DNA Notes of Life

DNA: Tell us about your meeting God experience. What were the main feelings and revelations around this time?

Don: That was at a youth camp in October ’71… meeting God was a life transforming experience. I was almost 16 and felt alone, unloved, lacking purpose and a failure. I experienced God’s love and felt clean and discovered a purpose to life.

DNA: So, Don, was that where you knew that God was calling you to the ministry?

Don: Yes, totally, I knew that God was asking me to help people know his love and purpose for their lives. The seeds of who I am today were planted then. ‘Course, I didn’t know I would be SM of C3Robina, but I did know I would be telling God’s story and what he had done in me.

DNA: And what was your experience, Adrienne?

Adrienne: I have difficulty with that question and I have met people who have had a similar experience to me. I grew up always knowing God. I used to go to Methodist Sunday School and the Anglican church and had a sense of God’s presence. He was just always there. I remember going out to my fort (it’s what we called a cubby house) with my prayer book one Sunday morning and having my own little worship time. But because I was only 6, I couldn’t read all the words. I began to sing other words and only years later I realized that I was singing in tongues and feeling a real closeness to God like I was sitting on his lap with my head against his chest, feeling safe and completely loved.

That was one early experience with God. But I vividly remember when I realized Jesus was so real in my life. I was 22. I had bought a new Bible that I could actually read and understand, and it was as if Jesus was absorbed into my spirit right out of the pages. I felt overwhelmed by God’s grace in my life; a grace preventing me from going down wrong paths. But most of all I felt valued like I hadn’t for a very long time.

DNA: Just going back to when you sang in tongues, it was like a baptism in the Holy Spirit? Did it continue on?

Adrienne: No, actually. That was a one-off experience. Then in about 1970, I remember seeing a programme on telly about Pentecostals and my Mum laughing at them and saying how silly they were. I had a bad attitude about speaking in tongues until I met Don and because I loved him,wanted to share every aspect of his experience of God. He prayed for me and I remember been filled with God so full that I felt like bursting. I went outside, sat on the bonnet of my car and laughed and sang and worshipped God, trying not to be too loud in case I woke the others up.

Don: When we went to see the minister for our marriage prep he was more interested in asking us about the Baptism in the Spirit and what books to read. Then he got filled with the Spirit too.

Adrienne: And then he ran a class for those parishioners interested (this was the Anglican church) My mum went and contrary to her 1970’s response, accepted that it was a good thing, a God thing, and one day while she was vacuuming the floor, she started to speak in tongues.