Anyway, I figured I'd share "The Exoskeleton" testimony from my baptism service, because many people reading this won't have seen it before, and I can't really think of a better way to mark the event right now, and maybe, just maybe, it's helpful to someone...
- The Exoskeleton - My testimony: November 22nd 2015 -
I have been going to church all my life, and was at the church at home for fifteen years, ever since we moved to there, but it wasn't until much more recently that I would say I truly began my journey. I used to come to church for one reason, and one reason only: Sunday School (you know, that thing they now call Sunday club now?). I must confess I had very little interest in the actual content of the sessions, I just went because it was a place where we did fun stuff and where I had friends. At one point I actually started refusing to go to church unless the group was on, so for a good period of time I missed all of the all age services. Upon moving up to the group now called Extreme, however, the focus switched somewhat away from the fun side to much more of the serious side, and it was then I began trying to work out exactly what I thought about God. Actually, I think the point I began this journey was in a P&R lesson in year 7, where we were learning about Thiests, Athiests and Agnostics, and the teacher asked us to stand where we thought we would put ourselves. It was at that moment my 11 year old self realised he had absolutely no idea, and resolved to do something about that situation, one way or another...
Two years later, youth homegroup happened.
Youth homegroup presented me with an opportunity I had so long desired, the ability to talk about faith openly with people in a safe environment, and it was through this I was first introduced to the thing that by far has been the biggest turning point of my life - Soul Survivor
Anyone who has had this conversation with me knows that I consider Soul Survivor 2012 to be BY FAR the best week of my life. If you haven't had this conversation with me, or if you have and need a comparison, it would be approximately equivalent to Mt. Everest, where the next best thing in my life was Wittenham clumps. There's nothing quite like it on the planet. It's an experience that in a single night completely changed everything I thought I knew, because things happened that week that I cannot now, and never will be able to explain, and it is what kick started the chain of events leading to this moment...
Skip forward another couple of years, to April 2014, and the situation I found myself in was completely different. Caught up in exam stress things began to go downhill, massive amounts of pressure, coursework deadlines and revision began to get to me, and while nothing changed externally I began to spend much more time deep in thought. In August 2014 I began recording these thoughts in the notes section of my iPod, which helped greatly, because it was almost like talking to another person, but without the other person.
Moving up into sixth form in September 2014 affected me a lot. Even ignoring the completely new attitude, increased workload and more quote on quote "Free time" than I had any idea what to do with a lot changed, despite the location, organisation and actual teachers largely remaining unchanged. It wasn't so much any of that as the fact that one of my good friends Will Annells left to do an apprenticeship, and with Will gone the friendship group I had once been a part of began to drift apart. The result of this was that I began spending a considerable amount of time on my own at school, and in an environment where connections matter this had a huge negative impact. This was not helped by the sudden massive jump in expectations of teachers, on top of the generally more challenging work being set, and combined with all the other things on my mind at the time (none of which I'm going to go into right now, because we'd be here all day) I began to be pushed towards a state that can only really be described as depression. Retreating inside my own head, trying to collect my thoughts.
Partly due to this, and partly because I thought it would be interesting, in April 2015, I began to write the story that is now called "The Exoskeleton". The idea was to post it on my Facebook page, and see what people thought about it, as well as provide a point of discussion for those interested as to what on earth it could possibly be. The answer to that question is actually rather simple. The Exoskeleton is a tale of the past seven years of my life. While nothing in it can necessarily be taken literally due to the fact I have used creative license, every post I made is based off something that actually happened. It is a story of how I put up barriers to protect myself, but then how those very barriers became my prison. The story ends on the 15th of August 2015, when I am finally able to overcome the barrier at Soul Survivor, but to understand that properly we have to break chronology and go back a bit...
The main problem was that the barriers I had put up were so strong they not only protected the stuff inside me, but made it so that it couldn't change. This made adjusting to my new situation nigh on impossible, since the barriers were quite literally immovable, and ultimately anything I tried to do to break them down ended up hurting me more than helping. I guess it would be comparable to being trapped in a giant impregnable bubble. I therefore needed help. I needed the key to the future. The only thing that could get me out.
Finding the key proved to be easy, as by the time I realised I needed it I'd already found it. Using it to open the door proved to be far more difficult, as it required actually stepping through what had once been an impenetrable wall. Stepping out in front of around 10,000 people to break through was no easy task, particularly since I had to go first, but the moment I did I knew I'd made the right decision. Standing there, in that position, the numbers were irrelevant. What mattered was I had finally found the courage to make a commitment publicly, in front of people I cared about, as well as complete strangers. I had finally escaped. I was free, and I was alive!
- Thank you. -
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