‘I thought Christians were fooling themselves, until I came out of that baptismal water’

A whirlwind of loss and lament was set in motion the day Mike Wallbridge’s then wife left him to be with his best friend, the day that would ultimately mark the start of God’s transformative work in his life. Though initally, Mike proved resistant to God’s calls to come home, God’s persistence proved greater. 

Tomorrow I celebrate my 70th birthday and I have been reflecting on the thirty-three years I have been a Christian, particularly my beginnings, which were, if not unique, at least unusual.

They involved no prior belief or repentance, no sermons or scriptures. I can point to a definite day and time but the story began a year or so earlier. On a beautiful summer’s day in the English Lake District, where we lived, my then wife announced she was leaving me for my best friend and my world began to collapse around me. Over the coming months, I lost not only them, but my job, my home and all my savings and I found myself sleeping on the couch of my mother’s retirement apartment.    

Before leaving my employers, I had been invited to church by an elderly couple I met through work. Nobody had ever asked me to church before. I’d lived happily for thirty-seven years without that happening and the invitation was to a Pentecostal church too, definitely more worrying! Those few times I’d been to church it had been to a Church of England church, huge, cold, and menacing like the distant God I associated with Christianity. I graciously accepted the couple’s invitation but with no intention of ever going. I come from a long line of atheists.