A Personal Testimony
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The Great Commission
16 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. 18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
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14 But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me,
the Lord has forgotten me.”
15 “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast
and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
16 See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are ever before me. -
This is a testimony and teaching about a period in my own prayer life shared at St Paul’s Barton, Newport, Isle of Wight, January 2022
These two readings sum up a recurring theme in my own life story, and as I relate my testimony to you, I hope it speaks into your own situation. The Lord says in Isaiah 49:15, 'Can a mother forget the baby at her breast..and have no compassion? Though she may forget, I will not forget you. See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.' Matthew 28:20, the Lord said as he was ascending from this earth, 'surely, I am with you always.'
Testimony
I was brought up in a Christian home where I became Christian by kneeling at the side of my bed one night, asking Jesus into my life, and saying I wanted to follow him. Then that boy aged 10 went to school in Lisburn, Northern Ireland and I wore a little metal badge on the lapel of my school blazer, it said 'Jesus Saves.' I got some stick for that badge, but it toughened me up! The people I knocked around with in school and sport were amused by this statement ‘Jesus Saves’. They would say, 'Jesus Saves, but Keegan scores the rebound.' I refused to take it off ‘Jesus Saves’ singled me out from the crowd and in some it defined me.
I was at school during the troubles; everyone was affected in some way by the troubles. My Uncle’s Gallery was blown up in Portadown; my Maths teacher was injured in an IRA bomb blast, lost a leg and had over 500 stitches in her face; my childhood friend was killed in a Bomb blast. I guess the troubles influenced my decision in 1973 to move to study at Manchester University. I took an active part in the Christian Union, in the University Hockey team and somewhere further down the batting order my Economics and Accounting Studies. I had just been capped for Ulster (Northern Ireland) Juniors and was welcomed into the University Athletic Union. I took part in the CU's missions and got a real joy from seeing friends become Christians. After I graduated with a degree in Economics, I moved to Wakefield in West Yorkshire as a trainee Accountant (articled clerk). Once again, I got involved in the local church, St Andrew's Wakefield and joined Wakefield Hockey club, winning a place as first X1 Goalkeeper. However, two years after my move to Wakefield, my life took a dramatic turn which I will read to you from Rebekah Domer's book, 'Broken but Blessed.'
Kelvin Burke, a Healthcare chaplain on the Isle of Wight, experienced [brokenness] dramatically when, at the age of twenty-three, he found himself forcefully moved from the ranks of the able-bodied into those of the disabled.
"At twenty-three, it looked like I had it all going for me. I was sporty, flirty, and had a good job as an Accountant. I played hockey in the Premier League and had an outside chance of being selected for Great Britain for the 1980 Olympics. I owned a four-bedroomed detached house and was a practising Christian. What more could I have wished for? Then, on May 30, 1979, the bottom fell out of my rosy world."
"I was on a Church week away hiking in the beautiful British Lake District. I and some buddies had just climbed Buttermere Fell with its spectacular views over Lake Burrermere, Honister Pass and the famous Honister Slate Mines. We hiked back via Derwent Fell, pausing to ponder, pray and worship as we enjoyed the vista of mountains and valleys. Returning to our campsite a short time later, we were nearing the top of Honister Pass when our car stalled, sped backwards and crashed over the side of the mountain pass, falling into the ravine below. I was thrown out of the car and landed with the car pinning me face down in a stream with a complete spinal cord fracture at the level of the eleventh Thoracic vertebra. My lungs were pierced, and I was paralysed from the waist down.
As I lay there waiting for the ambulance, I heard the words of the Lord clearly in my heart, "I am with you always." This verse went through my mind repeatedly as I battled for life in Intensive Care.
Returning to my accountancy work in full-length callipers after ten months in hospital, I was no longer the cocky youngster who set off to the Lake District the previous year. I now saw the needs of people around me. One was alcoholic, another had cancer. One guy was estranged from his wife, while the next was rich but lonely.
Later, as I prayed and read in the Bible, I felt challenged to give up my business and become a full-time pastor. Not only had the accident paralysed me for life; it changed me spiritually."
Kelvin has been deeply influenced by Henri Nouwen's "Wounded Healer," wherein he depicts Christ's brokenness as our way to new life. The wounded healer empathises with the broken person, offering not an ideology but himself.
I finished my accountancy studies at the Accountancy Tuition Centre in The Old Park Hotel, St Lawrence, Isle of Wight and that started my love affair with this beautiful Island. I qualified as a Chartered Accountant and started my own Accounting Practice. Around the same time, I met Jennie in 1984, and we married in St Andrew's Church in 1986. At that time, I was the youth leader at the church, and the church welcomed our families from Northern Ireland and Cumbria, but it was also a great celebration with people from the church fellowship and rascals from the church youth group.
A few years after the accident and shortly after our wedding, I began to wallow in self-pity (1987); outwardly, I was the same Kelvin who was coping. People saw a different outward me to the real inner self. I began to formulate a different view of God to the personal Lord Jesus of my youth. God was distant (‘him up there’ type of God), a creator God but not personal, not speaking or interacting with me. Like the people in Isaiah 49:14, I was saying, 'the Lord has abandoned me, the Lord has forgotten me.' I was 'flattened' by the disabled life that had been forced onto me. I still did church, I still prayed, sang hymns, but I had stopped reading my Bible. God was impersonal; I felt as if I was battling with this paralysis and disability on my own, abandoned and forgotten. God's answer blew me away!
I was visiting the Isle of Wight, staying at our friends John and Margie Wells and I was having a personal prayer time, praying some of my angry prayers:
'Lord, you don't know how I really feel inside, Lord you are a great creator but can't you see my tears. Jesus, you save my soul, you took my sin, but you are doing nothing to mend my broken heart, my broken back, my broken dreams. Lord, you don't know me personally.'
As I prayed alone in my room, I began to cry and then weep and that turned into sobbing; tears fell like never before; they were tears of desperation, longing for an answer.
As I prayed, the Lord took me in a vision to Gethsemane, and I was there, and Jesus was praying, lying prostrate on a flat scree or rock in the garden, an olive tree drooped over him, and Jesus was weeping as he prayed. Sobbing and agonising, blood sweats fell from his forehead and mingled with his tears. He prayed about the cup of suffering he was to drink from.
42 “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” 43 An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. 44 And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.
— Luke 22:42-44
However, in my dream, Jesus paused in the middle of verse 42, he turned and looked at me, then he looked back to the heavens and said, 'not my will but yours.' I continued to sob, I thought I had been forsaken and forgotten; I was questioning the personal God, here was the answer - he took that cup of suffering for me; he knew me totally and wept for me, he wept with me. Then in a second part of the vision, I was taken up, I soared like an eagle up high, and I looked down on a crater Lake midst a mountain range. I asked why the Lord was showing me a crater lake full to the brim with crystal clear water. The answer I got was, 'It is a Lake of tears, and for every tear you have cried, I have wept tenfold and not one tear was lost, every tear held and cherished.' What an answer!
God is personal; he knows, he understands and cares. He blew me away. Later I read in Psalm 56:8 ‘I have held your tears in a bottle’ (or a crater lake). He could not forget or forsake me.
As we read from Rebekah's book, I felt led to give up my accountancy business and re-train for ordained ministry in the church of England. Miraculously, the Lord provided a house for us in Durham. We lived in Durham for two years, where I studied at St John's College. After I was ordained in Wakefield Cathedral, I took up a curacy at St Peter's Stanley and was later appointed Diocesan Evangelist.
I returned to be the vicar at St Andrew’s Wakefield, where I’d had the accident, where I had been a Youth-worker, where Jennie and I were married and my accountancy practice was located. The Lord has a way of using our past experiences; he has not forsaken us. Nearing the end of my time at St. Andrew's, an opportunity came up for me to work as a healthcare chaplain in Leeds.
I was appointed assistant Hospital Chaplain in Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, part of a team of a dozen chaplaincy staff and a further sixty chaplaincy volunteers. It was a great place to train. I even managed to complete a Masters in Theology at Cardiff University!
We have always had a hankering to live on the Isle of Wight and after a ‘family meeting’ we took the plunge and moved in 2010. I was appointed lead Chaplain for Mountbatten Hospice and St Mary’s Hospital in 2012. Who would have thought an evangelist would have ended up as a hospital chaplain.
But the surprise is this, I saw more people come to faith in Jesus Christ in hospital than in the years as a Diocesan Evangelist in Wakefield.
Visiting people in hospital, I had an immediate rapport; people assumed empathy; 'you've been there' (they would say). Often people felt abandoned by God. Assumed givens of health, mobility, independence are stripped away. But because that young twenty-three-year-old was trapped under a car on Honister Pass, broken and traumatised, there was connectedness. Patients were often asking me very direct questions:
"Do you think there is anything after this life?"
"How can I be sure I will get to heaven?",
"Can I be forgiven the things in my past?"
"Do you think God has sent this sickness because of my sins?"
Very direct questions that gave me opportunities to give direct answers of a loving Saviour who was wounded for us, disfigured with scars that he wears for us in glory. If we choose to follow him, he will never forsake us; he cannot forget us. Our names are written on the palm of his hands (Isaiah 49:16). Let me explain this; the Israelites were in exile in Babylon at that time. They would have known very well that the Babylonians tattooed the name of their gods on their hands to remind them who they worshipped. If you were to tattoo 'Jesus', you would be like the Babylonians remembering who you followed.
But that's not what God is saying here. God replies to our taunt, 'have you forgotten us' with "See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands". Babylonians tattooed their God on their hands. This is Yahweh tattooing your name on his hands - both hands. God is saying, I love you so much. I am so certain of the permanence of our relationship that I have engraved you on my hands.
