Nia’s Testimony
My name is Nia and I’m a professional cellist. I’ve been in London since 2018 when I came here to study, I live in East Finchley and have been at Kensit for about a year.
I was raised in a Christian home and grew up near Swansea in South Wales hearing the stories of the Bible and going to church regularly. When I was 14, I went away to boarding school in Manchester and, as is often the case for teenagers, I started to distance myself from Christianity, being easily influenced by my peers who weren’t Christians. I spent the best part of 10 years very disinterested in faith. It wasn’t that I ridiculed it or necessarily doubted it, but I just avoided thinking about it.
In 2022 my parents and brother Rhys started attending a church with solid biblical teaching, and I noticed their faith making a positive difference on their lives. Initially I thought “that’s nice for them” and that it was something I would figure out later in life, but I still observed them quietly from a distance. Once a year for a few years while I was a student, I also bumped into an old school friend who had become a Christian as an adult. I didn’t think much of this at the time other than it being nice to see an old friend, and I remember thinking it was “nice for him” that he had found the Christian faith. My own journey of becoming a Christian was a bit of a slow burn. It was a combination of conversations with this friend and observing my family and attending church with them whenever I was home, that started to get me thinking about Christianity. Obviously, I now know this was God using the people around me to work in my heart when I had absolutely no idea.
In November 2024 I bumped into the same old school friend again and he invited me to a carol service at his church. At the time I thought “yes why not, I love singing carols, I’m sure it’ll be nice around Christmas”. When it came to that evening, I actually couldn’t really be bothered to go, but thought I probably should because my friend was kind and it was nice of him to have invited me. I went along and had a nice time, but listening to scripture that I’d heard time and time again around this time of year, and having it actually make sense to me was something I really didn’t expect. I really believe God opened up my heart in this moment to receive Him. I started to read the Bible and ask friends who I knew were Christians about Jesus, because I just had to know more about Him. I read both the gospels of John and Luke in two nights because I was so intrigued about Jesus, who I had grown up hearing about but had never truly understood what He did for us. I finally understood and believed why we need to repent of our sins and trust in the Lord Jesus.
That Christmas I went to church with my family and asked them lots of questions while I was home with them, and in the January started to attend my friend’s church weekly. Reading the gospels helped me to understand a lot more about Jesus, and also how God works in our hearts to reveal Himself to us. In Matthew 13:13, when Jesus is teaching in parables, He says, “Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.” Reading this verse, I was amazed because I recognised this to be true about me until that carol service when my eyes had been opened. I’d heard scripture so many times but only now did I understand and believe why we need to be saved, the need to repent of our sins and to live my life following Jesus.
