I can only remember parts of it now. I remember walking towards the entrance way of the church. In my last year of high school, I was not over the nervous awkwardness of the teenage years. I remember greeting the welcome person at the door with an almost apologetic explanation that Troy and Martin had invited me.

Troy had been a distant family friend for as long as I could remember. Over the past ... say six months, I had noticed that he had developed what some might say was a bad reputation amongst some people at school. When someone in maths class drew a satanic diagram one day, someone else commented ‘dont let Troy see you do that.’ Around that time I would have considered anyone who was ‘born again’ to be a weirdo to stay well clear of. But because Id known Troy a for a long time, I guess I didn’t quite see him that way.

It was Troy who played a large part in the miraculous event of Martin becoming a Christian. When Martin announced at maths class that he’d gone to a Christian camp with his friend Troy and become a Christian, we were all shocked. Somehow Martin and I discovered that we shared an interest in the supernatural, although I dont think we discussed it in depth. It was perhaps because this interest, that Martin made the initially strange-sounding decision, to tell only me what led to his conversion. We waited until the rest of the class had left the classroom at the end of the period for him to reveal this mysterious secret.

It turned out that as part of his conversion, he felt God performed an emotional experience in him. I guess Martin felt awkward describing what happened to him in front of others, but he seemed to feel that this proved God’s existence.

All this sounded fascinating to me and I didnt need much encouragement to come along to youth group at the next available opportunity. Although I had been to classes on Christianity in primary school, and I guess I believed in God, Martin seemed to be aware of a whole new dimension to it.