Talking to the wall

On the 6th of August 2001, four months after I moved to Dundalk, my sister Caroline attended the women’s meeting in the Baptist Church. She asked the women there to pray for me because she was going to ask me to attend a gospel meeting with her that was going to be held in a house in the Cooley Mountains that Friday. She thought that if she asked me to go, I would laugh at her and refuse, a very real fear as she knew that in the past I had laughed at the very idea of people believing in a God. I ridiculed them for their beliefs and thought they didn’t live in the real world. The next day, Tuesday, I was talking to my brother, and he said that if I wanted to know God, I should find a quiet moment and ask The Lord to come into my life. That evening, my son was in bed and it was peaceful and quiet. I remembered what he had said, and standing in the kitchen I said, with as much conviction as I could under the circumstances, ‘Lord Jesus, please come into my life’, or words to that effect. I did say it with as much feeling as I could but afterwards I felt incredibly silly and thought that if anybody could see me through the window they would think I was doing a Shirley Valentine, talking to a wall! I went to bed and forgot all about it.