Testimonies

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My name is Carl Halling, and I'm a Bible-Believing Christian writer, singer, songwriter and actor, born London in 1955, and born again in 1993, and this is my testimony as of the of July 2010.

In the months prior to my accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I was in appalling shape on every conceivable level, and the period embracing the autumn of 1992 and the first few weeks of winter may well have been the most debauched of my entire existence.
At the time, I was training to be a teacher in colleges of further education at the University of Greenwich in South East London, but I was also engaged in various other minor occupations associated with the entertainment industry.
I'd get up early, possibly about six, and then prepare myself for a day ahead with a bottle of wine, usually fortified, then I'd keep my units topped up throughout the day with vodka or gin, taking regular swigs from the miniatures I liked to have with me at all times.
Some evenings I'd spend in central London, others with my new friends from college and we were a tight and pretty wild crowd for a while. There were times in town when I couldn't keep the booze down, so I'd order a king-sized cola from MacDonalds, which I'd then lace with spirits before cautiously sipping from it through a straw.
I was a euphoric drunk and so almost never unpleasant...but I was unpredictable...a true Dionysian who'd cry out on a British Rail train in the middle of the afternoon, causing passengers to flinch with alarm...or perform a wild disjointed Karate kick into thin air on a crowded London street. One afternoon I tore my clothes to shreds after having arrived too late for an audition and a barman who served me later on in the day asked me if I'd been involved in a fight...and then there was the shameful night at Waterloo station - or was it Liverpool Street? - that I had to be escorted across the concourse to my train by one of the drunks who used to sleep rough at mainline stations back then.
However, all these insane incidents came to a head one night in early 1993 in an Indian restaurant in Hampton Court close to the Surrey-London border. I'd been dining there with two female friends when, suddenly feeling like pure death, I asked the one closest to me whether I looked as bad as I felt. She told me I did, so I got up from the table, walked a few paces and then collapsed as if stone dead in the middle of the restaurant. I was then carried bodily out into the fresh night air by two or three Indian waiters, one of whom set about shocking some life back into me by flicking ice cold water in my face. "Don't give up", he pleaded, his voice betraying true concern...and in time thanks to him some semblance of life returned, and I was well enough to be driven home.
Yet, within two days I was drinking as heavily as before, continuing to do so virtually around the clock until the weekend. I then spent Saturday evening with my close friend from the restaurant, and at some point in the morning of the 16th after having drunk solidly all night I asked her to fill a long glass with neat gin and each sip took me further and further into the desired state of blissful forgetfulness.
I awoke exhilarated, which was normal for me following a lengthy binge. It was my one drying out day of the week, and so I probably spent it writing as well as cleaning up the accumulated chaos of the past week. One thing I definitely did was listen to a radio documentary on the legendary L.A. Rock band the Doors which I'd taped some weeks or perhaps months earlier. I especially savoured "When the Music's Over" from what was then one of my favourite albums, "Strange Days" released in the wake of the Summer of Love on my 12th birthday, 7 October 1967. This apocalyptic epic with its unearthly screams and ecstatically discordant guitar solo seemed to me about living in the shadow of death, beckoning death, mocking death, defying death.
I powerfully identified with the Doors' gifted singer Jim Morrison...who'd been drawn as a very young man to poets of darkly prophetic intensity, such as Blake, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Artaud, as well as the poets of the Beat Generation, who were themselves children of the - largely French - Romantic poètes maudits, whose works have the power to change lives, as they surely did Morrison's.
His philosophy of life was clearly informed by Blake, who wrote of "the road of excess" leading to "the palace of wisdom", while his hell raising persona came to a degree from Rimbaud, who extolled the virtues of "a long, immense and systematic derangement of all the senses" as an angel-faced hooligan in the Paris of the early 1870s. What a price he paid...dead at just 27...like Jones, Hendrix, Joplin before him, and so the '60s dream was revealed as the beguiling chimera it'd been all along.
After having spent the day revelling in my own inane notion of myself as a poet on the edge like my heroes, at some point in the early evening I got what I'd been courting for so long...an intimation of early death, when for pretty well the first time in my life alcohol stopped being my beloved elixir and became a mortal enemy, causing my legs to lose sensation and my life force to recede at a furious and terrifying rate. In a blind panic, I opened a spare bottle of sparkling wine I had about the house even though I'd hoped not to have to drink that day. Once I'd drained it, I felt better for a while, in fact so much so that I took a few snaps of myself lounging around looking haggard and unshaven, with freshly cropped hair.
Soon after this macabre photo session I set off in search of more alcohol. Arriving at a local delicatessen, the Asian shop keeper nervously told me that the off-license wasn't open for some time yet. There was nothing for me to do but take refuge on a nearby green, where I lay for a while, still dressed I imagine in the shabby white cut-offs I'd been wearing earlier. Finally, the offie opened and I was able to buy more booze. I can't remember what I bought, but I think it may have been a litre of gin, because that's what I was guzzling from the next day. One of the last things I remember doing on Sunday evening was singing hymns in a nearby Methodist church as the tears flowed...tears of remorse, tears of fear, tears of desperation.
I've no further memory of what happened that hellish night, but there were many such nights ahead. At least one of these saw me endlessly pacing up and down corridors and stairs in an attempt to stay conscious and so - as I saw it - not die...and each time I shut my eyes I could have sworn I saw demonic entities beckoning me into a bottomless black abyss. I set about ridding my house of artefacts I somehow knew to be offensive to God from what I think was the night of the 16th and 17th onwards. Many books were destroyed...books on astrology and numerology and other mystical and occult subjects, books on war and crime and atrocity, and books about artists some call accursed for their kinship with drunkenness and madness and death.
I genuinely believe though that for all the horrors I underwent, it was during that first night that I came to accept Christ as my Saviour.

Had my violent conversion not come about when it did, I might have been lost forever, depending of course on where a person stands on the issue of Predestination and Free Will.
Many Christians are of the opinion that the longer a person puts off coming to Christ, the less likely it becomes of their ever doing so and I'm among them. I also believe that Christians who convert relatively late in life may be required to pay a far higher price for the follies of their pre-Christian existence than more youthful converts, especially if these include alcohol, drugs, fornication, and involvement in the occult. God can and does heal Christians damaged by their pre-conversion sins but He's not obliged to do so as his Grace is sufficient, so while I was almost certainly already a Christian by the morning of the 17th of January, my ordeal was far from over.
I somehow made it into New Eltham that Monday morning for classes at the University, but by evening I felt so ill I started swigging from my litre bottle of gin. I also phoned Alcoholics Anonymous at my mother's request, and agreed to give a meeting a shot.
Next day, on the way to Richmond College, I got the feeling my heart was about to explode, not just once but over and over again. After classes, I tried walking through Twickenham but I couldn't feel my legs and was struggling to stay conscious, so I ended up ordering a double brandy from the pub next door to the Police Station. I was shaking so much the landlord thought I was fresh from an interrogation session. Later, I was thrown out of another pub for preaching at the top of my voice, then, walking through Twickenham town centre I started making the sign of the cross to passers-by, telling one poor young guy never to take to drink like some kind of walking advert for temperance and he nodded without saying a word before scurrying away.
Back home, in an effort to calm myself down, I dug out an old capsule of Chlomethiazole, a sedative commonly used in treating and controlling the effects of acute alcohol withdrawal. I still had some capsules left over from about 1990 when I'd been prescribed them by my then doctor, which meant they'd long gone beyond their expiry date.
For a time I felt better and was able to sleep, but soon after waking I felt worse than ever. Later, at an AA meeting, I kept leaving the room to douse my head in cold water, anything to shock some life back into me, to the dismay of my sponsor Dan who wanted me to stay put, as if doing so would exert a healing effect.
Wednesday morning saw me pacing the office of the first available doctor, who seemed at a loss as to what to do with me, but then it may have been touch and go as to whether I was going to stay on my feet or overdose on the spot and die on him. It was he who prescribed me the Valium which caused me to fall into a deep, deep sleep which may have saved my life, and from which I awoke to sense that a frontier had been passed and that I was out of danger at long last.

To reiterate an earlier assertion...there is a widely held belief within Christianity that the sooner a person comes to Christ the better when it comes to their immortal soul. The same could be said for their subsequent relationship with God. There may for example be serious health problems resulting from a former self-destructive lifestyle which could damage their effectiveness as Christian witnesses.
On the other hand, one possible advantage of being a late convert is a testimony with the power to cause those normally sceptical of the transforming power of the born again experience to sit up and take notice. Such as that of this rescued Rock and Roll child...raised in an age in which messages of revolt...and defiance of all forms of authority, society, the family, God himself were being spread by an adversary culture led by Rock music.
We drank deeply we children of the sixties from the spiritual darkness that was all around from about '65 onwards, and it affected us in ways I believe to be unique to us. That darkness has been a thorn in my flesh ever since my first days as a Christian, when I suffered from panic attacks that at one stage could be triggered simply by venturing beyond my front door, and I've never been able to fully throw it off.
I struggled on with the PGCE, partly at the University of Greenwich, and partly at Richmond College, Twickenham, while playing a couple of tiny parts for the play “Simples of the Moon” by Rosalind Scanlon, under the direction of my friend Ariana Henning. Based on the life of James Joyce's troubled, fascinating daughter the dancer Lucia Joyce, it premiered at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith on the 4th of February 1993.
I also attended occasional drugs and alcohol counselling sessions at a church in Greenwich, south east London with dear Eileen, a lovely blonde woman of about 45 with a soft and soothing London accent and the gentlest pale blue eyes imaginable. The only time I ever knew her to lose her composure was when I announced over the phone that a matter of hours after deciding of my own volition to stop taking Diazepam, I'd switched back to Chlomethiazole.
I owe so much to people like Eileen, and my AA sponsor Dan - who kept tabs on me during my very worst time - and other AA friends like Brian, who had such a soft spot for me because it had only been a short time before we met that he’d been in an even worse state than me. As far as I’m concerned, they're the salt of the earth. Still, I chose to attend only a handful of meetings before stopping altogether.
One of the reasons for this was that a matter of days after coming to Christ, I received a phone call from a counsellor for an organisation called Contact for Christ based in Selsdon, South London. I think he'd got in touch as a result of my having half-heartedly filled in a form that I'd picked up on a train, perhaps the previous summer while filled with alcoholic anticipation as I slowly approached Waterloo station by British Rail train with the sun setting over the foreboding south London cityscape.
Knowing me I tried to put him off, but he was persistent and before I knew it he was at the door of my parents' house, a trim, dark, handsome man in late middle age called Spencer with gently piercing coffee coloured eyes and a luxuriant white moustache, and at his insistence we prayed together.
Some time later I visited him and his wife Grace at his large and elegant house where suburb meets country just beyond the Greater London border. On that day, he and I made an extensive list of aspects of my pre-Christian life he felt required deep repentance, and we prayed over each of these in turn. My continuing use of tobacco was one of the lesser issues addressed, and while it may have been coincidental, soon after I'd taken my last Valium, I stopped enjoying cigarettes, so that a single draw was enough to interfere with my breathing for the rest of the day, and so rob me of a good night’s sleep.
In addition, we discussed which church I should be attending, and there was some talk of my joining Spencer and Grace at their little family fellowship in the suburbs, but in the end, Spencer gave his blessing to Cornerstone Bible Church in the opulent suburban district of Esher in the county of Surrey, where I went on to be baptised by the pastor.
Cornerstone, known today as Cornerstone the Church, is a large fellowship affiliated to the Word of Faith Movement and specifically Rhema Ministries of Johannesburg, South Africa, pastored by Ray McCauley. I'd attended my very first service there even before becoming a Christian in late 1992. Drunk at the time as I recall, I’d sat next to a beautiful blonde woman of about 55 whom I later discovered to be a successful actress who at the height of her career in the sixties had appeared in television cult classics “The Avengers” and “The Prisoner”. Apart from an elder from the Jesus Fellowship, who’d laid hands on me at a meeting of theirs in central London, she was my very first Christian mentor, if only for a very brief period of time.
However, I was never to see or speak to her again as I didn’t return to the church for several months, and by the time I did as a new believer, I think she’d moved to another church. We kept on missing each other, and she died in June 2001. I’ve never forgotten her.

I'd be being disingenuous if I was to assert that my Christian walk has been easy, because it most certainly hasn't.
By the end of '94, I found myself suffering from deep tormenting spiritual problems for which I'd ultimately seek a solution in the shape of what is known as Deliverance Ministry. This came first through a venerable evangelist called Frank, who laid hands on me after lunch at his home deep in the heart of the Devonshire countryside…but there were further sessions...one of these taking place at night in a beautiful old Anglican church with just myself, the vicar, and the vicar's wife in attendance.
Also, following a minor if triumphant revival of my acting career, I suffered my first major relapse. Release from what had become a torturous dungeon of sobriety came while I was attending some function at a suburban pub theatre where I'd only appeared in a play a day or so ago; and some guy I'd only just met offered to buy me a drink. I asked for a glass of wine, and slowly sipped away at it until it was fully drained. Apart from the time at my parents’ house a few weeks earlier when I took a swig of what I thought was water but which turned out to be vodka or gin, this was the first alcohol to pass my lips since January '93.
This single glass of wine made me feel amazing, doubly so given the purity of my system. I cycled home that night in a state of total rapture, feeling for the first time in months that I could do anything. Over the next few week my drinking increased, reaching a climax in a pub in the Twickenham area of South West London, where I met an old university friend who'd just finished a course at St Mary's University College in nearby Strawberry Hill, and where I drank and smoked myself into a stupor.
Cycling home afterwards, I took a bend near Hampton Wick in the Hampton Court district, and came off my bike, striking my head against a bus shelter. I stayed flat on my back for a while abject and stinking of drink -I could've sworn I saw a shadowy figure running towards me as I lay there in the dark - but before long I was shakily resuming my journey home.
However, weeks of controlled drinking and one massive binge, possibly combined with the ill effects of a violent blow to the head, resulted in my becoming ill and virtually incapacitated for what might have been as long as a fortnight. Time and again during this awful period I'd awake from a feverish semi-sleep, dizzy, faint and nauseous, with my face a deathly yellowy pale, but each time a single further second of consciousness seemed beyond me I felt the Lord breathing life back into me and the terror of dying subsided.
All I could do was lie around, waiting, praying for a return to normality...and when this came, I determined never to drink again as long as I lived. But we swiftly forget our sojourns in Hell; and there would be many further relapses...
My acting career flourished throughout '95, and it was in that year that I defected from Cornerstone to the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship, part of the Association of Vineyard Churches founded by John Wimber in the 1970s. This was as a result of being told by a phone friend that the Vineyard movement contained members whose spiritual gifts were in the realm of the truly exceptional. My curiosity aroused, I went along one Sunday evening and had a powerful experience which made me want to stay; and so I did.
As with Cornerstone, I joined a Home Fellowship group, where I completed part of the Alpha course, which had been pioneered by Nicky Gumbel of West London's famous Holy Trinity Brompton.
I'd visited HTB at some point in the mid '90s, when it was at the height of the revival movement known as the Toronto Blessing. This was so called because it had been ignited in January 1994 at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church by St. Louis pastor, Randy Clark. Clark received it himself from South African evangelist Rodney Howard Brown during a service at Rhema Bible Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then pastored by Kenneth Hagin Jr, founder of the controversial Word of Faith movement.
It spread to the UK in the summer of 1994, where it was dubbed The Toronto Blessing by the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Its main British centres went on to include- as well as HTB - Terry Virgo's New Frontiers family of churches; and Gerald Coates' Pioneer People, whose main venue at the time was a large suburban cinema in Surrey. Once again for an Evangelical fellowship in the London area, Esher was the venue.
Then, in January of the following year, I forsook the secular stage for the sake of a Christian theatre company, Street Level, based at a Pentecostal church of the British-based Elim denomination in the vast multicultural suburb of Croydon in Surrey.
While forming part of the Greater London Urban Area, Croydon's yet in effect a city within a city which runs the gamut demographically from tough inner city areas such as Thornton Heath to semi-rural enclaves such as Sanderstead; yet it still manages to contain the largest council estate in Europe in the shape of New Addington.
With two other Christian actors…viz., company leader Serena from the aforesaid Thornton Heath…and 19 year old Rebecca from nearby Sanderstead, I went on to serve variously as MC, script writer, actor, singer and musician, and together, we toured a series of shows around schools in the bleak outer suburbs of South East London.
One of these, “Choices”, was almost entirely written by me, although it had been based on an idea by Serena, who also heavily edited it for performance purposes. On the whole, the kids were incredibly receptive to our productions, and we were greeted by them with an almost uniform affection, and there was an incredible chemistry between Serena, Rebecca and myself...until things started to go wrong.
Towards the end of the summer, Serena asked me to write a large scale project for the group, suggesting a contemporary version of John Bunyan’s classic Christian allegory "The Pilgrim’s Progress".
This I set about doing, and after some weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic punctuated by scenes of the blackest humour that occasionally verged on the off-colour, I began to have second thoughts about continuing with Street Level.
The play, "Paul Grim's Progress", had left me poor shape spiritually, and I didn't fancy too many more of the long and costly train journeys that were necessary to get me to Croydon and back. So, I began to withdraw; which wasn’t very honourable of me, because Serena had become more dependent on me than ever following Rebecca’s departure at the end of the “Choices” tour. As things turned out, my dark masterpiece was never produced, and in time, I destroyed all but a few pages of it.
But, returning to my secular acting career: its last hurrah came in the spring of '98, when I started rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, to be staged at Fulham’s Lost Theatre in the summer; and despite the fact that my three cameos were praised by cast and audience alike, I’ve not acted since beyond a handful of ill-fated auditions. Quite simply, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that raged within me like a forest fire for more than two decades has long been extinguished, or rather turned to dread.
Just a little over a year later, and the troubled, turbulent 20th Century gave way to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout my neighbourhood.
Phoning my father that night to wish him a happy new year, I discovered that my mother was desperately ill with flu. It’s crossed my mind since that she may have become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by the fact that I’d latterly quit yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London. In time though, her incredible Scots-Irish constitution saw her through to a complete recovery.
I'd found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, despite an awareness that writing extensively about Literary Theory might come to disturb me, and even challenge to my faith, and I eventually withdrew on a provisional basis. It's a decision that's haunted me ever since.
At the time I was attending a satellite church of Kensington Temple, part of the British-based Elim Pentecostal movement, founded by Welsh evangelist George Jeffries in 1915. I was playing guitar for them at the urging of my friend Martina, Russian wife of Pastor Phil of New York City. It was Phil who’d got in touch with me the previous summer through KT about joining a cell group at his home in the Surrey suburbs. This eventually mutated into Liberty, with which I forged very close ties from the outset, especially with Phil and Martina, and first worship leader, Maria, from Peru.
Then, shortly after agreeing to be Liberty's lone musician, I quit my position as a telephone canvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thus bringing a fairly lengthy period spent as an office worker to an end.
A change in my professional fortunes came around Christmastime, when I was made lead singer for Nuages, a Swing band named after the instrumental by the great French Jazz guitarist Django Reinhard. We went on to cut several very fine demos arranged by band leader Bruce, but they didn't result in the interest they deserved…given the wealth of talent involved.
In early '01, Pastor Phil decided to dissolve Liberty, which was a sad event for all of us, so I made yet another return to Cornerstone, to be joined there by Maria and a couple of other friends from the LCC. Around about the same time, I took a short computer course at my local adult education centre, but nothing came of it in terms of employment.
Then, the following summer, in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival, Nuages disbanded, which was a real shame because we'd finally found the audience we’d been searching for all along at the festival, evidenced by the passion with which our first performance there was greeted.
The day after our final show, I started working from home making appointments for a travelling salesman, and was briefly very successful at it, until things started tailing off in the autumn and I was let go in consequence. By this time I'd also left my new church.

This sudden flight from Cornerstone came in consequence of a desire, born of intensive internet research, to seek out churches existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic fold
Such fellowships are Cessationist, which is to say they don't accept that the more spectacular Gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as Tongues and Prophecy are still in operation. Up until then, any church that didn't encourage the speaking in other tongues I'd not recognised as being truly Christian. That is not the case today.
One of my main inspirations during this period of wandering was the Cessationist Sermon Audio website, and I downloaded so many of their sermons that my computer may have crashed as a result. I was also inspired by the many online Discernment Ministries, although not all of these were - or are - Cessationist, and among the churches I visited were Bethel Baptist (Wimbledon), Christ Church (Teddington), and Duke Street Church, (Richmond), all located in the pleasant and affluent outer suburbs of South West London.
Bethel is an Independent Fundamentalist Baptist church based on the US model and therefore using the King James Version of the Bible only. I went to three - possibly successive - services at Bethel, and fully intended to return for a fourth, and so witness the preaching of Sermon Audio favourite David Cloud of Way of Life Ministries, but never did. What happened was that I was held up at Wimbledon British Rail station for over an hour on my final Sunday at Bethel, and this may have put me off travelling by train to church, although I was also tiring of the constant new boy status of the inveterate church-hopper.
Christ Church is part of the Free Church of England, which separated from the established C of E in 1844 in response to the High Church theology of the then Bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts. The Free Church is Evangelical, as well as liturgical and Episcopal, and its member churches adhere to the Doctrines of Grace, also known as the five points of Calvinism. These are Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Perseverance of the Saints.
According to Calvinism, those who form part of the Elect have been predestined to final salvation by God, and that no one can come to saving faith through their own free will due to total depravity.
Duke Street is also a Grace fellowship; while Bethel is Free Will. As a result, many Calvinists would describe it as Arminian, after the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius who emphasized free will when it comes to responding to the Gospel. They would not, however, be entirely accurate in doing so because true Arminians maintain that salvation can be lost, while most IFB fellowships believe in the doctrine of Once Saved Always Saved. In short, they are neither Calvinist nor Arminian, which is an oxymoronic statement to some.
For me, all true believers are united by a clear adherence to certain key doctrines forming the basis of the one true faith without which there can be no salvation, even when they may be divided by non-saving inessentials, or secondary truths. For example, while I’m an upholder of baptism by full immersion, I certainly don’t believe adherents of infant baptism to be heretics, at least not automatically. On the other hand, I have a real problem with those who maintain that a person must be baptised in order to be saved, because the Bible makes it clear that we are saved by faith alone. That said, every Christian should be baptised by full immersion because God commands it, and God urges us to keep his commandments.
Also, while I believe that Christ's return will be followed by a literal thousand year reign on earth, which makes me a premillennialist, a person can insist that Christ won’t return until after the millennium, or that the millennium lies in the past, and still be a saved Christian. What are at issue here are justifiable differences in scriptural interpretation.
Before 2003, which was my year of relentless internet research, I'd known next to nothing about the finer points of my faith, although I was fairly well versed in the subject of prophecy thanks to having been introduced to this early in my Christian life by Spencer and Grace, through various magazines and books such as “Prophecy Today” and the works of Barry R Smith.
At the same time, I had no clue whatsoever as to the meaning of Calvinism or Arminianism, Predestination or Foreknowledge, Cessationism or Continuationism and so on, but that didn't affect the state of my soul, in fact, no one is either saved or damned by believing one or the other of these distinctions, but by faith alone, with true saving faith producing the fruits of repentance.
No Christian has a perfect knowledge of the truth, but I believe there is unity to be found between Evangelicals adhering to the fundamentals of the faith, irrespective of what church they choose to worship in, but this can never be achieved at the expense of compromising the pure Word of God.
For all this talk of churches…if the truth be known, I’ve not been settled within a church since 2001, which points to a deep inner turbulence that I still haven't managed to understand, although it may be at least partly attributable to the fact that I accepted Christ relatively late. After all, the Bible makes it clear that each person who rejects the sovereignty of the fleshly realm for Christ’s sake will know incessant tribulation and persecution. Perhaps this is especially true of repentant Christians who come to faith following a relatively long period of time within the decadent heart of the world as avid flunkies of the Flesh.
However, as comfort these late converts have a true and infinitely worthwhile purpose in life. This was something that constantly escaped me in my youth, for all the fierce, flaming fanaticism of my beliefs and ideals.
In many ways, though, I’ve been my own worst enemy. One by one I’ve had to slay evil habits left over from my pre-Christian existence. In my early days as a Christian, for instance, I still entertained a fixation on the occult, albeit from a Christian perspective. Now I can barely stand to look at pages filled with occult information and symbols. Most recently, I’ve had to address the matter of my dress, which may not seem very important to some - God looks at the heart after all - but I disagree.
For close on a decade, I was more or less addicted to designer sportswear, and among the objects of my love affair were shady baseball caps, sweat tops with massive logos, flashy striped trakkie Bs, and chunky branded trainers...and I wore an earring too, having had my ear pierced in 1979. Some Christians associate earrings on men with ancient pagan idolatry, and specifically the notion of being enslaved, and that makes good sense to me. I've recently come to realise that if a Christian's outer appearance fails to reflect a changed life, he may be cheating others of the chance of coming to Christ through him. He will also be cheating himself of respect, and God of potential converts. In short, I think it’s time I started looking like the Christian I profess to be. Perhaps then I might actually start acting like a person worthy of the name.

In a general sense, the year 2000 turned out to be something of a turning point for me, not just spiritually, but in terms of my entire personality, which has become more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years. Significantly perhaps, the previous year had been the first since I was about 17 that I faced the world with my hair its natural medium brown after having dyed it for nearly three decades.
What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the fact that the peroxide-based streaking kits I favoured were causing me to have breathing difficulties. At first I missed being blond, but in time I came to prefer my natural colour after years of youthful blond androgyny. The fact is that throughout my twenties and for much of my thirties, I remained in a state of extended adolescence, blond being after all the natural colour of eternal youth.
I've elicited a lot of admiration in my time for attempting to take the romantic bohemian rebel existence to its logical conclusion when all around me were conforming at a furious rate, and perhaps still do. But the price for doing so has been high, in terms of social and financial mortification, for which I've no one to blame but myself. If I thought they'd listen, I'd tell the young: listen to your parents, and not to the voices of trendy rebellion, because they're trying to protect you from social failure, out of knowledge of how painful this can be beyond a certain age.
Young people still worship at the altar of romantic rebellion as they've done since time immemorial, but perhaps to not quite the same extent as my own poor generation. We were the ones who came to maturity to a frenetic Rock soundtrack in the tail-spinning nineteen sixties, and who can say what effect it had on us, this music...tailor-made to inspire a generation scornful of deferred gratification, a generation of hipsters.
However, Rock was far more than another mere music form…being a total art involving poetry, theatre, fashion, but even more than that…a way of life with a strong spiritual foundation. It could be said that its first true ancestor was the great 19th Century artistic and cultural movement known as Romanticism, which reached a climax with Nietzsche, who by declaring God's death, cleared the way for the eventual rule of a Do Your Own Thing philosophy so dear to the heart of Rock and Roll culture.
Convinced by 2003 that no person can call themselves a Christian and yet listen to such a libertine music as Rock, I made an attempt to destroy all traces of it in my possession, even though I’d long lost any real taste for Hard Rock. However, by the summer, my attitude had mellowed to the extent that I felt able to write about an hour’s worth of Rock songs in response to a request from my dad, Pat Halling, for songs for a possible collaboration with the son of a close friend. Yet, these were as far from Hard Rock as it’s possible to be, being influenced by such relatively benign and melodic genres as Folk, Pop and Soul.
The songs, some new, some re-workings of old tunes, were recorded on a Sony CFS-B21L cassette-corder, which I think has been discontinued, and were generally well-received, despite having been crudely recorded. Pat even went so far as to suggest that I record them properly in a studio, which was a high compliment indeed, given that unlike me, he’s a trained musician who’s been a professional since the age of 9, where I’m just a primitive with an ear for a catchy tune.
A year or so later, a project was mooted by Pat which involved the recording of an album of Pop standards featuring myself and harmonica genius James Hughes, as well as Pat’s own London Swingtette. In spring 2008, the CD was finally released with the title “A Taste of Summer Wine”, due to the fact that Jim’s playing had long been featured on a British situation comedy called “Last of the Summer Wine”.
As I've stated elsewhere, soon after coming to Christ, I destroyed most of what I had written up until that point, and then wrote quite happily for a time as a Christian, until it seems that God called a halt to my literary activities. It was as if I was being saturated with an almost tangible leaden darkness which took me over to the extent of altering the expression in my eyes.
Once again, I started destroying any writings I managed to finish, sometimes dumping whole manuscripts in handy dustbins, or one sheet after the other down murky London drains. This went on until about 1998, when I more or less gave up creative writing altogether, which was a good move, given that these early Christian writings reflected a continuing preoccupation with subjects that had held me spellbound prior to my conversion. What's more, some of my writings mixed truth and fiction to produce a pointless and deceptive hybrid.
Finally, in January 2006, I believe God made it clear that I was mature enough to be able to write again, and so I started tentatively publishing pieces at the Blogster website, with the first autobiographical one being written sometime around the spring of 2006. As things stand, I'm desperately trying to put the finishing touches to the memoir that evolved out of them, in fact, since 2006, I've done very little except write, so there's really not much to say by way of wrapping things up. What else have I done since then? How have I spent my time?
In terms of my online life, every so often I find myself immersed in a labyrinthine search for information related to a subject that has me briefly in its thrall.
As a result it requires mental processing through a punishing bout of research and the fervid taking of notes. The most recent topics to beset me were the nature of the giants of Genesis 6:4, and the spread of pagan religion following the destruction of the Tower of Babel when God confused the languages, and I couldn't wait to be free of them.
As a general rule I'm most content when at peace with my faith, and least while lost in an endless quest for cyber-knowledge with one page linking incessantly to the other until information overload becomes a serious threat. From time to time, however, I'm tempted to venture beyond my comfort zone into the mysteries of the Bible and history. It's hard for the intellectually curious to resist doing this, and according to the Bible, knowledge shall increase (Daniel 12:4) in the time before the Second Coming of Christ, and this may well be via the miraculous medium of the World Wide Web.
There's really not a whole lot left to add to my testimony, other than to say...were it not for the fact that I came to saving faith in Christ in January 1993, I might be almost eighteen years dead by now...and almost certainly in Hell.

This testimony is based on the final two chapters of "Rescue of a Rock and Roll Child", which is a roman à clef rather than a memoir, so some names have been changed.

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