I will be forever grateful – literally - to a man named Andy Bales. I met Andy when I was 17, both of us doing the day-release ‘study’ part of our apprenticeship at Derby Lonsdale College. We struck up a friendship and met up fortnightly at the Baseball Ground, home of the (then) mighty Derby County.

Andy became a Christian during the time we were doing our apprenticeships, and he immediately started talking about the difference Jesus had made to him. He wasn’t a great preacher or evangelist, but he had clearly found something of life-changing value and meaning and wanted to talk about it.

To cut a long story short, Andy invited me to attend an evangelistic meeting that set me on the path to discovering Jesus for myself – or rather discovering that it was God who had come looking for me in his Son Jesus!

It was Andy’s courage in witnessing to his new found faith in Jesus that led me to want to know more – and in God’s goodness I have followed Jesus since I gave my life to him in 1984.

Our Verse for the Year is Romans 10: 14-15 (2 verses, I know…) as the apostle Paul asks ‘How can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?’

We are not all given the gift of evangelism, but every single follower of Jesus is a witness to what they know of him.

Come and hear more from these encouraging verses and how it is God who comes looking for us in Jesus, to make us right with himself, and then gives us the joyful responsibility of being a part of someone else’s story.

Mick