Faith Stories with Naomi Reed

“In Australia, people don’t talk to people very much on the streets, not like in Cameroon. In Cameroon, people are always smiling and talking to people. I don’t know if it’s a cultural thing. I came to Australia in 2011, and I try to know about people here. I try to listen to them and […]

“My daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 34 years old. She couldn’t care for herself, so she came to live with us, with her three young children. We took them in. It was really difficult. All of a sudden, our roles were changed. I had to bathe her and help her use […]

“Five years ago, I had a Damascus Road experience … except it was on a Mosman Road [in Sydney]. At the time, I’d been battling addiction and depression. No matter how long I stayed clean or sober, I inevitably fell back into old habits. I couldn’t stop. But that was when the Lord intervened. It […]

Angelina’s story (first published in February 2020) has been selected by Naomi Reed as a stand-out in her Faith Stories series so far. “I was a New Age Gypsy for ten years. It was after my husband left me. He took all of his belongings, and the car, and he left me a note, and […]

“I grew up in Slemani, Northern Iraq. When Saddam Hussein attacked our city, my family fled with everyone else. There was a mass exodus of two million Kurds. The Iraqi army were shooting at us from their helicopters. I can’t tell you about the things I saw. It was a terrible few weeks. Finally, foreign […]

“My favourite passage in the Bible is in Matthew 25. It’s about the virgins and the oil. I’ve always wondered what the oil represents. I don’t want to be part of the five that don’t get in. So I’ve asked a lot of people what they think. Some people think the oil is the Holy […]

“I only became a Christian in my 40s. We had teenage children, and I wanted to go back to work. So I retrained as a high school teacher. I went to Uni. My husband was the sort of person who criticised everything. He’d had a hard life, and he was negative. He thought Christianity was […]

“I got sick a year ago. I found out I had prostate cancer. At first they said it was low-grade and contained. It was okay. But then I had some more scans … and as soon as he looked at them, you could see it on the doctor’s face. All the blood drained away. They […]

“My entire left side was paralysed, and my right side was partially paralysed, so I stayed in hospital until I was three years old. When I went home, I had two long-leg iron calipers, and a leather corset around my trunk, and four iron bars holding my neck in place. But I didn’t wear the […]

“I was 75 when I came to Australia (from the UK). My daughter was already here and she said, ‘Come to Australia for a bit of an adventure.’ So I did. But when I got here, I thought, ‘What have I done?’ How am I going to manage? My daughter lived down a big hill […]

“My family are Christians [in South India] so we used to go to church every Sunday, and then afterwards, we would eat chicken curry. Every other day of the week, we would eat vegetables, but Sundays we ate chicken. I liked chicken! But before we could eat the chicken, my father made us recite Bible […]

“It all happened in the space of about two years. First, my mum died. Then, my wife’s dad became ill, and he died. Then our son-in-law was diagnosed with cancer, and he needed surgery. Then one of our close friends committed suicide. Throughout that time, our daughter was very unwell and she needed a lot […]

“I spent my childhood on an island in Vanuatu. We used to play on the beach. My local friends and I would make sandcastles and share our canoes and paw paws. But then one day, when I was nine, I was sent away to boarding school in Australia. It was an awful day. I remember […]