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Health & Fitness

A 50 Year Roller Coaster Ride

The date was July 13th, 1963, and a young couple were preparing to link their lives together at their wedding at the ancient Aston Parish Church, in Birmingham, England.

That couple was my wife Norma, and myself, and as we said our wedding vows taken from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, “To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part,” we had no idea where our roller coaster of a life would lead.

And what a journey we have had since that day, five decades ago, in that huge old church next too Villa Park, home of the famous British soccer team, Aston Villa, and ironically a short way from the birthplace of Aston’s most famous, or infamous resident, Ozzy Osbourne.

We had met in the office of a local factory and fell in love, and shortly after we were married, I started an evangelistic group (with my sister Ruth) called The Messengers, which was a team of young Christians that, each Saturday night would fan out from my father’s church, The Sparkbrook Mission, to take the Christian message to the local coffee bars and pubs (bars) of the rather rundown area of England’s second city.

It wasn’t long before we became involved in working with drug addicts and then we helped to start Hill Farm, Europe’s first drug rehabilitation farm, and became its first wardens. Our two sons, Andrew and Peter, came along and, after a time at Hill Farm, which was chronicled in my first-ever book, “Junkies are People Too,”

I finally got into the world of journalism and we made the exciting move from Birmingham to London, where I became the Chief Reporter with Billy Graham's newspaper, The Christian. Even though I had not real academic background, the paper took a chance on this young and enthusiastic writer and soon I was interviewing people like Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at a memorial service for him at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and shortly afterwards, I also interviewed, Mahalia Jackson, the great Gospel singer who actually sang for Dr. King, before 250,000 people in Washington, D.C., before he made his famous “l Have a Dream” speech.

Sadly, after a year, the paper was closed down, and I moved into very different world of secular journalism, working for a series of London-based newspapers, including two of Britain’s large circulation tabloids, the Sunday People and the Sunday Mirror.

My time in the tabloids started off well with many interviews with people like Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr from the Beatles, Johnny Mathis, and Hollywood great, Burt Lancaster, but soon I got sucked into the lifestyle and after a while, things became very difficult for Norma, with me becoming involved in some rather sleazy stories and also by the fact that I was drinking heavily, and had just about lost my Christian faith.

Yet she stuck with me during this rough time in our marriage. If that wasn't enough, we began to get death threats from people in London's Underworld and, on one occasion, when I was overseas, a gangster I had been writing about, contacted the Sunday People to say that he had been told that someone was going to try and kill Norma while I was away. Fortunately, nothing happened, but it was all most disconcerting. I also received a threat from a terrorist group for something I had written.

My life was quickly spinning out of control. The turning point came about one night in the 1970's when I was, once again, drunk in my “watering hole,” the “Stab in the Back” pub, where my tabloid colleagues gathered each night to verbally “stab each other in the back”.

Suddenly, to my surprise, a friend, Irish-Canadian, Ray Barnett, appeared in the pub and soon began to challenge me to get my life “sorted out” and then walk out of my tabloid career and “do something worthwhile” with my writing skills. Believe it or not, there in that smoky bar, I recommitted my life to Christ and then handed in my notice, much to the shock of my colleagues, who thought I had taken leave of my senses, and so began a new chapter in both of our lives.

Now that I was free of my work in Fleet Street, the then center of Britain’s newspapers, Ray asked me join him on a dangerous trip to Uganda to chronicle the story of the terrible eight years of misrule of Idi Amin, during which some 300,000 Christians were murdered by Amin and his thugs. Idi Amin had just fled the country and Ray suggested that we worked together on a book called “Uganda Holocaust”, which was later published by Zondervan.

It was a real turning point in my life, for after meeting some of the most amazing Christians I had ever met, I knelt by my bed in the Namirembe Guest House in Kampala, Uganda, where we were staying, and prayed to the Lord saying that I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing and broadcasting about Christians like these Ugandan Christians, who didn't have a voice out to us in the West.

After the book was published, I was hired by an organization called Open Doors With Brother Andrew (who now have their U.S. headquarters in Santa Ana), to write a series of books for them about Christian persecution, and this took me to war-zones all over the world. And then in 1982, they asked me if I would like to move to Southern California to be their media director.

We both prayed about it and also asked our boys about their feelings about making such a huge move, and we all felt it was the right thing to do. So, once again, Norma stood with me and even though it was a big wrench for her to leave her mother and sister in the UK, she and the boys came over “The Big Pond” with me, and so began another chapter in our lives in Orange County.

But even that proved difficult for her, as both Andrew and Peter eventually returned back to Britain, and began working with a group called Youth With A Mission. She missed them terribly, and still does. They are now both now married and we have six grandchildren in the UK.

Eventually, more than 20 years ago, we started a non-profit called ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) – www.assistnews.net – and she again stood with me and agreed that we would not take a regular salary from the ministry, but trust God to help supply all of our needs. It was another step in our walk of faith.

It has been quite a ride for both of us, as each month we have seen our support drop sometimes dramatically, yet she had stood with me all the way so we can continue with this work to get out stories of Christian persecution via my news service, radio show and TV program.

We are now both in our seventies and coming up that incredible day when we celebrate our 50th Wedding Anniversary, and neither of us would have changed a thing in our rather unusual roller coaster of a life. Norma and I still talk about the time when she accompanied me to Bethlehem and we were held up by five teenage gunmen who were going to kill us, thinking we were Jewish settlers who they wrongly assumed had come into the birthplace of Christ to have a gun battle with them. Fortunately, our Arab taxi driver was able to explain in Arabic that we were actually visitors from the United States, and after several heart stopping minutes, they let us go.

We never dreamed that we would have such a fulfilling and exciting life together and we both believe the struggles with have gone through has miniscule compared with many of those we feature in the stories we release almost daily. If you would like to read more about our life together, it is all contained in my autobiography called “From Tabloid to Truth,” which you can get at: http://www.assist-ministries.com/feedbkdan/indexbook1.htm

About the writer: Dan Wooding, 72, who was born in Nigeria of British missionary parents, is an award winning journalist now living in Lake Forest with his wife Norma. They have two sons, Andrew and Peter, and six grandchildren who all live in the UK. He is the founder and international director of ASSIST (Aid to Special Saints in Strategic Times) and the ASSIST News Service (ANS) and he hosts the weekly “Front Page Radio” show on the KWVE Radio Network in Southern California and which is also carried throughout the United States and around the world. Besides this, Wooding is a host for His Channel Live, which is carried via the Internet to some 192 countries.

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