Back home and settled in our ‘under-construction’ owner-builder home, our new neighbour (a retired gentleman who ‘just’ happened to be a follower of Jesus) invited my husband to a ‘mission’ fundraising night for men at his church. The evening over, he happened to mention I was also very interested in Biblical things and was studying the Scriptures with a ‘fringe’ Christian group(an attempt to build on what I’d learned from the book on the mantle-piece)! At that time, my husband was unaware I’d pulled the plug on those sessions, my ‘tutors’ insisting Jesus was ‘a god’… not God, and that was something I could not accept. Having terminated contact with them, I had actually cried out to God to show me the way through the maze, and unbeknown to me, my prayers were in the process of being answered!
The very next morning, my gentle, caring neighbour was at our door with a pile of pamphlets a mile high for me to read about that particular group. He also mentioned that his sister ‘just happened to be’ the state coordinator of ‘Know Your Bible’ study groups and would I like to meet her when I’d finished reading the pamphlets?
I agreed and stayed up late while my husband attended his uni’ lectures, reading through every bit of the information my neighbour had given me. It didn’t take me long to realise that I didn’t know what the Bible said and could not tell whether I was being deceived by what other ‘believers’ were telling me or not. It was time for some serious study with a ‘mainline’ denomination and when my neighbour collected his pamphlets, I asked him to arrange for his sister to visit me. When she came, we talked, she asked questions, I asked questions, we talked some more, then I stumbled and fumbled my way through a sincere prayer of repentance and surrender, inviting Jesus into my heart and life.
Days later, I discovered that small Bible study groups had been meeting each week all around the district for years, one meeting two streets behind our house! I found it gobsmacking that I’d been struggling to grasp what I needed to do to ‘connect with/come to know’ God when ‘the Truth’ had been literally houses away! Jesus said when we seek Him with all our hearts, we will find Him, and I did. Are you joining the dots? Was all of this mere coincidence… well, what resulted from it all? I joined a Bible study group, and as a family, we became members of a local Protestant community church. Our children were raised in a Christian home, dedicated to the Lord, and educated in a Christian school. Was that book on the mantle-piece significant? Very! Was that Christian neighbour used by God? Absolutely!(We had virtually nothing to do with our neighbours on the other side.) Is any of this saga an accident? No way!