After a great breakfast, as always, the 50 (or more) men who attended were blessed to hear Jeremy Field tell of how God has worked in his life.
Jeremy is currently studying to be a Vicar at Cambridge, for the Church of England.
He was born in the UK and his family moved to Washington US when he was just 6 months old, and then moved on to Mexico City in mid 80's. Jeremy was sent back to boarding school in the UK after his dad realised he wasn't doing well academically and basically spent the whole first year messing about having fun.
Jeremy hated boarding school. They were only allowed to write letters home once a week, and the letters were read by the headmaster before they were sent. It was like prison. At the age of 11, not long after writing a letter home telling his parents how much he hated the school, he was called into the headmaster's office and was told that his parents had been in a serious plane crash and died.
Life changed from that day on. He had to go back to boardig school and moved in with his uncle living on a Devon farm. at this time Jeremy sensed God was with him. He wasn't a regular church goer but at the memorial service he knew God was with him. Despite this feeling of the reality of God he missed the point of Christian faith. He knew God existed but didn't do anything about it.
He went on through boarding school but didn't associate with Christians even though he thought God was real. Life for Jeremy began to unravel, becoming lonely and pointless. He didn't want to do any job and missed interviews because he didn't see the point in it all.
He decided to travel and search for meaning in life. He went to India to teach English which he enjoyed and the went to the Himalayas. Jeremy got sick while in the mountains and, fearing this sickness may mean death, called on God with promises of faith if God would heal him. It seems God answered his prayer as he did recover, but after the healing it wasn't long before he forgot all about God again.
After becoming ill again Jeremy had to return to the UK. On his travels, he always carried a Gideon bible and could never throw it away, he kept it with him without really knowing why.
Soon After his return to the UK he got a job and settled down. It was now that he decided to look into the faith... was God real? Reluctantly, Jeremy undertook the Alpha Course (10 meetings where the Bible and Jesus are explained in detail). He hadn't cried at his parents death because he was always able to keep a stiff upper lip, but the moment he walked into the church for the Alpha Course he found himself welling up.
During the Alpha Course he started understand the Christian faith and about the possibility of a relationship with God through Jesus. He experienced again the feeling he had when he was 11 but now he understood what it meant.
It's not just a warm feeling, in response to what God has done he wanted to go out into the world and make a difference. Jeremy decided to go into prisons and saw what a difference a relationship with God made to
these prisoners lives causing them to be a blessing to their families and society. Jeremy also started helping full time at Holy Trinity Brompton Church in London and began taking the Alpha Course to the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, taking resources to the field and running the Alpha Course from DVDs.
Jeremy said he could see more and more that God was opening doors to meet people who's lives were being changed. In Sierra Leone, the Civil war was evil, vicious and bloody. There were riots in the city. He saw the head of armed forces there who was a Christian and asked Jeremy for prayer because he feared things there would escalate and put the Jeremy and the others in danger, so they ran the course outside of town. The tension didn't explode as fear, believed to be and answer to their prayer and they were able to continue their work there.
Jeremy recalled an encouraging story of that time when a Christian was threatened in his home by a number of gunmen. Surprising himself, rather than obeying the gunmen, he told them "Come into my house, I want to tell you about Jesus". These men who wanted to kill him came in, ate with him and he even prayed for then all. They left his home and they never touched him again. His confidence obviously came from years and years of a relationship with God.
Since the age of 11, Jeremy had struggled with forgiveness when it came to the pilot of his parents plane, who was clearly in error, causing the plane crash because he was trying to save money by landing the plane in dangerous circumstances instead of flying to a different airport. But something happened to show Jeremy that God is in control and hadn't forgotten what he was dealing with. It happened that Jeremy met someone, Washington, US, who was visiting the UK for a week and Cambridge for one day and walked into Jeremy's church. After hearing Jeremy's testimony, it turned out this visitor had lost his parents in the same plane accident. It was clearly not just chance. God is at work. God is creating relationships.
Jeremy finished by urging us all to "investigate God or even ask of God himself now".
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