Trevor talking to Mike in the hall.

There wasn’t a blinding flash of light, I seemed to drift into religion and to God.
As a child I always suffered terribly from guilt, whenever I did anything wrong.
It was only many years later that I could put a name to it – conscience.
Somebody once said that conscience is another name for God telling you when you have done wrong. And that made sense to me. After all, who else can tell you, deep inside, when you have done wrong?

About twenty to twenty-five years ago, before I met my wife, I used to always go to St. Margaret’s for the Christmas Eve service. I used to badger all my friends about the fact that we should all go to church on Christmas Eve. It was the only time of year I ever went to church, apart from funerals and weddings (where I only went because I was invited). But Christmas Eve I always went because I wanted to.

Then I met Lynne and she came along on my Christmas Eve visits to church. After a couple of years, it became a case of ‘Let’s go again, although it isn’t Christmas Eve.’ So, we went again in the New Year.

It was like God chipping away at me, nagging at me slowly. I had already been christened, as a child so there was a link there. My parents weren’t particularly religious although I always went to Sunday School. But I think that was more Mum and Dad getting us out of the house for a bit of piece and quiet instead of any religious beliefs.

God has given us so much with our wonderful children - a teenage son and twin daughters. It is so traditional for children to be difficult but our children have never, ever been ‘difficult’ so God has obviously blessed us here. We are bringing our children up as a Christian children, taking them to church every Sunday, and living Christian lives every day. Although them being Christian children is obviously very important to us, it is also very important to them - our son is a member of the church GAP group and plays in the church "rock band", and our daughters were devastated when our vicar announced his retirement. These are (to us) good testimony to how close our children feel to their church.

There has not been anything outstanding where I could sit back and say, “Wow! That was God acting.” But I have these feelings in house group when we are sitting there praying - I sometimes feel, during the prayers, that I am so very, very insignificant. It is almost as if I am floating up above everyone else and that I am really small and they are extremely enormous, absolutely massive.
It is a real feeling of being worthless and is totally overwhelming. It only ever happens while I am in group prayers. It is like I am looking over a huge cliff, looking down, and feeling so far away from it all. And yet (and this is the weird bit), at the same time I feel so huge as well, like I have fallen over that cliff and I am not so much floating in the space before me but that I am completely filling up the whole of that space. It is such a strange feeling but so powerful as well. This is with my eyes closed. If I open them then the feeling disappears. Although God talks to me in private prayer, these feelings are in the presence of other people when they were praying and I feel small, yet absolutely massive at the same time

Sometimes, when our vicar or others are giving a sermon, it is like the sermon is directed at me personally - whatever the sermon is about is hitting a raw nerve in my life at that particular moment; and, like the prayer experience,  I believe it is God talking to me through others.