My Testimony

When I was four I moved from South Africa to New Zealand with my family. I had a pretty sweet upbringing in the far north with my Christian parents, and I can’t ever recall a time when we didn’t attend church on Sunday. I even remember walking to church when we still lived in South Africa. Being a Christian was a part of my identity, I knew that God was real and that is something I’ve never been able to lose sight of. I feel like my life was generally smooth sailing up until I hit my teen years. 


At thirteen I had begun to acquire a taste for alcohol, and would drink it whenever I got the chance, even if it meant sneaking into the cupboard late at night. The first time I ever got drunk was when I was fifteen and a guy I liked was at a party that I wasn’t invited to. I was really upset and finished almost an entire bottle of home-brew wine by myself. Needless to say, it didn’t end well. I threw up everywhere and experienced my very first hangover the next day... at church.

Around this time I had begun to drift away from God. I was finding comfort in drinking alcohol, having lots of friends and getting attention from boys. This later turned to finding satisfaction in being unimpressed with everything, all of the time. This general apathetic attitude towards life would stay with me until much later.

My teen angst got worse as I got older, by the time I was sixteen I was painting hearts with black tar oozing out of them, eyes that were cut open, trees that drooped and sagged, and blood was a common theme. I could tell that something was obviously wrong with me emotionally but I didn’t even consider trying to resolve it. People would ask me what was wrong and I never told them. I wrote songs talking about how unhappy I was, how no-one understood me and some days I even longed for death. I refused to wear anything other than black and swore a lot. I painted my nails black even though my Christian school didn’t allow it. I would find myself in detention for refusing to follow the rules. My mum threatened to take away my bass guitar if I dyed my hair so I sneakily put black streaks all through it and no-one could really tell. I was obsessed with pushing the boundaries, whether it was breaking the rules at school, underage drinking or disobeying my parents. A phrase that was used an awful lot during this time by my mother was: “Why are you so defiant?”

At sixteen I was the bass player in the school praise and worship team, but in the same year I was also beginning to drink more heavily. I went to parties every other weekend and drank too much, I was one of the only people from my Christian school at these parties so I actually had a lot of people who wanted to argue the existence of God and things of that nature. I tried my best to defend the faith I wasn’t doing a very good job of representing, but I don’t think it ever really worked. I continued to drink up until a point when I realised that it wasn’t doing me any good, I think it was sometime towards the end of my 6^th form year.

When I reached 7^th form, I had decided that I wasn’t going to drink anymore because it was setting a bad example for all the younger kids at school. I think that this was also a time when I was starting to get my relationship with God back on track. It seemed to be the pattern that once I stopped drinking, I could focus more on God and reading His word. Unfortunately when I didn’t get Head Girl of my school, partly because of my drinking behaviour the previous year, I totally lost it. My angst reached an all-time high. I was furious. It took me a really long time to accept what had happened, to accept failure on my part. I never considered that the way I had acted in my younger years would affect me now.

Nevertheless, I finally got over my anger at losing the Head Girl position and took more of an interest in God. I was reading the Bible every day, and was actually about halfway through it. I had never been so disciplined in reading the Bible before and it felt good. I also got baptized with my family on 18 October 2008.


Eventually I took to drinking again.


By the end of 7^th form, I felt like God and I were back on track and my teen angst was finally behind me, but I was still drinking. Before my final school prize giving I got really drunk on rum I had gotten for my 18^th birthday. It was the funniest prize-giving I had ever been to. Shortly after this, I decided to stop drinking again.

Then I moved to Dunedin for University.

My Bible reading soon fell to the wayside as other things took priority in my life. My first three awkward and stone-cold-sober weeks in Dunedin were some of the worst I had ever experienced. I felt almost completely alone and out of place. I was struggling to connect with the people at my hall and my disgust at the drinking habits of everyone around me wasn’t helping. Sometime during my fourth week at University something clicked in my mind. Drinking was the answer. I took to the bottle like it was an old and faithful friend. I soon found that making friends was really easy and I really began to enjoy myself. As you can imagine, at this point God was taking a back seat in my life again.


It was during the mid-semester break in April that I discovered the Captain Cook Tavern and the subsidised drinking and points system entitled: “Power Hour” that was run every Wednesday and Saturday night from 9-10pm. During this time I was actually playing electric guitar at a student-focused service held by C3 church on Wednesday nights. As you can probably guess, Power Hour took precedence over my Wednesday nights and I stopped attending the C3 church. This is a perfect example of how drinking literally replaced time with God in my life.

During my time at Power Hour, I met a bunch of guys who I found out lived in a flat right next door to the Carrington building I lived in. I also began to hang out with people from Carrington who enjoyed drinking as much as I did. I stopped going to church regularly and when I did I was usually hung over from the night before. I also started going out with a guy who was part of my regular drinking crowd. He wasn’t a Christian but I was naive enough to think that it would work out and maybe I could even make him believe in God... eventually.


Almost all the time we spent together was while we were drunk. It became hard for me to spend time with him when we weren’t drinking because I got too accustomed to it. About two months into the relationship I was convicted of my behaviour and I decided to break it off with this guy before I did anything I would regret. The break-up didn’t go well. He seemed fine about it, but I felt like it destroyed me. I constantly prayed for God to make it better for me. 


I had retreated into a pathetic version of my former self. I didn’t want to be alone anywhere and would beg my friends not to leave me. I must have been a real pain. I had to stop drinking because I would cry about what had happened and make a fool of myself. I was no longer happy, crazy and fun when I drank, I was just a mess. I also found out that my dog Brutus, who I had grown up with and loved dearly with all my heart, had cancer. I started to do really badly in my studies and got really sick, probably due to the heavy drinking and emotional turmoil I was in. I remained sick for a long time.

It was around this time that I started hanging out with the guys who lived next door to me who I had met at Power Hour earlier that year, in an attempt to get away from Carrington and its dramas. Plus they had a TV. There were six of them but I never really saw the sixth member of the flat. He was never there. I was told this was because he was a Christian and part of a group called Student Life, which I’d never really heard much about. When I finally met him, I could tell straight away that his relationship with God was much different to mine. Throughout my whole life I always claimed to be a Christian, but he made me see that we were living for completely different things and that I was only kidding myself if I thought my relationship with God was all that it could be.

I really felt that hanging out at this flat helped me to heal from all the stuff that had been going on. They did tend to pick on me but I didn’t mind because they let me come over and watch their TV, and they never asked about Carrington. They were usually, on the whole, pretty nice guys.

Once I had recovered from my sickness and stopped being upset by the mention of my ex-boyfriend, I started drinking again. Usually it was with the flat guys, which I found was more enjoyable because they were way more relaxed about things. By the end of my 1^st year at University, I was attending church again, though I’m not sure how regularly, and I was still drinking and swearing worse than I had been in high school. I came to the conclusion one afternoon at the guys’ flat that I would join Student Life the next year. I could see that whatever Student Life was had made some kind of difference in Slippers’ life (the guy who was never there, I found out later his real name was Cameron). 

I had a few chats with Slippers about Christianity and came to the conclusion that I wasn’t actually living a life pleasing to God. I was still carrying on with alcohol and making stupid decisions, and this would continue until halfway through my 2^nd year at Uni.

During O-Week of my 2^nd year, I went on a hunt to find Student Life and join up. That summer I had seen the massive transformation that my family had gone through. It was pretty crazy. My dad was a lot calmer than he used to be, and read his Bible every day and watched Shine TV a lot. He would try to get me to watch it with him but I wasn’t really interested. My little brother was similar in the way that he was passionate about God. I felt like I was the only one in my family who didn’t feel this way, and I was hoping that joining Student Life might change that. My dog Brutus had also passed away that summer and left me thinking a lot about death. I was plagued by the thought of death for weeks, and it scared me to think that when I died I might spend an eternity separate from God.

I promptly joined Student Life, and it was kind of cool, but I never felt truly accepted by them.

I kept to myself most of the time because the only person I really knew was Slippers, and everyone in Student Life called him Cam, so that was weird.

I attended the Student Life events and was part of the Creative Media team; all the while I was still binge-drinking almost every weekend. During our filming of the third part of ‘The Relationship’ series, as well as my scenes as Treebeard for our ‘Lord of the Gings’ movies, I was seriously hung over. But this didn’t seem to concern me, and no one said anything to me.

It wasn’t until I went to the Student Life conference at Living Springs that I realised something had to change. I was living a double life. Attending Student Life and trying my best not to let my foul language come out, and getting wasted on the weekends and swearing like a sailor. I wasn’t fully letting God into my life because I didn’t want to give up my partying lifestyle. I felt like it defined me, people liked me more when I drank.

In the end though, I decided to just stop. Stop drinking altogether, and for good this time.

When I got back from Conference, I told my flatmates and all my friends that I was done with alcohol. I can’t really remember the way they reacted but I know some of them weren’t happy. I felt isolated from these friends because they stopped hanging out with me as much. My flatmates were pretty supportive but it was still hard, they would go out and drink and I’d stay home and watch movies alone in my room. It was at this point in my life that I really got involved with the people in Student Life.

With a rebuilt relationship with God I felt like I fitted in better with the people who truly loved Him and followed His ways. I stopped being at my flat as much during that second semester.

I had become what Slippers (Cam) was during my 1^st year.

If a random person had started hanging out at my flat they wouldn’t really have known me either, because I was never there.

I started to grow heaps in my faith and my walk with God was going pretty sweet. All my friends began to find out how serious I was about God through my commitment to Student Life. I was going out on campus and sharing my faith and talking more openly about God with my non-Christian friends. I would walk to church every Sunday by myself while my flatmates slept off their hangovers. 


By the end of my 2^nd year, I had a flat lined up with four Christian girls I had met with Student Life and things with God were looking awesome. I attended my first mission project that summer and really saw God continue to work in my life.