Anne

Twisleton

I'm Anne Twisleton, I live in Haywards Heath, and for the last 7 years I've belonged to All Saints' Church, Lindfield. My journey with Jesus began as a teenager and each day I look forward to what new things the Lord has for me. Born in 1952, and baptized as an infant in St. Matthew's Church, Darlington, churchgoing was part of my family's life. We went to church and Sunday School most Sundays. Prayers and hymns were part of school life too in the 50s, and so I grew up with an assumption that everyone, like me, believed in God. We moved to Yorkshire when I was 11, and began to go to our parish church, St. Peter's, Shipley. This was a larger church, and there seemed more excitement about God.

As a teenager I joined the youth club and began to meet people my own age who talked about becoming a Christian, about a time when they made a decision to invite the Lord Jesus into their lives, and of the difference it had made. They prayed, expected answers (and got them!), said that God spoke to them through the Bible, and made me feel very uncomfortable - after all, I'd always been a Christian, and it wasn't nice to talk openly about religion as they did. All the same, I did see something in them I envied, and the speakers, films and discussions began to make me think. There came a time when I decided to pray the prayer of commitment - just to make sure, though, as I told God, he knew I was a Christian. It was a night when a friend and I had frightened one another by telling ghost stories and I was too scared to put my bedroom light off. What if I wasn't automatically going to Heaven when I died? Hell seemed so real that night! So I prayed for peace, and went through the prayer at the back of a leaflet - admitting I was a sinner, believing that Jesus had died for my sins, committing my life to him as my Lord and Saviour. To my amazement I felt filled with peace and joy, and when I opened the Bible I felt God was speaking personally to me in John 14 "Let not your hearts be troubled - ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my father's house are many mansions, if it were not so I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you" I realized that I was a believer in God - but had never quite known where Jesus fitted in. Now I was meeting him. The passage went on "peace I give you, my peace I leave with you." - just what I had prayed for! And the promise of the Comforter (the Holy Spirit) - I so needed comfort. Just as my weird friends had said, God was speaking through the Bible, and I was able to put my light out and go to sleep in tranquility. From that point on, things began to change, and my relationship with God grew.

At 17 I made a much deeper and more wholehearted commitment to serving the Lord on having my heart broken by reading about the imprisonment and torture of my fellow believers in communist lands. I met Robert who like me became a Christian at St. Peter's, where we married. Two years later we spent a year at Bible School and then were sent out as missionaries to serve with a Radio Station in Quito, Ecuador. It was a fantastic experience - we loved life there. Sadly, Robert drowned when our two sons were 3 and 5. We'd never expected a bed of roses when we committed ourselves to serving God, and the bereavement and subsequent years as a single parent deepened my faith in the God who as he promises in his word, truly is a husband to the widow and a father to the fatherless.

The boys and I stayed in Ecuador for a couple of years, then returned to the UK for a time before I was accepted as a missionary with USPG. We went to Buenos Aires after spending the required 6 months at Selly Oak missionary colleges. It was there that the boys met John Twisleton and decided they would like him as their Dad, so introduced us and encouraged our friendship. God took a hand in that as we prayed for guidance. After just a year in Argentina I travelled with the boys 3000 miles to marry John Twisleton in a small village in the hinterland of Guyana, where he was training a group of Amerindian men for the Anglican priesthood. That was 20 years ago.

We returned to the UK in 1990, and our son James was born. We lived in Coventry for 6 years where John was parish priest at St. Luke's, then he became the missioner in Edmonton, London for 5 years, and in 2001 he became the Bishops' Adviser in Mission and Renewal here in Chichester. My life journey with Jesus so far has been very much more exciting than I anticipated, and I'm so thankful for my friends who witnessed so effectively back in the 60s, and brought me to the point of inviting Jesus to be Lord of my life. I can't wait to see what is next!