A Gradual Awakening
Jesus Never Lets Go!
Introduction
The impetus to write this came from my son asking me in recent years about my past history, and the extreme difficulty of finding opportunities to discuss it with him; I also thought that others in my family could possibly be interested in how I have reached where I am now – the age of 81 in 2025. I even felt that, since I believe this to be a statement of Christian belief and witness, that some beyond my own family may find it of interest. I have therefore written it in such a way as to be readable by any who may come across it. Since I always express myself better in writing than verbally I thought it best to put it down in a document.
Broadly speaking I am writing it because I believe God wants me to express how the simple faith of an ordinary man can be used in a fairly dull and average human life and can be transformed by God. It can be made into something beautiful for Him, not by one’s own efforts but by allowing His Spirit to work within us.
I am a nobody to humanity, but in God’s economy there is no such thing – I am valued by Him equally with every other human being. I believe first and foremost in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Yahweh to Jews, often just expressed as Lord in small capitals (Hebrew Adonai[1]) by Christians. He is all of the following:
He is our Father God who created the world and everything in it (see Psalm 24); His Son Yeshua[2] (Jesus); together with the Holy Spirit (Ruach[3], Hebrew for Breath), these three Persons form the Godhead whom Christians worship.
I describe myself as a Christian Footsoldier, one who works in God’s Army in the world, not as any kind of leader other than (I hope and pray) by example – despite making many mistakes along the way; it is within that role that I write this to witness to Who God is and what He has done and is doing in my life, and in the same way, what He can do in yours if you allow Him. My prayer is that you do just that; even if you have attended Church all your life, as I have, there is almost certainly much more that God wants to do in you, as He is still doing in me even though I am now in the evening of my life.
If you are not a believer, maybe have never even been to church, I dare to suggest that you may like to talk to a Christian friend and see what Jesus may have to offer you. May I encourage you to approach this with a completely open mind: there is no pressure, but you may be surprised by what you discover.
May God bless you as you read, even as He has blessed me as I have written this.
Peter Sebborn
Christian.Footsoldier@gmail.com
My Dad was born in 1897 in Yorkshire, the son of a village schoolmaster; he was 17 in 1914 when the First World War started, and like many young men at that time he lied about his age so that he could join up and he enlisted in the Durham Light Infantry. Sadly I have no access to his war record, as the warehouse in London containing these records was hit by an incendiary bomb in 1940, during World War 2. All I know is that he rose through the ranks from Private to 2nd Lieutenant during the course of the war.
In 1918 when the war finished he joined the Civil Service and worked on District Audit, covering what was then the County of Middlesex; his Head Office was in Vauxhall Bridge Road in Central London, but he spent about half the year travelling around Government Offices across Middlesex.
I was born in Worcester in 1944; my Dad was a Civil Servant who had worked in Central London but at the outbreak of World War 2, for safety reasons Dad’s Department was moved to Worcester; my Mum was a legal secretary, highly qualified in that profession – she took shorthand at 140 words per minute (wpm) and could type at 70 wpm. The move to Worcester had serious financial consequences for my parents; Dad was reasonably well paid; my parents married in 1937 and bought a house in Ilford in Essex, but when he was moved they had to sell the house. With a war on this meant that house prices plummeted and they received only a minimal price; they were never again able to buy and had to live in rented property for the rest of their lives.
After the war as life began to return to normal, late in 1947 my Dad was moved back to London; I was then 3½, and we lived in the ground-floor flat of a rented Edwardian terraced house in Hampstead, so I was living there during the winter of 1947 in which snow fell continuously for nearly two months; the River Thames froze over for the first time in 200 years and people skated along it! There is still debate about whether 1947/48 or 1962/63 was worse, but having endured both I would simply say that they were both horrible! In the early 1960s I was a student in London, and lived permanently with Central Heating – a totally new experience; this made life rather more tolerable.
When I was young, in the school holidays Dad would sometimes take me with him for the day to lovely places like Sunbury-on-Thames; while he went to work I was left to my own devices for the working day (we met for lunch and ate our sandwiches by the river), and I had a school friend who lived a short walk from my house so he sometimes came too. For a London boy it felt very Swallows and Amazons!
For a while my Mum did a secretarial job in the administrative office of the theatrical Union. NATKE (The National Association of Theatrical and Kine Employees), a trade union for workers in the cinema and stage industry (which changed its name in 1970 to NATTKE to include Television). In this work she would occasionally accompany her boss on trips to Shepperton and Elstree studios, and came back with some fascinating photos of stars of stage and screen. Her office was next door to a radio and TV shop, which I found much more interesting! In that job she also operated the firm’s manual telephone exchange (PBX, or Private Branch Exchange [4]), the original office telephone switchboard system operated by plugging in individual cables to connect callers to internal extensions – there were very few automatic dialled switching systems in the offices of small firms in the 1950s. if you can’t imagine such a device you can try to see some old war films in which they were used.
During 1953, the year of Elizabeth II’s Coronation, Her Majesty went on many tours of her Realm; one of these took her down the main shopping street nearest my Primary School; I was 9 at the time, and with the rest of my school took great pleasure in lining the route waving our tiny Union Jacks to greet her as she was driven past.
I remained an only child, having been born when my Mum was 42 and my Dad 47; they married in1937, but when the War started they felt they should not start a family until it was over; clearly they had no concept of how long it would last. I was conceived in 1943, as they felt they could wait no longer. In the event my Mum had terrible health after I was born; she had a miscarriage a year or so later, and was then told she could never have any more children; this was a very severe psychological blow, from which she never completely recovered. Her physical health also suffered; she was hospitalised several times for internal operations, and in the early 1950s had a total hysterectomy. During these sessions I stayed with my Aunt and Uncle in Stanmore, and grew very close to my cousins Pauline (4 years my senior) and Bob (4 years my junior). Pauline and I are still close, although we now live 150 miles apart; she is now widowed, but her daughter is my Goddaughter, and my wife and I try to meet with them each summer.
My Dad bought his first car in 1952 when I was 8 yars old; having your own car was a relative rarity for an ordinary person in those days and I was very proud of it. OK, it was a 20-year-old Morris 8, but it was our own car! Walking home from school one day one of my friends asked me, “Can you drive it?” Wanting to be the big fella I said, “I could but my Dad won’t let me!” unbeknownst to me Dad overheard this remark (the sort of thing you really don’t want a parent to hear) and he grinned as he reminded me of it some time later!
I was not healthy as a child; we lived in a very damp Edwardian house built without a DPC. Despite our proximity to Hampstead Heath, we lived within about a quarter of a mile of Finchley Road and one or two other major roads and so the traffic fumes were quite unpleasant; this was after all still inner London. As a result I had very frequent bouts of bronchitis as a child and thus missed quite a lot of my Primary School education. I was determined to succeed however, and always managed to catch up the necessary work, resulting in excellent results at 11-Plus. When I went to Secondary School however, I spent all of term-time living in the Sussex countryside (a much more healthy environment), and a year later we moved from London to Crawley so I was in the Sussex air all year, this finally put paid to my bronchitis; I was much more healthy after that.
From when I was a fairly young child my Dad took me to the local Parish church each week and at the age of 7 I joined the church choir. Dad was a good solid Christian (and also had a good Bass voice); my Mum was a believer and attended church when she was able, but in those days it was normal for the wife to stay at home in the kitchen: Dad and I always had a roast dinner prepared for us when we got back from church!
This was my first introduction to the Christian Faith; I would sit and hear the Bible read, and I enjoyed singing the hymns and psalms. I learnt to sing pointed psalms and canticles[5], with occasional Anthems on special Sundays. Typically these were works written between the 17th and 19th Centuries. Worship was very formal, but I always enjoyed going to church and singing, and quite a lot of Christian teaching rubbed off along the way. At that time I never understood that one could have a personal relationship with a loving God; that was to come much later. I learnt about heaven and hell and that I was supposed to do the right thing or else, but that was about as far as it went.
The Headmaster of my State Primary School happened to be a good Christian, and in his morning Assemblies he would always give a good Christian talk, very effectively aimed at Primary-age children. It was in one of these Assemblies in Advent that I first heard about the Second Coming of Jesus, probably at about the age of ten. The entire school sat totally spellbound, and as we walked back to our classrooms afterwards my friend turned to me and said, “Gosh! I’ll be looking up at the sky from now on, won’t you Peter?” “Yes!” I agreed enthusiastically; then somehow we just carried on with our normal life and our Maths and English lessons. But the message went home, and I have never forgotten it. This may explain why today I tend to place a greater personal enphasis during Advent on the Return of Jesus and what it will mean to us all, than on the Christmas story which precedes it by two or more millennia.
Dad was a moderately competent amateur conjuror, and at my birthday parties he would entertain us with some simple conjuring tricks; he had a pack of marked cards such that one could read the face value from the back of each card. He also had a red-green colour-changing handkerchief, and various other very simple tricks; any reasonably intelligent adult could see how these worked, but for young children it was pure magic and a great delight.
My parents would often take me for walks and a picnic on Hampstead Heath, which was about a 15-minute walk from home; living as we did in Inner London this was a wonderful release. Later when I went to University my hostel was on Finchley Road, about 500 yards from where I had lived as a child; I would frequently visit the Heath and other favourite childhood haunts. In the meantime the area had moved a bit up-market, and my childhood corner fish and chip shop was still there, but by then had become a dine-in restaurant.
Dad was a fairly competent pianist, and I also started learning the piano while at Primary School; in church I was totally fascinated by the organ, both musically and mechanically. Like so many boys through the ages I was always asking my parents how things worked, and church organs were a real challenge! No surprise then that I learnt to play one as soon as I was able to reach the pedals, in my teens.
At the age of 11 I took my 11-Plus and passed with flying colours. There were 37,000 children in London who took the 11-Plus that year, and the 100 children with the highest marks were selected for an opportunity to compete for a free place at Christ’s Hospital (CH). Of these 100, ten of us (out of the original 37,000) were offered places for entry into what would today be called Year 7. In my Headmaster’s 20 years at the school only two of us ever achieved this success, the other one was my friend from down the road who had been my companion when Dad took us to places like Sunbury.
CH is a Christian charity Public School founded in London by King Edward VI in 1553, with the objective of taking in poor children from the streets of London, housing them and educating them. It was originally located in Newgate Street in the City of London, but in 1902 it moved to a 1200-acre former dairy farm site near Horsham in West Sussex.
I attended this school from 1955 to 1962, gaining in that time the usual crop of ‘O’ levels, ‘A’ levels and ‘S’ levels, and eventually gaining a place at King’s College London.
CH is a fee-paying school, but unlike most Public schools the fees are means-tested (it is a Charity Foundation); in 1960 (when I was 16) my father sadly died of cancer and my mother was left in very poor circumstances, so from that point I did not have to pay fees – I had my final two years there completely free.
In 1956 when I was 12 we moved to what had become the New Town of Crawley in Sussex; we were living in a very damp house in Hampstead; this was diagnosed as the major cause of my constant bouts of bronchitis as a child, and at that time Crawley industry were recruiting people from the post-war London overspill with the promise of a rented house to go with each job: my parents viewed this as the answer to my health issues. It was an ideal arrangement; it was not a tied house but a free tenancy, so having qualified and acquired the house one was free to go anywhere else in the town. This was a great blessing as my Mum had been commuting by train daily from London to Crawley to do a day’s work as a Secretary, at the end of which she was too exhausted to do anything but go to bed. Dad more or less ran the household during this time, and he was on his own as I was at boarding school.
After we moved into our new house Mum was hospitalised with High Blood Pressure and the Doctor told her she must give up the job or it would kill her. She felt very guilty about this; she said “I can’t, I’ve only just got the house!” The GP said, ”If you want to go on living for your husband and your son, you’ll stop work!” So she did.
I mostly enjoyed my time in Crawley; our brand new semi-detached house in the village of Ifield was literally on the edge of the countryside and I could cycle from home either into town or to the various nearby villages. Incidentally I give full marks to the architects of that town; we had one smokeless fuel fire in the lounge, behind which was a ventilation system which drew in cold air at floor level, heated it from the lounge fire, then expelled warm air by convection into the dining room, controlled by a hit-and-miss vent at thigh level. this was also the extraction route for the central chimney, the heat from which thereby passed between the two largest bedrooms – a very primitive but highly efficient form of central heating.
We were members of the Parish Church of St Margaret’s, a wonderfully historic 13th Century building, which had replaced an old wooden building believed to have been from the 10th or 11th Centuries. The 11th Century village of Ifield pre-dated the town of Crawley, of which it later became a Neighbourhood (a distinct section of the town) when the New Town was built after the War; in fact Ifield was mentioned in the Domesday Book. When I learnt to play the organ I would also sometimes play at Ifield Church in my school holidays.
Sadly my Dad contracted prostate cancer and died at the age of 63, when I was only 16. Being at boarding school I never really got to know him properly when I was young, and as I write this I find I am still missing him very much, despite the passage of time.
I mentioned that CH is a Christian school, and daily attendance at Chapel services was compulsory; however on Wednesday evenings during Lent we also had midweek Voluntary Services – these were rather more meditative. It was during one of these Wednesday evenings at the age of 14, shortly after I was confirmed, that I was first conscious of God speaking to me personally. I cannot remember His exact words, but it was along the lines of, “I’m real, I’m here, and I’ve got plans for your life.” I think this event was the beginning of an understanding which took many years to come to fruition, namely that far from being an impersonal Being in the sky, God actually wants to be involved in every detail of our lives; He created us out of love, and He goes on loving us for the rest of our lives here on earth and through eternity. He wants to have that personal Father/child relationship with us every moment of our lives; He wants to converse with us, and conversation is a dialogue and not a monologue; He wants us to hear Him as well as talk to Him.
You may think of God the Father as remote and inaccessible; such influences as childhood experiences of Sunday School could easily be largely responsible for this, especially among my generation – my Sunday School teaching (in the 1950s) was extremely formal, and we were not expected to interact, only to listen, except when we prayed – this was Talking to God – I was never taught to Listen to God – and I am sure that my experience of this was not unique.
At the age of 14 this Word from God really did not mean anything specific, so I filed it away in the memory banks to be dealt with I knew not when. I got on with my school work, and with singing in the choir and learning to play piano and organ. We had a magnificent 5-manual organ in the chapel, built by the same company who had built the organ in Liverpool Cathdral. That was a real joy to play!
It was also during my time at CH that I first went camping, with the school CCF (Combined Cadet Force). I thoroughly enjoyed camping holidays (despite the somewhat indifferent British weather)! When I married Viv we camped together for years, first as a couple and later with our 3 children and two dogs, eventually graduating to a caravan, and then to a motorhome when our children left home and there were just two of us. By this time all the children had got the camping bug, and now all in their 40s they still camp regularly with their own children.
I quite enjoyed my time in the School CCF; we would meet every Friday afternoon, and in that period (not such a very long time after the Second World War) we would train to be soldiers, so that we would be ready for our compulsory 2-years National Service in one of the armed forces from the age of 18. It was a great relief to me when National Service was abolished in 1960, 2 years before I would have been due for call-up, so unlike many young men and women not that much older than me I was able to pursue a normal course of academic study straight from school.
As a Private in the CCF I qualified as a First Class Shot on Enfield 303 rifles, which was the nearest I ever got to being a real soldier. As soon as I could I joined the Royal Signals Section, which meant I escaped a lot of square-bashing the other kids had to do and instead laid communication cables along the school’s extensive playing fields to set up field telephones. We also took 2-way radios with us on regular exercises and on camping trips. Remember that this was decades before the invention of mobile phones, so for a techie like myself it was very exciting!
Over the years I was promoted to Sergeant; I also learnt Morse Code to 15 wpm, which was the highest badge available in the CCF at that time. The teacher who was a great influencer to me was Mr Kirby (known as Uncle to many); he taught chemistry, and in addition to his Royal Signals background he was also a great amateur radio “ham” who spent much of his spare time communicating by both voice and Morse Code to many schools across the UK. He was a prolific bee-keeper and made both honey and mead in profusion! He never married and spent his entire life in the school even into retirement. We visited the school some 30 or 40 years after I left, and we found him in his garden in a deck chair, by then over 90. I was delighted when he actually remembered me and called me by name!
Kirby had “rescued” a number of 2-wheeled carts from the Normandy Beaches; these were known as KirbyCarts and were used to carry our kit (clothing, tents, radios etc.) on camping trips. We were delivered by 3-ton truck on site (no rules then about people, even children, not travelling in the back of an open but canvas-covered truck), each group of two or three issued with a KirbyCart for our stuff and left to pitch camp and get on with the week’s exercises (under adult supervision of course).
Another feature of the Signals Section was that instead of having to take part and run in the Annual Inter-House Steeplechase (I could never run – my Housemaster once told my parents that I “ran like a ruddy carthorse!”) – a 5-mile cross-country course – I would be part of a team of commentators dotted along the course with radios reporting back to a loudspeaker-mounted receiver back at base as to which houses were in the lead – or not!
All of this was in the 1950s; the War had only been finished for a few years and there were several Conscientious Objectors; at first they had no choice but to join in, but around 1957 or 1958 this was accepted as genuine and they were excused from what was seen as encouraging military service. The school set up a Public Service Group for them; they would occupy their Friday afternoons in such activities as gardening for the staff houses – a win-win arrangement.
For a short time I even considered a career in the Army, but I think it was really only a fad and I soon settled back into a more normal way of life.
At 18 I left school and went to London University to read Physics and Mathematics at Kings College. This is also a Christian foundation with its own Theology Department to train people for the Anglican Priesthood; it is built into its Charter that every student of any Faculty must be “given the opportunity” to study Theology if they so wished; in practice this was an hour a week lecture at 9am on a Monday morning for our 3-year stay, leading to an AKC (Associate of Kings College) Diploma. This is also available as a full-time non-graduate Diploma course for theological students training for the Ministry but who were not academically qualified to enter a degree-level course.
I also joined the University OTC (Officer Training Corps), in which all students were dignified with the title of Officer Cadet (it sounded better than Private) which was a kind of advanced version of the CCF; we were being trained to enter the services (should we so wish) as Officers rather than as Privates. I suppose the major difference was that we were all over 18 so leisure time at summer camp included visits to pubs. One summer we were in Blandford Forum in Dorset, an area known for its Cider; we had a Glaswegian in our group who fancied himself as a “hard man”, and when the pub landlord said he should really only drink his cider in halves (I forget the exact ABV, but it was potent), said something like “Och no, gimme a pint!”, with predictable results – he had to be helped back to camp!
While I was at University I spent a lot of my leisure time with various musical activities; I was an assistant organist at the college, and at the other end of the culture scale I took part in the college’s annual Gilbert and Sullivan performances. I was also living in the hostel section of New College (now a part of the Open University), which was then a Congregationalist Theological College; this was just prior to the merger between the Congregational Church and the Presbyterian Church, a merger which resulted in the formation of the United Reformed Church; there was a college Society discussing this, known as Presby-Cong Soc. During this period I was occasionally called on to lead the 15-minute daily Morning Prayer session or play the piano for it, which was interesting – my first experience of non-Anglican worship. Also conversations over dinner were quite often discussions regarding the latest lectures on doctrine or ministry that the theologs had endured that day – between that and my AKC studies I learnt a lot!
In the summer of 1964 a group of 17 of us from New College (mostly theological students, with a few hostelmen like myself) went on a 5-week coach and camping tour of Europe; we bought (for £100!) a 1947 bus that had been retired from public service in Devon and spent several weeks kitting it out for our needs; we drove through France to Italy as far as Rome (we had originally planned to go as far as Naples but time did not permit), then back through Switzerland, Germany and Belgium. We had intended to cross the Adriatic to Faro but time plus political uncertainties forced us to abandon this part of the trip.
We managed to visit some of the best sites in Rome, including the Colosseum and St Peter’s Basilica; we also took in Venice and managed a trip in a gondola. That week also boasts my personal unique achievement of swimming in the sea before breakfast – but it was after all in the Adriatic with temperatures the UK would have thought of as very passable for noon on a hot summer’s day! After Italy we climbed the St Gotthard Pass into Switzerland, experiencing a temperature drop from nearly 40oC to about 2o or 3o; since we had left Italy that morning in shorts and T-shirts this came as something of a shock to the system! A day or two of American-style flash touring took us through Switzerland into Germany; there we visited the magnificent cathedral in Cologne, and the church in Speyer which had been the start of the Protestant Reformation; this began with the Protestation at Speyer in 1529, when the nobility protested against the Edict of Worms which banned Martin Luther's writings. The Diet of Speyer temporarily suspended the Edict of Worms, allowing each ruler to choose whether to enforce it – a recipe for anarchy one would suppose. As is so often the case, the persecution here helped the Protestant Church to flourish and spread.
We finished our holiday by passing through Belgium on our way back to the ferry at Calais, and we finally sold our coach for the £100 we had paid for it. An unforgettable 5 weeks which had cost us a net total of £35 per person (around £600 in today’s money); this had included all the costs associated with the bus (incluing ferry charges and fuel), plus all our camping gear and site fees, together with food and entertainment. Furthermore we all managed it out of our Student Grants (not crippling loans then) – I had no private resource (Mum was still a relative pauper so I got a full Grant covering both tuition and maintenance).
I should really just like to add here that those people who think Christians are boring and do not get any fun out of life, really do not understand God; to put that into context, we recently watched an episode of the BBC’s Songs of Praise which focussed on God’s Gift of laughter – one contributor even said, “When I’m joyful, God walks in, a delightful thought. He created us to worship Him, which in all its fullness includes fun and enjoyment of life; the Puritan ethic is just so distant from reality. If you look at the Jesus you see in the Gospels you will see that He really quite enjoyed parties, in addition to all the highly serious stuff which is so important to our lives. There is nowadays a genuine realisation that laughter is a Gift from God.
Another incident which I recall was when a Christian group of us at King’s had an away weekend in Somerset; the college Chaplain had bought a small and isolated (off-grid) cottage, and I think about a dozen of us went, leaving London in 3 or 4 cars at teatime on the Friday. A tricky journey: we arrived late at night – no GPS or satnav in the 60s – and my navigator fell asleep about an hour before the end. Plus it was foggy. Suddenly I stopped; I could see nothing around me, the headlights simply bounced back off the fog; I got out of the car to see if I could see a junction or anything helpful. I found that we had stopped a few feet short of the edge of a quarry and had been in danger of dropping in! We turned round and drove slowly back until we found a road sign, and then proceeded with extreme caution for the rest of the way. By this time the navigator was fully awake and focussing on the map! My only response to all that was – “Thank you Lord!”
One of my last projects at University was some work on DNA spectroscopy, following in the footsteps of Watson and Crick. To support this work my partner and I persuaded the Biophysics Department to buy us a camera which could record the results of the work, taking colour photographs through a high powered optical microscope. Colour photography was a relatively new art form in the 1960s, so we first did a sub-project to evaluate the camera; we then successfully showed that the camera was capable of achieving the results needed by the Department.
On leaving Uni I abandoned my Physics training and started work as a Programmer with Elliott Automation, a computer manufacturer; a year later I moved to ICT, later to become ICL, a somewhat larger computer manufacturer. I stayed with them for around 4 years and then moved to Guinness, that well-known brewer of the Black Stuff. My career there offered a growth path which made it unnecessary to consider changing jobs for a further 15 years, and while at Guinness I also gained an MBCS qualification.
In 1974 my boss decided that as a progressive Company we needed to know about database software, and that the place to do our research was the USA since their business practices were far ahead of the UK in this field at that time. My boss arranged with the NCC (National Computing Centre) to research which companies were worth visiting in New York, the mid-West and California, and I then became part of a team of four (two from the NCC and a fourth from another UK commercial organisation), sent to the USA for three weeks to visit a number of Companies. We designed a questionnaire to tout around our pre-arranged contacts and wrote a report afterwards containing our findings. Our recommendations were never actually followed by Guinness since the implementation cost would have been too high for us, but we were able to fully justify this position and pursue different techniques instead.
Being a three-week trip it also included two weekends, so in the first we visited Niagara Falls, and in the second we walked along some of the rim of the Grand Canyon. Actually the flight to Grand Canyon airport was quite interesting; of our party my name was last alphabetically and there was only room for three people on the planned flight for this leg (checked at every point where we stopped along the way right from London), so I ended up rearranging my flight from Las Vegas onto another airline – Scenic Airways – in a 10-seater Cessna; the pilot flew along the rim of the Canyon, and changed the banking of the plane along the way so that those on each side could get a decent view! I’m really pleased that I missed my original flight!
During 1975 my boss decided that we needed to know about PCs or microcomputers as they were usually called then; this was some while before such devices became commonplace, even for business use. Actually my favourite quote on this topic was from a senior manager in IBM (and I have no idea of the date of this one), who reputedly said that computers [very large ones] were never going to be very useful, he doubted if the world would ever need more than about 10 of them in total (!).
My task was to examine the leading Manufactuers of microcomputers in the field and make a recommendation as to which we should adopt as a standard for the Company. As a result of this study I recommended the IBM PC, which along with any number of third-party compatibles later became an international standard, along with various Apple machines. These two standards have been in competition ever since.
- o O o -
When not working, in the early1970s I had attended the local Anglican church of All Saints in Harpenden, where I joined the choir as a Bass. There in that choir I met Viv, who was an Alto, and we married in 1975. We had a West Indian organist and choirmaster, who played and sang with gusto; I always said you could hear the non-existent steel combo behind the organ seat! It was a strange building though; ultra-modern and minimalist (built in the early 1960s and consecrated in 1965), with the most uncomfortable pews I have ever sat in! The choir was on duty at most services, and Holy Week and Easter were a particular marathon; many devout Christians would attend the daily Holy Week Evening services, then we had a Sung Communion on Maundy Thursday followed by the stripping of the Altar and an All-night Vigil into Good Friday (Viv and I usually stayed for an hour or so). We then had a short service on Good Friday Morning, followed by all the Harpenden churches together walking along the High Street in a Procession of Witness, finishing with soup and rolls at the Parish Church of St Nicholas. We were then free for 36 hours, meeting again for the most wonderful service of the year – a midnight Communion on Holy Saturday, starting with the church in darkness we passed lighted candles around the congregation, until at the stroke of midnight we celebrated our Risen Lord as all the lights came on and the organist played a fanfare, leading into the First Communion of Easter. This was followed at 9.15am by the Easter Celebration Eucharist. Following this marvellous week and its wonderful climax, many of us then took a week’s holiday from our secular work!
Clearly I had always been a church-goer, but rather as what I have since referred to as a pew-filler than as a committed Christian; I enjoyed church life, especially in the choir, but it was really in effect a Sunday morning affair only, except at festivals. I was 35 before I understood what it meant to have a personal relationship with God.
Viv and I planned our own life much as we wanted to; for our first Christmas together we had bought each other a Siamese cat (two from the same litter) – they provided us with endless entertainment, and we were never short of friends to feed them when we went on holiday. They were a blue point boy (Viv’s) and a seal point girl (mine) and she was definitely the boss – she said, so he acted. He found that if we put food down (in two separate bowls) that if he wanted any he had better get in there quick or she would have his as well! Whenever the door bell rang she told him, “We don’t do people – upstairs now!” which he duly obeyed.
She died of a liver tumour at the age of 12, but he lived to a few months short of 20; after she had gone he found a new freedom. Rather than running upstairs away from visitors he found that he liked them; he would drape himself around Viv’s neck while she answered the front door (quite upsetting for the visitor if it was someone from the Gas Board or perhaps a Jehovah’s Witness)!
Our eldest daughter had decided, I think when she was about 10, that she wanted a dog. I had a friend at work who popped into my office one day and sat down, then asked me about the A4 poster I had on the wall which simply said “Jesus loves you”. We chatted about what this might mean; he said his wife was a Christian but it had never done anything for him. We chatted; our families had tea together one day and we ended up going camping with them. They had a dog, and our daughter was hooked; after we got home she went round the house towing a toy dog on a string, so we gave in (I teased her about it recently and she remembered the incident clearly, albeit 30-odd years later). My friend was also hooked into the Christian life, and subsequently got baptised. Never think that the simple things don’t count – God can use anything, even in this case a simple poster.
So we got a dog; our elderly Siamese, who had very little fur, discovered that here was a nice warm creature to snuggle up to on a cold day. The dog seemed a bit nonplussed at first – cats weren’t supposed to do this – but eventually he took it in his stride.
We also thought a second dog would be a good thing as company for the first while we were both out at work, but we had not realised that when we were out the new dog suffered from severe separation anxiety – she chewed everything in sight, including the vinyl floor covering in the utility room and even her own dog bed! She also went round the garden asiduously digging up all the bones the other dog had buried over the years, much to his disgust!
We both had elderly parents who obviously took up some of our time, but beyond that and our work commitments we just did things more or less as we wished within our limited resources, we did not take foreign holidays but always went camping in the UK.
One of our favourite holiday destinations was the area around Hereford and the Malvern Hills; I would occasionally drive the family with our dogs to the Northern end of the range, then drop them and drive to the Southern end at the British Camp. We would start walking from our respective locations and meet in the middle, then all walk down to rejoin the car at the end, after partaking of a rather fine fry-up at a mobile café strategically located a few yards from the Southern tip of the hills, emitting an enticing smell as we approached!
We always went on camping holidays, but when there were just the two of us before the children arrived, you could almost guarantee the weather – wet! The major exception to this was in the glorious summer of 1976, when we had a wonderful fortnight in Cornwall; I believe that year it did not rain at all from about May to September (whereupon it rained almost non-stop for nearly 2 years). This dry weather brought some challenges, however; firstly the ground was so hard we had trouble banging tent pegs in, dogged persistence was needed. In temperatures mostly in the 30s we could not keep milk or butter fresh, since we had no electricity or gas; we would put our dairy items into a cool box, with ice packs frozen the night before in a central facility, and so on.
On the plus side we had some lovely beach weather, swimming in various coves; we visited the Minack Theatre, which looked just as if we were in Greece. Then there was the Causeway walk to St Michael’s Mount, and other narvellous events.
In 1979, still before our children arrived, we went to Snowdonia; we went to a rough campsite with no available hot water other than what we heated on our stove, and this was too much like effort so we washed in cold water; this was when I decided to grow a beard!
Day 1 was marvellous; blue sky, warm sunshine, and we were in Wales so this was a real bonus. We decided to climb Snowdon in case the weather should not last. We arrived at the top, sat and ate our lunch with a beautiful vista, and had a thoroughly enjoyable day.
On Day 2 we decided to try Moel Siabod instead. We had left our start point by only a short distance when the sky descended and we found ourselves walking through mist and drizzle. We gave up the attempt and went back to camp. This was less than a mile but we had to use map and compass to find our way back – no GPS then!
As the day progressed the rain became heavier, until we were sitting in our tent eating our evening meal as the wind blew the rain through the fibres of our canvas tent. Again, in the 1970s tents were not made of modern waterproof materials, we had to rely on our tent-pitching skills to pull the fabric tight enough to make it waterproof. I had been camping since childhood and was actually quite good at this, but we were no match for the wind that night; around 9pm we abandoned camp and packed everything as quickly as we could into the car and drove back home to Harpenden, arriving in the early hours of the following morning. Just to round off the holiday disaster properly, driving down the main road about a mile from home at around 2am, a cat ran across the road in front of us; it turned back at the last second and ran straight under our wheels. It was wearing a collar with a phone number, so the following morning we had to grovel to the owner and explain what had happened. Actually she was very understanding, which helped.
That day was beautiful, so we hung all our wet gear out in the garden to dry, and decided that the following day we should go in the opposite direction.
We duly set off for Canterbury; we set up camp, had a meal, when what do you think happened? The rain started again! We decided to find a pub and at least go and enjoy a quiet pint.
At that point we said, “Do you think God is trying to tell us something?”
We had been nominal Christians as far back as either of us could remember; we went to church each week, put money into the collection, sang in the choir and generally became involved in church life, but we had never reached the point of a personal relationship with God. We had seen that some others seemed to have one but never understood how we were supposed to achieve this.
Anyway we sat in a pub car park that night in the pouring rain and prayed a totally unconventional prayer of commitment: “Lord, we don’t know what you’re saying or what you want, but whatever it is, we’ll do it. Amen!”
The following day was a Sunday so we went to church in Canterbury Cathedral, in itself a wonderful experience, and that morning it seemed that every word of the sermon was directed straight at us. We stayed in Canterbury for a few more days as tourists in very tolerable weather, and felt very calm, not quite sure what we had done or what was to happen next.
When we went back to our home church one or two people asked us what had happened, they noticed that there was something about us that was different. One person said he had a group of people meeting informally at his house every Friday evening, and would we like to join them? So this was our first experience of a House Group.
We were soon to learn that the real active life of the church took place in these House Groups and perhaps not so much, as we had previously supposed, just by attending a church service on a Sunday morning. In the House Group people talked about their joys and their challenges and we would read the Bible and pray for each other, then when anyone in the group had any particular practical needs the group would work together and help as needed.
Although Viv and I were both what some would call Cradle Christians, brought up in the faith from childhood, we believe that our life as true Christians dates from this holiday in Canterbury in the summer of 1979, when we were both in our 30s.
This new phase of life at our church coincided with two Lay Ministers starting a weekly Family Service, so I joined with them to form a small leadership team for these 25 to 30 minute services; I would take a turn each week in leading, preaching and playing the piano. This new ministry filled a need for a small number of young families for whom the main 70 to 80 minute service was something of a stretch; these were largely unchurched people who were drawn in by the low-key informal and friendly nature of the atmosphere.
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In the 1980s God blessed us with three children, two girls and a boy. All three went to St George’s School, a Christian School about a 10-minute walk from home. They were all Confirmed in the Church of England during their time at St George’s; they all did well at school and followed this with University. All are now committed Christians and are a great blessing to us. Between them they have given us five grandchildren, and our family are very close, both geographically and emotionally.
While our children were still young enough to come on holiday with us we went camping every year; everyone loved the primitive side of camping; it was hard work, especially for Viv who seemed to have as much work to do on holiday (if not more) than at home, but being outdoors all day was great fun. Actually after the children came along we moved up to a caravan – two of us were happy enough in a tent, but with babies in nappies we felt this was a step too far – and I mean terry-towelling nappies in those days that had to be laundered, not modern disposables! It was an essential feature of any campsite where we stayed that it should be within striking distance of a launderette!
The children grew, and we also acquired two dogs along the way; everyone thoroughly enjoyed camping. We went to many different UK locations, but rarely took the caravan abroad. However I remember one particularly scary trip when we arrived at our destination in France late at night after a delayed ferry trip, so having to find our route to our campsite in the dark – along narrow unlit rural roads, without kerbs, driving on what to me was the wrong side of the road, suddenly seeing a huge farm vehicle approaching us from the front: headlights blazing and travelling uncomfortably fast; I pulled onto the grass verge and waited until it had gone past! It was one of those “Please Lord don’t let that happen to us again!” moments!
The last family holiday we took together was when we realised that we would soon go our separate ways, and the children had never been to where Mum was born and brought up, namely Northern Ireland. We had a week in Belfast, Viv’s home town, then a week on the Antrim Coast at Cushendall, where she had spent many childhood holidays with the family of one of her school-friends.
Viv is the daughter of Ulster Protestents and was born and brought up in Belfast, but she left there in 1965 to go to Canbridge University. After Uni and a year doing a PGCE in London to qualify as a teacher, she stayed in London; she taught Classics in Inner London from 1969 to 1980. She left in the Summer of 1980 simply because she wanted a change, but almost immediately fell pregnant and our eldest daughter was born in June 1981. I suspect this was not what she had in mind when she talked about a change! Two further children quickly followed: we had three within less than three years.
Having three children so close together was not ideal in many ways and Viv found this time quite difficult. There were also other pressures; Viv’s father had a heart condition and her parents were still living in Belfast, so we wanted them closer to us in case of any emergency. We arranged to move them from their terraced house in Belfast to a similar house in Luton, which was fairly successful for a while. One small problem though – my Mum was living in St Albans, Viv’s parents in Luton, and Harpenden is halfway between the two, so every Saturday morning we would each drive to our respective parents and mow their lawns!
As part of that move from Belfast we helped Viv’s parents pack up their effects in their house, and we discovered in the back of one of the wardrobes a mid-19th century American striking clock which was a family heirloom. Apparently they took it off the wall when Viv arrived so that it would not wake the baby, and sadly it never again saw the light of day.
I had always been fascinated by mechanical devices in general and clocks in particular, so it seemed natural for me to undertake its refurbishment. Antique clocks were a totally new venture for me so I started learning about the topic, even buying books on it. I repaired one or two parts (bringing some old Meccano items back into service) and bought one or two more, and finished up with a fully working striking clock which has graced our hallway ever since.
By now I had the bit between my teeth, as it were, and decided that what I really wanted was a longcase (grandfather) clock. The only problem was that antique longcase clocks were selling for 4- and 5-figure prices and were way beyond my means. I simply put the subject in abeyance pending (I hoped) future consideration at a later date.
One day I chanced to glance in the window of an antique clock shop in St Albans and I saw an 18th Century clock movement – just the movement – no dial, no hands, no case, weights or pendulum (Viv’s description is, “No, it was a heap of junk!”), so I saw this as the seed of a new fun project. They only wanted £100 for the movement so I took the plunge!
Again I bought some components and made one or two from odd items I had in my garage at home, but I was still short of a case. It just so happened that a local antique shop in Redbourn (about 10 minutes from home) had for sale an empty clock case of near enough the right period. We put down the seats on one side of our Citroen Visa and put the clock case along the front and back seat and into the boot, and Viv held on tight to it while we drove home. I then bought weights, cord, pendulum, dial, chapter ring (the bit with the numbers on), hands and bell, and set about the task of stripping and thoroughly cleaning the movement, followed by the assembly and adjustment of my pride and joy. Needless to say this task lasted for several months.
If you are ever tempted to believe that God does not take an active role in your fun and hobby times, I cannot agree. Along with many other Christians I believe that very often what we term coincidences are better thought of as God-incidences, and this was certainly one of those times – He knew I could not afford a clock, so He steered me to the Clock shop in St Albans and later to the Antique shop in Redbourn, none of which I recognised at the time as bring from God; it was only on later reflection that I became aware that it had to be. As with the hall clock, I have also had a fully working grandfather clock in my living room (with occasional cleaning and servicing) for the last 50 years, and now in 2025 God has turned it into a parable – but more of that later. We always have to remember that God is outside of time, and 50 years to me may be most of a lifetime, but to God it is but the twinkling of an eye.
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One year in the late 1970s we went on a Narrow-boat holiday to Cheshire with some friends; they were fanatical boat people, we were fanatical campers, so we said we’d go with them one year if they would come with us the next. The only problem was that while we were on the boat we got a message. Again no mobile phones, but our parents knew that we were going to the Anderton Boat Lift in Cheshire at some point. When we arrived there we found a piece of A4 paper sttached to the structure saying “Message for Sebborn”. This was to phone home as soon as possible. God’s hand again – against all the odds, we saw the message.
It turned out that Viv’s Dad had been taken ill and admitted to hospital, and could we possibly come home. In the event he died before we could reach home – so much for being close by for energencies! We were in the middle of nowhere in Cheshire, on a Sunday, with no car, having to find our way home as urgently as possible by bus and train to Harpenden. This also involved leaving our friends to pursue the holiday without our help with winding the lock gates, only to discover when they arrived home later that the lady had found out she was pregnant and the last thing she should have been doing was winding lock gates! So we arrived home and resumed normal life wirh a bump and with a funeral to arrange. However we had good friends and a helpful vicar, so we came through this somewhat traumatic period relatively unscathed. Life gradually returned to normal; we had jobs to go back to and a mortgage to pay, so we just knuckled down and got on with it.
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In 1988 a lady from church organised a visit to Israel, so I joined them. Viv was unable to come as we had three young children at home (ages 4 to 7); it was not practical either to bring them with us (it was during term time) or find a friend or relative to look after them at home for two weeks.
Our party had a week in Jerusalem and a week up in Galilee, visiting all the pilgrim sites in both locations. This was a very special time for me and one which I shall never forget.
While there I was blessed by being baptised in the river Jordan, at the site where John the Baptist is believed to have worked; I also had an amazing blessing of a vision of Jesus, during an Anglican Communion service held at the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem. We were singing “Thine be the glory”, and Jesus came walking towards me from the mouth of the tomb with His arms outstretched in welcome.
This tour and events have really shaped my life since then; I have always had a love for the Jewish people anyway, but to walk in Jesus’s footsteps, to see the places where events happened, to join in some Messianic worship, was all a real thrill and a very emotional time.
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During the 1980s we left our local Anglican Church and joined a small Independent Evangelical church. It had had Brethren roots and a woman had at one point stood up and spoken a Word from God. Part of the church was scandalised – women did not speak in public in the Brethren Church – and it split into two as a result. We joined the small Progressive group, who were quite happy to allow women’s ministry.
When we first joined the church it consisted of seven members, and we arrived with our three children and almost doubled their numbers overnight! We were happy there; the worship was freer than we had been used to in the Anglican church, and our children were for the first time being properly taught Bible-based worship and Christian life. The church grew in numbers and the children’s teachers were excellent. A typical example of this is that the youngsters were given prizes if they could recite all 66 books of the Bible in order; this was assisted by little aide-memoires such as:
Old Testament = 39 books
New Testament = 3x9 = 27 books
and other such devices.
A year or two into our time there the person who was leading the church said he felt it was time for him to move on into other things, and he asked me to take over the leadership of the church. I was a little surprised, but also quite excited at the idea; I also felt that it was the right thing to do under God.
I found myself leading this chuch single-handedly for a while (as my predecessor had also done) although there were a few others who were able to assist; this meant that in practice I would sometimes lead the service, sometimes preach, and sometimes lead worship from the piano. Also during this time I was made redundant, so life was a mix of blessings and challenges.
I had had mixed fortunes after my time at Guinness; I worked for one or two smaller companies in Hertfordshire; one of those companies made me redundant in 1990, which was quite a blow as we had three young children at the time. I found myself out of work for most of that year, which meant we were living on Benefits plus Viv’s pay; while the children were in their first few years at Primary School she was working part-time in the school kitchens; life was quite hard for a while. Then Viv got sucked back into teaching by a fellow Mum at the school gate.
That was also the start of an interesting career episode for Viv; this lady had said that the school where she worked were suddenly short of a French teacher and would Viv consider taking it on, just for the rest of that term as the previous person had let them down by simply walking out. Viv’s response was that she was a Classics teacher and had never taught Modern Languages, to which the other person said, “But you speak French, don’t you? It’s only for 10 weeks!” So she went in to see the Head of Department and came out with a request to start on the following Monday; then 10 weeks turned into 15 years! Although she left the school 20 years ago when we moved to Hereford, she and that Head of Department (now himself retired) are still firm friends. He and his family are Jewish and have a fascinating history back to the Second World War and beyond.
God never let us starve; we survived (just) financially, and a kind person at church suggested that as we couldn’t afford a holiday, we might like to join in with a Christian Family Camp in Suffolk. We continued doing this for two or three years; we grew spiritually and made some good friends.
The firm which later made me redundant had caused me a fair amount of stress while I worked for them; they were situated close to the river in Berkhamsted, so in my lunch break I would often walk along the river bank, which was very peaceful. On one of those walks, out of the blue, God said quite distinctly, “I love you, it will be alright”. Again on a separate occasion last year He said “I love you, Peter”; I asked Him if that was really what He said and He confirmed it with a surge of the Spirit’s power. He then told me to go and share that power with another (specific) person, but here I have let Him down – somehow I cannot find a suitable opportunity to do that; clearly this is something I need to pray about.
I knew that our pattern of one-person church leadership as it was then was not the best we could do under God, so I took a day’s retreat by spending the day on my own in the church and praying to discern God’s Will for us as a church, and for me in particular; the result of this was that we set up a leadership structure with four Elders, based on the ministries of Ephesians 4. This was highly successful and God greatly blessed the church; we grew to around 80 members.
Later there was another re-organisation; some of us wanted to move more in the Work of the Spirit, while others were firmly rooted in the Evangelical tradition, so we formed two separate churches; the Evangelical group stayed in the building which had previously been the Brethren church, while the other group met weekly in a local school. The Evangelical church still appears to be thriving and has its own website, but I can find no information about the other group; we ourselves are quite out of touch as we left Harpenden in 2006.
Shortly after this change we felt God was saying that our season with this church had run its course and so we moved to the local New Frontiers church, which was very charismatic and largely suited us; we even led a House Group there for a while. I had first come across New Frontiers while working at Waterloo; a colleague there was a regular member of a New Frontiers church and she described them to me, even gave me a CD containing a selection of their worship songs. At the time I simply regarded New Frontiers as a different but probably valid form of worship, but maybe not for me; many charismatic leaders were coming to the fore at that time, largely in America, and I mostly felt that material from the other side of the Pond was “different” from my own tradition. I apologise to our American cousins for this, but I tended to be dismissive of it, an attitude bred largely from my experience in the IT world. I was quite wrong however to include New Frontiers in this category; firstly they are home-grown, founded in the 1970s in Brighton by Terry Virgo[6]. They were one of the first church movements to encompass both the Evangelical and Charismatic wings of Christianity. While on a conference once I worshipped in this Brighton church and it was an amazing and fulfilling experience. They are now a worldwide movement of around 5000 churches and are a great force for God and for good.
New Frontiers then had a standard House Group format which we tried to adhere to each week; we largely followed the rule of the ‘4 Ws’, with a different person leading each time:
Welcome
Worship
Word
Witness
This was a guide and a help rather than a straitjacket; it was very useful in getting people who had not led a meeting before to have a pattern to work to and to encourage them to have a go.
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One day our next-door neighbour knocked and said they were leaving the area, so as a joke he asked how we would like an annexe to our semi? Great idea, we thought, save all the travelling.
Wrong! It was one of those theories that just did not not work out in practice. We had Viv’s Mum living upstairs and mine downstairs, sharing facilities. The problem was that they did not get on very well. Then Viv’s Mum got skin cancer, and in the summer of 1985 she died.
Our local Vicar had been very helpful and had come to visit her in her last few months. She knew about the Christian faith (as an Ulsterwoman she could not have avoided it) but was not a believer; she had seen the disasters that “religion” had caused in her homeland and wanted nothing to do with it.
Over a period of a few weeks, however, our vicar encouraged her to understand that Jesus wanted her to get to know Him; that it was never too late. She said it felt like cheating, to have rejected Him all her life and then come in at the last minute, so he explained to her the parable of the vineyard workers in Matthew 20:1–16, where those who come in to work only at the very end of the day are paid the same as those who had been there all day. May God be praised – she came to faith and accepted Jesus five days before she died! That funeral was one of great celebration.
My Mum was also ill; she had had angina for some years, then she had a stroke and had to go to live in a Care Home. She died at Christmas of the same year.
Once we had to an extent recoverd from these traumas we sat and considered our financial options: we could either sell both houses and buy a large house in which to bring up our family, or we could sell one house on the open market and use the money to pay off our mortgage and live in relative comfort.
We have always been financially risk-averse and pragmatic, so we settled on the latter option; we stayed where we were until our family had grown and finished at University, a total of 27 years in the same house, then I retired and we decided to move to Hereford. Our eldest daughter married a man from Germany, whom she had met at Cambridge University; for a time they thought they might end up living and working in Germany. Our other daughter was working for a Christian Charity in Thailand, and our son at that stage was finishing University and had no long-term plans, so we felt able to live anywhere we chose; Hereford was a part of the country we had always loved and where we had spent many holidays, and where the cost of living was considerably lower than Harpenden; the attractions for retirees were considerable.
We took the City of Hereford as our starting point and looked online for a church; we found a church where we believed we could feel at home, Christian Life Church (CLC) – part of the New Frontiers movement, so we took our caravan to Hereford for a week and visited a Sunday service.
We clicked immediately; we felt God had directed us there, so our thinking then was that all we had to do was to find a house within commuting distance. We spent some time house hunting; we found a suitable house in Madley, a few miles South of the City, and moved there in 2006 with our two dogs.
Iit was a delightful rural community, but by definition almost impossible to get into and become a part of. We were on a small modern development of 5 private houses on the edge of a Council Estate; all our neighbours were very friendly, but the locals had all lived in the village all their lives and we were welcome so long as we conformed.
Within the first week or two one of the local residents whose family had been in the village for ever, knocked on our door and asked if we would like to join the local bell-ringing team. The village Church was a huge mediaeval building that had once been on the pilgrim route to Compostella and had an absolutely fascinating history, but was a bitterly cold Grade 1 Listed stone building with no heating except for high-up radiant heaters in a side chapel; this was used for most services. It was also cold spiritually. We love the sound of church bells, but ringing them is definitely neither my forte nor Viv’s.
As new residents in the village of Madley we felt we should find out about the place, so on our first Sunday we went to the 8.00 Said Communion Service (as per the 1662 Prayer Book rite), held in the Choir as there were only 8 of us present; we were retirees, but we were the youngest people in the congregation by some way. We could not believe this, but a lady came and asked Viv to move as she was sitting in this person’s seat!
We stayed afterwards and chatted to a couple of people, but it was a great relief to go to the 10.30 Service at CLC, who could not have been more welcoming. We had a foot in both camps as we tried to maintain relations with the Parish Church, which after all was the centre of the village life. I served on the PCC there, and planned and installed their first-ever audio-visual system, complete with hearing loop. Getting permission from the Diocese to do this in a Grade 1 Listed building also proved an interesting challenge! I also created the church website, to cover the five Parishes which the Vicar had in his charge.
The Vicar also asked me to be Church Warden; the previous holder of this job was a local farmer in his 80s who had been Church Warden for 50 years (he would often come to church in his wellies straight from the farm) and felt it was time for him to retire! As is so often the case, I could not see any nice way of eventually leaving this job, but in the end we solved it by leaving the area!
Our own real church life was at CLC, where we joined a House Group and felt really at home. We did not really take any active part in that church, we sat and enjoyed worshipping God there, but together with our weekly House Group that was about all. God was allowing us a fallow period.
We actually left Hereford in 2010 and moved to Cambridge in order to be nearer to our family, but we still visit about once a year as we have many friends there gained in our short time in the area.
o O o -
My period of unemployment ended in the Autumn of 1990, when I found a job (or rather, a friend found it for me in a press advert) in IT in the NHS, initially doing Support and then Training in a London Health Authority in Waterloo. I argued with God and said that I did not want to work in the NHS, but He said “but that’s where I want you to go”, so I went. I was not really accustomed to God speaking to me directly, but I found that it was starting to happen. There are many ways in which God speaks to us, and if you are not familiar with this happening you may be interested to read it in my e-book “The Holy Spirit in your Life”[7], Chapter 11; also for a Scriptural example of this (and there are many) see 1 Samuel 3.
In my job I was teaching both clinical and clerical staff how to use standard business software. I found being a Christian in that environment extremely challenging. I believe it is no exaggeration to say that most of my colleagues had no faith at all; Political Correctness was the Watchword in South East London in the 1990s. The saving grace for me was that I was 10 minutes’ walk from Westminster Abbey, and so I would often spend my lunchtimes there in private prayer; there is a small chapel near the West door reserved for the purpose, and as a result I also got to visit the Abbey itself at any time. I had also found a reasonably local church in Blackfriars where I would sometimes go at lunchtimes, where once a week they had visiting worship leaders to sing and lead prayer; on one occasion I even asked a friend from Harpenden to come and lead. This meant taking an exended lunch break, but as I worked flexitime I could easily make this up.
I also found a few other like-minded souls at work, and we formed a lunchtime Prayer Group, which met weekly in a spare office; these features for me made the whole experience tolerable.
I had intended to stay in that job for a year or two and then move on, but my age did not help – I was around 50 and changing jobs was not easy – and in the end I stayed until I retired in 2005 at the age of 61.
Following my retirement I spent a rather lazy year at home; the strain of daily commuting from Harpenden into Central London, as well as a rather stressful job, had taken their toll on my well-being.
Viv was still working as Head of Languages in a school in St Albans, so for that year I became a house-husband of sorts; I was never a wonderful cook, but I was quite good at taking meals from the freezer and re-heating them. I would walk the dogs and do a few chores around the house, as well as working on our cars and caravan. My other failure is in the garden; my regular job has always been to mow the lawn, while Viv does the planning, planting and cropping.
I have mentioned that in 2006 we moved to Madley near Hereford but we only stayed there for about four years; in 2010 we moved to Milton, on the outskirts of Cambridge, to be near family; for 12 years we worshipped at City Church in Cambridge, the same church as our daughter and son-in-law, and we really felt we were called by God to be at that church; it was natural for us to join a House Group, and we also led a group for a few years, but then came the Covid Pandemic, which changed the whole modus operandi of the church. Services were held online via Zoom, which was the best way to maintain the spiritual life of the church, but it felt very remote and impersonal. Full marks to the leaders, however, they really did make the best of an impossible situation.
Another important family event around this time was that our son married in 2012; his bride had been a lifelong member of High Street Methodist Church in Harpenden so they married there – another joyful occasion; also they now have 2 children of their own, so our family now numbers 12 (not counting our daughter-in-law’s family, which is quite large). Viv and I were both only children, and it is a great blessing to have progressed into a “tribe”; God is good.
After the pandemic the leadership (rightly, in my view) reviewed our worship styles and format, but we then somehow felt slightly less at ease there; we started reviewing under God what our future might be.
When we first arrived in Milton, on our first Sunday we went to the Parish Church of All Saints. Just as we had done in Madley, we felt it a duty in a new location to find out about the local Parish church. We found the people at All Saints friendly and welcoming, but the worship was more traditionally Anglican than we had become used to and we somehow did not feel that it was for us, so we joined City Church instead, where our daughter and her husband were already well-estalished members. That first Christmas, however, the person in charge of the music at All Saints placed a small item in the village Magazine inviting anyone who might be interested to come and sing with a scratch choir to lead the Christmas Carol Service. We could not resist the invitation – we had originally met in the church choir at All Saints Harpenden, and now the best part of 40 years later we were being invited to join the choir at All Saints Milton – full circle you might say!
We stayed with this group, singing at Carol Services each year and occasionally at Choral Evensong; we even once joined in with them when they were invited to Waterbeach to sing a Plainsong evening service, a style of music which we both love.
I mentioned that after the Covid pandemic we were not quite so comfortable at City Church, then God said, “Why don’t you try All Saints? You know the church, you know some of the people, give it a go.”
Ironically the first Sunday of our trial there, Easter Day 2022, was also the day the Rector left to start a new job in Norfolk. The congregation gathered outside after the service for a souvenir photograph for him to take with him; someone we barely knew said to us. “Are you coming into the photo?” I pointed out that we were hardly part of the congregation, to which he responded, “Well you sing with us!” This too was clearly an instruction from God – we have also studied this photo several times since to see how many of the people we now actually know, and so how much we really are part of the Fellowship.
We went, we tried it for a few weeks, we liked what we saw, God’s Spirit was clearly active there, everything seemed positive – in fact this was a church which passed our tests – it was clearly Bible-based and Spirit-led; the problem was that we had a well-established network of friends and family at City (not least our daughter and son-in-law and now three grandchildren). Discussing this with another relatively new couple after morning service one day, we said we did not quite know yet whether we were supposed to stay at City or come here to All Saints, when the lady said, “Well here, obviously!” Instantly the voice of God in my head said, ”Yes, that’s right!” We clearly no longer had any choice in the matter; we were now to be members of All Saints.
So the first situation which hit us was an Interregnum, a time when nobody was in overall charge. This fact in no way stopped the work of the church from going forward, however; we have an excellent Ministry Team of both Priests and Lay Ministers, and together with the PCC they kept the wheels turning very effectively, both administratively and spiritually.
Immediately one of our Lay Ministers set up a brief Prayer Meeting to run every Saturday morning for about half-an-hour, to pray for a new Priest. I am not given to visions; I am a scientist and mathematician and I want things explained scientifically; however God can cut straight through this, and in my lifetime I have had two or three visions which have come directly from God. One of these was in a Saturday morning prayer meeting; there were never more than 4 or 5 of us gathered in those meetings, but on one such occasion I saw the Holy Spirit coming down through the church tower, spreading out in tentacles like the roots of a tree and settling on the congregation. God simply said, “A sign of things to come”.
That Interregnum lasted about 18 months; yes it was frustrating, but it was also both challenging and rewarding. God was clearly at work among us. We finally reached the stage of interviewing candidates for a new Priest-in-Charge, as he was now to be called. There were four candidates, and the whole Fellowship of about 140 people were invited to a free lunch to meet the candidates on Interview Day; I think about half of us actually attended – a very good turnout for a weekday when many are in employment.
We duly met and chatted informally to all four candidates and were asked to write our (anonymous) comments about each on a piece of paper and place it in a box; as we walked home I felt that one person in particular was right for the job; I also felt that God was directing us to the same person. Then God said, “That’s right, but don’t stop praying about it”. This clearly indicated that some level of spiritual battle was taking place (cf Daniel 10) and we were being called to partner with God to achieve the right end.
This man was duly appointed and as I write in early 2025 Alex has now been our Vicar (a term which everyone understands), for almost a year and a half. He has a very powerful ministry among us and as a church we are very blessed. He also works very hard to help us to become a Church at the heart of the Community – no mean challenge as our geographical situation right at the edge of the village down a side road means that we get almost zero casual footfall. An interesting challenge however – we have to go out and find people rather than expecting them to come to us! The Ministry of both ordained and lay people plus the full Body of Christ at All Saints together form an effective force and we work well and pray well together. With God’s help we’re growing spiritually and functionally, and gradually numerically as well.
Despite the somewhat varied history of church membership that Viv and I have been through, I can truthfully say that I have never felt the presence of God through His Holy Spirit to the extent that I have felt Him in the last few years at All Saints. We are a church that faithfully preaches the Gospel, the Word of God is paramount in our life and work, and the Holy Spirit is our Guide in all we do.
One of our earliest experiences on joining the church was that we were asked to pray for one of half a dozen young people who were undertaking an Admission to Communion course, a kind of pre-Confirmation. The person who asked us was actually someone that we knew from our years with the choir; we willingly undertook this, although I said that as we had not been there long enough to know any of the candidates, then he should allocate someone to us. On the following Sunday we sat next to a couple we did not know, so we introduced ourselves. Our friend then came up and said to them, “You do know that Peter and Viv are praying for your daughter, don’t you?” “Oh!” we said in stunned surprise, “so you’re her parents!” God moves in a mysterious way.
o O o -
I have never been a sportsman of any kind, but have always enjoyed camping and hiking; generally I suppose I would describe myself as one who likes the outdoor life, but this has rather been curtailed in recent years due to various health issues. I have prostate cancer and in 2023 I had a kidney cancer removed, so my general health has detrioriated recently. I also have advanced glaucoma so I can no longer drive; life is very different, but God is very close and I am a very happy octogenarian.
Soon after we became part of the church in the Summer of 2022, we joined a local Homegroup; this was meeting 300 yards from our house. One of the incidental blessings of worshipping at All Saints is that it is 10 to 15 minutes’ walk from home, instead of 20 minutes’ drive to City Church, plus the Homegroups are all local rather than dispersed across Cambridgeshire. In practice we’ve been driving quite often due to my health following the operation in 2023 but I am now getting back to being fit enough to walk again, although this is I’m afraid weather dependent.
When my prostate cancer was first diagnosed I shared this with the Homegroup and asked them to pray for me; one lovely lady asked, somewhat diffidently, “Would you mind if we were to lay hands on you for healing?” I simply said, “If it’s from God, who’s arguing!” That evening many people laid hands on other members of the Group, and it felt entirely natural. The Holy Spirit definitely moved that day!
This Homegroup meets in the evenings, and since my op. I no longer function in the evenings, so we have joined another group which meets in the mornings. The effect has been positive – we are now in the WhatsApp groups for both Homegroups, so we can cross-fertilise the prayer messages (with due regard to any confidentiality of course). We have discovered that one of the reasons that God called us to All Saints is so that we can pray for people; it’s very rewarding. Actually the same person I mentioned above once referred to Viv and me as Prayer Warriors; I suspect this accolade may have been a little over-generous, but one does one’s best to listen to God and live up to it. The other interesting feature is that I seem to be regaining my evening strength; last week was Ash Wednesday plus the World Day of Prayer – two evening services which I was keen to go to – so I asked a friend to pray for me to that end; in the event I was able to attend both evenings without a qualm – thank you Lord!
The most significant thing that has happened to me since moving to All Saints is that over the two to three years that we have been there, God has started to develop in me the Gift of Prophecy; He sometimes gives me messages for the church and sometimes for individuals; I feel very honoured and privileged to be accepted by the church in this role (particularly by the Vicar), and I am certainly aware that there are others in the church who also have this Gift; I definitely believe that God is doing great things among us at present (and no doubt going forward as well).
People say that life begins at 40; for me in some ways I think it began at 62; it is only in my later years that I have found both time and energy to do the things that I now believe God wants me to do.
o O o -
While in Harpenden we were members of the Bethany Fellowship, the New Frontiers Church which met in the Chapel at Highfield Oval in Harpenden. A few years previously the site had been sold to YWAM (Youth With A Mission) by the National Childrens’ Home who had previously owned it for many years. That transaction was the subject of much intense prayer by many Christians in Harpenden and beyond, and although I am now a little hazy about the exact figures involved, as far as I can remember the final sum was still short by a 6-figure amount as the deadline approached; this money arrived within about the final hour! God is good – we all believed right to the end that God would provide (Jehovah Jireh) and He did!
In 2006 our eldest daughter married; they wanted to marry in a traditional church building with stained glass windows and the like (which excluded their own church – that meets in a somewhat different style of building), and the chapel at Highfield Oval suited perfectly. Actually the wonderful aside detail about that was that somehow the administration got mixed up; our daughter’s planned wedding date turned out to be double-booked as the Chapel was needed as part of a conference that weekend, and they only told us a short time in advance; mild panic set in, but God is good and a few frantic phone calls sorted it out and everything (including their honeymoon bookings) was moved back a week! We should just have trusted God better; on their original planned date it poured with rain, but the following week was glorious sunshine! She and her husband-to-be had both graduated from Cambridge University and had a house and jobs in the area; they were members of the New Frontiers church in Cambridge and nearly 20 years later they are still very committed to that church.
Our son married in 2012, and between them our offspring have now blessed us with a total of five grandchildren. Our son-in-law is also an only child, but our daughter-in-law is a member of quite a lerge family so the extended family is now fairly big.
While we were living in Madley, our other daughter had been working with a missionary organisation in Thailand; sadly ill health brought her back to the UK and to a job in Oxford; meanwhile our son was still undecided about his future but wanted to stay in contact with some good friends he still had from school, so he was still in the Harpenden area. At one point we had expected that our children would be scattered around the world, so it did not matter much where we were living; in the event we found that they had all settled within a relatively short distance of Cambridge and visiting our family was a four-hour journey each way, so maybe it would be a good idea if we were to try to move back!
Again God’s foreknowledge and perfect planning of events to come proved to be just right for us: in 2010 we moved to Cambridge; we fondly supposed this was simply in order to be closer to family; we certainly timed it right financially – house prices dipped significantly and we were able to change our fairly large 4-bedroom house in Madley for a much smaller 4-bedroom house in Milton, for a minimal price difference. A few years later I was to develop cancer, so I was treated and cared for by Addenbrooke’s Hospital, a first-class teaching and research centre; I have better care there than I would have received if we had stayed in Hereford; I am so grateful to God for His timing.
Actually I have had three separate cancers; I have prostate cancer, which is ongoing but is stable; it is being treated with a hormone implant which is changed every three months and is asymptomatic. I had a 12cm tumour on a kidney, which was removed surgically in the Autumn of 2023, and I had a melanoma in my forearm, which was removed in Day Surgery in 2022. As if that were not enough I also have very bad glaucoma, which gradually destroys sight cells. I am now at the point where I have 40% sight remaining in my left eye and only 20% in my right. Tests in clinic in November 2024 showed no further deterioration over the preceding year, and the consultant said he would not expect further deterioration at all if I stay on my present régime of drops. This in itself is an answer to prayer, as several people had prayed for me for precisely this effect.
I have often asked people to pray for my glaucoma, including my (at the time) 11-year old granddaughter and a 12 or 13-year old young person at church; both of these were at God’s prompting so I have over time expected that He would heal my sight. This has still not happened, but He has given me peace about it; I have accepted that healing (or not) is in His Sovereign Will and I must accept what I have; I praise God that it is not likely to worsen and that I can still get around normally and (mostly) live a normal life. Basically now if someone asks me how I am, that is to say, someone who actually wants to know rather than expecting the standard non-committal British answer of “fine, thanks”, my standard response is, “My sight is awful, my hearing is bad, I’ve got cancer, but I’ve got God in my life and so I’m fine thank you!”
In Novenber 2023 I asked God if my glaucoma was my Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” but He said “No, I will heal your sight in due course to reveal my glory (John 9:3); your ‘thorn’ is your prostate.” And since then He has given me Peace about my various health issues; I am totally conscious of His love and care.
In 2024 my grandfather clock stopped working; clearly this was a major disaster as it had been a faithful friend for nearly half a century. My sight was no longer good enough for me to work on the clock, but my son kept saying that he’d love to learn about it and to help fix it; it was one of those good ideas that we could not see an effective way of achieving; he works a 4-day week and has Mondays off to look after his 3-year old; his wife used to have Fridays off under the same arrangement but since her recent change of job she now has to be in the office all 5 days. We finally solved it; the family stayed with us for a couple of days over Christmas, and on Boxing Day he and I sorted the clock’s time section by what he generously called a Masterclass, while the ladies looked after the children, then on New Year’s Day Viv helped me to fix the strike function. The clock is now keeping near enough perfect time (accurate within a few seconds a week) and striking correctly every hour; its tick is very soothing to listen to and I am very happy. Then God said, “Your clock is a parable of the Holy Spirit; its regular tick represents the constant presence and filling of the Holy Spirit in your Life”. Thank you Lord, it works just as you said it would.
I said earlier that one of the reasons we were called to be at All Saints is to pray for people. This has often involved praying for healing (in all the senses of that word), and there have certainly been occasions when we have seen individuals healed (and I should point out, not only through our prayer but by others as well). There are however some for whom no healing takes place. We always have to acknowledge that healing is in the Gift of God and there is no way we can conjure it up if He is not in it. On one occasion though He said to me, “The reason you’re not seeing more healings is because you’re not banishing the spirits responsible for the problem” (Mark 16:17). Being careful not to go too far the other way and become presumptuous, this is nonetheless a wake-up call regarding my own praying.
Another issue we have found is that many people are under serious spiritual attack. There is always the danger of seeing demons under every bed, but we need to achieve a balanced outlook. Part of this is to acknowledge that Satan is very active in this world and that he is behind many of the problems we see around us. We live in a fallen world, and each of us is subject to our sinful nature unless and until we have allowed the Holy Spirit to take control of our life (and even this does not actually make us immune). The problem is that being a Christian does not give us a trouble-free life. It is often said that Satan doesn’t attack unless there is something worth attacking, which inplies thay being under attack means one must be doing something right, but it ccan be a very hard lesson to learn if one is suffering, for example, from a severe health issue. I find that I am working harder and am challenged more in recent years by what I see as the prayer needs of individuals around me than I ever was in earlier years. For example at this particular time I am challenged in prayer by some situations which seem so unfair, and the only choice is to pour my heart out to God and plead with Him to fix the issue.
Sometimes He does fix it; I have many examples of answered prayer, where a loving God has solved the person’s problem immediately, and in one case even before I had had time to utter the relevant prayer. Unfortunately that does not make it any easier when we go back again and again with the same prayer and nothing changes, the person is still suffering the pain just as before. I then have to acknowledge that I am impotent and God is Sovereign and that He will always do what is best for the needs of the person concerned (Romans 8:28). I join the ranks of the many psalmists who pray words such as, “How long, O Lord,,,?” I then have to remember that I am called to be faithful and obey (in such cases this simply means to pray as called); I am not called to achieve results,that is God’s business. Often He will call us to partner with Him in achieving those results, but often we find that the whole exercise is a lesson in faith, trust and patience; St Paul has much to say on this in his letters.
I believe God wants us to stay as we are geographically but to move forward with what we see Him doing at All Saints, that is listening carefully to Him and praying appropriately, and also from time to time to share prophetic Words from Him. I am quite sure you realise that God has a sense of humour, and sometimes we can laugh with Him at what He is doing. There was a marvellous example of that last year at our Summer Barbecue: it rained steadily all morning; I was leading the prayers that day, and I thanked God for His perfect timing in everything – for the rain in His perfect time, and I prayed that in His perfect time He would also be able to give us a fine afternoon for the Barbecue. He did. Some complained they were too hot and my prayer had been too effective, and the churchwarden asked me to pray for a fine day for their forthcoming cricket match!
Joking aside, if we ask in line with His Will then it will be done for us (1 John 5:14-15), yet so often it does not seem to be that simple; the task here is first to discern His Will, and there are so many ways to do that which are beyond my purpose here.
I have had some very exciting Words from God recently, showing that He really is on the move; I plan to put these on the Internet in due course – as they say, watch this space!
o O o -
Assuming you have had the patience to read through the above I would like to ask you, dear reader, before I look at this topic, what you think I may have meant by my subtitle:
Jesus Never Lets Go!
I have tried to show here that despite the ups and downs of a fundamentally “normal” life I have had the gradually increasing knowledge of the in-dwelling of Jesus within it. Unwittingly perhaps in the early days, but now very much my raison d’être, my driving force and my constant companion. However much we may wander, and I am no stranger to both failure and error, Jesus is always there to catch us when we fall and nudge us back to the right path when we go wrong. God said to me during 2024, “The whole of your first 80 years have been preparation for where you are now”; in other words, I am to continue to look forward to what is to come. I am now 81 and I find this very exciting!
As a young child my Dad took me to church and encouraged me in my desire to join the choir. I had good Christian input into my Primary school life and attended both a Christian Secondary school and a Christian college at university. When I was 14 God said He had a plan for my life, and over the years He has gradually been showing me what it is and steering me away from self and closer to Him, largely through the churches He has drawn us into but also through friends and through my secular life. Also by what I think of as our conversion at Canterbury, my baptism in the Jordan, my lunchtimes walking along the River and praying in Westminster Abbey. Now in the evening of my life I am more confident than ever of His love and care. It is said that wherever you go as a Christian you carry the Holy Spirit with you; He can be seen in us as we go about our daily round. This is not something one tends to be personally aware of, but others see it in us and it can be very powerful. I have been very blessed by others telling me that this is so.
I don’t know whether you know the late 19th Century Sunday School song Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam,[8] but the childlike lyrics of that song express very effectively how Jesus wants to meet with each one of us and use us day by day to shine for Him; He is the Light of the world and He wants us to reflect His Light in those around us. To that end He will gently move us towards His goal for our life, even when we shift that goal slightly by our own error and sin. He constantly wants to draw each of us closer to Him; He is the God of the second chance, and the third, and so on (Matthew 18:21-22).
We now believe that we are settled in both home and church for the rest of our days, but we certainly have not finished moving spiritually. We are definitely at All Saints for a purpose, and although we are quite clear what some of this purpose is – God has shown me and it has been borne out in many ways by events – it would be arrogant to say that He has no more for me; I may have some ideas and even some hints, but basically I am still learning and (I hope) moving forward; I simply look forward to see what is still to come (Exodus 14:13). I recently heard this expressed most effectively by Nicky Gumbel in an interview with J John by saying that there is no retirement in the Kingdom![9]
And how do I know that any of this is true? How is it that I keep saying “God said”, and can be sure that He did? God speaks to us in many different ways, as I have already mentioned above and written about it in my e-book[10]. With His guidance, I simply keep on keeping on.
God bless you; as you go forward in your own life, may you draw closer to Him – Hallelujah!
[1] Adonai is the plural of Adon, simply means Lord or Master.
[2] Yeshua HaMashiach: means Anoinrted to Save; Yeshua (or Joshua) is the Hebrew name for Jesus. The name Jesus comes from the Greek and Latin form Iesus,which in English becomes Jesus.
[3] Ruach is Hebrew for Breath, or Spirit. This is first seen in Benesis 1:2 which refers to the Spirit of God hovering over the waters.
[4] If you are interested, there is a Wikipedia article about this device at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switchboard_operator; these were later replaced by PABX systems (Private Automatic Branch Exchange) systems; you can see details of these at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch.
[5] For a description of Pointed singing see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglican_chant
[6] You can find details of New Frontiers at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
[7] “The Holy Spirit in your Life” you can find this as a link on my website at www.charismata25,org
[8] You can find details of this song at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ll_Be_a_Sunbeam
[9] For information about Nicky Gumbel and J John see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicky_Gumbel (who along with Sandy Miller, founded the Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Brompton), and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.John (world-renowned evangelist, author and broadcaster.