STANDING INSIDE the dark railway tunnel, fourteen-year-old Paul Veitch could see and hear the train thundering towards him. It registered somewhere in his brain that there were two choices he could make. He could flatten himself against the wall and the train would miss him. Or he could stay where he was, walking calmly along between the lines, and be smashed to pieces.

He'd spent the afternoon sniffing glue. It was evening, now, and by this time he was so high that it seemed irrelevant to him which choice he made.

"To this day," says Paul, "I have no idea why I moved away at the last minute - the glue had made me completely indifferent to what happened to me!

"About six of us lads used to get together in the evenings looking for excitement and doing silly things. Mucking about on the railway, throwing stones at the trains was the latest buzz. Then we moved on to something else - like stealing motorbikes and burgling houses."

Soon after this, in the summer of 1982, the lads got hold of air guns and went on a midnight rampage, smashing up a school and setting fire to two caravans used for storing equipment. Paul got caught and was locked up for six weeks 'short, sharp, shock' in the local Detention Centre, charged with vandalism and burglary.

"I think I started to get out of control when Mum and Dad split up when I was about seven. Before this, I'd been a fairly stable, outgoing lad. Our council estate was a rough one but up to this time I'd had simple, harmless interests like kicking a ball about with my mates or making camps with them in the woods round the seaside town of Hastings where I was born in 1968.

"As a child I had bad, unsightly eczema, which got me a lot of teasing at school but I coped OK until Dad moved out. My security and my sense of boundaries seemed to move out with him. Mum did her best, but without a dad I got rapidly out of control and by the early 80s I'd got drawn into the local yob culture."

By the time Paul was sixteen, he'd left school with few qualifications, dropped out of college after a few months studying engineering on the YTS scheme and started to go down a tunnel far darker than the one on the railway - the occult.

"I met a man at work who was a witch in a coven. I was drawn to him as I felt he had spiritual power. He became a close friend and we spent hours together smoking pot and talking about the occult. I left home and moved into a bed-sit with my girlfriend. We spent all our money on music festivals, LSD, speed, dope and drink and experimented with the supernatural. Some pretty scary things happened. As dark powers got hold of me, the future looked bleak and my whole life seemed to be heading towards despair.

"A lot of things happened in a few ears of manic teenage stuff which culminated in me meeting a friend of a friend in the drug scene, who offered me a lot of money doing drug runs for him.

"He was a very evil, demonic man and he really oppressed me, holding power over me by saying that he'd hurt my family if I didn't do what he said. I lost my job and for a few months I saw him most days. Awful things happened. As the demonic, psychological pressure built up, I got withdrawn and paranoid."

By late 1985, Paul was in a different scene. He had a new girlfriend and they planned to drop out of society altogether and travel abroad - Paul had always been interested in experiencing different cultures.

One day, when Paul was seventeen, he was crossing Hastings on his way to a club, when he felt drawn to a group from the Jesus Fellowship, talking to people out on the street.

"They befriended me and I found out later that some of them began to pray for me in earnest. Two months later, two of the team visited me. As they described what the gospel of Jesus meant, the words mysteriously hit home and I felt the whole of my life rocking on its foundations. It was if God revealed Himself to me personally and I knew that Jesus was God. All that searching through the occult I had ever found an answer - now I knew I'd discovered reality and the source of life itself! Without any hesitation I gave my life to Jesus. When I went back with them to their community house in Hastings I was bowled over by the love and harmony as I saw people living together for Jesus. I'd just found Jesus. Now I'd found home!"

Two months later, Paul moved up to one of Northamptonshire houses and committed himself to Christian community.

"I found a wholeness coming into my life and a deep feeling of coming home. I felt that my life wasn't for this world any more but I wanted to devote myself to God and His people. Whenever people at church mentioned celibacy my heart leapt for joy and in late 1988 I accepted the gift from God - it just seemed a natural move after finding home and my heart being captured by Jesus and His church!"

Nearly twenty years in community have brought many different phases of spiritual life to Paul - and some of them have been like the dark tunnel again.

"Healing of any kind takes time - it doesn't happen overnight. It's a long process but - if you let Him - God makes it a thorough process. We make any mistakes but God can hold us through them. Some years have felt a bit like God taking me fully apart and I've had to pray in faith: 'Lord put me back together again - a stronger person!'

"I've had times of sickness and of backsliding and a time when I've had to move out of community for a short time and then make a fresh start - but at such times my vows, my hope in God and my love for the church have held me.

"When difficult situations have come up and we can't see the end of the tunnel, it's like God takes us to places where we don't actually want to go and makes us face up to ourselves. We see that God is sovereign and He knows what we are and what we go through and He knows what's best for us, even though we don't understand.

"I feel I have just come through such a time - and God as put me on my feet again in a new way and given me a job to do at the Northampton Jesus Centre. I've always had an empathy with people who have been oppressed or going through hard situations.

"It's good to look back at the tough times I've had and see that nothing is wasted with Him and all my difficult times have helped me to get lose to people and offer them genuine hope!"