From a very early age, as far back as I can remember, I had always liked the number 7. It wasn’t a lucky number for me, but I always liked it, the way it looked. I was born on the 14th of a month, in the year 1967, so the number was connected with my birth to a small degree. But there was always something special about that number, it looked good, even when written as seven.
When I was 18, I had the chance to choose something nice as a birthday present, and so I chose a gold signet ring, and had one made to order, featuring the number 7, here it is pictured below:
As my birthday approached in 2016, I was really looking forward to reaching the age of 49, as I had a feeling that the following year would be a good one for me, but with literally no idea how or why, I just knew that it was 7 x 7s. It wasn’t anything superstitious, so I can’t really explain why I had that feeling, but I did.
In the months leading up to my birthday a couple of significant events happened in my life. On a personal level, my parents fell out with me over something to do with my will, as they were unhappy with me replacing them as executors with some younger people. So they distanced themselves for several months. And around the time of my birthday, I discovered the rabbit hole online that produced a very rapid period of ‘red-pilling’ for me. I was already financially red-pilled, having seen what happened in the run up to the credit crunch and its aftermath. But a comment under a financial blog article about the r/k reproductive theory led me to a blog on the outskirts of the internet, and that led me to other blogs and websites, and within a few months, I’d absorbed huge amounts of ‘truths’ about our world today, the vast majority of which I’d never really considered before. Most of those truths sit outside of the topic of this post, but suffice to say all of the truths were eye-openers for me, and I suddenly realised that the world was nothing at all like I’d believed, having lived a life informed almost entirely by mainstream media, and other official sources of information (such as the state education system).
It was an exhilarating period, as I soaked up so much new information about politics, about gender realities, about racial realities, and about the structures of power that exist in the world. And I realised very quickly that nothing was as I’d believed it to be previously, it was all fake.
One aspect of this red-pilling that caught my attention within this period, which was covered by some of the posts at the first blog I’d found (Koanic Soul) that touched on the existence of the supernatural, and God. The writer of that blog was a Christian, so quite a few of his posts touched on the subject, so it piqued my curiosity. I had a reason to drop the blogger an email in June of 2016, and within that email I wrote the following:
‘I have had 3 weird experiences with wild birds, something I will share on the site. Spiritual experiences perhaps. Signs maybe? I don’t know. But 3 is two too many to just be a random thing. Although I am a lifelong atheist, God revealing himself to me would be my top personal wish.’
Although I was an atheist, I felt it was obvious that if there was a God, nothing would be better than having Him reveal Himself to me. Not just me coming to believe He existed, but actually knowing that he is there. I didn’t realise that I asked for something quite momentous at the time I wrote that email, and I wasn’t asking out of faith, just a genuine desire to know the truth and to know if God was really there.
My curiosity was sufficiently piqued to cause me to buy a Bible, and I just checked my Amazon records which confirm that I placed the order on the first day of the seventh month of 2016. Just a coincidence surely.
So, I started reading the Bible, beginning with the New Testament, and I remembered some of the events from my school days. But that was it at that point, nothing happened to me, but I read a bit each day, and continued to consume more and more red-pills as the weeks went by.
I became more and more aware of the issues I’d explored in a blog post I’d written elsewhere the previous year where I questioned why humanity often displayed an evil nature. I just realised I published that post on my birthday in 2015, the 14th, weird eh? I recall that at this point I started to form a conclusion that there was much much more to our life on this planet than I’d previously considered, and I also started to recognise what a tremendous force for pure good Christianity had been for the world and for my nation. I continued to read the Bible, but at this point, it was just out of curiosity, my ongoing quest to find as much truth as I could about our lives here, and humanity’s history.
In the early part of the summer of 2016 I began to have a period of unusual minor injuries, bumping into cupboard doors, bruising myself, or cutting a finger with a kitchen knife, and these continued for a few weeks. I cut my foot on a rock under the water whilst swimming one afternoon, and as this sequence of accidents continued, I realised it was very unusual, as I was normally very sure-handed and had good balance and thus hardly ever injured myself. At around this time I was involved in a very heated internet argument, where I was strongly defending the beneficial influence of Christianity with someone who was anti-Christian, some sort of pagan type, and I put two and two together and wondered if I was the subject of some sort of hexing.
I don’t know the precise date, but one night I was sound asleep, I’d guess it was around 3am. I woke with a start, and was immediately aware of something that had been very close to me, but that moved away up to the ceiling as I awoke. It was pitch dark, so I could only describe this thing as a dark object, I was very aware of its presence, and more so as it came down from the ceiling and moved towards me, until it was literally on top of me, and it felt as though it was trying to enter my body. I was terrified through this experience, literally in a cold sweat, as I lay there, wide awake, breathing deeply. I could feel an evil malevolence from this thing, I was in no doubt that it meant to harm me, maybe kill me.
For reasons unknown to me, but feeling I needed some serious help to escape this attack, I instinctively began to repeat the Lord’s Prayer over and over. I’d not said this prayer since school days, and I’d not reached the Bible verse where it appears in the New Testament, but the words were lodged in my memory somewhere, so I kept saying the prayer aloud, for what seemed like 10 minutes or so. After 10 minutes, this dark thing floated back away from me and vanished, and I immediately went back to sleep, and slept soundly until the morning. When I awoke, the whole incident was very clear in my mind. My only thought as I got dressed was:
‘There’s definitely a God, and last night He came to my rescue’
At that point I couldn’t call myself a Christian, as I was still quite ignorant about the nature of the faith, and Christ’s part in it, but I was from that point a believer in the Christian God, and it had taken Him all of two months (at most) to address the desire I had expressed in the email sent in June to know Him. That’s pretty sharp, considering my lifetime atheism, but you don’t get what you don’t ask for, and clearly He loves all of us, why else would He bother to rescue a lifelong atheist?
Later that year, things were ticking along in my life, I had read the four Gospels and more, and grasped a bit more about Christian faith, and I had enjoyed reading about the life of Jesus, and it was unusual that I couldn’t find anything incoherent or wrong about any of His teachings. It was all good. So I started to attend a local church. One night in mid-December I was driving back late from Cardiff to my home city in Devon. I had been unwell for a few weeks, with stomach issues, a bit worse than my customary IBS symptoms. I wondered if I had something more serious, such as cancer. Unlikely I know, but we all sometimes think the worst about what is causing troubling symptoms.
So, I’m in my car, it’s around 11pm, and I’m somewhere out in the countryside on the motorway, whizzing along on a clear night and a quiet road. I’m thinking to myself and directing the thoughts to God, sort of talking to Him in my mind. I told Him that I was glad I knew Him now after all these years, and I told him that if I did have cancer and I was going to die soon, that I was grateful for a good life, and that I hoped to meet Him and Jesus in heaven. I wasn’t depressed at all, it was just a communication to God that if my time was up, so be it, and I looked forward to whatever came next, hopefully something blissful in heaven.
You may have seen cartoons where a character is surprised by something they see, and so they do a double-take in amazement? That was literally what happened to me within a few seconds of sharing these thoughts with God, as I saw out of the car window away to the right in the distance a lit cross, just gleaming in the darkness. It was still there when I did the double-take, and it looked real, perched quite high, I’d guess a few hundred metres away from the motorway. Naturally I was taken aback at seeing a cross just after sharing my thoughts with God, and I took it as a sign that He had heard me (again). Around ten days later I made the same trip back from Cardiff to Devon, and I kept a look out for the cross, and it was there again, and I had my Sat Nav device on too, so I was able to look at the location, a small village out in the countryside, but I later confirmed it had a church, so it must have been the cross on the church’s spire. However, on a 150 mile trip, what are the chances that I pass that church’s cross at the precise moment I’ve just shared some thoughts directly with God? Slim, very slim.
The conclusion to this tale hearkens back to my attraction to the number 7. I did expect that once I’d passed my 49th birthday, that the following year would be the best of my life. Clearly it was, as nothing compares to the joy of knowing Jehovah and Jesus are with you in your life, and knowing that there is a reason why good and evil exist, and how to make the right choices in one’s own life to follow the path of good. The Holy Spirit does transform you.
Some months later I had progressed to reading the Old Testament, and had reached the Book of Leviticus, which I loved, as I thought God’s laws and commands and statutes were brilliant. As I read chapter 25, once again, I was startled:
8 And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. 9 Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land. 10 And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family. 11 A jubile shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow, neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes in it of thy vine undressed. 12 For it is the jubile; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat the increase thereof out of the field.
It’s very hard to find any other explanation for everything that happened to me once I had passed 7 x 7 years of my life and began my 50th year, but it seems clear that was the point where I returned to my family, the Body of Christ, the Christian church. God had planted a seed in me back when I was a child with the number 7, and He’d patiently waited for me to seek Him, and then without delay, He’d come to my rescue and allowed me to know Him. The Bible I ordered had arrived within days of ‘the tenth day of the seventh month’ of my jubilee year, and my eyes were opened almost immediately. I had no knowledge of the jubilee year until after I had turned 50 last year.
There will be a part 3 to this series within a couple of weeks, but for now, if you’re reading this as a an atheist or an agnostic, you should know that I was like you for most of my life. And probably, if I’d read my own story back when I didn’t believe, it wouldn’t have convinced me to believe. But what you need to realise is that the truth is sat there waiting for you, you simply have to want to know it, and make it known that you want the truth in your life. The truth is Jehovah and His son Jesus. Those of you who recognise the importance of Christianity to the development of our wonderful Western civilisations, you know that Christianity is under attack and is waning. You know that nothing can replace it. So don’t try to replace it, embrace it, take a leap of faith and ask for the truth for yourself, and rest assured it will appear. And then the West can be saved.
I pray that all who read this post come to know Jehovah. Amen.
Edit: My 50th birthday in 2017 was on Good Friday itself, 14th April.
Part 3 will appear within a week, apologies for the long gap.