t this point it would be tempting to talk about how wonderful life became; how, all of a sudden, everything fell into place; how the mist began to clear and I was able to discern truth, hear the voices of angels, and see visions of heavenly glory; how my heart was filled with a peace beyond words; how my destiny lay unveiled before me. Tempting, it might be; but honest, it would not be.

It is certainly true to say that I knew that I had "started a new journey". This was how it felt to me. I knew, without any doubt, that something significant, something life-changing, had occurred to me, but I did not yet understand what it was. From my limited perspective of personal need, I knew that my depression had lifted and that I was experiencing a joy that I had never known before. I also knew that, if I were to understand this experience, I needed to do some investigation; and since the experience was associated with Jesus Christ, and since the Bible is the book that tells about him, then the Bible was the book that I should be reading. As an earnest of my determination to pursue this path, rather than just picking up a Bible that belonged to someone else in the family, I went out the next day and bought my own copy.

he Bible is not an easy book to understand, and I have to say that I struggled with it. At the same time, I was still struggling with the turmoil within my soul that had been generated through the years of drug-abuse, investigation into ways that led into darkness, and basic self-centredness. As I read the Bible and spent time with other Christians, I became aware of the concept of "sin". This is a word which is scarcely used in normal conversation today. In our post-Christian, humanistic culture, where everything is OK so long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, and where there is no such thing as a moral absolute, sin seems to be something of an anachronism. However, the whole thrust of the Bible is that man has sinned against a holy God, and that God is reaching out to man to save him from his sin and restore him to a position of righteousness, or right-standing with God.

Being honest with myself, I had to face the fact that my problem with sin was not a philosophical one, but a very personal one. I came to see that I considered myself to be a victim of circumstances. I could not see that I was in any way responsible for my own plight. When it was suggested that I was a guilty party, I felt resentment rising up within me. It was many months after my initial experience of meeting Christ that he was able to bring me to the place where I was willing, or able, to accept the responsibility and admit that I was in the wrong. This experience, like the first one, took place while I was walking along the road. With that, the similarity ends.

The place that I had been brought to was this: that I was able to say to God that I accepted full personal responsibility before him, not only for everything that I had ever done, but also for everything that had ever been done to me. That may seem a strange statement to make, and it was certainly not made lightly. However, it was made in the confidence that the One to whom I was speaking was perfectly righteous, perfectly just, perfectly compassionate, and perfectly merciful. The result of my admission, very significantly, was that for the first time in my life I experienced genuine peace - the peace that, as the Bible says, is beyond understanding.

Up until this point, my agenda had been a totally self-centred and self-interested one. I had been a consumer, interested only in what would be of benefit to me. The transformation that took place that day was that rather than seeing truth as a commodity that I could acquire by means of study or meditation or some other practice, I began to realise that if understanding were to come to me it would be because I had allowed myself to be shaped and moulded into the person that God wanted me to be. I could no longer be the one in the driving seat. I did not set the agenda. I needed to align myself with the will and purposes of the Almighty. I needed to surrender to him. Accepting responsibility for the whole of my life, and not just for my voluntary actions, was an essential component of that act of surrender, and it opened up the way for God to begin to work within me to transform me according to his purpose.

isdom and understanding began to come to me gradually. The selfish part of me longed for spiritual experiences and profound revelations. However, I was struck by a statement made by the apostle James, who says:

ho is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth. This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly, sensual, demonic. For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing will be there. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. (James chapter 3 verses 13-17)

From this it was evident to me that my quest for truth must become a quest for character. True wisdom and understanding would not be mine because I selfishly desired them, but if I yielded myself to the will of God, then wisdom and understanding would become an integral part of me. And it would not be because I was especially clever. James's statement makes no mention of intelligence or education. I was beginning to see that true wisdom, the wisdom that comes from the one who created our intelligence, was not an intellectual thing but was in fact a quality of the spirit that owed little to the natural mind.

second milestone for me was when I caught on to the fact that the truth is not a something but a someone. This was a radical idea, as far as I was concerned, and I struggled with it for a long time. Jesus made the following statement to his disciples on the eve of his crucifixion:

am the way, and the truth, and the life. No-one comes to the Father except through me. (John's gospel, chapter 14, verse 6)

The implications of this statement are two-fold:

1. If Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, then any way that differs from his way leads away from truth and life toward deception and death
2. The only way to make any progress on this journey is to develop a close personal relationship with Jesus, with him as the master and me as the disciple

In a short space of time my quest had taken a radical turn, but it was a turn for the better, because for the first time in my life I had the sense that I was getting somewhere, that I was making some progress. Most importantly for me, I realised that I was no longer alone, that I need never be alone again, and that I now had someone in my life who was genuinely concerned about my welfare, and that person was the most powerful person in the universe - in fact, he was the one who had designed the universe in the first place. I found that God would speak to me; not in an audible voice (although I believe that some people have had that experience), but in a variety of other ways.

• He would impress a particular passage of scripture upon my heart, give me an understanding of it, and let me see how to apply it to my life.
• He would use what I can only call intuition - an inner sense of knowing without having been told.
• He would speak through the agency of another believer, sometimes in a prophetic message, sometimes through a mental picture that had a particular interpretation, and sometimes in the way that the person would pray over me.
• I found that he could also speak through me into someone else's life. To me, that was an exhilarating and very rewarding experience, especially when the other person would acknowledge that it must have been God speaking through me, for only God could have known the things that I spoke about.