My story is very different to Leonie’s story, but in the end, we reached the same conclusion: The most important lesson in life is learning how to live in communion with God.

I chose the word communion specifically, because it implies a deep, consecrated union, the intimate sharing of your whole being, with a Holy God. The kingdom of God is a “becoming kingdom”. It starts in our lives as a little seed, but it grows until the whole person is redeemed, past, present and future.

Our communion with Christ, is The Way, The Truth, The Life. It isn’t an alternative to an otherwise full life. It is the very purpose of life. Whether you are church planting or serving tea on a Sunday, the enemy’s strategy will always be to try and divert your life and energy to the pursuit of lesser goals.

I remember being aware of God from the age of three. God was somehow obvious in everything I saw. When I was about seven, my dad gave me a children’s Bible and I read the story of Moses. I was captivated! I resolved that I would become like Moses, leading God’s people to the Promised Land.

Before his death, my dad shared a memory from that time, how I told the pastor of our church that I too would one day become a pastor. I was baptised at eight and went to church every Sunday, but I never understood who this Jesus person was, until I had a power encounter with Him, at age thirteen.

From that moment on, my life began to run on two diverging tracks. There was the world, the devil and the flesh, warring against the growing kingdom of God inside me. I began to experience sustained oppression and persecution everywhere I went. But somehow the Holy Spirit protected me through it all. My darkest days were during military service, the horrors of which one never really recovers from.

But then I found the Vineyard.

At 23, I was at a party with my friends, and I just realized that I could no longer live like them. If I stayed a moment longer, I would die. I put my beer down on the ground and walked out. I never went back.

Around this time, a work colleague kept on inviting me to something called “The Vineyard”. I always turned him down, until one day I ran out of options. I found myself walking into a school hall where Bryanston Vineyard met. People were friendly and greeted me. Costa Mitchell was preaching on calling. He said, “Your first calling is to Christ”, and I vividly remember making a mental note and ticking that box.

Then something weird happened: Costa’s eyes locked onto mine, in a room of more than 200 people, and then he pointed at me and said: “And your second calling is to the Church.” Right then I clearly heard the Holy Spirit say: “This is your home!”.

From that moment on, I was Vineyard!

I began to attend a small group where I didn’t really fit in, and after the leaders relocated to Cape Town, I was in the market for a new group and got invited to Leonie’s home group. To me it was like discovering “a thin place” where heaven intersected earth. God was so present in that group I just wanted to be there all the time. And then the renewal came, and the presence of God was made manifest all the more.

Leonie and I became friends, and we spent a lot of time together at church and small group. I began to realize what an extraordinary person she was. Like the pearl of great price, or the treasure in the field, I saw the kingdom in her, and it was beautiful. 

This is how our two stories connect and begin to intertwine. Friendship turned into a three-way communion between us and God. As the Bible says: A chord of three strands is not easily broken!

Without stealing any thunder from Leonie’s story, my contribution to planting Yeovil Vineyard Church was mainly preaching and teaching the Bible. From the moment I held that first children’s Bible at age seven, God gifted me with the ability to see into scripture, and I simply shared with people what I saw. Now, this is what I see:

Both of us were broken people, outcasts, but God put these two pieces together to make a vessel into which He could pour His Spirit. We can so fully identify with the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53:

“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.”

That’s me! That’s Leonie! Our Lord does not identify with the wealthy, the popular or the beautiful, He identifies with us!

This book is a story of how God takes ordinary people with broken lives, and transforms them into more than conquerors, through the power of His unfailing love.

Hendrik Hattingh