GRANDPA WAS expelled from several African countries for being drunk and disorderly. He grew weed (not weeds) among the flowers in his back garden. But that is as strange as my family background gets. On the whole I had a stable upbringing: my parents loved each other, and us.

My ordinary life. Shy at school, but doing well academically when I put the effort in. Enjoying drinking pints with the rugby guys at the pub on Friday nights. Listening to Bob Dylan. Touring Europe with the school orchestra (bit of a scam, really – I only played the triangle).

When I was 13, my best friend invited me on holiday. I paid my money, only afterwards discovering it was a Christian holiday. My ardent efforts to resist “getting religion” failed abysmally. I saw with my own eyes that these 13-year-old girls on the camp knew God’s love and fatherhood – that He’d changed their hearts. In one evening, I discovered that God existed and I wanted to know Him – and that I could, through Jesus. I believed; I experienced God’s love. I also felt really bad for having blanked God up until then. Through tears, I prayed to God for the first time, and a friendship began.

At home it took about a year before I went to church, but I’d sing to God in the garden and suck as much spiritual life as I could out of Songs of Praise on the TV.

I started to go to a local Anglican church and was baptised when I was 16. I’d often roll up on Sunday mornings, 15 minutes late and a bit hung over. But it was my expression of faith at the time and I knew that God loved me.

After church on Sundays, and after the pub on Fridays, I would argue with my dad for hours about Jesus being God and through Him being able to have with the Father. We’d often end up laughing. (I love my dad.)

I can’t remember anyone teaching me about how to really go about living for Jesus – but I knew the conflict in my conscience between wanting to explore God and live for Him and wanting to go to all the parties. Inner conflict often reveals what you really want: I think God “heard” my genuine desire to live for Him even though I couldn’t change the bit that didn’t want to!

So at Warwick University, studying engineering, God gave me the opportunity to choose Him if I really wanted to. I discovered the Christian Union and something of what the kingdom of God was all about. One morning, having drunk far too much vodka the night before, I found myself amazed at God’s mercy and grace; I felt His presence in my hung-over state.

It was a small turning-point. I started making decisions for Him in gratitude. Then I sensed a voice saying: “Would you give up going out with guys for Me?”

I promptly dismissed it, but the proposal persisted until I reasoned that if I genuinely trusted God, I should give it a chance: I’d stay single for five years and trust that He’d provide a husband at the end of it.

Those years taught me a lot about how to love people with God’s love and not a selfish love. I was also finding that the shift in heart-focus was birthing more of a desire to live for eternal things. The futile distractions that litter Uni life began to fall away. I was starting to live my baptism.

When I was19, my mum died suddenly, of meningitis. Through God I found strength to face the pain, collapsing frequently, but knowing that the Holy Spirit, my comforter, was with me. God, I discovered, was an unshakeable rock while everything else in life seemed crumbly, shallow – insignificant. I really wanted to give the rest of my life to following Jesus.

In my last year at Uni I was invited to some Jesus Army meetings where I “drank deeply” of the Holy Spirit. After a while, I realised I was finding my heart’s home. I’d seen myself as a missionary in Africa – but I found God calling me to stay with the Jesus Army.

So I became a member, later moving into Christian community, where I quickly discovered the limitations of my love for others! I was quite selfish, really – and prejudiced. I needed to forgive lots and be forgiven: all the things that are in the Bible (previously my theology, increasingly my life).

I started training to be a nurse and began working on a cancer ward. Death can bring an acute awareness of what’s important in life; meanwhile, the Holy Spirit was gently tugging at my heart about that call to stay single.

I visited a convent and discovered an 80-year-old nun – called Mother Teresa! – who loved God and everything He did. She was always talking about Jesus and had a gentle authority over the other nuns. She seemed to really enjoy life.

The choice for me became: to look after my own family or my “Jesus family”? To explore this path less trodden, or be a wife and mother? To ride the adventure of trusting in the Holy Spirit, or to have life more defined? Again, inner conflict revealed what I really wanted.

On Lindisfarne, reading about the Celtic saint Hilda, I knew that what I really, really wanted was God’s will. I heard Him call me to make a life-long vow to stay single.

And that’s what I did – by a lake, at 6.30 one December morning, with 40 of my church friends there to witness it.

Now, five years later, I’ve become an integral figure in the community house that I live in. I’ve found God to be acutely attentive to my needs, to stretch me beyond what I could imagine, to be jealous over my heart, and zealous to straighten out wrong attitudes. He’s given me lots of teenage girls to love and nurture (they bring me joy and grey hairs).

Love and pain often come together – but I do really, really enjoy life; there’s a sense of deep contentment.

When I grow up I want to be an old lady like the Mother Teresa I met at that convent.