Martin

b.1962, married, 4 children, senior financial advisor

You look at people like David in the bible, David is typical you know, the guy sinned but God restored him.

Two things stand out in Martin's recollections of childhood as durable and good. One stems from the fact that the family lived in Sheffield for some of his formative years, in the vicinity of Sheffield Wednesday FC. His father was not interested and never took him to a match, but the boy watched the Saturday afternoon crowds as they walked to the stadium and then back again, listened for the roars in between and waited for the results. He became a member of the blue-and-white tribe long before he got to see a game himself. The other notable feature of his childhood has proved equally durable and of even greater worth. Martin always had a close friend in his sister. They were a source of mutual support to one another throughout their childhood (and adulthood too), a saving grace in a family life which was otherwise quite woeful and often distressing.

Martin joined the army at the age of 16, having left school with virtually no academic qualifications. He learnt to overcome his dyslexia in the course of his training with the Royal Signals and even caught up academically to an extent, acquiring a few good O-levels including Maths and English. He was posted to Germany, where he initially had the distinction of being the youngest British soldier serving there. While he was still below the age of 18, he was confined to his army barracks where there was not much else to do in his free time other than pursue sports. Rugby was his game. He trained hard and played as hooker in a team that competed at a high level within the army. His physical training instructor was Kris Akabussi, the 400m runner. They became good friends. It was Kris and his mates who took Martin out on his 18th birthday, to initiate him into the delights of being of legally adult age and out on the town.

The next posting was in Northern Ireland. Londonderry was at the centre of the trouble at the time, where bomb blasts and gunfire could be heard every day. It did not take long before untimely death encroached into Martin's own surroundings. The duties that Martin and other signallers had to do on a regular basis included trips to Bogside in an unmarked car, to make repairs to radio masts and other army communications equipment situated in the republican no-go area. The job was done in pairs, with a skilled mechanic doing the maintenance work and another signaller providing an armed cover. On Martin's twentieth birthday, two of his colleagues were designated for the trip across the river Foyle. They chatted with Martin in the operations room before driving off, one of them was collecting pledges for his little son's sponsored bike ride. A few hours later they were dead from multiple bullet wounds, having been ambushed on their return journey at a cross-roads near the cathedral, before reaching the bridge that led to the relative safety of the town's east side.

Another brush with eternity that remains imprinted in Martin's memory happened one evening in the following year. Martin and several colleagues were travelling in a car back from Limavady to the barracks. Approaching Ballykelly, someone remembered that a pub called the Droppin Well was there, it had just been removed by security intelligence from the list of establishments deemed too dangerous to visit. A proposal to stop for a drink naturally followed. Martin was well known by his colleagues for liking a drink and it came as a shock when he broke the expected consensus by insisting that they drive on home without stopping, that he needed an early night before a morning duty. His colleagues were bemused, but they drove on. Fifteen minutes later, they saw a stream of emergency vehicles rushing in the opposite direction. Back in the barracks, they learnt that a bomb had gone off in the Droppin Well. It had been placed next to a roof-supporting pillar and the whole building collapsed, seventeen people were killed. Martin's refusal to stop in the pub seemed uncharacteristic and unaccountable at the time, but he has since come to understand it as the Holy Spirit's intervention.

Martin's contact with Christian faith had not been extensive. As a teenager, he occasionally hung about with other lads outside the community centre on his council estate in Northampton. The centre was a home to a church and a Christian mission. The lads used to hear the singing inside and gathered around, partly in curiosity and partly in readiness to show a bit of attitude. When an American missionary came to speak to them and challenged Martin with a question about life after death, he replied that of course he would go to heaven, because he was British. In the army, Martin had opportunities to read the bible and learn about the faith, but his interest in taking them up was not great. During his Londonderry posting, however, he did take up the opportunities offered by the Soldiers' and Airmen's Scripture Readers' Association. By a regular arrangement, a SASRA volunteer came to the barracks on Sunday morning to pick Martin and several others up, drove them to his home in Limavady, fed them and talked to them, took them to his Baptist church, and in the evening brought them back to barracks again. Dandy McLean, the SASRA volunteer, never got the joy of seeing Martin come to Jesus, it was simply getting away from the barracks for the day that Martin appreciated the most. But Dandy's ministry was perhaps not entirely in vain and Martin commemorates it now, by being a SASRA supporter.

After two years in Northern Ireland, Martin's next tour of duty was six months in the Falklands. Armed conflict had ceased on the islands and there was not much to do for the soldiers posted there. Martin's method of dealing with boredom was the commonplace one of drowning it in drink. On his return to the UK, he had a few weeks' leave, which he elected to spend as usual, staying with his sister in Northampton. She had recently become a Christian, however, and a few days after his arrival, she invited him to accompany her to an evangelical youth ralley in Westminster Central Hall, London. Martin agreed, from a sense of obligation. The afternoon session led by R.T. Kendall left no effect on him that he noticed, but it was a different matter in the evening, when Floyd McClung spoke, who had just spent some time working in Amsterdam as a missionary. He told a story that turned Martin's life.

He said, and I can remember as if it was this morning, he was telling a story of how he was walking past a pub, a bar in Amsterdam and he felt God speaking to him as he walked past this pub. He felt God say to him, "I want you to go into the bar", into this particular bar in this area of Amsterdam. Floyd McClung again just checked his spirit, because it wasn't the kind of thing he'd normally do. He had this real sense that God was speaking to him and wanted him to go into the bar; and as he waited on God for a few moments he felt that God was saying to him, "as you go into the bar, at the corner of the bar there will be a round table and sat at the round table will be a man on his own". So again he checked his spirit and felt that this was what God was saying to him. So he opened the door of the bar as he went in and sure enough in the corner there was a round table and there was a man sat there on his own. So Floyd McClung just waited for God for a few brief moments and he felt God say to him, "I want you to go up to that man, look him in the eye and tell him that he does not know you, but that you have a message for him from God: that there's nothing he's done that God won't forgive him for". And so Floyd McClung, having ensured that it was right, went up to this gentleman and said, "you don't know who I am but I've got a message for you from God. There is nothing that you've done that God won't forgive you for." It then transpired that this particular gentleman was one of the underworld leaders in Amsterdam, heavily involved in prostitution and racketeering and the drugs industry. And he gave his life to Christ. Floyd McClung looked out to us, there must have been about 2000 young people in Westminster Central Hall, looked and pointed and he said, "and the thing is, there's nothing you've done that God won't forgive you for". And it was as if he was pointing directly at me. He was looking directly at me.

If God made a point of forgiving an Amsterdam underworld leader all his sins, the list of which must have been weighty, then surely He was ready to forgive Martin all of his tally. Martin lifted his hands up and prayed out loud, inviting God to come into his life, to do what he had done in the Amsterdam man's life, forgive him and change him. He had an overwhelming feeling of God's forgiveness and love; and made his commitment. A string of tangible changes followed immediately. He stopped smoking, having been accustomed to getting through a packet of twenty in a day. He reduced his consumption of alcohol drastically, just lost the desire for it. His language turned from barrack-room blue to clean. He got an insatiable thirst for reading the bible, and spent the rest of his leave reading it.

After the leave, he took up his new posting, which was in York. In Northampton he had started attending his sister's Assemblies of God church, so this was the church that he initially joined in York. He was too busy with his new life as a Christian to entertain any thoughts of relationships, chasing girls belonged to his previous life. He was a contended single man, for six months. Then a friend of his set him up and he met Elizabeth. They met again a few days later and a few days after that he asked her if she would go out with him; and she said yes. He joined the Elim church where Elizabeth went with her parents and, five months later, he left the army.

After a short period of working as an electricity board clerk and as a salesman of franking machines, he became an area sales manager of a publishing company. He did well in this work. In 1989, when she finished her nurse training and started work as a qualified nurse in York, Martin and Elizabeth got married. They were what was then called a dinky (double-income-no-kids) couple, able to afford to buy a house and furnish it without falling into burdensome debt. They were active in their Elim church, and life was secure and good. Then they went to an Elim bible-study week. Right at the beginning of it, on the Saturday evening, Martin felt struck to the quick by a verse he was singing in the assembly:

Here I am wholy available,
As for me I will serve the Lord

The feeling of being particularly challenged by this verse returned the next day and it did not go away. He feared what Elizabeth's reaction might be if he told her about it, but by Wednesday he felt he had to tell her. When they were alone in their holiday chalet, he broached the subject and it transpired that she had something to tell him too, that she had been afraid to mention before. It turned out that they were both challenged by the same message. Back in York they took it to Ron MacKenzie, the then pastor of their church. His advice was that, first of all, they should take their time and pray patiently before making any decision, to make sure that it was a call from God and not a flush of enthusiasm from a youthful bible-conference crowd. And secondly, if it was God calling them to full-time ministry, they would need proper training first. They prayed on it for a few weeks, and it was God's calling. They resigned their jobs (Martin having to fend off his boss's enticements of better money and a bigger company car), sold their house and moved to Natwich in Cheshire, where Martin enrolled on a two-year course at the Elim bible college. The plan was that Elizabeth would work while Martin was a full-time student, but it had to be modified after the first year, when God blessed them with their first son. They managed financially in the second year nevertheless, with Martin earning a bit of money as a waiter and the college helping out with a bursary in the final term. After graduation and a further seven months as a probational minister in Huddersfield, Martin became the Pastor of an Elim church in Buckinghamshire. They moved there in 1993.

It was a small church to begin with and Martin had to combine his ministry with part-time sales work for a Christian resource exhibition company to earn a living during the first few years. But the church grew, spiritually as well as numerically and financially. God blessed not only his church but his family too, and sons number two and three were born.

A serious moral lapse in 2000 led to Martin resigning his position in ministry, and enduring three months of living apart from Elizabeth. He was a broken man before God. However, God answered his prayers and over time their marriage was restored. God's hand was also evident in the way Martin ended up in a new line of secular employment. The way Martin knew himself, he had a good track record as a sales manager and the ability to be successful in any sales field, other than in financial services. He thought his numeracy skills to be below par for that, and generally he wasn't keen on what he thought he knew about it. But a recruitment consultant for an insurance company responded to a curriculum vitae Martin posted on the internet and invited him for an initial assessment. Martin went along, and then to several further tests and interviews, without ever believing that it was a serious proposition for him. He had a number of much likelier irons in the fire, including the publishing company he had left ten years before. For one reason and another, however, all the likely possibilities fell through but the insurance company offered him a position as financial advisor. He took it, studied in the evenings and passed three professional exams over the next eighteen months, and realised that he had started a career in which he was doing well. He secured a transfer and the family moved to York. Two years after entering the finance field, he got a position as a financial advisor in a major bank. Over the five years since then, he has attained a senior rank within the profession.

Martin and Elizabeth joined YCC when they moved back to York, as this was the church to which Elizabeth's parents now belonged. In the church, Martin became one of the people who take turns in speaking and worship leading. At home, in addition to raising their three boys, Martin and Elizabeth provided short-term foster-parenting to a number of needy children. This particular service, however, had to be suspended recently. Martin and Elizabeth had decided after the birth of their third son that there should be no more children; and accordingly, they had taken measures to make that decision stick. But eight years later, God showed them that His plan was different, blessing them with the birth of a baby girl, as if to seal the restoration work He had done in their marriage. There is surely a further church ministry in this for Martin and Elizabeth to take up - to support couples whose marriages have run into problems.

Martin is a blessed man. He knows how faithful God has been, what saving work He has done and what miraculous changes He has wrought in someone whose start in life was in a dysfunctional family.

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