Growing Up Non Christian - Part 2

I said my goodbyes to my family and friends then my mum and I caught the bus to Perth.  We stayed in an apartment in West Perth for about a week before I moved into Curtin student housing.

The moment I stepped foot into my new flat, I knew that Perth wasn't going to be the smooth-sailing ride to success I had imagined it to be.  My new flatmates consisted of two guys and a girl from Geraldton (Gero deros), a guy from Port Hedland and a girl from Denmark (the town in WA - not the country) who actually had been in my year at school although I hardly knew her.  I walked into the kitchen and my heart plummeted.  It was clear that the others had been there enough to establish themselves and there was barely any room for my things.  The kitchen was already skanky with piles of unwashed dishes, empty pizza boxes and beer bottletops everywhere.  It was clear that the male flatmates were typical young Aussie bogans.
I said to my mum, "Please don't make me live here."
She would hear none of it.  This is my mum by the way whose home is her palace, immaculately cleaned from ceiling to floor multiple times per week and she was content to leave her daughter in a hole she wouldn't have lived in if someone offered her a winning Lotto ticket.

This was the start of the first of three years in that student village.  It wasn't the kind where you have meals cooked for you like at UWA.  At Curtin, all the student villages are self-contained and you get shoved in a flat of six (sometimes eight) people (plus their random guests) and I had to learn to cook, budget and look after myself.  Most nights I went to sleep to the sound of death metal music rocking the flat's foundations.  There was no point in talking to these guys.  Unless you wanted to sleep with them or clean up after them, they weren't interested in having you as a friend.  They were the most unreasonable pigs I have met to this day and they used to go out at night, lock their bedroom doors with the metal music raging inside or smoke dope in their rooms and it would come wafting into mine.  I still don't know how I managed to get any sleep that year or maintain any sanity.

When I began my uni course, I soon realised I was in way over my head.  I began to doubt whether I had chosen the right course or even whether I should be at uni at all.  In Albany, I was used to being one of the better English and Drama students and now suddenly I was a very small fish in a very big pond.  I clashed with my creative writing tutor because she didn't seem to like me very much and I often went home crying and humiliated.  It was only when a couple of my people from my class told me they reckoned her criticism of my work was not constructive that I realised I hadn't been imagining it.  It was my baptism into the world of writing which is tough and competitive.  I had dreamed of coming to uni and making friends as good as the ones I had in Albany, but most of the people in my course were those strange arts types and I felt like I had nothing in common with anyone.  However, I did manage to make one good friend who I am still friends with to this day.

Amidst all my busyness, I barely had time to think about God.  At my orientation, I was approached by a girl from the Christian Union who asked me to fill out a survey on religion.  It had questions such as, Do you believe in God? to which I answered Yes.  Another question was about Jesus and who I thought He was.  I answered prophet from the multiple choice options given to me.  I had a feeling Son of God was the correct answer, but I didn't feel I was ready to take that step and acknowledge it.  A few days later I received a phone call inviting me to one of their meetings.  After encouragement from my mum (surprise, surprise) I went along a few times but as the semester wore on, I came busier and busier, particularly with my Film and Television class which involved long hours filming and then in the editing suite.  So I stopped going after about two meetings and thought little about God for the rest of the semester.

I went home to Albany during my mid-year break and realised how miserable and homesick I had been now that I'd slowed down enough to realise it.  I'd been spending hours on the phone to my parents, begging them to let me leave the hole that had been my home for the past five months.  But where would I go?  I felt uncomfortable asking relatives or family friends if I could stay with them, I had no money, a drivers licence but no car, and all of my close friends were still in Albany.  I was so far out of my comfort zone, but not despondent enough to think I needed God.  If things were going to get better it would be due to my hard work and determination.

My back was broken when I returned to my flat for Semester 2.  The guys had been there during the holidays and totally trashed the place.  There was rubbish everywhere, a record amount of dishes, my feet stuck to the floor when I walked on it and there were all kinds of decomposing things in the fridge and on the floor.  My mum opened one of the plastic bags to see what was inside and flung it away, shrieking, "It's a chicken carcass!"  If I wasn't in such shock, I would have found her reaction quite amusing.  My dad is a property manager and he has evicted his fair share of feral tenants.  He complained to management and they forced the guys to clean up the flat or face immediate eviction.  I returned to the flat to find it uncharacteristically spotless, but I wasn't sure whether to feel relief or disappointment.  I wanted a hygienic place to live, yet I also wanted them gone.  It irritated me no end that the mother of one of these guys complained when her son was finally kicked out at the end of the year.  She was clearly one of those 'My Johnny is an angel' types.  Some mothers have NO IDEA I tell you!  I was back to being miserable and desperately wanted some kind of hope.

Despite my lack of attendance at Christian Union meetings, I was still on their email list and an email I received over the next few weeks struck me hard.  It was about a camp that was held during the semester break and I recalled fondly the kind of Christian fellowship I had envied my Albany friends for, and suddenly my longing was reawakened.  I started attending the weekly Bible talks and signed up to join a Bible study before I really thought about what I was doing.  I lied to my good friend from my course, telling her I was going home for lunch when I was really going to the meeting, but I soon came clean and she was encouraging when I thought she would laugh at me.  I guess it must have been strange for her because when she met me, I wasn't Christian, then a few months later, I was.

It was at Bible study that I soon figured out how much I DIDN'T know about God.  I still can't believe my nerve actually, going along and asking all kinds of impertinent questions and thinking I knew the answers.  It was blatantly obvious that I wasn't a Christian, but I guess my presence must have excited some people because they asked if I was interested in doing a course called Simply Christianity which I was keen to explore.  It was as if God was drawing me and I started to fight against it because I was terrified about how my life would have to change if I became one of them.  I sure didn't feel like one of them.  This was obvious when I didn't know where Ephesians was in the Bible and some guy made a joke about it by saying, "It starts with an E."  That made me angry and humiliated.  I could see that these young people were different, but I was still convinced that deep down all Christians were hypocrites.  I couldn't understand why they were so keen on a word called 'evangelism' which to me sounded like 'Bible-bashing' or 'converting'.  When one of the staffworkers mentioned he'd been talking to some Muslim students about Jesus, I asked why he was bothering when they already had their own religion.  He smiled at me and pointed out that many Muslims are actually very keen to talk about Jesus.  I soon found that out to be the truth the following year when I had a Muslim flatmate and we had many good conversations.

It was after the fifth and final week of meeting to go through Simply Christianity with two fellow female students that I put my trust in Jesus in that empty classroom.  I felt God telling me to finally take the plunge and invite Him in and I realised He'd been calling me for the past few years, but I'd been resisting His call.  But after I prayed, I didn't feel any different.  I'd expected some super spiritual 'feeling', but there was nothing.  Yet, I trembled when I realised I'd asked God into my life to be my Lord and my Saviour and wondered if I could go back on my decision.  I didn't tell anybody at first.  I knew my life had to change, because that would make me just like the so-called hypocrites I had self-righteously judged.

I was a follower of Jesus - saved, washed clean, forgiven and in a restored relationship with my God.  Now my walk with Him was about to begin.

To be continued....