A childhood memory

I grew up in a street in South Wales on a housing estate that was built in the fifties. If you walked around the corner from where we lived along another part of the same street you came upon what was to me always quite an impressive sight - a Baptist chapel that had been raised over a hundred years before and surrounded with a low walled graveyard and with a huge cedar tree. As a young child I never went there on my own but as I grew older and was allowed to roam a bit more, I would go with friends to look at it.

I have a vivid memory of a summer's day, a Saturday in 1969 when I was 10 and being there with a friend or two. There were obviously some big meetings going on in the chapel that day and we wondered what it was all about. Apparently, it was a valedictory service, what ever that meant. I cannot remember who our informant was exactly but - and this was the thing that struck me - a young man was going to go as missionary to Peru and he was going there because God had told him to go. I remember thinking at the time what a stupendous thing this was. I had already worked out that we were in a bit of a backwater in Croesyceiliog and it was not the happening place that one might read about, yet here we were and God himself had spoken to a local man and told him to go all the way to Peru. Incredible! I'm sure my ideas of how God speaks to people were very fanciful but there it was. It was happening in my own back yard.

I don't think that moment had any fundamental affect on my attitude to spiritual things over the next few years but it was one of my earliest contacts with real live Christians and one of the first hints of an amazing world which I have been exploring by God's grace ever since.