From Blasphemer to Believer: Lynnie’s Story of Redemption

As a 20 year old student at Leeds School of Town Planning, Lynnie was a Godless blasphemer who despised Christians and Christ. This story is one you won’t want to miss. She tells us her story of how she spent 20 years in bed with ME, and this helped her grow closer to God.

Over to you, Lynnie…

A Life Turned Upside Down – Psalm 107

Coming home for the summer holidays in July 1972, I met for coffee with a school friend who said those dreadful words, “I’ve become a Christian, Lynnie, Jesus is alive!” The words Jesus is alive were words He used to draw me to Himself. I had a rapid conversion. By that September, having attended a church my friend recommended and having talked endlessly with a chap from there, who clearly wanted to convert me, I gave my life to Christ. I knew little other than I wanted to be with Jesus, to follow Him, whatever that meant, and have eternal life.

Rapid conversion was followed by little progress. I returned to college without any idea of what I was meant to do now I was a Christian, other than tell my mates all about him. I didn’t go to church or read my Bible, and prayer was spasmodic.

I returned home the following summer, and my friend booked me to see a kind, godly vicar who put me straight. A year later, at age 22, I started my first job. God put me in an excellent Bible-teaching church, and growth happened. I loved being taught, I loved the new pattern of my life, my own time with the Lord, reading my Bible and praying. I loved the gospel making sense, I loved serving the people in church, particularly working with the teenagers, and I loved being trained in personal evangelism. My heart was truly dedicated to Jesus. He had truly won my heart.

My life had been flipped by God: from Jesus-hater to Jesus-lover.

He had truly been turned upside down.

God does strange, unexpected things to make us more like Christ – Isaiah 28

Life was honky dory, but at age 24, my Nan, who had helped bring me up, died, then at 25, my Mum died horribly of stomach cancer. Although in His grace, God used me and my vicar to bring her to Christ on her deathbed.

My Grandad died the following year, and my dad just over a year after that. I have to say this rocked me to the core, and I got to the point of being afraid of God and what else he might do to me. But now free, I no longer had to look after my Dad, I said to God, I will/can follow you anywhere.

I then fell ill with what turned out to be glandular fever, which meant I was off work 6 months. It was while I was recovering and being looked after by friends that I picked up a commentary on Abraham, an Old Testament character who left his old life and land behind to follow God into the unknown. The unknown for me was to follow God’s call into full time Christian ministry, and what a disaster that was!

I was then 30 and trained for two years at Oakhill Theological College, and it was a killer. The stress of getting back into serious study, I felt like a complete numpty all the time and realised I had never taken the Word of God as seriously as some of the guys I was training with. Being one of just two women training for ministry meant I was pretty isolated and held in suspicion by some wives.

My room was just off a main corridor, so I don’t think I slept for the whole of the two years, well, it felt like that, and I was exhausted the whole time from not being fully over the glandular fever.

God does strange and unexpected things to make us more like Christ… I hadn’t a clue what he was doing.

At 32, I started in my first job as a deaconess, how old-fashioned a title was that! And life went from bad to worse. I got a job in a huge parish of 900 people (and only big parishes could afford to pay for a deaconess), and I was a nervous wreck.

Preaching and leading services terrified me; I felt completely out of my depth. The worst thing was that I didn’t have a clue what I should be doing, and to be fair, neither did my vicar!!!

I had no family to support me, and I knew no one in the parish. I was lonely, stressed and still exhausted.

The first thing I did every morning when I woke up was burst into tears and beg God to get me out. I felt too incompetent to move to another job. If I did move, I felt I might jump from frying pan into the fire. I felt trapped and hopeless.

BUT my wonderful Father, who I knew was watching over me despite it all, came to my rescue! And Tony, an accountant and church youth worker, married me, a long story for another time, but little did I realise, Tony was going to be my carer as well as my husband.

Two years after starting my job, I walked down the aisle, but only just. A month earlier, I had fallen ill with serious ME and could barely get out of bed. I returned from honeymoon (when God made me surprisingly well), to be told that this illness might well last for about 8 years. The 8 years came and went, and the medics saw no reason why I should ever get better. Life was spent alone in bed for most of every day with my fabulous golden retriever, Alf, by my side.

I have never known exhaustion like it. On a scale of 1-10, I was 2-3.

So what was wonderful God doing? What was he teaching me?

I couldn’t read or watch TV as my eye muscles had packed up, so Tony got me cassette tapes of the Bible being read and sermons from some of the top Bible teachers worldwide. So, every time I was with it enough, I soaked up all this gift from God. And after 20 years, I got better through something called the Lightning Process.

So, I came out of the wilderness. God finally rescued me. But had he used this strange way of working to make me more like Jesus??? Oh gosh, I hope so, it’s so hard to see yourself. I just see the sin that’s still there: the pride, the arrogance, the impatience. I still feel my love for Jesus to be very shallow, even knowing that he died to save me and all the promises he made and keeps for me. But one thing I do know is that He had prepared me for ministry far better, dare I say, than Oakhill. All those years of listening to the Bible taught me who he is and what he has done. Through all the training in my church before Oakhill, God had given me a heart for telling people about Jesus, and Jesus himself had given me a heart for the lost.

So, when I got better, I worked alongside Tony, who was now a vicar. I worked in the ministry as the women’s worker; building women up in Christ as I taught the bible, mainly one to one, and leading women to faith in Christ, again by reading the Bible one to one.

What a gift to me from God!! It is a work I adore. Seeing the Holy Spirit at work in women’s lives and watching them bloom like a flower.

I still do it, and I still love it.

Looking back, I had to learn:

• To trust him in the bleakest of times
• To keep turning to him and expressing my trust in him and his promises
• I had to learn that he wasn’t punishing me – Christ had taken all the punishment for my sin
• I had to learn patient endurance
• I had to find some fulfilment, and I found that as I listened to His voice in scripture.

I began by saying God turns our lives upside down (Psalm 107), He is the God of reversals, and He took me from what would have been an empty life solely about me, to a worthwhile life all about Him. He used the ME for my good and for His glory.

A very hard way to make me more like Jesus (Isaiah 28). But what a reversal followed. He had taken away my health, my friends, my personality, my ministry, and any chance of children. And when He had accomplished in me all He wanted to, He reversed everything!

I have good health, friends, I’m me again, I have a ministry, and He has even given me a daughter.