Our Stories

Perry’s Story 

I grew up in London, a middle child, my brother ten years younger and my sister three years older. My Dad was a factory worker and my Mum a school cleaner. We lived in a very nice semi-detached house in North West London. 

To the outside our family life looked normal. Sadly however life at home was to say the least very unpleasant. Most weekends I would wonder if Mum and Dad would be having yet another of their many arguments! Right up to my teens life at home was unhappy. Life at school was unhappy too! Bullying and racial tension! Sadly I didn’t want to be in school and didn’t want to be at home! Cutting a very long story short I began to ask myself the big question “what is life all about?”

My Auntie was a Spirit Medium giving many, seemingly convincing, proofs of an afterlife which led me to  wonder what the point of life really is, especially if after you die you go to a better place as a ghost! 

With all the unhappiness and feelings of being very unloved and weighed down deep with loneliness and despair I sadly took the decision at 19 years of age, to take my life. This decision I took in March 1985. 

After taking two bottles of sleeping pills and downing pints of beer I waited to die. However in a sudden sense of fear of what I was due to experience next I made a cry up to the sky saying that if there was a God, please can I go to heaven! 

That was Thursday 7th March. There are many details between Thursday the 7th and Sunday evening of the 10th of March but enough to say after recovering from the overdose of pills and through an incredibly unexpected meeting of an old friend of years ago I was invited to a Chapel in Hayes London where I heard a man speak from The Bible. 

There was a blackboard to his right and in Capital letters were written “DEATH and JUDGEMENT.” 

He began to speak and as he did so I began to be aware more and more of how sinful I was. 

He spoke a message from the Bible: “Just as man is destined to die once and after that to face Judgement so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people… and He will come again a second time, not to bear sin but receive those who are waiting for Him.” 

It all fitted into place. There was a point to my life! 

Sitting there I went through various emotions. I understood clearly that had I died on the Thursday evening I would be in Hell! By the end of the service I had asked Jesus to forgive me for my many sins. That night Jesus was my Saviour and God was my Father.

Forty one years have passed and Jesus is still my Saviour and God is still my Father and one day I WILL go to heaven as I asked on that terrible night in March 1985.