Ignite’s Editor, Rachel Rounds, asks what the story of Counties Evangelist, Lee Marsland - who suffered a horrific childhood before he found Jesus - teaches us about suffering.

In Summer’s Ignite we tell the story of Oldham-based Counties Evangelist, Lee Marsland. Lee was bought up in Oldham, by his alcoholic father after his mum walked out when Lee was four years old. His dad was violent and at just 11, Lee ran away from home. He lived on the streets and was in and out of prison, foster care, and children’s homes. He spent Christmas sleeping under Kwik Save supermarket air vents and had started using Class A drugs by the time he was 13. 

Lee attempted suicide many times, as he explains in his full story. It’s not hard to understand why. At one point in the article, he says:

“I was really angry all the time, getting into fights. I think I ran away in the first place because I wanted someone, especially my dad, to come and look for me but nobody did.”

The words are heartbreaking, as you imagine a small teenage boy, afraid and alone, simply wanting his dad to love him.

When I interviewed Lee, I found so many parallels between his early life and my own. I never suffered the same levels of deprivation and abuse that Lee did. But my father died when I was only 13. He had epilepsy and had a fit. He then fell onto his bed and asphyxiated. Shortly afterward, a teacher at my school, who everyone saw as a ‘father figure’ to me, began to sexually abuse me. It lasted three years. I told no one until I was in my thirties. Unlike Lee, I grew up in a Christian home and the man who abused me was a Christian teacher, in a Christian school.

None of this makes my experience worse or better than Lee’s - I often tell the people I speak to about my life, that it is not a ‘Richter scale of suffering’ that allows us to compare our experiences with that of others. Each person’s journey is their own.

But it has made me question many times: “Where were you, God? I was a child. I had no one to protect me. My father had just died and I was extremely vulnerable”.

The same could be said of Lee. I didn’t ask him whether he has asked that question - maybe I should have and I am sure he would be happy to answer. But who amongst us hasn’t pondered, asked, pleaded, cried, shouted the question: “Why me?” or “Where were you, God?”

I can’t pretend to have the answer. Thousands of books and sermons, written by much wiser people than me, have been expounded on the subject, but I can only share what I have learned from my own experience.

After walking away from God many times, I always found myself back with Him again - because as one friend, who lost her son to cancer, told me: “We had nowhere else to go”.

I realised that I would rather face the storms and vicissitudes of life with Jesus in my boat than without him sitting beside me.

I learned to stop asking the ‘“why” question because I realised that, on this side of eternity, we will never find the answer. And after many years of battling it out with God, I replaced the “why” with “what now?”.

By this I mean, that I learned to accept that God meant what happened to me for a reason, and although I still don’t understand it, I have to believe what Joseph says in Genesis 50:20: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

Over the years I have worked in an official and unofficial capacity with many women who have been raped and abused by men. Many of them have never spoken about their abuse before. I know that, had I not been abused, I wouldn’t be in a position to offer support, empathy, and understanding to women whose lives have been utterly shattered.

I thank God for that, just as Lee now uses his testimony and his life to share Jesus with those whose lives are a chaotic mess - because they, like him, were never loved before they met the One who is Love.

“After you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you” 1 Peter 5:10.