Finding the Foundations

It was the beginning of 1965 that we moved to London. I was in the middle of the 4th form, and found I had to do GCE (not GCSE in those days) exams very soon in Maths, English and French. I had just spent 18 months kicking my heels in some subjects in a school in South Wales that was taking things more slowly than the one I had  been in years 1 and 2 in North Wales, and a lot of repeating work had made me get slap-dash.

Now I had to hurredly learn Compound Interest, a couple of new French tenses and English préecis writing. I mastered the former for the exams, but in a way that I probably soon forgot them, but the précis practice came in handy later with poetry and hymn writing!
I also had to take up geography again after a break of 2 years, and do Biology in my spare time, as there one could only do 2 sciences. I think that was done when my class was doing German which I had never tackled. Despite all subject complications I actually settled well into this school and eventually made good friends.

But this period of my ‘diary’ memories is vivid and important for bigger reasons.
My sister had got very frustrated with the attitudes of our ‘social-club’ Welsh churches, and angrily rejected the faith. I didn’t want to but couldn’t understand what we were supposed to believe exactly.

While working on my own at the biology syllabus, I began to enjoy also reading books of physiology, medicine, and maybe biochemistry, and realised that evolutionary teaching couldn’t explain in any way the complexity of the wonders I was reading about.
When we got to the 6th form, we found we had a young vibrant economics teacher for General RE. He was very full of fun, but on his 1st lesson wrote on the blackboard, ‘Atheist, Agnostic, Don’t know, Christian’, and asked us to think which we were, and talked of their meaning. I was embarrassed to acknowledge myself a Christian (proabably as so few others did, and I didn’t know really what it meant); and admitted to him that it was much easier to understand about God than about Jesus – why and who was he? What did he do really?
In the coming months he showed us very clearly what Christian teaching was and a number of us began to meet to really read the Bible and dig in to it. The Head Boy who was quite notorious in his lifestyle, came to faith quite dramatically.

My father talked quite a bit as he struggled with the lack of clear teaching and evidence of Christian life in the Welsh Churches we attended over the years. Because of a family holiday I think, I had been unable to join these school friends in a visit to Westminster Chapel (not the Abbey!) where a famous Welsh preacher Dr Martyn Lloyd Jones preached (in English). My parents had heard of him as he had left Harley Street and London Hospital work to minister. So they took me up to visit one Sunday. We were high up on the large full balcony. He as usual preached intelligently, coherently, meaningfully, helpfully – for about 40 minutes. My father had been known to say that he could put up with sitting through preaching that had little or no meaning or usefulness for 20 minutes, but they had better not go on longer! When Dr Martyn finished he could not believe the time, as he had been so engrossed in following what was being said enlighteningly. I asked him how he’d found it and he said not to ask him then  Too moved to give a glib answer. That was about a year before he died age 51.