02: A Loving Neighbour's Story (How He Became a Foster And Adopt Parent)

well hello there my name is matt edmondson and welcome to what's the story a podcast where we hear stories about faith and courage from everyday people and today our conversation is going to be with the incredible phil watson about what it's like to love your neighbor and make a difference in the lives of others by showing love and compassion now this episode is brought to you by crowd church which is an online church an online church for those that might not be able to get to church buildings for those that might not even see the point of going to a church building this is where online church works really really well it is super accessible and a safe space to explore the christian faith and the thing i love about crowd is that it is online first so it talks with you and not just at you that's right that means you can join in the conversation it's a live stream every sunday you can share your stories you can ask your questions you can shape the service and regardless of where you are on your faith journey it is definitely worth checking out just head over to www.crowd.church or you can email me directly at matt crowd.church with any questions that you have now before i get into today's conversation with uh phil i just want to mention a few links that are going to be worth checking out first link which we will put in the show notes is home for good foster for liverpool and this works this is a great link even if you don't live in liverpool if you doesn't matter where about you live in the uk because phil is a huge fostering and adoption fan and in fact check out the talk on crowd church what does the bible say about fostering and adopting phil and claire and adam did a great job with that so you're going to want to check that out because you're going to fight if you don't know already you're going to find out phil is a huge fan and advocate of fostering phil is from liverpool here in the uk he has two birth children and one adopted child he's a part-time school teacher and a full-time adoption and fostering advocate and the thing about phyllis he loves to ride his bike literally everywhere even if that means he has to carry the bike on his shoulder for a bit he is uh always to be found in his luminous jacket cycling yes he is uh all of that said honestly you're not going to want to miss this so without further ado here is my conversation with phil watson phil thank you so much for joining me here on crowd stories what's the story with chris so we have phil watson who is one of the psychics on crowd we've done quite a bit of hosting together recently it feels which is great so here we are again chatting uh about all kinds of weird and wonderful things how are we doing yeah we're like the ants and deck of crowd church aren't we or the torval and dean or maybe we are like i'm debbie is it debbie mcgee and you can be my mike what was his name who's the magician paul daniels yeah yeah bit like that yeah yeah i'm going with that more as an option um sally burch used to host crowd a lot quite a bit uh when she had a bit more capacity in the time and people get referring to us as anton deck and i kept saying to her which one are you because i know which one i want to be yes no i'm deck no i'm deck no this is really funny it's it's it's fun to do this conversation with you bud and uh find out a little bit more about you so you're here we're both middle-aged men um and uh you know we've not always been middle-aged men so how did it how did how did how did it start for you as a you know as a christian where did it all sort of begin well i'm that i'm from the most i'm gonna say straightforward boring traditional background of anyone you're ever going to meet well i used to think i was until i realized as i got to know other people that everybody's individual everyone's unique everyone's got interesting story so i was brought up in the london borough of saturn in the 1970s and 80s and if you've never heard of something it doesn't surprise me it had the very first drive-through burger king in europe oh wow which hasn't claimed to be it's been burned down but it did have the first structure i don't know why it wasn't me that burnt it down um if you're really old you might remember a tv series called terry in june or you might remember the good life or you might even remember watching the bill which is about the police and very often those programs were filmed in or around sutton or chin it's a very pleasant um suburb of london some people say we're from london some people say they're from surrey depending on whether they want to sound a little bit posher or not my mum was a teacher my dad was a local solicitor i got an older brother we spent a lot of time mucking around in the back garden and the front garden when it rained we spent a lot of time basically seemed to play football all the time or cricket indoors outdoors um went to schools locally and our mom and dad um took us to the local church which was as i understood at the time as a church of england church is still going strong and it was a very important social hub for us and because we just knew the other kids there we knew this is the 70s and 80s it wasn't all idyllic but we you knew the people where you lived you played outside a lot so you knew everyone and i went along to the church um for as long as i can remember i think i was christened there as a as a baby and i've seen photos of that i'm assuming they're photos of me and so i i've always i think i would have been anyway i've always been quite interested in what you might call bigger questions of you know is there a god and if there is is he interested in me and um i came to the conclusion quite quickly if there is a god it isn't me i am not god that's actually quite a um revelation for a year well some people don't seem to know that they seem to think it you know and and also i want to point out that my mom and dad are very i'd say altruistic people so we'd often have people around our house so i didn't necessarily know who they were but they were very hot they are they still live in the same house 47 years later very very hospitable um and we'd often have people around sunday dinner evenings and people passing through relatives because we live between gatwick and heathrow we seem to have an awful lot we're almost like a stopping a stop off for people going around the world but also my dad was involved in a lot of charities he was a solicitor did a lot of charity work my mum did something called victim support so she'd help people if they'd been mugged or burgled she also did a lot of prison visiting so as i became sort of 18 19 20 i used to go with her sometimes to visit prison people in prison who had no visitors this isn't to say at the time i was particularly i wouldn't i wouldn't describe myself necessarily as a christian but i was certainly spiritually aware i was socially quite active um and i've got to say those you know it's very easy for everybody to find a reason why they didn't like their background and their upbringing and and a lot of mine was really pretty good fun yeah now were your were your parents christian then well this is an interesting thing because they might watch this one day my parents are wonderfully middle class and british which means yes i think yes they are but because but we didn't actually have that many deep conversations oddly enough so i knew for example because my and my mom still does it she still goes on a sunday uh and in the week to visit people in prison and she's absolutely a lady that says what she's going to do and does what she says she's going to do which is like i'm going to go in and i'm gonna help people she wouldn't necessarily talk about her motivation um but she she would meet people who had a need and you know i don't know what it was about people who are incarcerated um because she's never been in prison you know like as a prisoner yeah yeah neither have i neither brother you know we're we're very very i said keep someone saying normal but um i always was in looking at it i was always impressed that they did they did a lot of the things that are in the parable in the bible which is i think it's the sheep and the goats isn't it where you know if somebody's hungry you feed them if somebody's ill you look after them if somebody's lonely you invite them in and if somebody's in prison you visit them and my mum and my mom and dad are like that they wouldn't necessarily talk about their motivation but they they've always lived that life and and my wider family many of them are like that as well um and i would say growing up in the 70s and 80s in the 80s particularly there was a very materialistic streak and a lot of wealth slopping around in london and in the places where i grew up but my mum and dad yeah yeah yeah loads of money that's exactly it and i knew all those people and i was very much on the edge of that culture but i wasn't i was never i was always shown that it's not it's not the point that's on the point of being alive if you know if the point of being alive is being rich you're you're gonna lose ultimately because you can't own it we all know it you can't take the money with you and even if you are pretty rich there's always somebody wealthier um unless you're what's his name musk who's the bloke behind twitter here i am elon yeah apart from him there's always somebody richer than you isn't it and probably i wish i had that you know yeah i don't know does he scroll through ebay or amazon looking for stuff he hasn't got trying to go that's the way you get to that stage maybe maybe you have people do that for you he has his own personal shopper who goes on his own website amazon buying what he hasn't got yeah maybe i don't know but so i have a question right you showed a photo on facebook of your house a long time ago with a very famous uh young lady in your house wonder woman yes this isn't typical of my life and can we just say this is linda carter wonder woman not yeah not a new one my dad is one of five my dad was born abroad in india my mom's one of four and she was born in argentina so there's lots of funny stories there so i've got relatives from all over the world and for reasons that i've only recently become apparent christmas 1974 thereabouts i was dressed in a cowboy outfit with two little toy guns and for for reasons i had no idea about them at the time linda cartner carter who was playing wonder woman came to our house it didn't seem that unusual um i don't know why and um and the reason i found out is she knew my my one of my mom's sisters uh moved to california and knew people in california and one of them was linda carter's manager or something and said oh only they were going off i think they were going to vietnam because it was the end of the vietnam war and she wanted to pursue a career at the time as a singer and entertainer i think this is right i'm not i'm not good on detail and so on her way to vietnam she was stopping off in london to try and link up with some musicians and she came to our house and so i don't know if she was famous but obviously to me as a four-year-old i was overwhelmingly indifferent to very attractive women coming around i think some of the other yeah i think some of the other men in the photos were like my uncles and they were they were a little bit more excited by the prospect of the car to come around me but yeah i've i've sat on wonder woman's knee um so thank you very much that's one of my claims to fame i think it's a great it's much better than any of the ones i've got phil i'm not gonna lie so yeah so you're growing up then in i'm i you know when you said the good life before you said that i'm thinking that's how i know that kind of area of london you know the good life in fact we love that tv show so much we bought the the dvd set and the kids watched it when they were younger because it's quite harmless crazy isn't it it's homeless well it's it's nonsense but it's yeah it's perfectly pleasant and funny yeah yeah yeah and so um you're sort of growing up in this environment so your your parents are kind of christian well they are christian but they're you know they're not what you'd it doesn't sound like they're what you would call the modern day over the evangelical yeah they didn't shout about it they just got on with it i would say um and they were not i think that the good life is a is an interesting reference point because there's a sort of underlying snobbishness that you get is it margot the posh one next door who's really worried about what people think and certainly there were a lot of people like that you know what have i got have i got as much as you it's not unusual to have that as a character trait certainly my my dad had none of that it was peculiarly indifferent kind of laughably eccentric about uh you know he was very successful in his career but you wouldn't necessarily know it he was also uh two things you should know about my dad he was a a queen spark ranger season ticket holder um so he was used to he was used to disappointment putting it bluntly he went every week came back going oh i've done that and he also no one will remember there was a political party called the sdp the social democratic party there were sort of middle grounds they went into the lib dems eventually so in an area where almost everybody would have been a conservative voter my dad was more left-wing than most people he wasn't left-wing but even that was relatively unusual so he he's also a very big questioner so he'd go why why why is that the case so he'd wanna he don't have lots of different he's quite cantankerous dad if you're watching this i'd be surprised because it's online and you don't really do online but he would always want to put an opposing view yeah of whatever he heard on the news you go but what about the other side and if you hadn't you had an opinion you'd go what about the other side which is kind of annoying as a kid but actually has really helped me yeah question don't believe the source trust check it out and if something seems too good to be true or if something seems so one-sided there's another side to that there must be which is great yeah that's really interesting so what point then did you um you're kind of 17 18 years old visiting prisons with your mum are you are you a have you sort of made a com a decision by this point that actually this is who i am looking back i would probably say no because i was perplexed i had quite a lot of teenage angst now i don't want to get all french honest but i was doing french german and history a level and french existential nihilism attracted me as well uh which is it sounds really uh a really stupid phrase and it's something you say when you're a teenager and what it means is i was caught between is there a god yes i think there is but that's not the same as being a christian what does the christian bit mean also is there any existential nihilism is is there any point in doing anything ever that's what it's that's how it you could summarize it and probably reading french nihilistic literature and poetry i can't believe i did that but i used to for an a level and i'd go oh hang on a minute there's another scientist it also seemed quite cool to question these things and be quite alternative and i think it's not a bad thing if you're younger to have that to go through that pattern of going right i'm going to challenge i'm going to ask and some people found me dare i say it quite rude and aggressive but actually all i was doing was going if what you say is true defend it prove it um and i i had a because of where i was brought up probably there was a clear career path that i was meant to have taken so i probably should have gone to as higher performing university done something very sensible like law you know stay southern maybe uh and and and actually none of those things really appealed to me and then one day when i was in i guess it's now called year 13 i decided i want to go into modern languages so french and german in liverpool which at the time this is 1989 liverpool was this far-flung remote corner full of football hooligans football uh football and the beatles it was synonymous with them but also surprised and that actually massively attracted me even though i'd never been here um what happened was i left school um i existential nihilism is not good for your mental health i think i was probably drinking quite a lot more than i should have been uh and exploring other recreational activities that are not all together pleasant or conducive to good physical and mental health i shall say no more i think you know what i'm saying we know what you mean yeah you know and then and then i had something called a year out which was quite common then so between school and uni uh university i had a year out and i i really enjoyed that year was very formative because i started off i just went into a employment agency um because i thought better get job and i went into an agency are you 18 can you carry things that was the job advert and i mean hi i'm 18. yes i think i can carry things anyway great you're now an industrial temporary member of staff and this company would send me anywhere in south london to pick things up and carry them so i worked as a i worked in various factories picking things up and doing them so i carried beds i carried sofas sometimes sofa beds chairs occasionally i was an industrial i was a catering assistant so i cut cheese for quite a long time the most boring ever was i put sesame seeds onto croissants i did that for 12 hours it's not as easy as it sounds so the croissants become a conveyor belt you pick them up and then you put them in a sponge of water and then you put them in a big tub of the sesame seeds or the poppy seeds whatever they were and then another bloke he would pick them up and take them on and move them down the conveyor belt so i did this for 12 hours a day yeah yeah uh two pound ninety an hour and obviously then you pay your tax and i remember thinking this isn't that exciting one day when i'm older i to do a different job not not and you know i don't mind questions i like questions i'm glad somebody's in the croissant making business but it wasn't for me um and so i did lots of temporary jobs like that which was meeting a completely different range of people from what i was used to because they weren't there i said they weren't as middle class as we were and i loved being a hospital tech hospital and porter and i didn't realize this at the time but i didn't really i didn't realize how chatty i was i'd nobody never they just said you're too you only pointed that out before i know people just said shut up be quiet stop it and but when i was a big not you no be quiet and when i when i was a hospital porter you basically you get you know whatever it is you're carrying around so i was the medicine supporter in a hospital and i get this trolley loaded up with with drugs i used to i just think this is hilarious and i used to push this trolley around a massive hospital site that was full of drugs and just go around the different walls and go hi suppository anyone and all the nurses would go oh here he is and then they'd open up you know it was all like to be locked up because it was all um quite strong um painkillers and i would just push so i push a trolley around a massive hospital talking to everybody i met just chatting away and the tvs dotted around in waiting rooms and i'd sometimes just go i'm ahead of schedule and i'd sit down and i'd watch the telly like neighbors at lunch time and chat to patients and i go anyway i've got to get off i've got to get you know i've literally i've got to get some morphine to ward three and if it's not there by half one i'm in trouble and um if if i could have done if it paid more than two pound 19 hour i'd have probably been quite happy doing that job forever maybe i'll get back to it it keeps you quiet it sounds like a great job to be fair it suited me um yeah and with the money i was saving i then went traveling and i don't know nowadays people tend to go um you know to very exotic places i i was only really interested in the continent of europe and i'm still very euro focused you know as a geographical entity and i was doing as i've done german and french at a level and i was going to do them at university so i um bought a train ticket uh it was called interrailing and you can still do it and i basically went off into railing for about four months and hitchhiking um and it sounds not that exotic now but remember this is no internet there's there's no phones and i i my brother was living in france i went to see him and then after a few weeks of seeing him and one or two other people he knew i just went to a city called nice in the south of france so it says only 18 and i put my thumb out by a road and see where to see where i'd go i i went to venice in the end to start off with that was rubbish i was really disappointed with venice and then i said into rail tickets and trains so i just zigzagged across the continent now this is before the berlin wall came down so we were in the cold war so you couldn't go did you not go to poland you go you you couldn't did you don't go to czech republic didn't exist and there was a war going on in yugoslavia you're about to be so i didn't go there either um and i again it's a bit like being a hospital porter so i i would arrive in the city of cologne in germany and add a little book that said there is a youth hostel here i'd find it and you know knock on the door and say hello to here and then they'd go we're english or we speak english and i go i thought you'd be german i was always disappointed and you go in and you you know you you bunked down in a room with 10 20 people you get because and i'd start chatting and then we'd all go out to the pub or we'd go to whatever tourist thing there was and sometimes i didn't even sleep in a hotel or a hostel i just i remember being in the black forest and going this is nice i'm gonna lie down here and i went to sleep under a piece of plastic in the black forest again i'm not sure i'd do that now because it's it's quite dark and spooky but uh different world now isn't it but then everything just felt safer i guess i was as i alone or isolated in 1989 in europe as you would be anywhere on the planet now because there was no phones there was no way if no one could find me yeah um yeah i yes i zigzagged across the continent then i after about four months i kind of run out of money so i thought i better go over and you know it's an interesting thing that i've always had that safe base and maybe i'll come on to that later i've had like i can just go i'll just go over and i i went back to sutton um then i don't think i told my parents and i just walked home from the station and walked in and i remember very clearly my mom was in the kitchen washing and i walked in and she hadn't seen me for four months i'd run a few times and i went and she said oh you're back early as if i'd just been to the shop there's a wonderful and i like it now i've found at the time i found it there's a lovely um kind of oh yeah great you want to wander around the continent go for it do it why not um yeah which probably is a bit unusual now um it is but i i was talking to zoe my daughter about this yeah we've just been away for a couple weeks yeah and we went to uh the state of north carolina as part of our trip and i might did my year out in north carolina i worked at a children's home over there and that's where i became a christian was at this at this children's home so i took zoey to see the children's home and meet some of the people over there that had a big impact on my life and all that sort of stuff and i did the same a few years ago with the boys and interestingly the boys haven't they've not they've not looked at that and gone i want to do a year out but zoe's looked at that and gone i want to do year out i don't know what it is i want to do but i think this year out or this gap here before university after school is actually for me i don't know about you phil i think it's quite a formative time do you mean it it has a big impact on people i found a lot out about me i could have possibly done that anyway i don't know but i i s what i saw it is a message for some people what i saw as character weaknesses as in you talk too much you're too chatty you need to focus on detail i actually began to realize was a strength which was yeah i'm not particularly interested in you know i'm not interested so with the languages i'm not was never particularly good at getting all the grammar right but i was really happy to just do the speaking which actually he's like yeah i'm relational put me with people and i'm more than happy um ask me to fill in a form not a not a chance um and and when i when i came back um you know it's interesting isn't it again because i think we're probably similar in this regard if i see opportunities i tend to go i'll give that a go what's the worst that can happen you know again it's probably the benefits of my family is like give it a go try see what happens here and a friend of a friend of a friend's mother or something like that said oh there's a job going in corfu the greek island does phil want to go and work there so i've been back in england a few weeks and i thought oh kofu greek island what's the job and i went on for an interview and um for this company and um they went can you swim and i went yeah and they went can you um what was it can you drive and i went yeah now that wasn't actually true because i didn't have a license okay and when they said can you swim it's true i could swim i didn't actually have any qualifications that said i could swim except for do you remember the bronze personal survival and if i had to get a big brick from the bottom at three foot deep fine but um you know crazy really anyway um and it was it happened it because of the link it was a christian holiday company and i and they went oh so you go to this church in in something yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean great and so i i got this job and it paid 30 pounds a week i know it was all all it was free board and lodging 30 pound a week and basically all the food you could eat and beer was half price and i went i'm going for that and um it was i absolutely loved it i didn't and i was setting up um toppers and mirrors which are types of boats didn't know about them got taught i um worked out how to set up a wind surface and i got to drive a speedboat um all around because basically it was an offshore wind so all these holiday guests would arrive at this hotel go wow brilliant and i'd go hello welcome to the hotel this is how the toppers and mirrors work you know just picked it up as i went along um and then they'd all get in these boats and it was an offshore wind so they'd shoot off away from corfu towards albania then they couldn't get back so then i'd get in the speedboat and drive out to get them and you know it looks really cool in speed but it's really easy just go out and then just do that and it looks like you've done a handbrake turn you just screw it up next then when you go hi i think you're struggling to get back to the shore aren't you and because it was eighteen miami vice music because it was um it was a you know i was 18 and full of energy they then go i'd get we we'd do eight or nine hours on this working on the beach and sometimes i'll be driving a van around as well which didn't actually have a license for but i could drive it's the wrong modal verb if you want to be pedantic i could drive i just wasn't allowed to drive licensed to drive yeah it wasn't licensed modal verb to can to be able to there you go be careful what you what you asked uh maybe it's because without a lawyer and i just knew ah legally what i've said is true technically it's true morally wrong um but i used to go out every night with guests and we'd go out clubbing dancing and i loved all that i loved the dancing i loved art i loved music um but the hotel the hotel was christian so you'd have a lot of christian guests um you didn't have to be christian i suppose and they'd have like um a christian sort of um pastor chaplin each week who would do talks on all sorts of things and sometimes i went to them sometimes i didn't but the there was a really um there was a really nice atmosphere and mood about the place that i really enjoyed and i enjoyed working there i enjoyed going out enjoyed socializing with everybody there and then the this is this is my story of how i actually became a christian it's really boring but it's the only story i've got so i'm sticking with it and i didn't have a watch and so i'd come in i would go i'd be at the beach i had to be at the beach for 10 in the morning so i'd be at the beach at 10 we'd finish at 6. i'd have a snooze i'd eat everything i possibly could in the restaurant then i'd go out clubbing at about 10 then i'd get in about four and then i'd wake up to go to the beach about ten so it's a kind of a slightly insane lifestyle and i do it when you're younger yeah you can do it now i'm like oh how do i do that anyway but when one morning i woke up and i didn't know what time it was because i didn't have a watch because i just didn't own very much and i went down into the foyer of the hotel and there was no one around and i went well it must be earlier than i think it can't be you know must be seven in the morning anyway so i sat on a chair and i just flicked through there were magazines um by the you know in the foyer like you might get because you know in some hotels they'd be about tourism or they'd be about cars or whatever hotels this would happen to be a christian magazine and i was flicking through it and there was an article and i can't remember all the details but the article said something along the lines of you believe in god great most people do it's not the same as being a christian do good things great loads of people do that it's not the same as being a christian to be a christian what you have to know is or believe is that you have um sinned that you've there are things you've done or you're doing that god doesn't want you to but there are also things you're not doing than god wants you to do and i was not a bad person by most people's standards but i thought there are things i do that i shouldn't do and i realized that this this spit in the bible about jesus being on the cross which i've never quite got my head round bit on about jesus basically if you sin there's a punishment there's a consequence and i understood that from school you know you do something wrong you get caught there's a consequence if you don't get caught there doesn't appear to be a consequence but you're still wrong and i i sort of twigged i went oh hang on a minute so i sin jesus died for me so that he takes the punishment so i don't have to and then it was 7 30 in the morning august roughly um 1989 and i went right i'm gonna i'm gonna i believe that i'm gonna do that and i'm not going to say there was a bright light i'm not going to say that was the sounds of angels you could argue that i was sleep deprived and so i've made the whole thing but actually i just went yeah and i'm a little bit like that as a person going yeah i'm going to do that i'm going to become a christian so without without a ton of other theological reasoning um i just decided to do that and i did i would argue that i felt different i felt lighter happier and um you say you could say oh hang on a minute that was purely circumstance that was purely um yeah say you were tired you'd had a you know you it was emotional i'm going yeah maybe but 33 years later i still have that same sense um i i've had so and i would describe that as a religious experience i can't say to i've got a really convincing story that's full of reason it was to some extent well you could argue it's emotional i would say it's spiritual and i've had a series of religious experiences since that i can't explain other than there must be a god and there is somebody called jesus and jesus is god's son and there's lots of theology there's lots of bits in the bible that i don't understand and i don't mind that i don't mind not knowing everything so when somebody says to me yeah hang on a minute what about evil and suffering i'm going brilliant i don't know i'd love to know you know i think free will is a wonderful gift that we've got a wonderful thing but i don't understand um why there is you know i'm gonna get on some moral evil natural evil you know i don't understand why the tsunamis and earthquakes i i don't understand why god always does what he does and why he doesn't do what i want even though i asked him now is outrageous outrageous god what are you playing that yeah yeah but i i don't mind and i don't mind not knowing everything it's okay um so i would say that day is when i became a christian and what was interesting i guess from my own story is i came back from corfu and i went to university came up here to liverpool which was a long long way from sutton in those days and i arrived in a new city in a new place new relationships uh without any history so no so there was you know you're a blank canvas and that really suited me as well i think because it turns out and i know this will be a shock to you about turns out i was for the first time in my life i felt quite popular i i go along to the course and go hello everybody and people go wow you're really chatty and friendly and i didn't know it was so with within two days of arriving i'd organized kind of by mistake a pub crawl down the small town road which is a very famous road in liverpool yeah yeah and i just i made these posters with this boat called mark saying meet here for the phil and mark pub crawl and all these people came along and i went do you know the way to the pub crawl bark i haven't got a clue and i went well it must be this way so we just set off and we headed off but this way and if you say there's another tip if you say things with a degree of um confidence it's amazing people will follow you yeah yeah and i really enjoyed that time at university i really enjoyed i really enjoyed my course i really enjoyed learning i found i like learning for the sake of it i like the the literature i like the art that we learned i like the language and and i went to the laundrette and met a girl i went to the laundrette but i didn't mean oh well you're a different laundrette and i tried a few churches because i knew oh yeah church that's what you meant to do and again um i didn't find the church that i went to for whatever reason i didn't find them that welcoming the first ones i went to um and that could easily put you off but to me these are people churches are full of people they are by by nature um human and therefore sometimes they're good sometimes they're less good that's that's not that's not god's fault or jesus fault so um but it's what you actually should expect in church church is not a place of perfect people exactly and if it were perfect if i join kind of ruin it yeah but but eventually so this girl called helena um we we found a great church in south liverpool we went to they weren't used to students at all and so they thought we were amazingly funny and interesting and um they thought we were really poor because we were scruffy but that was just kind of like what you did when you were a student in the yeah yeah 1990s it was like oh it was a you know you made a point of being scruffy and um we met again a massively wide range of really interesting people who had completely different lives some of them were from very impoverished backgrounds again this is liverpool in the early 90s so unemployment was common they'd been involved in things like the liverpool riots they've been involved in things like the heisel stadium violence they've been involved in the hillsborough disaster and i was i really enjoyed meeting people from a very different background and i loved it um i then went away to live in germany for years part of my course and then i came back and for various reasons we my girlfriend at the time now my wife she said oh i'm trying out this new church um let's go when i went and i was a bit like yeah whatever let's go and um it's the church we're still in now it had a different name then it was called bethany um and i must admit yeah that's it and i must have met you matt but again it was like i met a bunch of people and they were from a different range of backgrounds lots of students but also lots of local people business people and i remember being invited around for lunch at the pastors and eating everything which was great and then one of them saying uh a lovely lady called jenny went i'm doing a kids club uh you you could do the games couldn't you and she said it in a way that wasn't really a question jenny has a habit of doing that right and i want her and nick to be fair it's the talent they've possessed for a while absolutely but but isn't it interesting that actually i was i was confident but i i needed that little shelf so i ended up being involved in something called the kids club um which was uh uh it's kind of like if you're quite old it was a bit like tis was so it's full of crazy games but with a with a christian message and the kids that came putting it bluntly were pretty rough pretty scaly they were not the kids that i grew up with they did not sit around wanting to read books or study existential nihilism but i loved it i absolutely loved it it was really good fun and um so i was going to university had a great girlfriend was doing this kid stuff going to this church where i learned a lot more about the bible i would say uh and i learned a lot more about um i guess how living a christian life and the people i was meeting there obviously we're all we all made mistakes and but they were generally going i'm trying to be a good christian a christian good christian um and there was no duplicity there was no or very limited publicity and hypocrisy in fact what you saw was what you got you know let's let's go and do a food bank well it wasn't called food bank then let's feed the homeless because that's what it says we should do let's look after orphans and widows because that's what the bible says and i love that social action side yeah but i was also learning about a spiritual side too that it's what you believe that matters and you know i mean i spend a lot of my time playing with this there's the story when jesus is crucified there's two other men who are crucified at the same time and the thieves and one of them says jesus what are you doing if you're the son of god get off the cross and makes fun of jesus even though they're dying a massively painful death the other fellow on the cross is going i think you i think i'm using my own language here it's not exactly the biblical words go the other uh crucified thief says no way i i think you are jesus i think you are the son of god i think you are you say you are and jesus says god jesus says to him you're going to be in heaven when you die which is basically going to be in the next few hours and i love that bit of you know when i say theology it's understanding of the bible because you go all that thief did was acknowledge that jesus was the son of god and that he you know he acknowledged who he was he didn't get a lot of extra theological training you know do you know what i mean he didn't go on a course he didn't even do anything good he didn't kind of help the age it helped help the loneliness no he just got into it didn't he that being said i think it's very important before you die to to to to act on your faith to do things that have an impact and a positive impact on other people and and this church that we're still in i think is is really is a really good blend of both of those things which is maybe why you and me matt are still there with our kids of course years later yeah yeah yeah now 30 years yeah yeah thirty years ago for me when i joined church yeah and um well bethany church with a mission yeah what a great name yeah yeah church with a mission it's like yes all churches have missions don't they yes but we are bethany church they do yeah no it's great and i totally get what you're saying and i'm i can hear jen in my head now uh when i was sort of 18 19 you know telling me a few to be fair it was more julie connolly with you yeah yes similar she's julie's a little bit more straight talking than jen jamie was very kind and julie was like and still is in some respect but um no yeah it's fascinating so here you are um christian you you met helena in the laundry i thought you met her at a bus stop that's when i picked her up with my friend dave uh so we've met in the laundrette i'd seen her around i saw in those days there's no phones is there so you had to stalk people if that's the right word by just hanging around where they might hang around so i knew she might be in this pub this club this you know whatever so i just hang around and i saw her with my friend dave and she was waiting at a bus stop with a another girl called joe and i said dave pull over let's give them a lift home and that was the evening of our first kiss with george benson playing in the never give up anyway um and it's really interesting actually because there's another example there of what i would call a religious experience because we um she was doing law she had a really good career path and a really good career plan i ended up doing a master's because i liked studying and in those days you didn't have to pay sorry everybody i did so i did a four-year degree then i did a master's in the administration of the european union so i was the only person who knew how the european union worked in the whole of britain uh and i still didn't fully understand it but i don't mind and and then i got a job i got a proper job i was an export sales manager um selling graphic arts filing it's not that interesting uh or there's a lot of talking um and people say why aren't you getting you know you're gonna marry helen i was like and i was in church one day helena wasn't there and for what reasons i cannot explain properly as a cerebral intellectual process just burst into tears and uh there was a fella there called paul who you know matt paul ed and i went anywhere what's wrong with ago i don't know i don't know paul and um about 10 minutes of crying i stopped crying and i was like well that feels better that feels good and it's funny somebody was explaining this once to somebody wasn't it krishna when do you think it was a mental breakdown and i went i don't know if it was it was a good one if you can have something because ten minutes break up maybe rather yeah i felt like a lot of things somehow had been dealt with and i wonder and again i've got a theory and i wouldn't like to put it to the test necessarily that sometimes as a christian you can work through issues in your life like you might be very angry you might be very bitter you might have had a very difficult past and slowly but surely god can help you deal with that and not everything gets dealt with some things you just carry with you you know physical health mental health issues other times and this has happened to me on two or three occasions it's almost like i've had keyhole surgery and that's the only way i can describe it as a comparison so it's like 10 minutes of crying and i was like oh i feel better i don't know why god would do that but i believe it was a god thing and the next day i said hey i think we should get married and helen went i've been waiting for you to ask me that and i went well there you go [Laughter] how long have you been married now uh only 27 years and just the other day it felt like i nearly knew what i was doing and then you had a word with yourself yeah well watch and it's when he says funny is it because i think because maybe my upbringing which was like you know you need to be relatively sensible and be a bit good lifey i had this really good job that paid really well i wore a suit i went abroad but i hated it i really found it tedious i was fundamentally i wasn't interested in in in in selling things um although i think i buy things so i don't mind people selling things it's part of life so you've got no problem with it if ethically just like this is boring for me i'm not interested yeah and then i was in church again maybe a year or two later and i again i was like i'm not happy i'm not happy and i it's almost like and i can't there wasn't a particular verse there wasn't a particular um message i remember other than why am i i think i was made for something else i think god made me with a heart for something else so chatted with helena and um we couldn't quite afford to do this but i gave up my job and i went to volunteer because i wasn't paid to work back at the kids club and to work for the church and apart from taking a hundred percent pay cut it was brilliant everything about it was great and i'm maybe i'm not that materialist i mean everyone's gotta have some money but i was like oh this is so much more fun and i don't mind that you know i'm not going to hotels and restaurants i don't care i'm mucking about in in places that you might have heard of wherever you are in england topster wavercy kenny kensington not kensington london kenny liverpool very very different places very different places and i loved it um and it was like this is great and i think this is you know there's a great verse in the bible uh god's got a plan for your life now it could be misused that verse but i'm pretty sure that there is something about god god's got also he knows me well and he knows what i'm good at he knows what my skills are if you like he knows my heart he knows my personality and it probably wasn't to sell filing um and so i but i like working with kids so i trained to be a teacher so i and i became a teacher so i had an income and we had an income and i still carried on doing this kids stuff and the balance was pretty good it worked it worked well um for those years that we were involved in both um then to jump forward we had children and this sounds odd but it will make sense in a minute we had children in the natural way got it so we were living in seven yeah we were living in a semi-detached house great church great kids my wife was a solicitor i was a teacher brilliant brilliant brilliant and then my wife uh who was pretty clever said should we foster and i was like you know what you know whatever and said yeah look there's a there's an evening to find out more about fostering should we go along and i was like what like on a date it's not a very good date but i'll go anywhere so we went off to the local council's foster event and um the social worker who spoke put us off entirely by speaking in a social worker language i didn't understand then a lady who was a foster carer put us off by saying these teenagers that we that i look after keep smashing up my house but then so i'm not doing this and then a young lady spoke who was it who'd been in care and she said going into care going to live with strangers um is terrifying if you could make it less terrifying could you foster and i knew that the bible talks quite a lot about looking after they call them in the bible orphans and it's like essentially that's kids who haven't got a family and we just and i'm a bit like this and it's a great way to be if you can which is like well let's give it a go what's the worst that can happen we can always stop so we went through the process of becoming a foster carer it takes about uh it took us about eight nine months it's pretty rigorous you can't just ring up and say we'd like a kid you know it's it's they really need to they there's a few questions they want to answer there's a lot of questions you're filling something that there's a they fill in you fill in a form called a form f it's a book it's a hundred pages long that's what that should be called um and so we started fostering so we had from two birth kids who were five and seven or something like that at a time we started having additional kids coming into our house um and some came for uh what the one came to four hours uh one came for a few days then we had one for a year and a half and you know that you know you might have seen know about this and there's a whole other podcast about getting a kid ready to be adopted and we had another lad who he came to live with us we thought he was russian and so when he arrived i said to him privyet because i've looked up on youtube how to say hello in russian and his first words to me were why are you speaking russian i'm not russian and i went oh where are you from and he was from moldova which you know is in the news at the moment because of the ukraine russian war um and um oddly enough we lost contact with him but because of the internet instagram a little while ago he found me on instagram and it was just wonderful to be sort of um reunited by by the world the world wide web with a lad that we looked after some time it was just lovely it's been lovely to chat with him um and one little kid who we fostered got adopted the adoption broke down which does happen two years later he came back to live with us when the adoption didn't work and we fostered him again and then one uh sort of afternoon he's been very very quiet which is good and bad with children um oh he's been quite bad yeah shall i enjoy the silence or should i go find what he's doing and i enjoyed the silence a bit too long and then i went to find out what he was doing and he was in the front lounge in our house and he got a family photo he'd smashed out the glass and he added a picture of himself uh with his name and i went oh look at that that's very exciting um he was covered in glass which is a bit of a safety health and safety thing but yeah you gotta be careful about that uh i i was more interested in what he was trying to say and he was basically trying to say can i join your family please which is a very hard thing to say and it's not why we went into fostering but we went yeah okay so we ended up adopting him so this kid has had a lot of he's had a lot of parents but he did say to me and i will change the language uh when it was father's day when i've had i've heard you're the best dad i've ever had the others were really so we've got three kids um 2018 and he's nearly 15. so he's planning his birthday as we speak um fair enough that he's got a very long list on amazon of what he wants and if we bought it all it would come to seventeen thousand or 150 quid something like that you know i like that i'll read what's the name of that fella elon musk have you got his number yeah yeah just give him a ring with a few quid i i am i i was still a teacher for a long time but i found it quite i began to find a bit stressful and you know middle-aged man doing okay but i began to get um i don't think it was depression but i got very anxious about work and somebody said to me he was a wise again a very wise person at church who worked in mental health chatted to her and she um you've got um i think she referred to it as environmental anxiety so you found yourself in a situation that you're not i mean one or two things can happen in your life and you're fine but so many things were happening that i wasn't able to deal with them very well so i wasn't sleeping i wasn't eating very well i was getting very anxious at the weekend i was trying to get ahead of the week by looking at emails all through sunday so i was and i would say looking at this now if i could give any tip for mental health it's um you know the bible uh so old testament new testament even the quran you know i mean you know i'm not a muslim but they talk about having one day being different from the others and i can't help thinking that having a day different day of rest whatever you want to call it sabbath shabbat day of rest one day different from all others is really good for our mental health and i wonder if the reason we have such poor mental health in the west is because we've eroded that and we treat all seven days the same but um um with a lot of help and friends uh kind of got better um and but i did think i need to change my environment so i stopped being a full-time teacher and became a recruiter or promoter is maybe a better word of fostering so i now spend three days a week teaching love it teach german uh theoretically french although that doesn't have very much and ari so a lot of ethical issues um is there a god i'm always asking kids that question it's brilliant because they always want to know what's the answer and i go that's the whole point we don't know it's a matter of faith it's if somebody says they know there's a god they're using the word no incorrectly that's me being kind of slightly cantankerous again going no you don't know it you know facts and it's not a fact it's a matter of faith and you you know you don't know everything that's why god is omniscient which is from the latin all knowing you're not you're just a kid and i'm just a big kid basically um and it's a pretty good balance at the moment as our kids get older and my wife's changed her job a few times still works in law um she's an academic my wife is an academic man you know you've achieved when you become an academic when you've worked so hard the university you went to says do you mind coming back yes could you come back because you're so clever it's not happened to me yet phil i spend quite a lot of my time with kids uh who are um shall we say uh marginalized sometimes traumatized they do some other charity work um we're trying to keep kids out of going into care i work with foster carers and adopters trying to help them deal with the kids because you know even when you adopt it doesn't solve the trauma and the the distress that you may have experienced as a child um and it's sometimes very challenging but i find it really worthwhile and that is one of i guess that's one of the values i have i think i'd have had it if i hadn't become a christian i think it would have been um reflected in maybe politics or something like that but actually it's become i'm inspired by the by a sense of justice that i've got but i'm also inspired by many bits in the bible that say what are you doing about the poor person what are you doing about the widow the marginalized the orphan what are you doing about the refugee and i'm you know i do sometimes and i tend to ignore i do sometimes despair when i see people that would say they're a christian who don't appear to have read all of the bible in the way i have but it's not my job really to i don't i don't i'd rather not go on about them i'd rather go i don't care i'm i'm gonna look after this kid whatever that fella wants to say you do those um you do those god bless them prayers don't you yeah it's some and you try and do them in a non-self-righteous way i do the self god bless those people i'm sure they think they're doing what is now then i mean you know a lot of my life's great so for example this this weekend i'm taking this little kid he's 10 to his first football match i mean you know it's not all good he's going to see everton poor kid but you know what i took him with uh like your dad learning how to deal with his support yeah i took him with our adopted son uh who's got a few learnings she's a brilliant kid i took him as a ten-year-old and he's not from the same ethnicity as me and i took and uh and our son and i took him into town he'd never been into town he lived he's lived in liverpool in a while he's never been into town and we just ran around the libraries the museums were in and out of shops everything was wow amazing and i just thought this is for me for my personality it's not for everyone this is just such a fun way of spending my time showing the kids there's a world that's exciting and just showing them yeah there are some adults because they both had a tough time there are some adults that aren't um good do bad things but there are some adults that are safe and you know there's nothing wrong with selling filing but this was a lot more fun not as lucrative and i think a lot more fulfilling for you yeah for me it's exactly and it's the way i'm wired it's the way i'm wired and you know very often i have all sorts i'm sure anybody watching this i have all sorts of questions i don't understand about why why did those two children have to find themselves in families that couldn't look after them and yeah that's great question you know why why was i put in a family if i was put in a family you know questions of volition and agents why was i in a family with a mum and a dad and a brother and and and happiness and wealth and they weren't and i'm like i don't know but i do know with that privilege and we've talked about this before with with privilege and with power comes responsibility and i like to think that i'm doing you know what i can my family can to to help people who aren't as privileged and who are disempowered or don't have as much agency i could always think i could do more but i'm going um it's fun to do it but it's useful to do it um and i don't know what happens when you die but i'm guessing i'm guessing guessing is that the right word is that theological world i'm assuming assuming my reading of the bible is this if it's true when i die god will go to me right brilliant uh you're in heaven well done i don't know if it works on this i really don't but you know i hope there's no paperwork in heaven i hope there's no form can you imagine those commandments about you know it's summed up with love your neighbor and your neighbor is everybody even people you might not like yeah and i like to think that that's how we live our lives um i've got a ton of questions for god but i'm figuring everybody else has as well um you know i don't understand everything that happens i think you'll have plenty of time to get a mentor yeah yeah exactly um and on earth i do talk to god often get quite cross with him and go why is this happening and i feel anxious about that and i've i quit but i like the journey i like to go to a i like to listen to a preach or read the bible or do a bible study and go this has answered a lot of questions but now i've just got a load of others as well so you know like yourself you know go to church and go that was a great bridge really interesting and i love listening to that man or woman talk about their life but what about this issue and what about that issue and i and i i keep going back because i don't mind not knowing i don't mind i mean you know you know i don't want to talk about it now but you know there's a big issue in the uk at the moment about trans and cis and gender and i'm like oh that's interesting and i can look at the bible and try and find a lot of information or some guidance on it but there's a lot about that that i i don't even understand all the words maybe because somebody said are you a cis male and i'm like and you think when i was younger i'd laugh at people who didn't understand the modern world and i'm going oh i'm turning into one of those people that don't the middle-aged guy that goes i just don't know what i'm doing i don't know what that is and i and i can i'm trying to find out i really am i'm thinking right because you know people are people aren't they everyone's made in the image of god so people are people but that doesn't i don't know let's not talk about it now because that's a whole other podcast and that's a that's very much another discussion but i think it's an interesting point um that i think there's a the thing that i've i love about the christian faith and the thing i love about your story this whole i don't mind not knowing there's a there's a word the bible uses um i've learned paul says it he says i've learned what it is to be rich i've learned what it is to be poor but in all things i can do all things through christ who strengthens me in other words and he talks about being content yeah in this phrase do jeremy and it's like i've had loads of money i've had no money at all but you know what i'm content i'm all right i'm all right i don't know all the answers yeah um and i'm all right i'm content yeah and i think um it's probably one of the most underrated aspects for me of the christian faith is that level of contentment that it sort of comes with where you go i don't know all the answers yeah and i know i only look at life in this very small tiny sphere in which i yeah which i operate jeremy and i we've just traveled uh to the states they see things very differently over there you know you talk about moldova they're seeing things extremely differently over there so i understand that in this small sphere in which i operate i don't know i don't get everything i don't get all the big picture all the time but you know what i'm content yeah and i i have got to thank for that yeah right and it's a it's a beautiful thing isn't it yeah so phil listen i'm aware of time and it's always lovely changed i guess never i guess in all of this we talk about life messages don't we and it's like um you've mentioned on the live streams before you know you write letters to your kids and uh and you've done that over the years you've written letters to them you give them to them on their 18th birthday stack letters which they can read which is great but i guess if you if you had one letter left which you were going to write and in that you would write your sort of you know your final message to the world this is you know your the one thing you want everybody to remember that you've i guess you've learned or experienced or come through what would that be oh now this is what i should say something really pithy and and deep no no i'd possibly say please consider fostering i wouldn't doubt it somewhere i i i think i think it's probably this is if if you're not careful you sound like you're one of those sayings that people put up in their kitchens like live life love but probably it would be more like there's a very old song i remember somebody saying to me which was was a little kid which was trust and obey there's no other way it rhymes trust and obey there's no other way to be happy in jesus but to trust and obey and there's a ton of theology in there but actually there's a lot of this there's a lot in it's it's the trusting which which i've probably learned and i'm learning game but what about that god what about this are you sure you've got it covered and it's like i'm god very trusting and obeying which is quite unusual as humans because we you know certainly i go hang on i've got i'm sure i've got this sorted better than you have yeah and and trust in obey maybe just trust and obey um yeah that i'm saying this on a good day because tomorrow i'll go i don't want to trust you anymore god and it's been that relationship and and seriously to me i keep coming back to the religious experiences i've had going well i know god was present and there there there and there's loads of them and i've got friends who've got similar experiences i'm going i can't deny those happened unless i deny that i've been alive i mean they just didn't happen to me um so yeah trusted obey maybe that's it simple as that and all you've got to do is find out the bits you have to obey which is to foster that yeah we're just to foster look after you look at the widow and the orphans yeah yeah that's brilliant and and actually uh on a more serious note phil um i know people will be listening to this from around the world but there will be folks listening from the uk if people do want to find out more about fostering which we're big fans of um here at crowd how do they do well there's a couple of things you can do um if you're a christian i would google home for good which is a fantastic charity it's a national charity and it's basically its goal is to find homes for children who need them so it might be fostering might be adoption it might be long-term fostering so home home for good and you'll find you'll find the charity if you really want to foster the best thing to do is to go to your local council and google you know say you live in sorry google foster for sorry google foster for gloucester foster for liverpool you'll find lots of agencies as well i'd want to go into all that now but you'll find something there or you can google fostering adoption with phil dot com and you'll find my blogs which are basically stories of fostering and adoption and check them out check them out i need the readers yeah yeah you need to read this yeah check out his blog leave comments he'll respect yeah i will yeah yeah no problem at all uh phil listen uh thank you so much for coming on to the podcast it's great to hear your story and um honestly man love it love what god's doing in your life and thanks for just being you man love i love it love it all right mate thank you very much thanks everybody so there you have it what a great story uh a huge thanks again to phil for joining me today now don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get podcasts from because we have some great stories about faith and courage from everyday lined up in the can ready to go and i don't want you to miss any of them and whilst you're there why not make sure you subscribe to the crowd church live stream also and if you're around sunday 6 p.m here in the uk uh and whatever time that is for you in the world you can always google what is uh my time when it's 6 p.m here in the uk it will come up or there's a handy little link on the crowd church website which will tell you come and say hi in the live stream on facebook and youtube come say hi in the comments ask your questions it's going to be great to see and in case no one has told you today you my friend are awesome utterly utterly awesome yes you are it's a burden we all have to carry because that's the way god made us the bible tells us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made and that we can walk that out for the rest of our lives that's fantastic that's the good news that is the remarkableness of the god we serve what's the story is produced by crowd church you can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app the team the fabulous team that make this show possible is salaf baylor george mcquaid stella robin and tim johnson our theme song is written by josh edmondson and as i said if you would like to read the transcript or show notes from today's show head over to our website www.crowd.church where you can also sign up for our newsletter