I’m sitting here on my bed; I have just had the weirdest and most terrifying experience of my life. Before I tell you what happened however I need to give you a little background information so this whole thing can be in a bit more perspective. To be in perfect perspective I’d have to tell u my whole life story, but I don’t think you would have the patience somehow to sit and read through that. So I’ll just give you what u need to know.

I was born into a catholic family and was the second of four boys. I was born in Melbourne and we went to church pretty much every Sunday. I moved around a lot from state to state, house to house, by the time I was twelve I’d moved close to 20 times. So I never really had much time to make friends, I learnt early how to be by myself. We lived the contemporary catholic family life, you know going to catholic schools, going to church, and that was it. Nothing over the top or fanatical.

I, like my three brothers, believed in God. Like kids just believe in Father Christmas without question that was like us with God. I use to talk with God and he was my imaginary friend most of the time (apart from my short stint with Bunyip). I asked him for things and he would give them to me, these quite easily could have been a coincidence. One example was when we were in Melbourne on holiday; we were living in Queensland at the time. Dad had to pick up my Uncle Adam from work and the whole family came along. We were waiting for Adam to come out. He was meant to finish at five and it was getting towards half-past. My mother knew I believed in God, so when I started complaining she suggested I pray for Adam to come out. I said a prayer out loud for my uncle to be the next one out of the building. A simple prayer to God from a believing child and it came true. My uncle walked out of that building bewildered by the cheers of amazement by my family. Coincidence you say? If that were to be the only thing I prayed for that came true I would agree with you.

I tried to keep up my catholic life until year 7. I was 13. I just didn’t want to go to church any more. I still believed in God but didn't understand why I had to go to church? After a short confrontation with my mother, my brothers and I stopped going to church. I still spoke a lot with God while I was alone, I didn’t have many good friends and by this stage we were firmly rooted in a house in Lower Plenty which is a suburb of Melbourne.

After all my schooling at catholic primary and secondary schools, you would think I knew a lot about God and Jesus. I knew next to nothing really. I only remembered the times when I was a child that God had answered my simple and humble prayers. So I kept praying for things, things that I deemed worthy of praying for. Now somewhere between 13 and 16 I hit the worst patch of my life. I dived headfirst into depression. Thinking about it now I had little idea where it came from, I was always a loner due to me moving so much and I always go teased because I was large and freckly. I was just all of a sudden completely sad all the time. During this time I developed Epilepsy and had two major seizures, I began self-mutilating via burning and cutting, I morbidly loved watching myself bleed and I use to bashing my head against corners and dumbbells, I had a very low self-esteem, and I wanted to kill myself. The pain on the outside seemed to dull the pain on the inside. It just started off me being sad and got that bad so fast. Also somewhere along the line my trust and belief in God completely went. In fact it turned into almost a hatred of God for neglecting me (in my mind anyway).

When I was in grade six, like all the catholic kids I had my confirmation. A confirmation is something catholic people do at the age of 12 to confirm their beliefs. We say I do to the questions asked at our christening and we get consecrated with oil by the archbishop. For this we choose a name, now choosing this name was very important to me. I looked and looked and looked for ages for a good saint’s name. We were meant to choose the name of a person we felt was a role model for us. All the other kids chose pretty quickly. I had to get extra time in the library so I could choose mine. I flipped through a book I hadn’t seen before, and I read a page on this guy who defeated Satan and his armies for God, his name means ‘who is like god’ I knew straight away this was the saint for me. From that day on I say my full name as Joshua Richard Michael.

Now back to the story…