A Sense of Injustice
Michael is the Youth Leader at
I grew up in Croydon and come from a Christian household. Up until the age of 6 everything was going well. I don’t think I could have asked for a better up-bringing. From the outside, it appeared that I had everything I needed. I was attending a good school, had a pretty stable household, nice family, nice cars, etc.
When I was 6 my older brother began to suffer with epilepsy and frontal lobe syndrome, and from here on our whole family life got flipped upside down. He spent weeks in hospital and came close to dying, and when he came home a couple of months later, everything changed. Our whole world had just been turned on its head.
My brother was not the same person. He had been left with severe anger issues and found it difficult to relate to other people. Being the younger brother, his anger was often directed towards me and for many years I was physically abused. It wasn’t his fault because he was ill, and he would have done anything he could to have changed it.
This carried on for years and years, and inside I was getting more and more angry at the injustice. When I reached the age of about 12 or 13 and started gaining my independence, I started going out a lot more and meeting new friends, and my life started going downhill from then onwards. I started drinking and getting involved with things that I shouldn’t have been doing from quite a young age.
This probably continued for another couple of years until the age of about 16. From the outside I looked like a cool, calm character – but inside my heart was rotten. I felt a real sense of injustice at what had happened to me. I felt like someone had robbed me of my older brother, and I was just very, very angry. I couldn’t hold relationships together. I struggled to get on with people. I wasn’t doing my best at school. Inside I think I was just crying out for help.
Fortunately things never went too badly wrong. I never got in trouble with the police and I thank God for that today, but times were really tough at home during those years.
At the age of 16 my cousin invited me along to a Christian camp. Although I was familiar with the Christian faith, I just didn’t live the lifestyle. The church had never done anything to upset me. I would happily go to church sometimes and go to my youth group and see my friends - I was happy with that. I never knew that Christianity was ‘real’ and I definitely wasn’t a Christian up until that point.
I spent the week at the camp just mucking about, arguing with boys, not really wanting to go to the meetings, staying up late, sleeping during the day. This continued until the last night when thousands of young people were asked to go forward if they wanted prayer. I was a bit sceptical and wasn’t too sure if I wanted to go forward. Then my cousin said: “Look, come on, what’s the worse that can happen?” So I went forward and a guy asked if he could pray for me. He asked me to hold out my hands, and I think deep down I did believe in prayer. So I stood there with my hands open. I didn’t tell him too much of what I wanted prayer for, but - out of nowhere - he started praying for my anger issues; he prayed for chains of anger to be broken and I had some very, very clear images myself with Jesus in front of me. It was as clear as anything. His arms stretched out to the left and to the right and there was no escaping them. I collapsed on the floor, and remained there for probably a good thirty or forty minutes.
No-one could believe what was going on. Earlier that week I had been a real “jack the lad”, and I would never cry. I was changed from that moment - everything changed – and at that point I knew God was real. I stood up and felt about five stone lighter as though all my anger had gone. I didn’t know what had happened. For the first time I started worshipping - lifting my hands up in the air and I absolutely loved it!
In the same way that you drop a stone into the river and the ripples take a while to affect everything around them, that’s what happened to me. God had changed my heart and I was a new person. Slowly, from that day on, things began to change. I didn’t want to drink and I stopped hanging around with the same people. Gradually my life was transformed. I got involved with a church regularly and went to a youth group and then went to university to do a degree in youth work.
After what Jesus has done for me, I want to give him my whole life. When he died on the cross, he paid for all my sins and he took away all my shame – I am completely free. Eventually I would like to be a pastor or someone who preaches all over the world about Jesus.
My whole life has turned around. If it wasn’t for Jesus and the work that he's done for me, I don’t know where I would be today!