One of the most common questions I get asked is "where are you from" with "what do you do" coming in a close runner up. I'm Greek Cypriot and recently started out on a new venture opening supermarkets. I used to own a dive centre but the world's economy is on a slippery slope and we'll always need food not diving, hence the direction change. But I always think it is more important to know where you are going rather than where you are from or where you have been. Most people try hard to ignore that most important of questions "where am I going when I die?". From age 10 I remember being bothered with that question. I reasoned that there must be a God and therefore He must expect something from each of us. And if I got it wrong I suspected there was a little truth in the Heaven and Hell theory so I better check to make sure I'm going to the right place. I never let go of that line of thinking but I also didn't get the answers I was searching for or the peace until I was 35 years old.
It started with a dream one night in which I saw an amazing city suspended as if in outer space and I was above looking down at it. There's too much detail for here but when I woke in the morning I had such a feeling of love and security and I knew that there was more to this life and it was GOOD!
Some time later I had another of these strange "dreams" which I knew were supernatural and in this dream a person was standing by my bed for a long time. When I woke in the morning I again had an incredible peace in my heart but also a feeling of love and the amazing thing is, it was a physical feeling. A kind of burning sensation. A few months later this was repeated and when I awoke I felt a lot of love for this person in my dream. I remember I associated this person's looks as a woman with brown hair (this is important because of the main dream later). After these dreams I started getting an urge to go to church but more out of a sense of looking good and being seen to be an upright clean cut sort of guy. Not really because I was searching for God.
Then.....a major dream in which I believe Jesus appeared (I know this now but not then as all I remember was His appearance). He was awsome. Beautiful, lovely, radiating peace and love and just dazzlingly bright. He had white hair but not old white hair, kind of like a fleece and white robe with a golden sash. I didn't know who this person was but when I woke up I was in love and ready to give everything up to find this person. Strangely I didn't share any of this with my wife. I felt it was for me alone. Shortly thereafter I went to N. Ireland with my unit and whilst stationed in Belfast met an old lady by the name of Gladys Blackburn. She was quite an amazing woman. She evengelised the troops and had suffered much persecution from the local terrorists as well as the soldiers themselves. I befriended her and I'm sure she put me on her list of people to pray for. There was no heavy preaching, just some literature with Scripture verses. I only met her twice but when I returned to Germany she wrote and sent me a Bible which sat on my windowsill until I left Germany. I really valued the letter where she thanked me for helping her. This made me feel very nice and respectable. I had actually helped someone:-)
About this time my thyroid gland stopped working and I started suffering the effects of thyroxine deficiency which isn't very nice. It makes you like a pre-menstrual Grizzly Bear with a hangover. This condition lasted for five years during which life really took a downward spiral. I was a physical training instructor in the British Army, an elite bunch of guys who were pretty fit. Suddenly I found I couldn't run very far without running out of steam, couldn't sleep well at nights, was falling asleep at my desk, snoring, looking hungover most of the time and constantly stressed out and bad tempered. My marriage disentegrated into divorce, my friends thinned out and I became a laughing stock of a soldier and an extremely depressed individual. When someone asks you "how are you" they are really just saying "hello". As I would repeatedly tell people how sick I was feeling, people would start avoiding me which made the depression worse. I did make a friend of one of the students I was teaching at the School of Physical Training, Aldershot and the two of us would go out drinking heavily and getting into all kinds of scrapes. One evening after drinking heavily we returned to the Sergeants' Mess and up-ended the gambling machine which spewed forth about £150 in 50p pieces. In the morning we woke to find we each had beer mugs of coins by our beds. The RSM appreciated our confession and the machine was duly filled back up!
One day the Jehovah's Witnesses came to my house which I had now moved into after my divorce and on impulse I invited them in for an argument. They patiently led me through their scriptures and slowly I started appreciating the Word of God. I even went to one of their Kingdom Halls a couple of times. I was amazed at how warm their welcome was and even though my impression of church up til then was bad and boring, I quite enjoyed the experience. I suffered through the winters with my dead thyroid feeling worse and worse. Visits to the Doctors were regular but remember: these were Army Doctors and the Army usually takes the NHS rejects (if you are reading this and the hat fits, ask me and I'll give you multiple examples of their cock-ups) and they never diagnosed my problem which was slowly killing me. The worse I got the more I would try and exercise to reclaim my lost fitness and the more I trained the worse I felt. One day in February about three and a half years after the Thyroid stopped I was feeling particularly useless, miserable, lonely and depressed when my boss called me to his office and informed me I was posted to Belize in five days time. What an amazing turn of luck. Warm weather was exactly what I needed so on 12 Feb 1990 I was on a plane bound for my new home for the next six months. St. Georges Caye just 9 miles off the Belize mainland is a crescent moon shaped paradise (except for the mossies) and I had a great time there even though by this time I was so slow and facially deformed that the locals nicknamed me"Turtle". I had a gradually expanding pot belly and blotchy brown skin over my face, my lips were large and turning up. I looked as if I had Downs Syndrome.
For the next six months I ate like a king, drank my weight in rum nightly and read an old Bible that had been rescued from a yacht wrecked on the local reef. I would spend most evenings lounging on a clam chair at the end of one of the many jetties trying to avoid the mosquitoes. The night sky in the tropics is quite spectacular. Either a billion sparkling white lights or a lightning light show blazing across the horizon. I never tired of the hours I spent sitting and watching. I would talk to God during those times, whoever He was, and although I didn't feel I got a response I knew He heard me. After all, He's God!
Towards the end of my six month tour I was informed of my next tour of duty - Hong Kong! As I was leaving Belize I wandered around the airport killing time and came across one of these little "tracts" usually handed out on busy streets by various religious zealots. This time I picked one up, looked at it briefly then pocketed it for future examination. On arrival in Hong Kong I quickly unpacked, familiarised myself with places of work, the Sgts' Mess which would be my home for the next 2 years and various other places one finds in new destinations. One evening I discovered the tract which looked something like this: