MAKING A STAND

MAKING A STAND

For too long I have remained silent due to overwhelming timidity concerning being bullied. But it is time in the light of the global disasters and atrocities occurring, to make a stand and reveal who I really am.

For too long I have remained silent before the general public. I am very timid – although there are some who wouldn’t agree! I spend a lot of my time on line, partly on Google or Face Book researching subjects in which I’m interested, and of course interacting with family and friends socially; also, partly on a massive art site deviantART, on which I post some of my fractal creations and happily interact with other artists from all over the world. I am also a “prophetic musician”, which requires time spent practising and keeping a good level of skill.

I have some testimonies on my profile page at deviantART, and willingly enter into chat with people who show interest in these. There is also a selection of poetry, testimony and other thoughts on my personal website at Anna Kirsten Art & Photography. However, I have been terrified of opening up to the secular world concerning my faith and letting people know who I truly am. This fear is all about being bullied by people who like to think they know all there is to know from their own perspectives, and who don’t respect other people’s freedom to believe what they will. It is also about losing friends and acquaintances, particularly where I live. The immense timidity I feel stems back to childhood, during which I was constantly mocked and bullied, not much liked by anyone, and I had no real friends. It was a very isolated and bewildering existence that I really shy away from repeating.
Unfortunately this lack of boldness could amount to being ashamed of my beliefs and experiences when in certain company, and now in the Autumn years of my life, I feel the time has long-since come for me to “come out” and speak some home truths about myself regardless of the consequences.

 A Christian, But There's More..
I am indeed a Christian, and have been since the age of eleven when I had an extraordinary experience – an encounter with God and His Son, Jesus Christ. You can read about this in my account called "The Beckoning" in my Poetry and Writings section.
Not only am I a Bible-believing, Spirit-filled Christian, active in praise and worship events playing flute or keyboards, but I discovered something in 1994 which suddenly made sense of something else that I had always wondered about...
Throughout my life I have always had an immense affinity with the Jews. I couldn’t bear to hear of the atrocities that were inflicted upon them, and some of the stories I heard drove me to tears. When the famous film, Schindler’s List came out in 1993, I wouldn’t go and see it because I was too afraid of seeing any of the atrocities that were carried out against the Jews during WW2. Eventually I did watch it when it came out as a video and my family wanted to see it. Of course it made me sob my heart out, similarly affecting our daughter too. But I couldn’t understand why the awful things that happened to the Jews affected me more than the fact that many millions of Christians were also killed by the Hitler regime.
I had not been brought up with my mother since the age of less than a year old until I met her again, quite by chance, at the age of 14. In 1994. many years later, my mother and I were discussing family history for the first time. It turned out that all the women in her ancestry, and some of the men, were Jewish, which meant that both she and I were also Jewish. For me this is a true privilege, and throws a whole new light on who I am! Having been brought up by my father’s family, who are mainly descended from Southern Ireland, I had no orthodox teaching at all. In some ways I feel the advantage of this, in that such teaching has not hampered my ability to openly receive Jesus Christ as my personal Saviour. Although I do feel somewhat deprived of the richness and very real input of the heritage I really have, I have still not felt the need to pursue it further than having knowledge of such things as the meanings of the various Jewish Feasts, which are significant for both Judaists and Christians – like two sides of a coin: the one in the context of the Old Covenant, and the other in the context of the New Covenant.
I am now in the (slow) process of writing an autobiography.