My name is Mark Golding born 1948. I come from a broken family, largely broken by the 2nd world war, that comprised my mother and 2nd step father and myself. I have a sister from whom I was separated when a child. During my formative years the family moved from one public house to another while I attended a boarding school they could not afford.

My parents were both engrossed in keeping a semblance of married life while drinking heavily and I spent most of my time wandering the countryside as a young boy shooting birds, somersaulting off cliffs in disused sandpits and setting woods on fire.

Fast forward to the seedy life of London’s West End where I ended up in my early teens living in a claustrophobic bedsit, among people of ill repute who lived for nothing but wild hedonistic rave ups every weekend, where drugs were freely available in great quantity and variety. This was like a black hole to an insecure drifter. I got sucked in one end and spewed out the other.

I had heard about Jesus years before when Billy Graham had been to an arena in Earls Court. I went with my sister and felt the need to respond to the ‘call’. Over time I was pretending to be good.

After the bad LSD trip however I was in a traumatic state, the hallucinations were so vivid, I thought I had died and was wandering around London as a ‘detached spirit’. I was very afraid that I might be ‘experiencing death’. I asked people to touch me. No-one did of course. Everyone moved away from me, which heightened my paranoia and fear.

My encounter with God since the day I was radically and instantly healed of drug addiction has been a long process of doubt and questioning and searching. The answers I have found in studying Jesus Christ are truly liberating, very personal and very illuminating.

‘I can see more clearly now the rain has gone’ sang Donny Osmond. Yep, more clear than my very scholarly peers.