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I was brought up in a Christian family but I turned my back on everything in my late teens

My Bible: reasons to believe in the power of the Bible

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‘I was brought up in a Christian family but I turned my back on everything in my late teens. I succeeded academically, but I had a quite hard party lifestyle for quite a while. It caught up with me. There were periods of heavy drinking and periods of severe depression. If I hadn’t stopped the wild lifestyle, it could have been disastrous.

‘I moved to Wales in 2013 and in 2015 I began learning Welsh. I started reading the Bible in Welsh. Beibl.net is the Bible in modern-day, spoken Welsh. I wanted to improve my Welsh and I was going to get my life back on track, again.

‘Reading the Bible in Welsh has had an impact in terms of strengthening my faith. It’s a new language for me, so I have to concentrate more. In a new language, you hear different things. There are different nuances. Things are expressed differently. It’s been like reading the Bible for the first time.

‘It really speaks to me in a way that it never spoke to me in English. I grew up thinking that the Bible was the norm. But, when I turned my back on the faith, I saw it as part of the tradition, my parents’ life. For years, I didn’t think about the Bible, let alone read it.

‘I’ve just started reading the New Testament again. I’ve just finished Acts. I sit in my kitchen in the morning with a cup of tea and my Bible. It’s become normal life. It sets me up for the day. If you’d told me 10 years ago that this would be the case, I would have laughed. I would have thought that I wouldn’t still be alive.

‘The partying is over. I have recently had a period of depression, which I’m coming out of now. In the past, I would have sat in a pub on my own and drank, but now I know that’s not the answer. I can pray about it and read the Bible.’

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