A detailed testimony

A number of my fans and friends have been asking me lately questions such as "Why are you a Christian?" "How did you come to find God again?" and the likes. My previous testimony (written in two parts, here and here) obviously wasn't enough, so now I will focus more on the time just after my car accident...

One night in the hospital, I had a dream. It was quite a strange dream as it felt real - actually real, not just a very realistic dream, but real! In this dream, I was lying in my hospital bed, in the same room as reality - everything was how it really was. Same window, same door, same ensuite - right down to the pictures on the wall that my two nieces drew, and there were quite a number of these!

The only out of place thing in the dream was a person, and it was Samantha. She was sitting on the chair next to my bed, holding my hand and talking to me. We both knew what had happened - that we'd both been in a car accident, I was in Royal Melbourne Hospital, she was in the Alfred.

We simply talked for an hour about general things, but Samantha kept holding my hand, telling me to stop worrying about her and to focus my attention and concentration on getting myself better. Though we knew we'd both been in this horrific accident, it never once seemed strange that Sam was by my bed and not in her own bed on the other side of the city.

The next day, our friend Victoria came in - this is back to reality I might add! I told her all about this dream, how strange and real it was. Victoria just smiled, thinking back on it I knew she wanted to tell me something but simply couldn't. A few days later, she did.

"Davie... Do you remember the night you had that dream? Well... Samantha passed away that night." she said. I simply went blank. There was no way of me knowing Sam passed away. All I knew is she was on life-support in the I.C.U and that four or five days before she passed on, the family decided it was time to turn the life-support off; she kept kicking on for the next four or five days, before eventually passing on, visiting me in my dream before leaving this world forever.

It wasn't for another few weeks, once I was out of hospital and in the care of my parents in Wodonga, that I thought back on this dream again. Strange. Really, really strange. I just couldn't comprehend how I managed to have this dream - this really realistic dream - the same night Samantha passed away. I of course at the time wasn't a Christian, but agnostic. I was open to believing in a God if I had something in concrete, otherwise I was happy to live my life. I wasn't seeking a religion or a God, nor did I feel the need for one. So after reflecting on this dream, I stored it again in my mind, and would soon revisit it again and again.

When I was a little better, well enough to get up out of bed for at least an hour at a time, my mind was wanting some activity for the first time since the accident. I had been doing puzzles on and off while in hospital, but only just. I couldn't manage to read a book because I was far too groggy, in pain and had very little concentration.

Now that I was a little better though, I craved something requiring a little bit of brain activity. So I jumped on the internet and just had a surf. I was compelled for some reason to look up religious things, and one of these things was the Saint I chose to study in preparation for the Sacrament of Confirmation some ten-years before. Saint Stanislaus - the boy Saint. Usually this sort of research would be for school or something other than personal interest.

I was soon re-acquainted with my Patron Saint and learnt some new things about him in the process. One of the things he was the patron of is broken bones. Prior to the accident, I had never been to hospital as a patient in my life. Kids are always going into hospitals for a broken arm or leg, large cuts on their knee and other minor injuries. But not I. I was only bragging about it a few days before the accident! Now here I was, back in Wodonga, in a back-brace and with crutches for I had broken one of the bones in the body no one wants to break - my spine.

Amazingly I was walking though, no damage done to the spinal cord. Even after surgery I had a risk of losing the ability to walk because of the delicate nature of it. Removing a vertebra that had been crushed by fifty-percent and putting a cage and bone graft in place. The vertebra wraps around the spinal cord too, of course, so I could see how it would be easy to nick the cord when trying to remove it.

This was the thing that finally grabbed my attention and made me think of God, Jesus, Mary, my eleven-years of Catholic schooling. It was all undercover at this stage however - no one knew I was secretly reading up on different religions and Saints, not even my parents.

One Sunday morning, when I was much more able to get around and leave the house even, my mum asked me if I would like to go with her and dad to mass. Now understand, that was a pretty strange question to ask me! Mum knew I didn't believe in God, more-so than my other siblings. I was a goth during high school who somewhat resembled the antichrist even at the worst of times! So asking if I would go to church with them?! It's not even as though they found I was looking at religious things by checking the history as I was using my own laptop!

My reply was of course yes, and I felt relieved! I was to go to mass for the first time in a number of years. I felt relieved because it was something I wanted to do, but I couldn't find the way to tell my parents I wanted to! It was almost like I was "coming out" to them it was that scary! I didn't want to seem a hypocrite or something as I was always paying out on Christianity as a high school student.

So I went with my parents to mass that Sunday, and the following Sunday. I was soon a regular at church and at times I was visiting other churches just to see what the differences are. I was going to a Pentecostal Church for a short time, but still going to the Catholic Church all at the same time. Finally, I made my home within the Catholic Church. Sure at times it may seem boring in comparison to the Pentecostal style, but all the other non-Catholic Churches were just missing something... It wasn't the tradition they were missing either, there was something more. Even the other more traditional churches I went to - the Lutheran and Anglican - I felt something missing. I now believe that "missing thing" to be the Virgin Mary.

Since then, I have had a few other small "visions" I will call them. So there you have it, a more in-depth recount of WHY I am a Christian. Well, not WHY, more-so HOW. Some of you will applaud, others may think it was just the drugs, but I'm sold to Christ!