My life-changing prayer

“I shall not die but live, and declare the works of the Lord.” That verse from Psalm 118 v 17 could not be more fitting for Calum Mackenzie – a man who’s walked through the darkest valleys and come out with a renewed purpose and unshakable faith.

Calum, 47, didn’t grow up in a Christian home. His early life was marked by chaos: “My dad was a con-man, thief, violent football hooligan and serial cheat.”

But everything changed in 1984 when his father, jailed for fraud, picked up a copy of John’s Gospel. By the next morning, he had decided to follow Jesus. “Even through my six-year-old eyes I noticed that Dad suddenly stopped swearing, smoking, drinking and smashing the house up.”

His mum followed a week later, and home life began to stabilise. “The next ten years were mostly calm,” Calum recalls, but his teenage heart wasn’t in it. Despite countless youth camps, he’d made up his mind: “God could keep his religion to himself.”

Chasing dreams of acting and world travel, Calum seemed set on a different course. Yet on a Christian theatre tour aged sixteen, he had a radical encounter with God. “Two weeks into the tour I asked God to forgive my sins and committed to living for him.”

The transformation was real, but his mental health struggles persisted. By his late teens and early twenties, suicide attempts and spiritual exhaustion began to take their toll. “I’d constantly beat myself up for not praying or reading the Bible enough.” Eventually, he turned his back on his faith.

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