Saved and healed by Jesus

Karl Ayling grew up a fighter, living on the darker side of South London until the age of 41 when Jesus found him broken, dishevelled and suicidal. But he didn’t leave him there…

Karl, of Oasis Church in Colliers Wood, documents his journey from abuse survivor to salvation in his first book Massive Power, Massive Love. He speaks to The Baptist Times about how it came about

Can you describe your upbringing?

We were a secular family and I was the eldest of three boys born in Brixton in the 1960s. We were a working class family in London's first multi-cultural melting pot...

Father was a plumber and a political activist for the SPGB (Socialist Party of Great Britain). Mother was a housewife.

One of my abiding memories of my early childhood was being taken by my mother to rob telephone boxes in Brixton. We would take a long handled knife and jimmy the coins out into a carrier bag.

Father had a short temper, and by the age of three he had already beaten me up one evening as I was trying to stop him beating my mother.

At age four and 3/4 mother took me to school on my first day. On day two of school, she opened the front door and told me to go to school, alone.

I remember her being beaten badly while heavily pregnant with my younger brother. By the time I reached the age of seven, father was sent to prison for abusing me, and three other children.

What impact did this have on you?
Massive. There was no after care offered to me. I was considered well enough not to need counselling. I became inured to pain and was one of the toughest kids at school. I became detached, an extrovert and wore a mask to consistently hide the pain.

Mother blamed me for giving evidence against my father and started to physically, emotionally and sexually abuse me. This didn't stop until I'd left home.

Meanwhile, the school I went to, rather than being an educational shelter, became another horror: being beaten up, robbed and mugged on a pretty regular basis, so I never reached my potential there.

Sport became my outlet, my sanity, my escape mechanism.


How did Jesus meet you?
That God shaped hole in my heart had been nagging at me for years. I was emotionally exhausted, had been diagnosed with a condition that would lead to blindness, had several psychological illnesses (undiagnosed at the time) and was a sex addict with a string of broken relationships and a trail of destruction behind me.

Then one day at the end of 2001, I walked into a church in South London - looked up and saw Christ high up on the cross and felt moved to get to know Him more (I now know I'd had a Holy Spirit encounter).

Put like that I know it sounds simple - but I was broken and more than ready for an encounter with the living God who knew all about my past and who I powerfully sensed wanted to give me a future.


What’s life like now?
A transformed work in progress. Jesus healed me of going blind, He healed addiction, OCD, PTSD and everything else so that now I walk in divine health.

Years in healing ministry in a large London church and years of (continuing) counselling, has built me up and given me a purpose. I'm fully aware this is a journey, God is gracious and he will continue to work in and through me until the day I die.

I'm very happily married to my partner in ministry and living in the sleepy farming town of Petworth, West Sussex.


You’ve now written your first book – can you describe it in a nutshell, and how did it come about?
The book is an autobiographical series of Psalmic poems. Each poem takes an aspect of Jesus' healing and expands what he has done in that aspect of life,

There are three major sections that describe, salvation, the healing journey and the search for a Godly companion.

To give credit where it's due, it was my mother who first told me that we all had a book inside us and I never forgot this.

Latterly, it was fellow Christians in healing ministry and dear friends at church who encouraged me to keep a journal which eventually morphed into the writing of the book.


What are your hopes for it?   
I started off hoping that if this book blessed just one person with the concept of surviving abuse and finding a life worth living with a God who loves them infinitely, then it has served its purpose. One's enough.

I have had some sage advice from my publishers - it's a specialist Christian book on a taboo subject and it won't be a big seller.

However, God knows who needs to read the contents: perhaps they're as ready as I was to hear the message.  

Massive Power Massive Love by Karl Ayling is available online, including publisher Apostolos Publishing