Garp - My name is Paul.
I'm 24, born on the 8th of December 1980, the very same day John Lennon was murdered. I have one older sister, who's 26. I was born and raised in Stratton in Gloustershire, raised there until I was 7, when we moved down south to Haywards Heath where I have lived ever since. Waltzed through the whole school thing putting minimal effort in, and coming out with reasonable grades all things considered (mainly Bs). Only main issues being suffering from bullying all the time, in part due to my height (5'4" when I left secondary school) and part due to geekyness. Eventually overcame this by learning the ancient art of sarcasm, and by learning to turn insults back around on the insulter so that they made fools of themselves infront of their mates. Neat and effective. I started Judo when I was 14 and this gave me a good sense of self, and an odd breed of self-confidence when you consider I'm by nature self-depreciative. I'm confident I can do anything if I try, and I go out and do stuff purely on that strength, but at the same time tend to belittle the value of anything I've done. Odd mix, but hey.
Got to college, had my growth spurt and reached 6', became a more social animal, and failed to realise that I couldn't waltz through the exams. Whilst I put all the effort in in the run up to them, after strong mock results I slacked before the actuals, and my results suffered. Before I'd even sat the exams I was seriously wondering about Uni, and I decided I'd try and get some work experience before I headed off see if I enjoyed working instead.
Loved it, and after 2 days temping for a CD Wholesalers, who threw everything they could at me to see how I'd react, I was offered a job as IT Controller, which I took. Nice amounts of responsibility in that position, I oversaw the continued running of the central sales / stock / accounting server, and oversaw the replacement of it with a newer more reliable version (after I pointed out how much downtime we had on the old one).
After a year and a half of it I got tired of the job and moved on to work for a 6th form college as a network technician, where I still work 4 years and 5 months on. I still love the work, it presents new challenges regularly. I'm currently studying for my CCNA, and for LPI qualifications, to stand me in good stead for future work prospects. I still live at home with both my parents and am furiously saving money to use as a deposit on a house. Houses in the south are rediculously priced (£110k for a 1 bedroom flat?!), and ultimately I'll be looking to move away from here into a region where it won't bankrupt me to have a property!
Thats one part of my life covered. The other main part of my life is something some people here will value and others will deride, but I don't care. I'm a Christian. Although raised in a christian family, I never actually attended church until I was 8. Sang in the church choir from when I was 8 till I was 22, managing to sing every part on the way, from descant right down to bass, and then into my now normal Baritone register. I also sang in the West Sussex County Boys Choir for a period of time and even did a two week tour of Florida. But I digress. I was part of a good christian youth group for a while, from 13 till I was 19, where we did bible studies and the like. That gave me a fairly solid foundation for my faith. When I was 16 I got involved in a new project called Cords headed up by our local YWAM base (Youth With A Mission, an international christian missionaries group.) The initial aim was to provide a monthly non-denominational worship event for youth in the area for the first 6 months of the year, and it took off phenomenally, due to a combination of things and Gods blessings. The timing couldn't have been better for me, and I discovered more about
active faith in those first 6 months than I'd learnt in 8 years of regular church attendance. My time in the youthgroup gave me the every day life stuff I needed, and a good theological understanding, but Cords gave me stuff that was entirely practical. I learnt about the Holy Spirit properly for the first time in my life (I'd never heard about the Holy Spirit in any teaching form before then, never realised just how significant a part of God it actually is.) I discovered something else that has redifined my life as well. Modern worship. Not organs and hymns and stuff, not even Graham Kendrick or Christians with rainbow coloured guitar straps. I discovered worship that was in a form of music I love. Irrelevant, boring, meaningless hymns got thrown away as I discovered a way of worship that has meaning for me.
At the end of the 6 months a team of 8 of us went out to the Czech Republic for 10 days to work with a local church. Primarily this involved painting it, but there were other stuff we did for them.
When I came back I was a totally changed person, the end of the transformation from the pre-Cords me. I gained a peace I'd never known, a sense of joy of life that I still struggle to restrain, and a passion for Christ that is ever undiminished. In the years following I went to the Ukraine to work with a Ywam base there, working at orphanages, soup kitchens for the poor and stuff, and was part of a key change in the town where we went. Our team came across this shop and went in curious as to what it was selling. The shop manager heard us speaking in english, and ukrainian with atrocious accents, and started chatting to us in fairly good English. As a consequence of that we met up with him several times whilst we were there and he eventually gave his life to christ, and our team leader gave his own study bible to him (desipte it having 15+ years of personal study notes in it.) A year later we were preparing to go to Albania when one of the YWAMers explained the signfiicance of this one blokes conversion. He was an ex government worker of some authority, and he pulled several major strings to allow the YWAM base to officially start some major youth projects which has got kids of the streets and given them a purpose in life, and helped cut down on street crime. All from one guy in a random shop, and all because he heard us speaking English and wanted to practice his English on us.
Albania was an eye opener for me. We went completely out into the sticks and I saw a most truly beautiful country. Probably one of the most beautiful places I have
ever seen in my life. Its such a shame that the people are so embittered against the world. Yet another former communist state, they succesfully overthrew the government, elected a new one who then proceeded to advise them to put their money in pyramid schemes as they were 'safe'. Stupid idiots. Most of the little money that was left in the country rapidly exited with the people at the top of the pyramid, leaving the country even poorer than it was before. The are I went to had 90% unemployment, and this is in a country with no welfare system. The families were dependent on kids they'd sent abroad to work to send money back to them. All the coal mines, despite sitting on rich veins, were shut down at the end of communism in the early 90s and only recently have I heard that some businessmen are trying to get them back and running again using the local skilled labourers.
The next year I went to Marseille with a worship team and had probably the most fun I've had. Those guys are truly blessed musicians, and we spent the whole 10 days out busking, and the like, just worshipping God and stuff. We achieved something the church has never achieved before, even with other worship teams that came down. Marseille has a high muslim population, and on a couple of evenings whilst playing down at the docks, we actually had some of the muslims clapping and playing bongo's along with us, even though after every couple of songs we'd explain who we were and what we were doing. They'd never even got so much as a hello out of the muslims before, and yet here we were playing with them, joking with them (a couple of team members speak fairly fluent french) and the like. Really fantastic stuff.
Woah.. I really should stop typing. Already said more than I intended to
).
