I grew up in Dunedin which is a stunning city that I still love to return to and it will always feel like “home” because it’s where I spent the first ten years of my life.  Most houses were built on a quarter acre which meant that the average home had a really good-sized back garden.  We had a vegetable garden, a pretty flower garden and best of all a garden shed. 

That shed became so many different places – it was a tea shop, a tiny wee house for me be in charge of, it was a stage, a train station, a spacecraft and many, many other places that existed only in my mind. 

It was in this garden that I discovered the tiny world of insects and I adored hunting out these wee creatures and watching them go about their day.  I had a particular love for slaters – no idea why but it may have something to do with the fact that they could not move and run away from me as fast as spiders, ants and their other six-legged friends. 

I would sit for what felt like hours (but was probably ten minutes) watching these wee creatures and I can remember wondering how they had all come to be made so perfectly and yet they were all so distinctly different. 

Like many before me I asked lots of questions – why, how, when, where had they come from and I kept coming back to the who question.  Mum and Dad did the best they could to answer these questions but they were badly equipped to do so.  My Dad was an atheist and Mama had attended Church as a child and young adult but had drifted away. 

All I remember is that from a very young age I was asking some of the really big questions about where everything came from.

I also loved worms and found the way that they moved absolutely fascinating, it was the first thing I had seen that did that and I was told they could be cut in half and would still live. 

In the interests of scientific curiosity, I tried that out and it didn’t work, I remember being heartbroken that I had killed a worm and again it was the first time that I became aware that life could be extinguished.  I think at that point I thought death was only for animals but again the seed had been sown.

I don’t think either of these epiphany’s are remarkable, I believe that those first few years of our lives are centered on getting a handle on some of the big themes of existence.  We are born, we live and we die. What is different for each of us though is how that is illustrated in our personal experiences. 

Unfortunately, some of us learn about death at a very young age and I am sure the “where did everything come from?” question is one that all of us form in one way or another during those first few years.

The second of my earliest memories happened when I was about four years old.  I was walking home from playing with a friend and I heard someone say or call out audibly “Rachel” I said “yes I am here” but nobody answered me.  I then called out “hello” but again I had no answer. 

Even though I was very small I just “knew” that something important had just occurred and looking back I believe that God was letting me know He was there.  My memory is that I heard this via an auditory voice i.e., someone saying “Rachel” out loud but I suspect it could have been a voice in my head and I was just too young to realize these two things were different.

I look back as an adult and believe that it was God who called my name on that day.  I had no frame of reference for who or what God was at that point in my life so I didn’t recognize the voice as it were.  I had never been to a church and nobody close to the family ever discussed God in a way that a four-year-old would understand, if at all. 

I like to believe He was just letting me know that He was there and given I remember it so vividly it obviously made an impact all the way to my soul which I believe was the point.