Exodus 20 verse 4 continues: ”...for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments."

Shirley Garrett grows up in Sydney, Australia, in a family who are not Christians. Somewhere along her journey she grows to love God. She gets a difficult time for being a Christian from her family.

While a primary school student, Eunice McLeod and her sisters see a Salvation Army band marching through their town. They follow the crowd down the street, and into a building. Later, the woman sitting beside Eunice asks her if she’d like to go up the front. “Oh, no thanks.” The woman persists. At the front, Eunice is asked, “Now, you will read your bible and pray every day?” Eunice doesn't really know what it is all about, but goes home and says to her mother, “I want to go to church.” The family are not Christians, but her parents were married in a church. Her mother says, “Well, if you’re going to church, you’ll go to the Church of Christ, because that’s our church."

Lyndon Usmar’s father died when he was five. While he did go to school, from that age he also had to work, selling ice creams at the cinema on Saturdays to earn money to help feed the family. Lyndon’s mother believed in God, and taught him to do so as well. He grew up in the Church of Christ, and later he married one Eunice McLeod and went into ministry, in the Church of Christ and then later the Presbyterian Church.

Neville Babbage, a young medical student, sits in the Austin 7 of his old school friend and fellow student Paul White. Paul and Neville were training in medicine together. Paul would go on to become “the Jungle doctor” in Africa, writing the books which would teach many children (and adults) about God. On that day, though, Paul tells his friend Neville about God. Neville talks to God. He acknowledges he can't live his life the way God wants him to, unless he lets God be in charge. Neville becomes a Christian. At the church he joins, he meets Shirley Garrett.

Four people, three from homes that do not know Jesus, grow to love him and follow him for the rest of their lives. Neville and Shirley Babbage, Lyndon and Eunice Usmar. This is my heritage; these are my grandparents.

Growing up in the home of their children, I never knew a world without God. I think sometimes it takes longer to see the work of God in your life in such a situation, but I see it now. God has richly blessed my family through the years, and he has richly blessed me.

I made a personal decision to continue this walk with God when I was about 11, on a Christian camp at a place called El Rancho. Since that time, I've been on a journey, as God teaches me the family business...

Over the years, I have experienced God in a number of ways. There have been times when I have had a keen sense of God's presence, which has been accompanied by peace or joy. These experiences are not my “proof” of God, but they are part of my relationship with him.

I have a belief or sense at a deep level of God's existence. I have had times of doubt, but never unbelief. Even at these times, my thoughts are always open to include God and allow him to speak to my spirit.

I have seen the effects of prayer. I have seen people whose lives have been changed. This has included both the dramatic and the everyday. I have spoken to people who have personally experienced miraculous healing from serious diseases. I have also, however, stood at the graveside of friends who have died, despite much prayer. I have accepted that I cannot fully understand God's ways.

God has always guided me at critical times. One recent example of this was when Bronwyn and I were wrestling with whether to come to London, in the aftermath of September 11th and the Bali bombings. At that time he gave us Psalm 91, which I have ever since known as “the Anti-Terrorism Psalm”.

Over the years God has led my family and then me... initially, from Australia to New Zealand and now to London. He has led me from a Church of Christ church, to an Anglican church, to Titahi Bay Gospel Chapel (an Open Brethren church), to St Albans Presbyterian Church, and now to here. In each of these parts of his body I have met people in whom God was clearly working, and through them he has changed me too.

In my current journey with God he is stimulating in me a desire for community with depth of real relationship, centred on the relationship we have with him. In my journey I am trying to subvert my desires to the will of God. I am trying too to be open to his leading. Coming to London has been a process of uprooting, of considering what plans God has for us in the future. Visiting missionaries in Thailand on our way here made such things seem more normal, more real. Perhaps God has further plans for us overseas. But perhaps God may use us in what might seem to us to be a more mundane way, showing the things he can achieve even through the “mundane”.

Either way, we desire to be open to wherever he may lead us.