Readers will remember Marilyn who wrote the Article recently about the upcoming Ezekiel War “Acting like Fools”. Today Marilyn shares some of her personal story as she pursued her Christian walk. Many thanks Marilyn for sharing this encouraging story with such openness and honesty.

Gibber! Gibber!

Chugley

My story is that of the intervention of a loving God

into a life that seemed devoid of hope and was going nowhere to give an eternal purpose that outweighs all present sorrows and calamities.  Born in Sydney, Australia, into a church-going Methodist home, I was a darkly unhappy child, passionately enamoured of horses but grief-stricken that I could not own my own.  One of three girls, my parents had little interest in us as people – only as appendages to their all-absorbing oneness, props to display to the world that we were a family.  We always felt that, as girls, we were supposed to be clones of my mother, liking what she liked and disapproving of that of which she disapproved.  To my father (and, dare I say, my mother), my mother was perfection personified, the template by which we were to be measured, and we fell far short.  We just never knew how to please them or meet with their approval.  I spent endless hours sobbing alone in my bedroom and grew up believing that, obviously, children were things to be despised and could bring no joy.

By the age of 10,

I was suffering from ulcerative colitis, a stress-related illness causing ulceration of the bowel and considered alarmingly unusual in a child so young.  There wasn’t and still isn’t a cure.  But though I held God responsible for my misery, He, nevertheless, loved me enough to see to it that I had friends with horses who generously gave me free access to their animals.  I gave Him no thanks and failed to see His hand.

My High School years

were spent at the Methodist Ladies’ College where I was taught (in a Church school!) evolutionary biology and geography, which did nothing to provide me with hope or purpose and I just scraped through the Leaving Certificate.  Although I had a penchant for art and drawing, I undertook a Secretarial Course out of a sense of futility and lack of interest in life in general.  At least I would be able to earn money and acquire my independence.  I hated it!

At the age of 21,

an on-again/off-again relationship drove me to hand my life over to a Saviour whose Word was not particularly relevant as I believed implicitly that science had proven that its opening chapters were not literally true and, thus, it was impossible to know which bits were.  Following my marriage to my precious, life-long friend, Max, classical singing lessons produced a passion to succeed in this field and, at the age of 30, we set off for England to pursue the dream.

But the Lord had other plans.

 Instead of continuing my training as a singer, the colitis, which had previously occurred as an acute attack at times of stress, now became chronic.  It was Max who directed our search for answers to the Lord, buying books on Christian healing for us to read and directing us to healing services.  It was through these books and services that the Lord led us both to be baptized with the Holy Spirit which awakened in us a heightened sense of evil and, soon after, prompted me to question whether David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, showing on U.K. television at the time, were the whole story.  Could the Biblical version of creation have any support at all?  As the Lord always does, once we display an interest in the truth, He will see to it that we find it.  It took very few pages of a thick tome, The Creation/Evolution Controversy, by D.L. Wysong, for the truth to burst the bubble of the evolutionary lie!  I had been duped!

The worsening level of the colitis would send us back home to Australia.  My becoming a Christian changed everything between my parents and me and another thing that came out of our being baptized with the Holy Spirit was that, once home again and growing more unwell, I was convicted of the need to apologize to my parents for not honouring them appropriately.  This caused my father to break down, bending down to kiss my hand which lay on the table and saying that he, too, was sorry.

We began attending Hills C.L.C.

(now Hillsong), then only 12 months old.  Here we would be nurtured and encouraged to hold fast to the Word of God and I would be provided with an Australia-wide network of prayer as the illness continued its grim progress over the next 10 years, culminating in a perforated bowel that took me to the point of death and placing me on life-support in hospital.  I also lost my ability to sing.  However, after 12 years, without any fanfare, the Lord moved and the colitis began to recede so that now, contrary to all medical expectations of this disease, there have now been 19 years that have been free of colitis.

When I was finally able to return to C.L.C., the Church that had once been Bible-based and Christ-centred, seemed to be shifting away from these foundations, subtly at first and now, of course, in a landslide.  It was time to move on.

The many years of suffering

have left me constantly weary, but one thing that cannot be dimmed is the shining truth of God’s Word – His love-letter to this wicked, lost world if we but heed it.  I continue to strive to be equipped to impart Biblical truth to whoever should ask.  “…..and always be ready to give a defence to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you……” (1 Peter 3:15) 

Marilyn 2021 NSW AUSTRALIA