Testimony: "the answer came back to me… 'The world didn't get turned upside down. I turned you the right way up!'"
From former NHS physicist and churchgoing atheist to covid sceptic and Bible-believing Christian
Dear Church Leaders (and everyone else)
This recent podcast featuring covid reflections with Christine Padgham is worthy of a wide audience:
In this special episode, released on the government’s ‘Covid 19 Day of Reflection’, we interview Christine Padgham about her journey through the covid era. We discuss how she woke up to the truth of what was happening and the truth of the gospel. We hope this interview will give an accurate reflection of the harms caused to so many through the covid interventions, fear and propaganda, and will be an encouragement to those looking for hope and truth which can be found in Christ.
At the time of writing, this is the latest episode from “Owl & Badger” — Helen and Tim — who describe themselves as “a couple of Christians applying critical thinking and Biblical principles to the big issues we are facing today”.
Other episodes can be found at the same link. A transcript of much of Episode 68 is below, with occasional additional comments.
Setting the scene
[Tim (Badger of Owl & Badger)] [0:44] It’s great to have you with us, Christine. Thank you for taking the time to chat with Helen and myself. Would you be able to just introduce what you do, and a brief bit of background to give some context to our listeners…?
[Christine Padgham] Yes, I am now working in a restaurant, but I was a physicist in the National Health Service. I stopped doing that in 2012 and was a stay-at-home mum after that until 2020 when Covid happened... And then I became — I still find it difficult to define what I was during that time — I don’t know if I was an activist or a campaigner or… a professional dissident.
[Tim] It’s hard to believe it’s five years ago, isn’t it…?
[CP] It feels about 500 years to me. It’s been a long five years… I had been out of professional work, but I had been doing a bit of maths and physics tutoring from 2012 to 2020. [After 2010] I think I’d just been leading an increasingly… naive life... When I was growing up… at school… at university, I was always a very critical thinker. I really didn’t go along with things, and I was very sceptical about a lot of things, but something happened to me, I think I can identify now in 2010 — and it might have been because I became a mother or maybe because… I withdrew from the workplace having had my daughter, and then I gave up work altogether in 2012.
By the time 2020 arrived, I was very much a believer in science. I was quite “woke” really — very woke is how I would describe myself looking back actually. I was quite a news junkie. And… when 2020 arrived… and we were hearing about this new virus, I was really, really concerned. And because I followed the news so closely, I was saying to people, “Why are we not locking down?” — in January 2020. I was ahead of the curve. That was me.
Actually, this just doesn’t make any sense. We’re hearing about this virus and it’s spreading and what are they doing? Why are they dragging their heels? They were talking about lockdowns I think probably from the end of January. 2020 was the first time I heard of that. And I was like, that sounds like a good idea. Why are we not doing that?
By the time the 23rd of March arrived, I just thought we should be locking down and everybody should be really scared about this virus, and I was quite frustrated that people weren’t more concerned about it, because I was really concerned about it. And because I followed the news so closely I felt like I was really well informed about it, and [that] this was an obvious course of action… A lockdown hardliner!
[Tim] In terms of thinking back to that time, I guess you were probably aware of what was happening before Christmas… because there were snippets in the news from China, I seem to remember, and people saying, “This thing is looking really bad.” And then it was kind of simmering away…
[CP] I can’t remember when I first became aware of it, but I know that by March 2020 I was extremely alarmed. I should have said when I was describing my background… I was always raised in the church. My Mum is a Catholic and my Dad is Presbyterian Church of Scotland. And I grew up going to church every week, and I continued doing that into my adult life mostly. I went through phases where I didn’t go to church, but I definitely was not Christian, and I would have said that I was like a churchgoing atheist. That’s what I would have said.
Anyway, the lockdown thing happened in the first three weeks. [But] even though I was a lockdown hardliner, I was really concerned about the effect that this would have on the economy and things, and people, and I was aware of really vulnerable people in care homes and how terrible this must be for them. So I felt like we had to do it, but [that] it was a very worrying thing that we were doing, and that people must be really concerned about it. And I felt like the government must be doing this all with a really heavy heart, and I didn’t envy them being in this position. These were all things that I would have said.
Do you remember the first lockdown? The weather was weirdly good… It was a really abnormally warm April, and we had been living in our house for quite a number of years, and the garden needed a lot of work. So we got to work in the garden, and we just spent three weeks basically in our garden sorting our garden out. And I started to quite enjoy myself. And when the announcement came that we were locking down for a further three weeks, I thought “That’s good” because I need to get more work done in the garden here.
And when I had that thought, that was my first moment of checking myself, because I thought, “Hang on… how can I be so flippant about this? Because I was so concerned about this three weeks ago.” I recognised that something had changed in me in those three weeks of being isolated and just focusing on my house and my family. And I actually felt quite ashamed of myself — well, actually very ashamed of myself — for that selfishness. And I recognised it, and that was when I started holding myself to account. So I went and I looked up the death statistics for covid.
Now because I was a woke person, I was very aware. I was very concerned about vulnerable people, and I was thinking, “So we’ve got all these vulnerable people locked up, and people not able to get to see doctors, and people with special needs who… cannot get any of the support they’re supposed to get, and this must be really bad. Lots of people must have died to justify this, and for them to justify a further lockdown.” And I can’t remember exactly what the number was but I looked for our NHS Trust at the number of people who died, and it was very small — the covid death numbers.
And that’s not to say that I'm not concerned about the people who died of covid. I am now really concerned about those people who died, and I’m wondering what they actually died of. But I was like, that’s such a small number and this is obviously not so dangerous that we couldn’t even open up a little bit. How can this possibly be justified? And why is the government not looking for a reason to open back up again? And by that time of course we had all the numbers from the USA and Sweden… and you could see that states in the US that hadn’t locked down weren’t doing any worse than states that had. And I thought… surely if you were in government you would be desperate to open the country up again. You would be looking for any reason to do that, and they were doing the opposite.
Seeing the darkness
Spring 2020
[CP] [9:55] And so I started to feel really uncomfortable, and by the end of the second three weeks of lockdown I was actually feeling quite beside myself at the lack of justification for what we were doing… I went through a process of just becoming absolutely convinced that what we were doing was not logical or rational or justified in any way. And then I started to experience quite a lot of difficulty with people who didn’t see that.
As soon as you expressed any scepticism about it, you would get… sometimes quite vicious responses. And I just started to become so confused about what was actually going on, and why people were behaving the way they were behaving — which I have a lot more insight into now, but at the time I found very difficult. And… I recognise that my own behaviour towards people who didn’t agree was quite problematic as well.
[Tim] It was very polarising wasn’t it….
[CP] Yes. And then there was the whole Dominic Cummings thing, which I’m always amazed people don’t talk about that more… than they do… to Barnard Castle. When that happened I just became absolutely apoplectic with rage that that he had done that… All these people were suffering, and he was just getting in his car and travelling across the country. And then I examined myself again and I thought, “Why am I reacting like this? This is just a man who went to his family for support when his child was sick.” And that was my second moment of thinking, “Why am I behaving like this?” I started to really realise that I wasn’t behaving in a way that was normal for me.
And then the third big thing that happened was the BLM riots in the summer of 2020. When the George Floyd thing happened I watched the video… on the news. I was absolutely outraged at this black man having been murdered by the police, and the discrimination against black people in the USA, and I got so wound up about it... But by that time I’d realised that the news agencies were basically lying consistently about covid data, because I was by that time watching the covid data and I could see that they were consciously lying about what was happening.
And I got really angry about the BLM stuff and I was on board with the Black Lives Matter movement and everything. And then I again had to question myself: “Why am I trusting them on this this stuff when I know that they’re lying to me so consistently about the covid stuff?”
I am reminded of the Trusted News Initiative:
And I felt quite embarrassed a third time when I reflected on my own responses to things. And so I would say [that] by July 2020, when they introduced masks, I… was fully… initiated into the dissident programme.
[Helen (Owl of Owl & Badger)] That’s quite a transformation in a few months isn’t it?
Yes… and again, because I was so interested in the covid statistics at that time, I went and actually looked… at the statistics [on government websites] for black people having been killed by police in the US. And the statistics are not what they are presented as in the mainstream or legacy or whatever we call the media. They’re just not. There is no systemic racism. There just isn’t. It’s… all just lies… It’s all on government websites… their lies are exposed.
So by July 2020 I really felt like I was losing my mind because everything that I trusted I was discovering was a lie. All the institutions that I believed in… they were all lying to me, all the time.
[Tim] Did you have any other specific people that were around you that were realising the same thing at a similar time…?
Yes, as you said — and everybody in the country knows this — it was very polarising. There were many people in my life who started to find me very problematic, which was also just intensely painful. And it actually remains intensely painful. But by God’s grace there were people in my life who understood what I was saying, and who were helping me as well.
One of my friends who first suggested to me that this stuff wasn’t all by accident and that there seemed to be some sort of programme in place to change us in the United Kingdom… when she first told me that, I thought she was crazy. I was like, “She’s paranoid and she’s going too far.” But she just kept quietly talking to me and telling me what she was seeing. And I had to reflect on what she was telling me, and I had to conclude that she was right. And I think I did that for a lot of people [and] there were a lot of people in my life who did that for me, and that really was such a blessing because otherwise I think I would have completely lost my mind.
I am reminded of the gradual dawning I had in relation to the various ways in which there seems to be a concerted effort to weaken society:
Autumn 2020
[CP] [16:34] Anyway we had the summer of 2020, and then by the autumn… I think it was when the schools started to go back and the UsForThem Scotland group formed — which was a group campaigning for schools to reopen — I got involved with some people on there, and I had found some people online through Facebook… and Twitter who noticed me. We formed just naturally into groups of people out of similar minds. By the autumn of 2020 I think the Inform Scotland group had started up, and I’d got to know the chap who runs the Think Scotland magazine website,1 and I’d just met quite a number of people. I knew quite a lot of people… who ended up forming the HART group, and we were all working together.
So we started trying to counteract what Nicola Sturgeon was doing — and Boris Johnson — with her daily Covid updates. I started to do a similar thing as Inform Scotland. We had a number of people in that group, but everybody was so worried about speaking out publicly, so the Inform Scotland group always sort of looked like it was just me.
But I wrote this daily blog of the covid stats. And it was just taking numbers from the government website, and graphing them so that they were in context, and showing people what the statistics actually said was happening with covid.
And I was also trying to draw people’s attention to the problem of false positives with testing. Now I know that people probably groan. If they’ve been following the Covid stuff they’ll groan about false positives because they’ve heard so much about them. And if you’ve not been a covid sceptic then you’ll groan because it sounds really boring, but…
I did not have an illustrious career as a health physicist in the National Health Service, and I would never claim to have had an illustrious career — and I don’t think it was an environment in which I thrived… But one of the things that I know, and I know that I know this, is about test sensitivity and specificity. Every test — even if it was a perfect test, which doesn’t even make any sense… the PCR tests for covid were not perfect — but even if they were, human beings are different from day to day. Their physiology is different… we’re different from one another.
You cannot just test every single person who presents himself to a testing facility, and then say any positive that comes back is a case. You can’t do that. You have to check. You have to do a secondary test. When you’re checking for virus particles up a person’s nose and you’re claiming that we’re in the middle of a pandemic… presumably these virus particles are everywhere… you should not be surprised to find a virus particle — I know viruses don’t really exist in particles but let’s say that they did — you shouldn’t be surprised to find one in a person’s nose. [But] it doesn’t mean they’re infected.
And so this notion of asymptomatic cases was just so dangerous, because you’re telling people, “You are a danger to those around you,” when they weren’t. They were likely false positive and in the summer of 2020 when I first really started paying attention to this, we were returning a 1% positive rate or something [similar]. That was definitely the false positive rate at that time… definitely. I know this. I know it from my physics training. And we were locking those people up, and we were using these positives returned as a justification for mask mandates and further lockdowns. It was absolutely crazy.
The PCR test was too sensitive and not at all specific. Those were the two problems with it. So it was returning back far too many positives, and getting people into this crazy habit of testing themselves all the time for a disease that they didn’t have, and they had no reason to think that they did have.
I am reminded of Kary Mullis, the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method,” who stated that “with PCR… you can find almost anything in anybody”:
And this 2007 article from the New York Times:
And the refusal of the authorities to disclose the false positive rate.
[Tim] Yes. And people still test themselves now… I’ve just got a load in my cupboard and I’m just thinking I should try and eBay them or something…
No! Throw them out. Don’t encourage… When people tell me that they’ve tested themselves for covid, I do an internal scream… As a physicist, and having been trained in testing statistics, it’s just so crazy… that I can’t cope with it really… The thing… that really, really troubled me in 2020, and continues to trouble me now, is why more physicists aren’t coming out and saying, “This is bonkers. This is not how you test for disease.” How many chickens have now been slaughtered on the basis of PCR tests for bird flu? It’s absolutely nuts. It’s just totally insane.
As PCR expert Kevin McKernan notes, when “they are threatening jail time if you get a second opinion on the PCR test... that’s how you know it’s a fraud”:
I’m just going to finish up my voyage of discovery. I got to the autumn of 2020 and the chat about the covid vaccines was coming up. And I, of course, it won’t surprise you… I hope I’ve painted an accurate picture of myself here, and you’ll not be surprised to hear that I was very pro-vaccine… I thought, “That sounds quite good… it’s a wee bit quick for vaccine, but I suppose if we need to do this to open up…”
But I had been put in touch with all these people who were jumping up and down like I was, saying “What are we doing? This is nuts!” And people who were medical experts as well… I was on quite a few Zoom calls, and quite a large number of… these people who’d been sacked from their job or suspended or whatever because of the stuff that they were saying about covid… they were jumping up and down about this vaccine.
They were like, “This is so dangerous. mRNA technology is not safe. This is not a good thing to be injecting into people. We’re going to see heart attacks, strokes, accelerated cancers, immune system dysfunction…” And they were explaining to me — because I… didn’t know anything about vaccines — and they were saying… “How they’re saying that it’ll work is… we’re going to inject this mRNA into people. It’s protected by… lipid nanoparticles so that the immune system doesn’t just kill it immediately. And it’ll go into people’s cells and it’s going to instruct their own cells to make the spike protein like the one that’s on the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And there’s no knowing when this function of spike protein production will shut down… if it’ll ever shut down. This is a dangerous protein. People’s immune systems are going to start attacking their own cells.” They were saying all of these things in October 2020…
And they surely weren’t wrong:
For a summary of some of the related issues, see e.g. this post:
And then the Pfizer trial document came out in December 2020. The trial document had pages and pages and pages of results that showed 95% efficacy… So I was reading this trial document and I was like, “Well, maybe the vaccine might be dangerous like my new friends are all telling me it will be, but at least it seems to be working. That’s good. Of course I knew that they were using PCR tests in the trials, and I knew that there were lots of problems with the PCR test, but I thought, “Well it’s 95% efficacious. Good. Fine.”
But after all those pages and pages of tables there’s a paragraph that says that suspected covid-19 cases the week following vaccination had been 42% higher in the vaccinated group than the unvaccinated group. So, when I was reading that, I was thinking, “Okay, hang on a second… the vaccinated group were more likely to have had a suspected case of covid-19 in the week following vaccination. So how did they get that 95 percent efficacy rate then in those prior tables?”
And of course what they did was, they didn’t test people in the [two weeks] following vaccination... it’s page 42 of the trial document…2 I was reading it with my physicist numbers hat on, and thinking the only way that they could have done that is by deliberately not testing people following the vaccination. (And the question is, “Why would you do that?” Well, because you would think that you were expecting them to test positive, presumably…) And then taking those people who had the suspected covid case out of the group for those prior tables… pages and pages of results that show the 95% efficacy rate.
So they were taking people who had got covid following vaccination, and putting them in the wrong group for the results. Now you don’t have to be a physicist or good with numbers or a medical expert or a doctor or a vaccinologist to know, looking at that, that that is fraud.
I am reminded of the “cheap trick” described e.g. here in this short video from Prof Norman Fenton, where an illusion of high efficacy for a placebo vaccine can be demonstrated over the period of a vaccine rollout study simply by excluding “cases” that occur within some fixed period after vaccination:
Fenton outlines further context in the interview featured in this post:
Now there’s a whole lot of people… who know a lot more about this than I do and who are much more aware of the ins and outs and the intricacies of the trials than I am. But that is your basic level evidence of fraud. And it showed that people were getting sick [with covid symptoms] following vaccination. So I was thinking, “Right, so we’ve got this vaccine that all my friends, who have absolutely no reason to say this other than it being true, [saying] that this vaccine’s really dangerous; and it doesn’t work… What is going on here?”
Into 2021, and a whole new level of evil
[CP] [28:20] And then when the regulator approved it — or authorised it or whatever it was — I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing… I couldn’t believe it. All the lockdown stuff was bad enough… mask mandates… they’d said that masks didn’t work, and then they said that we were all to wear them, and… I’d been thrown out of shops for not wearing masks — with my children — in extremely humiliating incidents… All that had gone on…
But this vaccine thing was a new level of evil. To approve something that had no long-term data, there was no rational… you couldn’t justify injecting people with something that was going to make their own cells make a foreign spike protein. And it didn’t work. And there was evidence to believe that it was really dangerous. They knew the mRNA technology was dangerous. They knew that lipid nanoparticles were dangerous. They knew from the Japanese study [see also p45 of this Australian Government document] that happened at the end of 2020 as well… They were finding the spike protein everywhere in the bodies, including [in] the reproductive organs… And the regulator authorised it. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
And then, because I was looking at the data — and I was looking at data from all over the world by that time, and I was putting these things into articles on Think Scotland and in the Informed Scotland website, and I was telling everybody that I could find about this — we were watching… The Middle East was the first place where they rolled out the vaccine. And everywhere they rolled out the vaccine, covid cases went up. Everywhere. Israel, Egypt, Jordan, all of them, everywhere… Lebanon was a really bad case as well, I think.
They were giving them to elderly people in care homes, and then they were having covid explosions in care homes. We watched it happen here time and time again. Everywhere they delivered the vaccine in the UK, covid numbers went up, and people died from covid.
So that was how I started 2021 — seeing this happening, and watching it happen in real time. And seeing people that I loved and people that I cared about going for these vaccines that I knew could only harm them. And I kept thinking, “I’m a housewife, basically. I’m a housewife with a long-ago physics degree, and I can see this. Are you seriously telling me the MHRA and the JCVI haven’t looked at this trial document? They haven’t spotted this problem that I have been able to spot?
I am reminded of these recent revelations about what was actually going on in 2020:
And this series of posts showing how the UK Covid Inquiry is covering up what happened:
[Helen] Well, there was two questions there wasn’t there: either they had looked, and had seen it, and chose to ignore it and plough on otherwise; or they hadn’t bothered to look at it, which shows gross incompetence. It can only be one of the two…
[CP] Maybe they looked at it and they just felt that politically… this is the best case scenario that I can think of… that they felt like if they came out and said, “Look, actually we’re not going to approve this” — or authorise it I should say, because they were never approved… they were authorised under emergency use arrangements… They thought, “We can’t refuse to authorise this because it will just cause huge problems in the country because this is how we’ve told people we’re going to open up… and the vaccine hasn’t worked and that’s not the way out…”
But either way it showed a callous disregard for human life, and I kept thinking to myself… I took my babies to get their vaccines because I believed that we had a regulated medical system and that everything that we took and everything that was prescribed to us by doctors had been checked and regulated and monitored for safety. I based so many important decisions for myself and my children on this assumption. And it’s a lie. I don’t know… maybe other people coped with this than I did but I really had a serious personal crisis on understanding this the extent of the mismanagement — at best — of the medical system in particular just absolutely horrified me…
[Tim] One of the big issues with what you’ve described in the about-change that you went through… is that… one of the things it does is it completely upends your worldview, and all the things that you’ve trusted in. You think, “Hold on a sec, I’ve got to re-evaluate everything,” because you realise… we’ve been conned…
I think we forget sometimes about how organisations work, and I would always say… if you’re working in your day job, or maybe you’re part of a charity, or it could be even in a church, and you’re involved in some kind of leadership, you only have to understand that when you meet as leaders of an organisation or a business, you take decisions which are there to — hopefully — generally be positive. But sometimes those decisions can be to take you in a certain direction, but at the expense of telling the truth to the people you’re leading. And… you could say… that’s manipulation… you could say it’s necessary because not everybody needs to know everything… but it’s worth remembering that, because organisations higher up the echelons… government organisations do exactly the same thing. And we seem to think that they just act in our best interests all the time when actually they don’t. And it seems to me… that often they’re actively acting in our worst interests, sadly…
Can I… ask you about the NHS… how would you describe the kind of the culture within the teams in which you worked…? Was it generally speaking [that] people trusted… the system that they’re a part of… what was the general consensus?
[CP] I’m not sure if I’m… uncomfortable or unqualified to answer that, because… I don’t know that I was ever really thinking along those lines back then. I… think there was an assumption, and I think it’s probably quite a natural assumption, that everybody was there for the good of the patients, and we were all just doing our best. I honestly don’t really feel like I had a lot of deep thoughts about it… I didn’t enjoy at all working for the NHS. I didn’t find it fulfilling… and obviously it’s a huge organization, and there’s a huge amount of inertia in it, and everything was very slow to change. I didn’t work [there] for that long, and I was quite young at the time. I think I [now] look back into things that happened [then] with a different perspective… like I say, I think I was very, very naive… up until 2020….
And I think it’s because I wasn’t a Christian… I was talking about this… with some very dear friends that we were staying with… Before you’re a Christian you can’t really afford to look properly at evil, because if you were to look at it properly it would drive you mad. If you don’t have Christ, then you can’t look at the darkness full-on, I think, because you have to protect yourself from it, because the darkness is very powerful when you’re not in Christ. And it can destroy you.
In my experience, many Christians — and indeed church leaders — appear curiously reluctant even to acknowledge the darkness, let alone look at it. Despite what the Bible tells us about dark forces. And despite the fact that God has been using what is happening to bring people to Christ.
And I think what happened to me in 2021, without wanting to sound overly dramatic about it, [was that] it did almost destroy me, because I could see what was happening, and I felt so motivated to fight it. But all that fighting it does is lose you friends really — [actually] that’s not true; I gained friends through doing it as well — but you can lose your reputation, your standing in the community. You lose a lot of relationships. There’s only loss from it. And… it certainly felt to me when I was doing it that the gains were very marginal, and the losses were just enormous.
Seeing the light
Finding a good church
[Helen] [39:15] So… you’d become an activist at by the beginning of 2021, but you were still trying to fight the darkness in your own strength. So tell us what happened then in terms of your faith journey…
[CP] One of the things that happened was… a lot of the people that I met… kept saying a number of things to me which I didn’t really understand. One of the things that they used to say is — these would have been Christians — “We mustn’t lean on our own understanding” [compare Proverbs 3:5-6] and I was like, “What does that mean?! I don’t understand what you’re saying. Whose understanding am I supposed to lean on…?” And I used to get so frustrated when people would say that, because I had no idea what they were talking about.
And a number of people said to me, “Have you read the Bible? Do you know what the Bible says?” And I was like, “Well, I’ve gone to church my whole life. I know what the Bible says.” And I just… didn’t really know what they were saying to me. But eventually I was just speaking to some quite random person, and he said to me, “You need to find a good church. That’s what you need.” And I said, “But how do you find a good church?” Because I had actually withdrawn my membership from the Church of Scotland because I was so fed up with all the general nonsense. (I’m very sorry to anybody who's listening who’s still in that church, but I just got absolutely frustrated and I cut myself off from them… I did that quite a lot in 2021… from lots of things…)
And then I was listening to Alex Thomson… the journalist who writes for UK Column quite a lot… he’s a very faithful Christian… and I knew him a wee bit through the covid stuff. And he was on a podcast, and he said people need to find a good church, and a good church to go to would be the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland because they’re very serious and they just preach the gospel. And I didn’t have a clue what he meant. And I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I thought “I do feel like I need something now.” So I went along to my local Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, I think with quite a consumerist mindset, because I just wanted some wisdom. I had been in this darkness. I was in a void. I didn’t know what to trust or who to believe, and I felt completely and utterly lost, really… I think consciously lost.
And I went to church this church and I thought, “I’m going to get some wisdom here and maybe it’s going to make me feel better.” Now the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland is a wonderful church. It’s a very conservative, very serious church. They’re quiet people in my limited experience. They don’t sing — they just chant the Psalms. And it’s a long sermon — I think the first sermon I attended [was] at least 45 minutes. And I would have just thought that was inconceivable before… that I would sit through a 45-minute sermon. Anyway, I went, and [the minister] was preaching on Isaiah 28, which I have read many times since, and I still don’t really understand… but he preached on it and he preached for a long time. I don’t know how long it was, but it got to the end and I almost shouted out, “Please don’t stop!” — and it’s not the sort of church that you would shout out in… because I was listening to it and… I’ve got all the notes… I’d never heard anything like it, to hear somebody preaching the gospel through Isaiah 28.
I wouldn’t have understood that… before because I always thought the Old Testament and the New Testament were different things, and the Old Testament was not that relevant. But he was preaching on Isaiah and talking about Jesus. And he was talking into things that I had seen in the previous year that I couldn’t have understood before… Anyway… we came out of the church and somebody stopped me on the way out. And he said, “Where are you from?” And I told him where I was from — and I’d travelled a long way to go to this church. And he said, “That’s a long way!” And I know now he would have been thinking, “This girl is hungry.” And he said, “Do you read your Bible every day?” And I was like, “No.” And I was thinking, “Do people actually do that? Read their Bible every day?” And I said, “No.” And he said, “Well, you must read your Bible every day… you should be doing that.” So I got in the car, and I bought a Bible online in the car before I’d even started the engine, and I cried all the way home.
[Tim] I really like that… straightforward “you must read the Bible”… emphasising the importance of it… that’s great to hear… we need more of that…
“I’d been wrong my entire life about everything”
[CP] [45:27] I went home, and I cried all the way home, and it’s quite a long drive, and I was just by myself. And I found myself praying. I don’t know if I would have recognised that I was praying at the time, but what I found myself saying is “The world has just turned upside down and I can’t make any sense of any of it.” But… in that drive… the answer came back to me: “The world didn’t get turned upside down. I turned you the right way up!”
And I just understood from that first trip to church that that’s what had happened. I had been wrong my entire life about everything. And I recognised that in 2021. I was consciously thinking that. “How can I have been wrong about everything?” And the only logical answer to that question is, “Because you started from the wrong place.”
And really quite quickly towards the end of 2021, up until 2022, I really came to fully understand that I did not know God. I didn’t know anything about him. I sort of knew that he was there. Somebody used this analogy — that it’s like you know that King Charles exists [but you don’t know him]… You don’t maybe doubt his existence… Although I didn’t really believe in God, but sometimes I would have said that I did. I knew that he was there but I didn’t know him at all. And I’d never tried… I’d never thought it applied to me or that I needed it, I think maybe because I led quite a sort of “together” life. People would probably have said that I was quite “together”… I’ve got a lovely husband and I’ve got two amazing children and I live in a nice house and… it looked like everything was fine. But everything was not fine.
Anyway, I got my Bible. I couldn’t go to that church [I mentioned] very often because it’s so far away, and I’d started working by that time, and I work full-time [and] quite often on Sundays so I couldn’t go to church regularly. But I started reading the Bible. Now the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland reads from the King James Version, which is not an easy thing to read sometimes, although the language is absolutely gorgeous I think. Anyway, I started reading my Bible, and some days… my daughters would go out to school at 8:50 in the morning. And I would sit reading my Bible until they came back from school at 3:30 in the afternoon. I was absolutely starving for it, and I couldn’t believe… reading it… all the things I had not understood before.
There’s a testimony… on one of the albums that I listen to, just somebody delivering a testimony, and he says, “One day I opened my Bible, and it was like somebody had messed with my book. I understood things that I didn’t understand before.” Well that’s what it was like for me.
“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good…”
[CP] [48:50] There were a few things that really stand out to me as being so powerful when I read them. Genesis 50:20 — when Joseph is speaking to his brothers after they’ve sold him into slavery, and he’s just had all these trials and tribulations but this amazing thing happened to [him] in Egypt where he ends up being Prime Minister and saves millions of lives because he predicts the famines… He says he’s reunited with his family and… they find it hard to trust that he’s really forgiven them, and he says, “What you did to me you meant for evil, but God meant it for good.” I remember reading that and just thinking that it is possible… through these terrible things that happen in the world… that God will use it to glorify himself.
You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives (Genesis 50:20)
That… was a real truth. I could see that it was true. And… there’s no way before 2020 I would have been able to understand that. Even during 2020… people used to say things to me like… “This will be used to glorify God… it will glorify God in the end.” And I just thought these people were nuts. How can anything good come out of this awful crime that’s been committed against us? But of course that’s the sort of thing I say now all the time…
And Exodus 3:14 as well, when God says to Moses, “I want you to go… to speak to Pharaoh… and I want him to release my people…” And Moses is like, “Don’t ask me. I don’t want to do this.” And he keeps pushing back, and then eventually he’s like, “Well, who am I going to say sent me then?” And God says, “Tell him ‘I am’ sent you. I am who I am.” And again, that was one of these moments reading the Bible… I just thought, “I’m not reading this book. This book is reading me.” It’s answering questions that I didn’t even know that I had… Reading the Bible for the first time was just the most incredible experience…
The living word
[CP] [51:16] I used to think that explaining to people what I’d seen during Covid was hard. But explaining to people what you’ve seen reading the Bible is much harder, because… God’s word is just so mind-bending that I discovered a whole new realm of something that was hard to communicate. In some ways the gospel is very easy to communicate to people. But explaining the effect that God’s words can have on you… to people who haven’t read [the Bible is really hard].
[Helen] Yes, I always think it’s that concept of God’s word as a living word. It makes total sense to me, and it makes sense to you now. But people who aren’t Christians would probably find that quite difficult to understand — “What do you mean by that?” But it literally is alive isn’t it, and that’s why we can sometimes… we’ve read it before, or heard a story before, and then all of a sudden we can read it, and it just comes to life, and it completely speaks into a situation, completely makes sense. And that’s what it means, isn’t it? It literally is alive, his living word.
Yes…. I remember being absolutely amazed… when I became a mother [when I learned] about breast milk, and how breast milk changes with the baby, and it always delivers to the baby exactly what the baby needs. And [that] women can breastfeed [even] two babies at one time, one older than the other. And the younger child will get different milk to the older child.
And the more I went… especially [to the] Free Presbyterian Church… I was looking at people around me, and they were mature Christians who’d been Christians for decades in some cases. And I was a baby Christian. And they were listening to the sermon and understanding something on a completely different level to how I was understanding it, because I was new. And I see that happening now. I’m still a baby Christian… because I’m relatively new and inexperienced [but] when I’m at my church now, which is not the Free Presbyterian Church… I can see that happening, that I’m getting something different to some of the newer people in our groups. And yes… I could never have grasped what any of that meant before I’d been woken up in 2020…
Speaking with Christians now
[Tim] [54:33] One thing that strikes me is that… if we’re not [as Christians generally] engaging with the world in terms of what’s happening in the world, and we’re not looking at that through a biblical lens, we’re going to really struggle as Christians, because we’re not actually able to apply God’s word to the real world. So, for example, everything that happened… you’ve talked about all the lockdowns, not having the vaccine, not mask-wearing… I think as Christians we can and should apply Scripture to that in a practical sense. And if we’re not awake to those things, we can’t apply Scripture in a practical sense…?
[CP] Of course, being a Christian should inform your view on absolutely everything. And… the thing that I try really hard to do is not impose my understanding of things that might be going on… on my brothers and sisters at church… We should understand that we can be deceived. I think I find that, when I speak to Christians now… always really — I can’t think of any exception, when I’m speaking to a true Christian — I can explain something to them that I’ve discerned that they maybe don’t share… they might not have seen what I’ve seen, but their mind will be open to it, because they understand that they can have been deceived...
But it is really difficult, I find, because… with the covid stuff, I know that it’s possible to have been deceived. I’m not claiming to know the specifics about why and what happened exactly during the covid era. But… the things that I’ve said here on this podcast… I know that they are true. I have explored every avenue to try and prove myself wrong, because I would love to be wrong.
I remember when I would talk to people, or try and explain to them what I’d seen… Quite a lot of the time people would say to me that I was experiencing confirmation bias, and I was only looking at things that confirmed what I’d already said. And I remember just thinking, “Honestly, that is not what I am doing. I would love to be wrong about this. I have tried to prove myself wrong so many times, but this stuff I’m really not wrong about.” But I don’t know where the line is… where you should and shouldn’t talk to people about these things…
I used to think that it was obvious [that] if people around me were doing something that was dangerous I should tell them that what they were doing was dangerous, especially if they didn’t already know. But I’m now much less sure about that…
[Tim] It’s a tricky one I guess… Helen and I started this podcast… because we want to encourage other Christians, and we want to be alert… awake to what’s happening… but at the same time to very much say, “Well, what does the Bible say?” and actually start to apply it…
It’s important to be able to look at what’s happening in the world, so that we can say, “What does the Bible say about this?” and, crucially, “How do we live in the way that God calls us to, in the circumstances that we are?” And the problem I think is that, very often in the gathered church, we don’t talk about a lot of things that are happening in the world. And the end result of that is actually we constrict our ability to apply God’s word to how we live our lives…
One of the things that you’ve really highlighted is [that] you’ve had that humility to be open to change, to be able to say, “Wow! Okay… I’ve had my eyes opened…” To make that dramatic turn is really quite something, and then, when you do, God really uses that and that’s amazing…
[CP] I was baptised in January 2023, and a number of my friends were baptised around that time as well, or shortly after. And I do feel that there’s a couple of ranks of Christians now… I think that there are a lot of people… who’ve experienced something very similar to what I experienced. I don’t think that there’ll be many people listening to this podcast who wouldn’t nod along… and what I’ve said will resonate with them. But what I notice is that there’s a lot of the older Christians in my church, whose faith really inspires and encourages me, and who I would rely on for guidance on loads of things. But… because they’ve come on the path to Christianity a long time ago, sometimes I feel like — I don’t know how to say this [so] it doesn’t sound like I’m being patronising or rude — but sometimes I see a bit of the naivety that I had before 2020.
Now they know the gospel, and they believe in Christ, and they’re following him, and, like I say, they’re like absolutely essential to me now in my life, these people. But they just didn’t see what happened during covid. And for me that feels really strange because that’s how I arrived at the foot of the cross.
Strange indeed.
I sense that this post is already on the long side, and probably more than long enough. But the remainder of the podcast is also well worth hearing. And to finish here, I thought it worth highlighting two comments that particularly struck me:
[CP] [1:10:52] One of the things that I found really, really frustrating when I was joining the church, and I would try and speak to people about [bad things happening in the world], they would always say, “Well, we have to preach the gospel”. And I was like, “Well yes, but I mean we can do two things at once presumably…? We can deal with these issues and preach the gospel?”
Quite. Here is a great example from November 2021:
I wonder where we would be now if only more churches had actually stuck to preaching the gospel during the covid era and avoided endorsing the deception being fed to us by the authorities…
And I wonder how history will judge what these church leaders did…
…and indeed their subsequent silence on the matter.
[CP] [1:19:00] One of the things that I really wanted to say is… the most frustrating thing that I found in the two years from 2020 was when people would tell people something, and they would say, “Well that’s just your opinion.” And… “I don’t agree, and can we not just agree to disagree?” And of course we should be able to agree to disagree on matters of opinion, but it seems to me that one of… the most obvious results of rejecting Christ — which we are doing as a society now — is that you lose a grip of the difference between truth and belief and opinion.
When Jesus is on trial… Pilate says [to him], “What is truth?” And I remember being really, really surprised that he says that… One of the things that [Jesus] showed us is that he is the truth, and you can’t just say, “Well, I don’t agree with that truth.” It doesn’t matter whether you agree or your believe, or it’s your opinion that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life. If he is, your opinion is completely irrelevant.
And it’s the same thing… the covid vaccines just as a worldly example… well they’re either safe and effective, or they’re not. It’s not a matter of opinion. Masks… they either work or they don’t. It's not a matter of opinion. It’s either true that the climate is changing because of man and his actions. Or it’s not. And you can say, “Well, I haven’t discovered what the truth is yet.” Or, “We don’t know yet.” But that doesn’t mean that the truth doesn’t exist. And we’re so confused about opinion and truth now. My truth and your truth... I know that’s been explored… a lot of people are talking about that, but… this opinion business is… something that really, really bugs me. Opinion and truth are two entirely different things.
One of the things that my pastor said in one of his sermons quite a while ago now — I felt really convicted when he said it — was [that] God doesn’t care what your opinion is. He couldn’t care less. Your opinion is completely irrelevant to God. And I felt really convicted there because I know that I used to be — maybe people would say I still am… I was always being told I was so opinionated… And I knew that when people said that to me they weren’t meaning it as a compliment. But I thought, “But what’s wrong with having an opinion?” [And] that I should have opinions on things. And you can have opinions on things or not. That really doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s true.
Amen to that.
Related (in terms of testimony):
Also:
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See e.g. these articles from 2021: