Yesterday 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 as you'll maybe remember from his song, never wore 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 had 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 glanced 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.

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