By Alan C Dougall
(completed as part of a Poole Bible
Training Course)
The evidence of God's grace in my life is simply this: without God's grace, I consider that I would not be here; more than likely I would have been dead long ago. As I have been blessed, I trust that God will bless you as you read this account. This is a testimony with a difference: yes, it could fit neatly into chronological order, but instead I want to focus on three different aspects of my life where God has made a difference. From each perspective, I will contrast the difference before and after I became a Christian.
Three perspectives on my life (so far) are:
Firstly, my brother. This is undoubtedly the area in my life where the contrast is most significant.
Like most brothers where there was less than 2 years difference, my brother, Ian and I spent a lot of time together. We shared the same bedroom and, for much of our lives, the same bed. We played, and we fought. However, as we grew older, we developed totally different outlooks, and our relationship dissolved completely. Ultimately, I had reached the point where I could not cope with the contrast in my brother's behaviour towards me.
One minute he was friendly, the next minute, without warning, he would lash out at me with his fist. Especially after my father had died, I suppose he felt a responsibility for us all, like he was the head of the family, and he was there to take over the discipline in the same way my father had before him. He was becoming a man of violence: full of jealousy, hatred and a domineering spirit. I consciously tried to ignore him completely. That meant no birthday/Christmas presents. If I was setting the table, it would be for one less person, and I wouldn't clear away his dishes or the last thing he had used. For one and half years, this was extreme, but it was survival.
The only communication was times when the shells cracked and we would shout and swear. I remember a time when my brother had been in Germany working for two months and when he returned he had brought me a shirt. He was unable to give it to me directly, but he gave it to my mother to give to me. We were incapable of speaking normally to each other. The only contact was when we passed by each other in the narrow hall, and we would bash into each other. The closest interaction consisted of opening the door into the room where the other was and hurling a bread-knife or a poker towards the enemy each of us lived with. That was my response when his outbursts of violence started towards me or, in some cases, towards my younger sister or my mother. Thankfully, the closest shot was with a knife, which came within one inch of my brother's right eye.
A number of times the police were involved. I remember one occasion when someone beat up my brother near our house. He rushed into the house and grabbed a rifle (.22 calibre) and went out to threaten his victor. A gunshot was fired. The police later confiscated the gun. No charges were made on any of these occasions. I lived in fear that one day he would kill me or murder all of our family in a sudden rage.
One evening at the age of sixteen, I went to a Christian meeting at the back of a church. I had been invited one year earlier by a friend (who is now a Canadian resident and a full-time missionary in Pakistan). But because I worked as a waiter on Thursday evenings, I had not managed to go along. When I arrived that evening, I was very surprised to see my brother. I discovered later that he had been invited less than one week earlier by the pastor, Roy, who had given him and his girlfriend a lift home in his car, while they were walking in the rain.
There were only about 40 people there that night - out of a town of more than 40,000, and we just happened to turn up with the same interest at the same place on the same night. Or was someone else in control? I felt awkward because my brother was there, but in another sense I felt strangely at home for what seemed the first time in my life. Some weeks later, I became a Christian.
Being quite small and having been bullied most of my life at home and at school, I had become naturally very timid, but the next day I knew an inner strength to simply walk away from someone whom I had idolised. I had been cycling home with this girl while she was walking, and she was teasing me about this Christian stuff in front of her friends. So I cycled some distance ahead, and I expected that I would normally have waited at the end of the road and then licked her boots. On this occasion, however, I felt the strength to just keep cycling home, not in any sense out of being hurt or indignant, but because I now had a greater God.
Within six months, finally, I think even my brother had noticed a change in me, and then he came back to the Christian meeting, and he too became a Christian. Nevertheless, it was over a year before I had really forgiven him, and was able to talk to him without any tension between us. We could even talk about the past, and I was surprised that he had also been afraid of me. He knew he was capable of anything in a rage, but sometimes, as he went to bed in the morning, he did not know whether he would wake up in the morning. He was hot-tempered but I guess I was cold and calculated. It was only when we worked together, as Sunday School teachers and also as labourers on a building site, that I began to appreciate how much he really cared for me.
From someone who used to be filled with such hatred and venom, I learned that he was now able to love with such sacrifice. As a student who had then gone back to school, he once met a young gypsy girl who had no shoes, and he took her to a shop and bought her a pair of shoes - not just any pair would do, but the best he could buy in the shop. Now, for the last 5 years, my brother has been ministering in India: helping the sick including some time with Mother Teresa's Sister of Charities, teaching in various churches and providing practical help. He works here for a period (in Bournemouth of all places) to finance himself for as long as he can in India. I can now say that I love my brother and though he may not appreciate it, I am very proud of him also. Perhaps I will tell him that next time he comes back!
Secondly, about my father and the inheritance he left me.
My father died when I was 12. Before he died, at the age of 60, he was not at home for a number of years. I now understand that he had left because he could not cope with himself, his drunkenness nor his violent behaviour towards us. For most of the time I knew him, he did not work for health reasons but he did some work with his older bachelor brothers on a farm where he had escaped to. My mother was left with the responsibility of raising 4 young children born within the space of 5 years. Many times, she had also said, she wanted to run away and leave us.
Before he escaped from us, my father and I had little in common perhaps because of the age gap. I remember a few positive events: crossing from North to South Queensferry on a passenger ferry by for the cost of 1 old penny (less than 1/2 pence), standing with him at the queen opening the Forth Road Bridge in 1964, and a few silent games of chess. I hardly knew him. I once started to write a poem about my father - it only amounted to two lines:
I only remember a few conversations I had with him. Death and suicide were quite prominent in my thoughts. So, at the age of about 11, I asked him, "Is there life after death?"
He thought for a while, almost until I expected no answer at all, and then he said, "Some people believe there is; some people don't."
Many things in his life had led him to such an agnostic state. He had been to Edinburgh University to study Architecture but the social and drinking habits combined with the pressure of trying to succeed resulted in him leaving after 2 years. Like a record stuck in a groove, my brother started a similar course and also left after 2 years without sitting the exams. My father had also been in a coma at some stage during military service and this had affected his health. He also strove for much of his married years to provide at least the house we lived in. He had only been granted life rent by his father who had not expected him to marry. Under Scottish law at the time, we would have no right of residence after he had died. He died without getting agreement from all of our relatives that the house would be passed onto his family. His perception of himself was one of a hopeless failure and that same attitude infected all of us within the family. That was our inheritance.
My education at school on Darwin's theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest reinforced the belief that we were all likewise doomed to a hereditary failure. My older sister had a scripture verse on the wall that she had copied out of her Gideon's bible: For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; there is no one righteous, no not one. There seemed no hope. Often I would run away from my father's beatings into the bathroom and locked the door. In my despair, I would attempt to gas myself with the bathroom gas-tap, and I often cried out to God: "It isn't fair!".
For a number of months I even kept a Gideon's bible in a drawer in the bathroom and when I heard at school that God had blessed the founder of Gideon's International for reading the bible every day, I also wanted to be blessed. I read there, that whoever called upon the Name of the Lord would be saved. When I found out His Name, I called it out again and again religiously, thinking that something magic would happen. Nothing did. As I cried out in desperation, however, I felt a strange consolation as if I had been promised, "Everything will be better when you are older."
About a year or so after my father had died and shortly after a friend's father had also died, we heard about a public presentation entitled, Is there life after death?
The two of us with another friend who had no father, all went along to listen. During the session, the overriding message was, "Be baptised and you will be saved, and then live a perfect life after that and you will be okay."
I considered that my life was in too much a mess and that it was too hard to stop sinning then. I decided that I would wait until I was older. I thought, "Maybe when I am about 40 years old, I would not be sinning so much. Then it would be easier to live a perfect life afterwards."
When I first went along to that Christian meeting in September 1973 where I met my brother, the first sermon that the pastor, Roy, preached on was the call of Samuel. There was nothing strange about the message I guess but behind the scenes, this was the first time that Roy had preached the Gospel on a Thursday night. He hadn't the faith to do it before that night. For six months, Roy had brought along two sermons: one for those who were Christian members of the group, and another just in case a number of new people came to listen. Weeks passed and nothing happened and then he realised that God wanted him to exercise faith. He prayed for seven newcomers to come along then he reduced it to five, because that is all he could believe for. The night that he prayed for, there was indeed seven newcomers. My brother and I were blessed to be the two extra newcomers.
Within a month of going along to those Christian meetings, I heard a sermon about the Israelites getting up in the middle of the night and fleeing Egypt. They had had no time to leaven their bread before they left. The message that God was saying to me personally was that I didn't need to make myself perfect before I came to Him. He wanted me just as I was. I had tried for a year or more to be a better person and this option offered me hope. When I decided to become a Christian, there was no bolt from the blue, just a certain conviction that this decision was the next step which was the right one to take.
For more than ten years, Roy was like an earthly father to me, and I have been blessed by all he has done for me. Most of all, I have learned to appreciate who my real Father, God is. There is now some distance between Roy and I in terms of miles. But this has not prevented me from knowing a deeper sense of God's unfolding love for me through the character and concern of that man and his wife, who are like a new father and mother to me.
Roy has recently retired at the age of 55 - not from full-time ministry - but from Scottish Power. His full-time ministry has just begun. That man prays daily for revival in this nation and I am blessed that he also prays for our family also. I have a strong conviction that this man has been given the keys from God for a revival in his town, perhaps throughout Scotland, and maybe even the UK.
The final perspective concerns my general welfare, or rather God's welfare for me.
Coming from a family with little income, where four of us and my mother slept in the same bedroom, the stigma of being poor was most evident at school: in the clothes we wore, and the free school meals to which we were entitled. Over a period of 7 years, our village trebled in size, mainly as a result of its location for new job opportunities. However, this only enhanced the poverty felt about the haves by us have-nots. Like a number of youngsters in our village, I learned the only way to get things was to grab what I could. Sometimes it was apples from wealthier peoples' gardens. Then it was items from shops, which helped me to score points with others in our village gang. Or just girls that I would go with to get what I could get out of them. And ultimately stealing money from a friend's house.
On that occasion, we knew where the house keys were. My other friends had done it before and I had shared the spoils. Now it was my turn to do the same. I went to the place where the money was kept and from a large wadge of money, I took out £20, which was more money than I had ever seen. The house was a very modern house compared to ours with a split-level lounge and very large windows overlooking the countryside plus a few other houses. I remember that view well. As I walked back through the lounge with the money, it was like the whole wide world was watching me through those windows.
When my friends' tricks were uncovered on a later occasion, I became implicated in an earlier incident. I had heard that the rightful owners would be paying my mother a visit. Around that time, less than three years after my father's death, we were evicted from our house, even though my mother had offered to pay the valuation price. The Daily Express displayed the whole story, Out of the House! with photographs of all our belongings out on the street together with a photograph of our cousin who had initiated the court action. Our belongings were later taken into storage. Now my mother was about to find out that her blue-eyed innocent little boy was a housebreaker.
For six months I lived in fear of my mother being told of my escapades. I became a recluse and buried myself watching TV. I became so self-conscious that I was continuously nervous about meeting people. I remember at that time breaking down in tears at school in front of the whole class when the teacher asked me to explain where my school books were. I was too embarrassed to explain publicly that they were in storage.
After some months staying with a very kind neighbour, my mother managed to borrow enough money to buy a caravan for us to live in. We moved in and unpacked our belongings. Apart from a short spell in another village, this was a chance to begin again somewhere else. After a short while, I guess it wasn't a surprise to find that I wasn't well-liked in the new area; after all, I didn't like myself. It seemed that the more I tried to grab, even more slipped through my fingers.
Working as a part-time waiter to earn some money, I recall petty pilfering minor payments into my own pocket, and then losing significant amounts from my personal float. I became aware that God was teaching me that I could not gain anything by false means.
About a year before I actually became a Christian, I resolved to turn over a new leaf and make myself a better person. I even became religious to an extent but the same selfish thoughts were inside. Almost unaware of my hypocrisy, I realised how deceptive and manipulative I could be at achieving my own ends. I longed for innocence and idolised such a state in others.
A significant verse for me when I became a Christian was, If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away, behold all things have become new! God was not in the business of ruffling a few leaves; he had to dig down to the ground-root of the problem. He has changed my heart and gives me the grace continually to receive his strength to fulfil His purpose for my life and for those around me. I know I have been blessed to have been poor. It was only after I became a Christian that I realised that I should make restitution for the past. Thankfully, though sneered at by a shop assistant on one such occasion, the store manageress was more understanding and I discovered that she was a Christian. I continue to discover that His way is the best way.
This was the blessing that I received when I married my loving wife, Hazel, whom I first met at a University prayer meeting. We have been married for nearly eighteen years and He has blessed us with three lovely determined children, a good job and a large house (albeit with a mortgage).
Nevertheless, I am nothing without God. He is not a crutch for me to lean on; He is all of my two legs that enables me to stand. I am thankful that there have been times when He has reminded me that it is all of His doing, not my own. There are three periods in my life when God's provision and mercy have been most prominent:
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I pray and trust that God will bless you as you seek to perceive Him through the mist. May you see Him standing on top of the waves and beckoning you to come towards Him.
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