Yes, the day on the podcast, I mentioned that I'd like to tell you this week about some

of the people who have helped me, helped me especially in the earlier days of my Christian

life, in the hope that this will be something of a catalyst for you to reflect on the people

who have meant something to you so that together we can be thankful for these people.

I'm going to call the first person who helped me, the man in black. No, not Johnny Cash,

the American singer who always dressed in black, and the show maybe remember from his song

Never War Bright Colors on his back. No, this is a man I met only once in my life very

briefly, but I've never forgotten him. I was 14 and had, as people used to say, come under

conviction of sin. Maybe people today would say I was a seeker. Anyway, although we were

not a church-going family, I'd started going to church morning and evening. And one Sunday

night, in the dead of winter, I was walking down the hill to our home. There'd been snow

the previous week and it had turned to ice. At one point, I felt my feet slide on the

ice and just managed to regain my balance and stop. And as I stopped, I found a shortish

man standing right beside me. He was dressed in black from head to toe. If I remember rightly,

he even had a black hat on his head, men wore hats in those far-off days. And I vividly

remember seeing his eyes look at mine and glance down momentarily at the Bible I was carrying.

And then he said to me, out of the blue, are you saved, son? Are you saved? Looking back,

I can still remember tears coming unwillingly into my eyes and I said to him, I don't know,

but I want to be. I want to be more than anything else in the world. And he told me to go home

and ask the Lord Jesus into my heart. We parted, and five minutes later, I was home. And

I tried to do what he told me. And strange though it may sound, I tried, but somewhere

I knew I wasn't succeeding. It felt too mechanical. And more than that, I had a sense I actually

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