PT: What was your upbringing like?
JG: I grew up in Arun Community Church and we were encouraged at a really young age to experience God for ourselves. I actually saw God heal my mum of terminal breast cancer when I was six years old. Obviously I didn’t understand completely what was going on, but I do have some really strong memories from that time. I remember seeing my dad in floods of tears in his bedroom, asking him what was wrong, and him saying, ‘We may need to learn to live without your mum.’ But she really believed in the promises of God and held on to God’s word, and the six months came and went and they couldn’t find any traces of cancer in her body. That had a big impact on me. We started to see lots of healings, and a lot of things happened in our church meetings; a lot of us kids seeing angels and that sort of thing.
In my early teens, Cutting Edge was formed, which was the event which gave birth to Delirious?. But at exactly the same time, I started to turn my back on church. It was around the time of the Toronto Blessing, so on the one hand we were having all of these amazing experiences of God, but I also started hanging around with the wrong crowd at school and some of my best friend’s parents were drug dealers, so we started to experiment. There was a split in my church too, so in my youthful angst I decided I didn’t want anything to do with Christianity. I never stopped believing in Jesus, but I definitely stopped believing in the Church. It was very unfair, to be honest, and a lot of it was to do with the fact that I was already a mess and in a very negative place.
I was quite overweight in my teens, and I guess I was bullied to a certain extent. I’m quite an all-or-nothing sort of person, so I started to diet and lose weight in quite an extreme way. My friends and family thought it was great at first and encouraged me, and that fed this desire in me for more. I got to the point where – though I didn’t realise it – I’d go for long periods of time without eating. I’d tell my parents that I’d eaten elsewhere, and as far as they were concerned it looked like I was doing really well. It wasn’t long before it really started to really take control of me; I’d go for weeks without eating at all and became anorexic. What usually happens is that you get to a point where you’ve denied yourself again and again for such a long time that you snap, and you want everything you’ve denied yourself, and then feel horrified at yourself – and get rid of it. So I became bulimic as well.
A lot of the time anorexia is to do with self-image, but for me it actually became a way of self-harming. At that point I was really into the grunge music scene and Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, had recently killed himself. I’d idolised him and copied everything he did. I remember watching the news when that happened and thinking, ‘I’m going to go that way’. So the journey of depression, anorexia and [suicidal thoughts] began and carried on for three years. At my worst I got down to four stone, seven pounds. I used to be able to count my bones through my skin, and was ghost-like. Most people really didn’t think I was going to make it. Church was crying out to God for me. Cutting Edge was still going strong and really building in momentum, and the lead singer Martin Smith came up to me after one of the meetings and said, ‘I’m not willing to let you die.’ He said that he wanted me and my brother to come round every morning and pray with him. So we did, and lots of days I went there kicking and screaming! However, slowly things started to change.
...the thing that stopped me from falling over the edge each time was love
By then I was just finishing my GCSEs, and had worked really hard, as I was looking for another way of finding fulfilment. As I finished my last exam, I just felt so empty. I thought to myself: I don’t want to live. Walking back to my house, I was 100 per cent set on ending my life. I walked in and had the realisation that - having grown up in church and having that kind of God-awareness - I knew death wasn’t the end, and I guess there was still a little bit of fear about what that meant. I remember saying: ‘God, if you are there please do something, and if you can do anything with my life I’ll gladly give it to you, because I’ve made a complete mess of it. But if not, that’s it. Game over. I don’t want to carry on.’
God did respond. And it’s hard to explain, even to this day, what actually happened in that moment. Something much bigger than me came into the room, and knocked me to the floor. One of the first things I remember was that I started to cry. I hadn’t cried for years. I had just felt so numb and held everything in so much, and just didn’t want to show any emotion at all. Then I began to have an out-of-body experience: I was in a pit and every time I tried to crawl out I’d slide back down until in absolute frustration I gave up and cried out to God. Then a hand reached in and pulled me out. And I knew that I was standing in front of Jesus. I remember looking at his eyes and thinking, ‘You see me inside out’. And all that I could feel was love, like waves of liquid love hitting me.
And I will never forget what God said to me. He said, ‘If you’ll give me your life, I will take you on an adventure that will leave you breathless, leaving you wondering how on earth you could live the kind of life I have called you to.’ In response, I just said: ‘God, I’m in. If you can do anything with my life, I give it to you.’
I got up from that experience knowing that I’d been changed. In the weeks after, my body started to become strong. I had an incredible hunger for God’s word. Between May 1997 and Christmas of that year, I read through the entire Bible seven times and the New Testament an extra ten times. I really experienced what Romans talks about in chapter 12 about not being conformed to the world but being transformed by the renewing of your mind. It was like God took my brain and washed all of the rubbish out.
My life has been an adventure since then. I’m married to an amazing woman with four children and have travelled to over 40 countries around the world and seen God do amazing things. I now help to lead Arun Community Church, the church I grew up in, and also work as community development and organisation Links International. I won’t say that it’s been easy from that moment - there have still been times where I’ve had to fight and battle those old thought patterns – but it really has been incredible.
PT: What advice would you give to those battling anorexia, and those working with young people who are suffering from it?
JG: I would say that everybody is different, but for me the thing that stopped me from falling over the edge each time was love. I knew that my church community loved me and I knew that my family loved me. It would break my heart to think how much I was hurting them, but I knew that they were there for me, and that they accepted me no matter what. I knew that they were fighting for me when I didn’t have any strength at all to fight for myself. I am convinced that love never fails. Every time that you reach out to those people with love and pray for those people with love, God is doing something behind the scenes.
PT: Is anorexia is on the rise?
JG: It does feel like there’s been quite a big increase. Part of that may be that I am just more aware of it now. Maybe I just wasn’t as aware when I was a teenager. I don’t remember hearing about anorexia as a teenager, apart from when a girl on Neighbours had bulimia. With social media and with the stream of information we have, there is even more of a tendency for people to think they have got to look and act a certain way. I heard a statistic recently which said that 15-year-old girls are putting pictures on Instagram, and if they don’t get a certain number of likes within the first few minutes they take it down and put another one up because it’s all about how many likes you are getting. This all feeds into our need to look a certain way. And I think this has grown more for males than in the past. I think the number of men with eating disorders has increased.
PT: You’ve written a book called Follow – what’s it about?
JG: I’ve felt for a long time that I wanted to write my story, but always felt that I wanted to do that in the context of the bigger story; the story of Jesus: who he was and what it really means to follow him. What my life has been about since giving my life to God has been this attempt to really follow in his footsteps and understand what that means.
For a long time I’ve been convinced that we can only understand Jesus and really understand his teachings if we can understand the world that he lived in and the Jewish perspective on the things that he talked about. The book is essentially a call to radical discipleship by understanding what that meant in the world of Jesus. An example would be the understanding of the rabbi to disciple relationship. In our Greek-Western understanding we think of this like teacher and student, and the student wanting to know the information the teacher knows because they want to get the grades. In the Jewish context a disciple and rabbi were completely different; a disciple wanted to be exactly like the rabbi. Disciples wanted to know exactly what their rabbi thought, they wanted to act like their rabbi and they wanted to respond to life exactly as their rabbi would. That in itself is a radical reshaping; it’s not enough just to know what Jesus thought about stuff, we have to want to be just like him. And rabbis believed that their disciples could be just like them. When a rabbi said, ‘Follow me’, it was like they were saying, ‘I believe you can be like me’. Jesus believes we can be like him.
Joe Gisbey’s book Follow is out now.
