Chris Cole FRSA

I once tried to explain to one of my daughters how real God was, even though you couldn't physically see Him in person. The question was prompted through a discussion we were having since my daughter saw so many people staying with us and sleeping on the couch in our early years as a family, and the fact that we always seemed to be talking about God with them. I told my daughter that as a family we believed in a God who is Love, and relied on Him because he had turned Daddy from being a really broken person into someone who was getting better. A process I've discovered which takes a lifetime, yet genuinely improves as the years go by. I told her that hurt people, hurt people and that our values as Christians was to try and help people because none of us is perfect, especially her Dad.

To illustrate the point about seeing God, I walked out of the room and closed the door and said to her that even though she couldn't see me on the other side of the door, I was there and she knew that I was there because she could hear me as I spoke to her through the door. This was also a good illustration about prayer, and I was really feeling quite proud of myself because I'm not the best teacher in the world and I thought I had done a fairly good job of communicating a very difficult concept to somebody who at the time hadn't had their own spiritual experience and understanding opened up. I can't remember how impacted my daughter was with my answer, but it started me thinking that sometimes the answers to life are often really quite simple, but often difficult to grasp.

At the time I was doing a radio programme I'd started on Plymouth Sound in 1983 called the Solid Rook Of Jesus Christ which ended up as the Cross Rhythms Experience. It started as a half hour programme which then became what Cross Rhythms radio is today.

My discussion with my daughter made me think quite deeply about what I was trying to communicate on the radio at the time. You see prior to my conversion, I had a really amazing experience listening to a song by Bob Dylan from his album Slow Train Coming - the track was You've Got to Serve Somebody. At the time I was in a pretty mixed up state and in a desperate condition. Life as I knew it had come to a decidedly dire place. I had come to the end of myself, which looking back, although very painful, was the best thing that had ever happened to me. Bob's song impacted me in a powerfully supernatural way and spoke straight into my life in a way that I had never experienced from a song before. After my Christian conversion I understood how contemporary Christian music plays such a transforming role in so many peoples lives.

Then a thought struck me, that if we could imagine God as a massive radio station broadcasting some really great radio programmes to anybody who wants to listen, then we as Christians could be likened to the receivers. If we're not plugged in, we won't receive the programmes, and if we're not tuned in properly, we just receive a lot of static, either way we become powerless in terms of receiving and re-transmitting the good 'programmes' that God is sending. We all need to tune into God, who wants to communicate His love to us and through us to a broken society.

On the subject of radio, can I encourage you to tune into Mrs Kerry Cole's wonderful programme 'The Worship Warehouse' on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at 7pm, and on Sunday mornings at 9am - I can really vouch for this amazing lady who plays some brilliant music.

This article was originally published in the Plymouth Shopper, a group of 7 localised community newspapers produced by Cornerstone Vision, reaching 62,000 homes every month in Plymouth. Each edition carries positive news stories and features, and provides local businesses, community groups and organisations with a very localised media platform to reach their own area.