RAIN lashed down the Welsh mountainside, as Donna’s group on the school trip climbed up to the entrance that led down into the underground caves.

“I was 14 and a real tomboy,” says Donna. “I loved anything to do with sport and outdoor adventure. Climbing and caving were just my sort of thing!”

Suddenly, Donna slipped on the wet rock. Her horrified schoolmates saw her slide over the edge of a hole that led to a thirty foot drop down into the caves.

“I came round to hear my friends screaming above me. They expected me to be dead or massively injured. Miraculously, I wasn’t – though the huge dent on the back of my helmet showed how hard I’d fallen.

“That was miracle number one. But I didn’t think, then, that it was God’s hand on my life – I just thought I was really lucky!”

Two years later, Donna began to ask serious questions about faith and whether there was life after death.

“As a family we never went to church and it wasn’t until my grandad got ill with cancer that my mother even brought up the subject. She blamed God – whoever He was - for my grandad’s suffering. I thought I would find out who God was, before I judged Him the same as Mum did.

“I must have spent a year talking to all kinds of people - including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and Krishna followers - before deciding to choose a Christian church near school. My new faith was severely tested when grandad died. Soon afterwards, it was tested again when a good friend collapsed and died as we were playing football together - an enormous shock. But, some how, my belief in God stayed strong.”

It wasn’t until God rescued her from death a second time that she became aware just how real Jesus is and that she could have a living, personal friendship with Him.

“I was very fit and sporty and I’d taken up martial arts in a big way, so I felt I could handle myself and no-one could touch me.

“One day, I was running alone, round a huge lake in a local park when a man attacked me with a knife and pulled me into the bushes. I put up a good fight and made a lot of noise, but he overpowered me and squeezed my windpipe till I started to go unconscious. I remember lying in the mud, bleeding, my clothes torn, thinking that it was so unfair I should die so young.

“Suddenly, my attacker was dragged off me. A man fishing in the lake had heard me scream and bravely ran over to save my life.

“That night I heard Jesus speaking to me personally, for the first time, telling me to read Psalm 124. ‘We are like a bird escaped from the snare of the fowler – the snare has broken and we have escaped!’

“Those words really brought home to me the fact that God cared about me and that I had a purpose on this earth. That experience seemed to strip away a lot of the old confidence and cockiness and slowly my trust turned from myself to trusting Jesus.”

Donna was 17 when she first met a group from the Jesus Army.

“They brought me into a new kind of family who accepted me and brought me much healing from the many hurts and hang-ups I’d carried with me from a difficult childhood. As I found myself in a new way, I began to realise why I’d always been so attracted to danger and to living life on the edge. Deep down, I’d never really felt in control of my own life. So I was always trying to prove that I could make my own choices.”

At the age of 26, in 2000, she chose a job as a town centre security guard.

“We were classed as police and treated with the same contempt. An arrest I made on my own turned nasty and I had to restrain the man and keep him on the ground until back-up arrived.

It was only afterwards that we found the man – who was mad drunk – had a knife on him! For a third time, God had looked after me!”

But her spirit of adventure is still very much alive – and she finds plenty of challenge in living as a radical up-front Christian!