Amy’s Story Part 1

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 Amy’s Story Part 1

One of my earliest recollections is of lying in bed at night, listening to my Mum practicing the piano downstairs. The soft, soothing melodies would float up to my bedroom, and gently take me to dreamland. I was not very old when I decided that I wanted to be a piano teacher.

Practice was sometimes hard, but I had lots of encouragement, particularly from my Grandma. My Mum had had a disastrous marriage, and after two years had returned home to live with her parents together with her two little girls, my younger sister and me. When I was six years old, my Grandma’s parents became too frail to live alone, and they came to live with us too, so we had quite an unusual household, of four generations. It was a very loving and supportive environment to grow up in.

My great Grandad was a Primitive Methodist, but his wife, and the others in the family had got involved with one of the cults, so I was brought up as a Christian Scientist. I was fully convinced of the truth of this heresy, and very vocal at school about my beliefs, so much so that I am sure that if you had asked my class-mates who they would have thought would have become a Christian, they would probably have said “anyone except Amy!”

When I was seventeen, as well as learning the piano and ‘cello, I was taking singing lessons from a neighbour, and elderly gentleman who was a retired schoolteacher. As with most young people I didn’t always do my practice properly, and one particular evening I knew that he would not be pleased with the lack of work that I had done that week, so I knew that I needed to do something to get in his good books! He had never tried to involve me before in his church; he attended the local Baptist Church, but that night he had brought along an invitation to go to a concert, where a music group from the Elim Church would be performing. Because I thought this would be an easy way to get ‘brownie points’ I took the invitation, and said that I would go.

I don’t know if I really intended to go to the concert or not, but when I showed the invitation to some of my friends at school, one of them said that she would like to go with me, so we arranged to meet outside, and went in together. It is so much easier to go somewhere new with someone you know, isn’t it? I was so surprised to see that Sarah, one of my best friends, was singing backing vocals; she had never told me about her involvement, but as I said, no one would have thought I would have been interested.

As I sat at the back of the hall listening as this group of young people share about their love of Jesus, I was amazed. I knew all the facts about Jesus, but to me He was just someone who had lived 2000 years ago. They spoke of Him as someone who was real to them, someone who walked with them, and talked with them each day; someone to whom they could turn in all circumstances in life. It was so different from the dry, empty religion of my childhood.

Sarah invited me to come along the following week when they were performing up in the North Yorkshire moors, and stay the night at her house. I was pretty keen to come and hear more, and besides, one of the guitarists, David, had already caught my eye. So that cold November night, coming home in the dilapidated church minibus, when David took off his jacket, and slipped it around my shivering shoulders, romance was born. David and I began going out, and over time as I heard more about the love of Jesus, I began to realize that I too needed Him as my Saviour and Lord. I became a Christian while studying for my music degree, and David and I got married three years later.