I've found my way home - to this sub - my testimony

Hey everyone. I have only recently come to discover Gnostism and known it to be the truth. It has been a difficult journey over my messy life - as all good life should be - but this is my story in brief. I hope you find use in this testimony, and keep on the path of the search for God.

One day my life changed - I was 21. I messed up in such a cataclysmic way, my life was essentially over. No turning back. No take backsies. No do-over. I had a simple choice. Keep on living through the pain, or exit. I made my plans, I found my favourite tree, I started planning letters.

In hopeless desperation my feet found their way to Coventry Cathedral - a very special, very unique place in the heart of Coventry, UK. It is a place of 2 parts - side-by-side the ruins destroyed during WW2 and the new building. Their primary mission is hope and reconciliation. Beauty in the broken.

In my grief for what I had done, I wept into the warm, black stone floor beneath the gaze of the centrepiece of the the cathedral - a huge looming tapestry of Jesus on the wall behind the alter. Ever present, always watching. I wept my remorse in to warm Blackstone heated floor. I could no longer continue, so for the first time in my life I gave myself up to God.

Soon after and through the Christian Union of my university, I met my now wife, and we have been together 18 years with 2 children.

I am not going to chart those 18 years for you here but suffice to say it has been a difficult road with ups and downs. There is been struggle. Happying and joy. Sadness and dissapointment. Pain real, felt or imaginary. But what has transpired these past few weeks has changed my life forever. By deep soul searching with God I uncovered my abuse, which is the last text in this post.

The spiritual battle is real, here and in the world. The forces of good and evil are real, and visible in this world. Our God of good is at war with the forces of evil.

Please the following testimony of mine - I mean it with all my heart - and I cried a lot when writing it:

The story of my life, and my jokes, and my lies, and my laughs, and everything that is me - I can never let my guard down for even a moment, because then someone might see how much pain I am in, that I often dream of the long sleep, but I don’t want to disappoint them, or hurt them, or scare them, so I lock it inside and quietly suffer in excruciating tormenting agonising silence eternally. I censor myself so you don’t have to suffer with me. My echo is I have to protect them, save them, shield them. I’d rather suffer so you can live free.

I was threatened my family would be hurt. To save them, I had to lose me.

A child’s love cruelly twisted back on itself.

Deep in a part of my brain I cannot unlock sits the code that if I am not suffering, the people I love are in danger. I generally like most people, which makes this a very broad feeling. Sometimes I can forget it but it always comes back. The echo echoes. Joy tinged with guilt that it should be possible to feel joy at all. Which is not to say that I am always miserable, but that I am unstable, I feel emotions more strongly than most people perhaps and I cannot cope when the world around me is falling apart. Which is why a loving support network truly helps, and is a privilege so many people do not have.

This is not something I remember it is something I feel. I could not tell you where or why or who or when. It is as a feeling is to a memory, a sight, a sound, a smell, a touch - all a confluence pointing towards the same conclusion that something terrible happened without the hindsight of core memory. This is not my plea for justice. I seem to be baring my soul to the world, so I might as well do it properly. Do with that what you will.

I bare this symbol in my profile not by accident but because it means something to me. It has always meant something to me although I didn’t always know it at the time. It is a raw, pure, unfiltered, ancient, patriotic, cry to the world of freedom. Understated in its purpose, a curious relic of a coat of arms on a wall to most. It is the keys to the city of London itself and the home and heart of what it means to be British, empire and all. It should stand as a beacon. A rallying call. A trumpet. To remember what this country was, its grief, and what it has lost.

- Gareth