl (there were six boys and one girl, and she was around five years younger than me), wasn’t allowed to play with certain toys and dolls that I was allowed to, and one day when I was playing with nail polish and suggested putting some on her, her older brother whisked her home, saying that their mother would be furious if she found her wearing that.

The second thing was the boys. As we grew up, and each boy turned 18, he disappeared for a year, and when he returned, he would not speak to me. He said hello to Uncle Tom and nodded to my father, but the friends I grew up with were all of a sudden, one by one, strangers. One day I asked my Uncle Tom where the boys went for their year away. He said they had to go back to Lebanon, to serve a year in the army. I just guessed that after spending a year in the Lebanese army they were no longer interested in playing with some young Australian girl.

In school, I always had trouble making friends. In any given year there would only be two or three people I would count as good friends, and these usually changed from grade to grade. But in Year 4, there had been one girl whom I had gotten along famously with, and when she moved away in Year 5, we had become pen friends. We had stayed in touch up until we were both 16, when, unbeknownst to each other, we had both run away from home and started our own lives, me with a husband, and her with a boyfriend, which changed into another boyfriend and city, followed by another. When we were 18 and I was in Year 12, she had come back to town and reconciled with her parents, but at the time I had not yet reconciled with mine.

Genevieve's father was a Baptist minister and her mother lead Bible study groups and was very active in the local Baptist Church. When we were children, I saw her do many "strange" things at school: pray before she ate lunch, tell other children off for using bad language, and once a girl came up to her and asked her to pray over her broken arm. It all looked very odd to me, but I chose not to focus on it, and largely ignored that part of her life. My parents thought she was a polite little girl but believed that her parents belonged to a "sect". I remember one day when I was in a jewellery shop with my mother and i admired a silver cross on a necklace, my mother mocked me by saying "Genevieve's converting you is she?” I felt a strong urge to say "No! Of course not!" and drop the cross like it was on fire.

Her parents' strictness was what had lead a 16-year-old Genevieve to rebel against her home life and run away to create her own rules. So when she had come back home, her parents kept her under strict lock and key. I first heard of her return from a girl in my class at school, who came up and said "You used to be friends with Genevieve Taylor didn't you? Did you know she's back in town?" I was quite shocked and eager to see my old friend again. However Rebecca, the girl in my class, warned me that her parents were not allowing her to socialise with anyone who was not a part of their church. She invited me to go along one Sunday to "see what it was like".

A few Sundays later, I took her up on her offer. My curiosity grew when my husband (at the time) informed me that his parents also went to that church. So we both went along for the Sunday service.

My ex-husband instantly hated the whole concept of church. He thought it was all stupid and didn't want to go back any more, not even with his parents. However, my experience was worlds apart: after getting over the excitement of seeing Genevieve again, her mother invited me to sit with their family for the services, and she explained it all to me as it was happening. She told me about how Jesus Christ had come down from Heaven to take the punishment for our sins, as there was no other way for us to be forgiven for them. She explained that since He had done that, we were now forgiven and children of God, and free to go to Heaven and spend eternity with Him. It sounded wonderful to me, like a dream. And then, she told me that my Year 7 history teacher had told me a vicious lie: Adam and Eve were created as beautiful human beings, not as apes. We did not evolve from green slime. The Bible was the Truth, and Evolution was a lie.

That was all I needed to hear. I gladly accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Saviour, and dug out my now old and mouldy Gideons New Testament, and signed my name on that last page. The date was August 18th, 1998.

The next couple of years flew by in a haze of Bible classes and worship services. I signed up to do a correspondence course with one of the major Bible colleges in Sydney, and attended classes three or four days a week. I learned that the next step in my Christian walk was to get baptised, and Genevieve's mother offered to be my sponsor.

3: Names

I had always remembered something my mother had said when I was younger, about her only regret was not sending me to Sunday School like she had done, because I had never learnt the "fear of God". So I figured, especially since my parents and I had been estranged for almost two years when I ran away at 16, that me becoming involved in a Church would be welcome news to her. Imagine my surprise then, when the news of my upcoming baptism, was met with screams of horror.

"But Tamara, we are NOT Baptists!" she kept repeating, as if I was telling her I wanted to join a bikie gang or underworld crime syndicate. She pronounced the word like it hurt her tongue. It felt like becoming a "Baptist" was the lowest, most embarrassing thing I could do to my family. Needless to say, neither of my parents attended my baptism, which hurt me a great deal, and confused me even more.

Especially since my Bible college classes were teaching me, among other things, that we indeed were NOT "Baptists", that there was no such thing as a Baptist, that we were all "Christians", no matter which Church we attended. If we believed in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we were saved. That was it.

Genevieve's mother was my teacher for the first two years, and then in my third year I was given to a different lady, so that the new crop of Young Christians could go through the same course I went through.

This was where my fairytale view of the Church started to slowly unravel. The first thing, let's call her Mrs Williams, felt the need to teach me, was that everything Mrs Taylor had taught me was wrong. It was all her opinion, you see. She had been saved in a Pentecostal Church, and that tended to taint her view of things a little.

So Mrs Williams proceeded to teach me a different spin on the texts that were sent down from Sydney.

The first such difference that came up was on the subject of Creation Science. While Mrs Taylor used a great deal of material from Answers In Genesis in her classes, Mrs Williams thought the whole thing was “silly” and shouldn’t be focused on. “No one has ever been saved by Creation Science” she said on more than one occasion, “and no one ever will be.” I stopped short of telling her that I had been saved by Creation Science, and from what I had seen outside the church, the concept of Creation Science would open a great many eyes indeed to the concept of the existence of God.

The first time I began to doubt the wisdom of my second teacher was when we came to the subject of sex. Mrs Taylor had always been frank and open in her classes on this subject. But Mrs Williams, a significantly older lady, would only lend me a book that gave a very flowery and delicate treatment of the subject (forgive me I cannot remember the name, I only remember that I had never seen anything that skirted around a subject so much without actually saying anything about it), and then ask me if I had any questions, which of course I didn’t, and that was it: subject closed. The part that stuck in my mind was after I handed her the book back. She looked at the cover for a second, and then mentioned that maybe she will put the book on her 18 year old daughter’s bed that day, so that she could read it when she got home from school. She was old enough now to start learning about that part of life. I could only clamp my mouth shut and look at her incredulously – did she really think an 18 year old girl who had gone to a public school didn’t know anything about sex??

And then the first time I started to notice the “imperfections” in my teacher was when I realised she had a plank in her eye, which was only brought to my attention by her constant chatter about the specks in others’ eyes. She was a gossip. You would walk into her house, and before you even had a chance to sit down you would hear all the latest private information on every member of our small church. She was always quick to criticise others, and it only became apparent to me after she had caused me to doubt the salvation of almost every person I knew there. From that point on, I almost began to doubt hers.

So my vision of the church as being the perfect place where everyone was good and honest and I would be safe from all life’s problems was beginning to crumble around me. And that wasn’t the only thing crumbling – my marriage was going through a very difficult time, and my enthusiasm for the church, not to mention the mixed lessons I was learning there, were only making it harder.

4: Baptist

My husband, and his family, were pretty well-known in the Baptist Church, and for all the wrong reasons. My father-in-law had made himself a nuisance in almost every Bible study group they ran, and my youngest brother-in-law was constantly the darling of the youth group, then the rebel, then the prodigal son, then the darling all over again. My husband came to church a few times, with apparently the sole purpose of sitting in the back row looking angrily at everyone the whole time. At the same time, everyone knew about my home life too: my husband had at any given time at least three friends staying with us, and the house was consistently open, loud, and full of drunken Centrelink recipients.

I was growing weary of the pitying looks I was getting every Sunday. But the clincher came when my own teacher, Mrs Williams, came up to me after one service where my husband had made it know he did not want to be there, and whispered in my ear “Divorce is a sin, but it’s not the unforgivable sin. God can and will forgive you.”

That started my thinking about leaving my husband in earnest. I had wanted an end to my miserable marriage for a long time, but the offence it would cause to God was my only restraint. With that seed planted in my mind, I began to pray in terms of “would You forgive me Lord?” before I had even committed the sin.

Now this is a subject I look back on in some confusion. What really should I have done? What would have happened to me if I had stayed in that marriage? I was miserable, I was scared to go home most days, and he was definitely not enjoying the marriage either. However, I do believe that by deliberately committing what I knew to be a sin, I put a wedge in between myself and God, which grew to bursting point with relative, and surprising, ease.

Growing up in Outback Victoria and suffering through many harsh winters, it had been my ambition since I was four years old to move to Queensland when I grew up. When I had met my husband at the age of 16, I told him of my dream, and he had promised to take me there, and we would set up a wonderful new life for ourselves in the warm sunshine. He just had to save up some money first, so just wait a couple of months.

After nine and a half years, I realised he had no intention of ever leaving the life he had set up for himself in the outback. He had his friends around all the time and life was a party every day. So armed with my knowledge of the grace and forgiveness of God, I laid down the law to my husband: I am going to Queensland. With you or without you.

Now he could at that point have made moves to save his marriage. He could have said “I can’t go just yet, but I don’t want to lose you, so let’s sit down and work something out.” But he didn’t. He just looked at the ground and mumbled something about all his friends and his job and his cars being here. So I then calmly walked into the bedroom, picked up my suitcase, and drove off to shelter at a friend’s place until he could get all his stuff out of the house.

I cried for many, many nights. I felt sorry to God for leaving my marriage, and I felt sorry for my husband; as much as I believed he would be better off without me, no one likes to have their wife walk out on them and have their whole life changed in an instant. The house we were living in belonged to my mother, so he had to get out as quickly as possible. But I never once doubted that my decision had been the right one.

So after settling my affairs, I made the long-awaited move to South East Queensland, to begin a new life at a university. I was 26, but felt more like an 18 year old, as essentially, I had only just left home to start my own life, much the same as the other 18 year old girls I was now living with.

God and religion soon became the last things on my mind as my new life in the hedonism capital of Australia became all about the beach, the club, and hanging with the “in-crowd”. Being that I had been unpopular and a loner in high school, this was a new experience for me, and it went to my head faster than the bucket loads of bleach I was pouring on each month. Classes were just a place to catch up on sleep in between tanning on the beach and dancing all night in Brisbane’s many nightclubs. My vow to never become involved with men again was also forgotten when my cousin, whom I had grown up with and trusted, introduced me to a young man who lived around an hour away, and told me that he could show me around and look after me in Queensland, as I didn’t know anyone up there. I was pressured into it at first, but after a couple of weekends away, I was in a relationship, and as far as I knew, in love.

We dated for the whole of my first year at uni. For much of it though, he had to travel overseas with his brother, but I trusted him (after all, my cousin had set us up, and told me that this man would “look after me”), so I patiently awaited his return. I called him every day, went down to visit his parents for days at a time, and even saved up and flew over to London to spend a week with him on my Spring Break. He was due home in a couple of months and everything seemed perfect. I ensured I was extra thin, extra bleached and extra tanned when he arrived. Our blissful reunion, however, did not go exactly as I had envisioned it.

He wanted to talk. He took me into a private room and told me he wanted our relationship to start over again, and that meant he had to be honest with me. I had expected him to confess some drunken fling in a foreign country during his travels; and being the vain, but desperate, creature that I was at the time, I was more than ready to forgive him and move past it. What he told me however, was a complete shock. He hadn’t had any drunken holiday flings, even though he’d had many opportunities to. He prided himself on the fact that he had remained faithful to me – and his other girlfriend. Yes, we were the only ones he had ever been with.

That’s right – he revealed that I had actually been the “other woman” the whole time. He had been with the other girl for almost a year before he even met me. And when he met me, he couldn’t decide which one he wanted, so he just kept both of us going till he made his decision. So after a year, he decided that he wanted to be with me. So he had come clean with her, and then returned home to come clean with me, and start our fairytale life together.

He actually seemed surprised when I wordlessly reached for the car keys and walked out the door.

However, after spending a sleepless night in my bed in my uni dorm, I realised that I was terrified of being on my own. Even though I had been living my day-to-day life on my own while he was miles away, I still had the recourse to call him at the end of the day, and that would make everything all right. So I jumped back in my car and flew back down to his house, desperate to apologise and take him back.

Except, when I got there, I discovered he had changed his mind, and he didn’t want me back. After everything he had done to me, this was the final slap in the face. I returned to Brisbane with my heart and my mind equally numb, and not a clue what to do with myself.

My friends at uni decided the best thing for me to do was throw myself into the single life. And when I was flitting around the dance floor and noticed an attractive young man watching me, my thoughts ran along the lines of “you’re single now, you’re allowed to.” The concept of God’s laws and being a good Christian didn’t even enter my mind. I just felt that a man had used me up and spit me out, and now it was my turn to use up and spit out as many men as I could get my hands on.

5: COC (Pentecostal)

During this time, some of my uni friends had been accosted by the Red Frog Brigade. This was a Christian group that maintained a presence wherever there was fun and youth. They ran a bus service every Sunday night from the campus to the huge COC Church in the city. Some of my friends remembered that they had a religious side, and started going to services. I remembered the same thing about myself, and began to go along too.

The church was awesome; there were more young, attractive people attending any one Sunday service than there were citizens of the whole town I grew up in. The services consisted of rock bands, complete with mosh pits and stage diving, and special events like myth busters, travelling ethnic performers, theme nights and so on. It was a lot of fun, but did not provoke me to want to change my behaviour to any real extent.

This became glaringly apparent on one particularly uncomfortable weekend. I had been out partying on the Gold Coast with a group of friends the night before, and as usual picked up some random young man, and come Sunday afternoon I woke up with him still in my bed. I looked at the clock and unthinkingly cried “Crap, I gotta go, I’m late for church!” The young man looked at me and exclaimed “You go to church? Cool! Me too! Let’s go together!”

The irony was not lost on me as I sat uncomfortably in the pew. We both jumped up and sang the songs of praise with equal enthusiasm. Anyone around us would think we were a nice Christian couple, eager to teach God’s ways to the lost youth of the city. If they only knew.

And that made me think: what do I know about any of the people in this building right now, jumping up and down and singing about living for God and God alone? What about the girl up on the stage with her low-cut top and tight miniskirt? Were all the young men in the audience really thinking about the words she was singing when they watched her bouncing around up there?

I felt ashamed of myself for the first time in a long time, and left the stray boy in the church. Having never given him my number (had I even given him my name?) I was confident I would never have to deal with him again. I went back home to the uni and took a long hard look at myself.

The first thing that had to go was my long, bleached blonde hair. It was always the first thing that got male attention, so I decided that I needed a makeover. And never one to do things by halves, I enlisted the help of one of my closest friends at the uni, to help me make over my appearance, my room, and my whole life.

Don was a Metalhead and took great delight in tearing down my posters of Eminem and Pamela Anderson and replacing them with Metallica and Slipknot. He took me shopping for black clothes and even gave me some of his jewellery. And he got his roommate, who was studying hairdressing, to chop my long hair off at my shoulders and dye it jet black.

With my new rebellious look I returned to the COC Church the following Sunday. I looked around for a new place to sit (yes, it really is that cliquey: Paris Hilton clones, and their Chihuahuas, sit over here, Axl Rose look-alikes sit over there). And so within the space of an hour and a half I had made a new best friend: let’s call him Matthew.

Matthew was around my age, and like me, hung out with people considerably younger. He liked the same music as me – Guns N’Roses, Metallica, Skid Row, and classic 80s metal. He had travelled a lot and even met some of my teen idols. So I enjoyed hanging out with him and soon we were spending more time together than just at church.

He took me for rides on the back of his Harley Davidson and we had picnics on the beach, where we wrote songs together, him playing his guitar and me trying to sing. He was looking for a girlfriend, so I tried to help him in his search. I told him that I was determined to remain single forever, but he kept trying to get me to go out with guys from church that fit my type: long haired rockers mostly. I took it all as good-natured ribbing and focused my attention on trying to be a “good Christian”. And then I discovered that Matthew, for all his well-known activism among wayward youth, had been having a similar struggle within himself – with much less success, I might add.

The first hint of trouble came about when somehow I discovered a secret set of shelves in his room, behind his normal ones. They were stacked with video tapes. I didn’t give them a second thought until one night at a party I heard one of his teenage female friends joking about his “video collection” and “if people only knew”. After some deep entreating of his trust in me, he confessed: this was his personal collection of home-made pornography.

But haven’t you been going to church for a long time now? The church teaches against sex outside of marriage, doesn’t it? Yes, he said, and that’s why he never had sex in any of the videos. He never had sex with any of the hundreds of teenage girls who starred in his movies. They were all performing sexual favours on him. But oral sex is not, technically, sex.

So yes, although he knew that his video collection was not something most of his church buddies would approve of, he did not feel like he had done anything wrong. He had not had sex with those girls so he had not committed fornication. Seriously? I had a hard time believing he actually believed that himself.

So even though my view of this man had been seriously tainted, I still wanted to believe the best of him, that he had made past mistakes, like myself, and was now trying to make it right, just like I was. So we continued living as best friends for another couple of weeks, until one fateful day he went clothes shopping without me.

He had purchased for himself two or three shirts, in fashionable colours and designs, and when I came over to his house the next day he showed me his new items. I was not impressed. Matthew and I had always been the 80’s rejects of the church – we wore faded band shirts and ripped jeans, bandanas around our heads and way too many silver bangles. We both painted our fingernails black and wore black eyeliner. And now here he was, buying the latest fashions? I told him (with humour) that he was selling out and wanted to look like the sheep. His reaction was, to say the least, over the top.

He completely blew up at me. Those shirts, he screamed, represented himself, and if I was not willing to accept them, then I was obviously not willing to accept him as a person. I was in total shock. I had never seen this polite, smiling man raise his voice to anyone, and here he was, screaming his head off at me, because I didn’t like his new shirts?? He ranted and raved and yelled crazy things, and in terror I ran out the door and home to my apartment, where I locked myself in and wondered how I could possibly have missed this person’s gaping mental illness.

A week went by and I did not hear from him. I did not see him at church, but being that there were literally thousands of people there and I sat in a different place, that was not surprising. Then a few days later, while I was at work, I received a very disturbing phone call.

It was Matthew. He sounded very odd. He began by saying “Now don’t try to tell me you didn’t do it, I just want to know why.” I had no idea what he was talking about, and being that I had come to regard him as someone that could not be trusted, I began to feel afraid.

It turned out that, a week after our “fight” over the shirts, someone had called the police and told them that he had drugs in his house. A large squad of police came in the middle of the night and searched his house. They did not find any drugs, but what they did find, was a rather large cache of illegal firearms and other weapons. And it was not just Matthew that was in trouble here, as the guns belonged to some of the elders of the church, who had just been using Matthew’s house as a storage facility temporarily.

Interestingly, the fact that he was telling me that elders of the church I was attending hoarded illegal weapons was not what struck me about that conversation. It was the fact that he was accusing me of being the one that called the police, out of “revenge” over the shirt incident.

I was shocked and angry. This person had been my best friend for three months, and I thought he had gotten to know me pretty well. I had told him everything about my life, all the mistakes I made and how I was trying to make up for them. I thought he would know that I would never do anything like that. I had never behaved that immaturely in my life; I was not about to start at the age of 28. But no, he was convinced that it was me who brought this evil down on him and on the elders of the church, so I should be careful, as my actions had made me some “powerful enemies”.

As I was driving home that night, several thoughts ran through my head. Matthew was completely mentally deranged. He was a bad, evil person. And he was the Welcome Wagon of the COC church – the first person that you saw at the door, who shook your hand and said “Welcome to church!”. Not only that, but his partners in crime were supposed to be elders of the church. The people that you looked up to, went to for advice and spiritual guidance. And they dabbled in illegal firearms on the side? Had the whole world gone mad?

Or was it just Christians who were mad? I started thinking about all the people I had met at all the churches I had attended over the years. There were definitely some crazies. I wondered if that was what religion was really all about – a crutch to hold up your life when you can’t hold it together yourself, as someone had once told me. Maybe that was the one thing all Christians had in common – delusions.

By the time I got home, my destructive thoughts had begun to take the form of, religion in itself was a delusion. No wonder there were so many hypocritical, lying, two-faced people there. That made me think back to the lesson I had first learned in Year 7 History. Maybe God wasn’t real after all. Maybe all the stuff I had learned, at the Baptist Church many years ago, and more recently at the COC, was just lies made up by crazy people to support their own delusions. I knew first-hand how talented some of these people were at lying.

So I did something that I had never been brave, or stupid, enough to do: I challenged God. I looked out the window of my apartment into the rainy sky, and said “God, if You are really there, You have 24 hours to show yourself.”

6: Atheist

I was miserable. A large part of me was desperately hoping to find anything at all that I could use to support my belief in God. A lightening bolt, a drop of rain, a butterfly; anything that I could use to say “that was a sign! That was God showing me He is real!”. I sat in that room for 24 hours. Nothing came.

I remember running a bath and laying in it crying until the water became cold. I felt a number of emotions, not the least of which was embarrassment at letting myself be sucked in by lies for almost ten years of my life. I began remembering all the times over the years that I thought I had witnessed miracles. If I tried hard enough, I could explain every single one of them away. It was obvious to me at that point: There was no God. There was nothing.

We really were just evolved green slime that became nothing when it died. There was no reason to try to be good in life. There was no reason at all in life. Nothing made sense anymore, and nothing mattered. It was all just nothing.

I discovered my newfound beliefs were shared by many in the Brisbane metal scene. I threw myself into it and continued writing songs, though my lyrics now were from an entirely different angle. There was a lot of pain in those words. I remember one song began with “I know You’re out there / I know that You can hear me / Why are You hiding / Why do You do this to me” – I still used a capital “Y” when I wrote it, but before I even finished writing it I was convinced that there was no “You” up there at all. Another of my songs began with the lines “I would rather die and go to Hell right now / Just to know that Hell exists / Than spend one more day inside this empty shell / Of living out of nothingness”.

It was during this dark, empty time in my life, when I met the man who would become my husband.

As our eyes met across a crowd outside of a popular metal club, I felt something strange and strong stir inside me. I knew in that instant I would follow this man to hell and back. And that was all before we had even spoken our first words to each other.

Casey turned out to be a singer in a metal band. We talked about our ideas and opinions on a number of things, and religion was one of them. We both agreed that there was no such thing as God. We both hated the Christian Church and the lies that it imposed on our country. During that first night, as we were walking through the crowded mall, we passed a rather portly young man standing on a milk crate, preaching the Word of God at the top of his lungs to anyone that would listen. Casey and I both screwed up our faces and rolled our eyes at him. When he stopped for a second to draw breath, Casey took the opportunity to yell out “Gluttony is a sin too you know!” I laughed and grabbed his hand and ran away from the scene, but his words rang true in my mind: this young preacher was obviously a slave to his stomach, there was no glandular problem that could explain away that girth. And that made him just another example of Christians preaching one thing and practising another. I could not trust a single one of them.

Soon after this I purchased a house to bring my parents up from the Outback to live in with me. I had found a nice little house with a granny flat out the back, which was perfect as I would be close enough to look after my parents, yet I would still have my own space and privacy. And so as soon as I picked up the keys, Casey helped me to paint the inside walls of my granny flat black, with red doors. We hung posters of Motley Crue and Marilyn Manson, and kept one wall in the bedroom blank so I could use it as a chalk board to scribble my dark, depressing lyrics on. It was a Metalhead’s dream den of gloom. Needless to say, my parents hated it and very rarely set foot in my end of the house.

Looking back, my parents must have received a shock when they saw what they were moving in with. The last time they had come up to Queensland to see me, I was sporting bleached hair, tanned skin and a miniskirt. Now it was black hair, white skin, and black leather and chains. They must have thought I had regressed back through my teenage years. Either way, their concern was setting up their new house, finding their way around their new suburb, and dealing with my mother’s cancer treatment. They met Casey and simply accepted him because they had no choice – he was the only person apart from me that they knew in Queensland.

And so my life of misery and metal continued until one night in February 2008 when I suddenly became ill. I ended up in the hospital, and it was enough of a shock to make me sit up and think hard about what I was doing with my life. I decided to leave the band I was in and try to curb the late nights and heavy schedule. I endured a sling of doctors and specialists trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I was very sick and very scared, and felt very empty as I did not even have a God to pray to during my times of pain.

A few months of this and I decided that I needed to change my whole life. I think I blamed the metal scene for my illness. The first thing I did was change my Myspace page – from black with skulls and a Trivium song, I changed it to a pink pattern and put up a Frank Sinatra song. I remember one of our Metalhead friends, who calls himself Demon, writing on my page ”Your page scares me now! But if it makes you feel better, then more power to ya!” I have never forgotten Demon’s kind words, especially as many of my other scene friends were dropping some rather disparaging comments about my change of theme.

I started wearing other colours than just black. And then the biggest change: I stripped the black dye out of my hair, and tried to take it back to blonde. It was not as light as it had been previously, as there was a lot of black dye to strip out. But nevertheless, the yellow-haired pink dress wearing version of me was a stark contrast to the black-haired bundle of gloom Casey had thought he had married.

It took him a long time to understand my change of appearance, and an even longer time to accept it. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I could not really understand it myself – all I knew was, if my former lifestyle had caused my illness, I wanted to be as far away from it as possible, in any possible way. Eventually, I began painting a nice lemon colour over the black walls of my house, and took down the band posters and put up some nice pictures of myself and Casey. Being that I had endured a few months of extreme illness and pain, I decided that we both needed something good in our future to look forward to – so we began planning a holiday to Europe.

As we settled in to the plane seats and began to temper ourselves for 25 hours of travelling, the thought crossed my mind that this is the first time I would be going on a plane without praying for a safe trip. I felt a little uneasy. I was surprised to realise that I actually wanted to pray for the trip. I started thinking back through the journey I had taken, from naïve child with her Bible For Children, to full-blown Bible-bashing Baptist, to nominal fair-weather Christian in a two-faced COC, to hate-preaching Atheist. I was not happy in the situation I was in. I wondered if it was possible to change.

A 25 hour flight gives one a lot of opportunity for thought. By the time we landed in London, I had said my timid prayer for a safe trip, and upon arriving in safety at our hotel room in Penzance, I even offered a timid prayer of thanks for said trip. As my husband and I toured the sites in Cornwall where my family had come from, my attitude towards God, and stance on His existence, began to significantly change.

7: Anglican

The defining moment came while I was sitting in a wooden pew of Paul Church, looking out the faraway window upon the sprawling lawns and jagged cliffs of Mousehole. The thought occurred to me that many of my family members must have stared out that same window on a Sunday morning during church. I thought about how many of my family had walked up that steep hill every Sunday morning as the bells rang out. I thought about the family tombstone, in it’s position of prominence against the wall of the church building. The closer the tombstone was to the building, the more important the family had been in the church, our guide had told us. It dawned on me that for a thousand years, my family had believed in, and fervently worshiped, God. What made me so much more intelligent than them? Did I really know better than countless generations of my family before me? Was not that a very arrogant and possibly ignorant thing to believe?

And then I flicked the switch back on – as easily as I had flicked it off almost two years earlier. I allowed myself the possibility that God does exist. It that were true, then how should I respond? Is it not better to be safe than sorry?

And so, in that ancient building in that beautiful countryside, I made the decision that when I get home, I am going to find God. I will search for Him, I will find Him, and I will worship Him. In Spirit and in Truth.

My decision to “find” God was not something I took lightly. I freshly remembered my experiences in the COC and the thoughts that followed, leading me to my hasty declaration of Atheism. I believed, at this point, that God does exist – He is just not to be found in those “charismatic” kind of churches.

So I decided to look in the opposite direction. What I knew of Christianity at that time was that all churches could be divided into one of two groups: Charismatic and Traditional. Having renounced the Charismatic kind, I set about searching for a more Traditional church, something like what my mother would have gone to Sunday School in all those years ago. It occurred to me for the first time that Paul Church, where my family had worshipped for centuries, was actually Anglican. So, why not start there.

I Googled “Anglican Churches in Logan”, and came up with one on the other side of the city. The very next Sunday I set out to see if I could “find God” there.

Google Earth had promised me a whitewashed, pointy, wooden chapel-type building, which by Australian standards was about as traditional as I was going to get. I was disappointed however to discover that the old building was now, as I have discovered is the trend around the country, only used for special events, and that regular Sunday services are held in the blank-looking auditorium next door. Still, if there was one thing the Baptists had bashed into my head, it was that the Church was not the building, it was the people inside it, so with a relatively open mind, I went inside.

The service surprised me a little. They used, as I had been expecting, some words and terms I was unfamiliar with, coming from an Evangelical background, however the rest of the structure of the service – even down to the songs they sang – were eerily familiar to me. Some of them I remembered from my old Baptist church. And the sermon was as soft and comfortable as any I had heard at the COC (perhaps however without the emphasis on the importance of tithing!). So, even though it meant a 30 minute drive every Sunday morning, I decided that I would stick with this idea, and explore it further.

I began my research at my work, as I knew that one of the boys I worked with considered himself Anglican. At one quiet moment in the shop, I asked him what the Anglican Church actually was.

“It’s the Catholic Church,” was his reply.

“Huh?”

“It’s the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church that they talk about. It’s not like all these break-away groups you have today, it was the original, traditional Church. The first one. In England.”

That sounded good to me. So I began doing some research on the Church of England, on it’s beliefs and worship structure, and what it meant to be Anglican. And then, in the natural course of this research, I began to look into the roots of the church, and it’s history. And as we all know, the beginning of the Church of England had very little to do with wanting to organise a group of people who wanted to worship God.

I learned that Christians in England were originally part of the Roman Catholic Church, under the authority of the Pope in Rome. Then, after around a thousand years, when one fat, hedonistic man by the style of King Henry VIII decided that his wife was not giving him the son he deserved, he sought a divorce from the Pope, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. The Pope refused, the King stuck out his tongue and said “fine, I’ll start my own church, and I’ll be the head.” Okay, so it was not as simplistic as that, but in essence, the Church of England was founded upon rebellion against authority and tradition, and essentially, the lust, greed and impatience of a sinful man.

As an interesting aside, the Cornish trace the destruction of their language and culture from this single event as well. When King Henry VIII decreed that all Britain was now under the jurisdiction of his new church, his men rode through the country, desecrating monasteries, whitewashing churches, and handing out new Prayer Books and Orders of Service written in English. The Pope had been happy to have his Cornish parishioners say their prayers in Cornish, even in the middle of their Latin services – which meant that even the roughest, most poorly educated miner or fisher could understand that on a Sunday, he was praying to God through His Son Jesus Christ, who had come into the world to save us from our sins. However, now we had to perform all our worship in this new and uncomfortable language of the Anglos. And so, in just a few short generations, Cornwall went from being a proud country with it’s own culture and language, to just another part of England, speaking almost entirely in English.

Again, that is a shortened, sanitised history, but the fact remains – in 1525 there was a sinful man, whose actions changed the history of religion in England, and subsequently the British Empire, forever. No matter how deep into the issues you want to delve, when you step back and look at the facts, they do not bode well for the Anglican Church.

I tried for several weeks to continue worshipping at the Anglican Church in east Logan, and studying it by any and every means at my disposal. But eventually I had to admit that I could not get past that fact. The Church of England today was full of good, honest, God-fearing people who probably knew little of King Henry VIII, and agreed with his actions even less, but I could not bring myself to agree that the foundation of the Anglican Church was ordained by God, and therefore the Anglican Church Universal was, in fact, God’s True Church on Earth. And that was what I was looking for – the Truth. And so, sadly, I left the Anglican Church, and continued with my search.

8: Methodist

I remembered something I had discovered when doing my family tree research several years earlier. An ancestor of mine, by the name of William Carvosso, had written a book in the year 1815, about his experiences with God and the Church. I had managed to secure myself a copy, and was pleased to discover that my ancestor was a very pious, God-fearing man. He also had felt that the Anglican Church was not the place to find the Truth of God, and so, in the footsteps of his contemporary John Wesley, he worked hard to spread the Gospel around Cornwall and all of Britain, in the form of what became known as the Methodist Church.

This was the opposite of the founding of the Church of England – this church was founded by the good intentions of a Christian man who simply wanted to follow Jesus and spread the Good News to the world in the way the Bible directed. Wesley had not intended to actually found a new church, and Methodism did break away from Anglicanism until after his death in 1791, but by then enough people had been influenced by his “methodical” way of practising religion that, when the Good News reached the ears of my great-great-great-great-granduncle William, he saw his calling to be selling his farm, saddling up his horse, and riding around the narrow roads of Cornwall with his Bible, at the ripe old age of 65.

So the Methodist Church was deeply entwined throughout my family history. And besides all that, it was the church that my mother belonged to. So to Google I went, and the words “Methodist Church Logan” brought the happy discovery that the nearest Methodist Church was in fact only two blocks away from my house.

Upon entering the large tin shed (by this point I had given up my romantic notions of imposing old buildings with pointy spires, stained glass windows and wooden pews), I was welcomed warmly by the Pastor, Reverend White, who was fascinated to hear my family history and story of how I ended up at his church that day. The service was very comfortable – in structure it was very similar to the Baptist church I remembered so fondly, however the Bible readings were read from the New King James version (which I preferred infinitely over the NIV of the COC church), and the songs were mostly hymns that my mother would have sung in her childhood. I felt great. I felt like I was “home”.

My feelings of being home only grew when I discovered that this church had an orchestra, and would welcome my meagre Trumpet playing abilities in their monthly concerts. I fell comfortably into church life and everything was rosy. I began attending Bible study classes and my classmates were impressed with my Biblical knowledge. I performed in Christmas, Easter and Anzac Day concerts, which my mother enjoyed watching, but it was always a struggle to get my husband and father inside a church, for any reason. My husband supported my free will to choose my own religion, but always offered snide little comments whenever possible, about how silly people who believed in God were.

So after around 18 months I was not expecting anything to change my mind about being a part of the Methodist Church... until the fateful day when dear Reverend White announced his upcoming retirement. The church had two assistant pastors, Pastor Rod, who was actually the husband of the orchestra conductor, who had become one of my closest friends, and the other was a young girl, Pastor Shannon. This fact had always made me a little uncomfortable, but I had always brushed it aside, as it had never been an issue before. However, now Pastor Shannon was going to become our new full time Pastor, and all of a sudden I had to confront my feelings about women in ministry.

From all the reading I had done on the subject, I had come to believe two things: one, that roles of leadership were always, as directed in the Bible, to be performed by men; and two, that everyone I had read who disagreed with that statement, always came first from their own feelings, and then tried to use snippets of Scripture to support their view. Women in ministry in Australia was a very recent, and seen by people of my parents’ generation, rebellious, thing. And as I have mentioned, I was looking for the traditional kind of church that my parents grew up with.

This incident caused me to open my eyes and take a fresh look at my local church. I noticed for the first time that there were significantly more women than men in that building on any given Sunday. And after Rev. White left, there were several Sundays where there was not one male on the stage at all, at any point in the service. Children read the messages, lead the songs, and even came up to do “guest” sermons. Isaiah 3:12 came to mind often during this time: “As for My people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O My people! Those who lead you cause you to err, and destroy the way of your paths.”

There had been talk for a while about overhauling the whole structure of the church as well, to make it more youth-oriented. I often wondered why, if the youth felt unhappy there, they didn’t just go 20 mins down the road to one of the huge pumping COCs. There were many people who had told me they agreed with me about the “traditionalness” of the church being its main draw card, and so these talks hadn’t concerned me that much. However, with the new female pastor, each Sunday seemed to be taking the little Methodist church closer and closer to the COC that I hated. I began to feel very uncomfortable. There were times during Sunday worship, when I would look around at the scene, and wonder what God thought of it: are these people there to worship God on a Sunday? Or are they more focused on making the people more comfortable, more entertained, more likely to come back and bring friends?

And so, while still attending Sunday services at the Methodist church, I began again my search for God’s True Church.