I was brought up in the Open Brethren church, so I always believed in God and “accepted Jesus into my heart” when I was about 3-years-old. I never felt right with God though and worried that I wasn’t saved, so I asked Jesus into my heart many times as a child.

As a teenager I was happy living what I thought was a Christian life. When I was 21, a friend I had grown up with in the Brethren church (who had left in his teens to go partying and drinking) contacted me to tell me he had received the Holy Spirit, with the biblical evidence of speaking in tongues.

He told me that I wasn’t saved because I didn’t have the Holy Spirit, which made me really angry. But over several months I could see a huge change in him. He had this joy and peace that he’d never had before, and he changed from a sullen, argumentative person into this really happy, lovely guy.

I didn’t like what he was saying (that I wasn’t saved), but I couldn’t deny that something had changed him when he spoke in tongues.

After about six months I was feeling really like I needed to know the truth about the Holy Spirit, even if it meant I had to change my life. So I prayed to God one night, “If I need this Holy Spirit, and need to speak in tongues, please ‘zap’ me! And if these people are wrong, please show me in the Bible, so I can tell them and carry on with my life.”

To my surprise, two nights later, after praying and looking up some Bible verses about the Holy Spirit, I biked home, sat on my front doorstep, and started speaking in tongues!

It was amazing, very exciting, as I realised that I was thinking in my head in English but speaking in this other language fluently. This was God. This was a miracle.

Immediately I went from believing (most of the time) that God existed, to knowing he was real through the evidence of the miracle of speaking in tongues. For the first time I knew I was saved with no doubts. I also got water baptised as the Bible commands, and have not lost this peace and assurance of my salvation over the past 20 years.

Life as a spirit-filled Christian has been exciting – having the Lord’s joy and peace, being able to pray about everything, and see miracles of healing and provision in the life of my husband, myself, and our children.

I am so grateful that my friend came and told me about receiving the Holy Spirit and how I could get saved as God has outlined in the Bible. My life was totally changed.