Protection

When Lisa-Lee was 10 years old there was a fire in the family home; her father got very drunk and decided to cook, he put the chip pan on and fell asleep, the chip pan caught fire and the whole house ended up burning. This was the night that Lisa-Lee knew her parents didn't care about her. Lisa-Lee was usually awake, looking after her younger sister and taking care of the home when her parents were drunk, but this night she fell asleep herself, her father was the first to wake, and he woke the mother and she got the children out, they never called Lisa-Lee, she woke up as they were leaving. Lisa-Lee says, "I saw them leaving, I can even remember how disappointed they looked and sounded when they realised that I had woken up, my father told me that we had to go because there was a fire".

Lisa-Lee was in the same room as her father, she was in full view of the fire, but she saw no flames, everyone was chocking with the black thick smoke, but the smoke had no affect on Lisa-Lee, she could see everything in the room quite clearly, it wasn't like smoke, it was like a type of mist and the room was very brightly lit, this was strange but it made Lisa-Lee feel calm, something was protecting her. Lisa-Lee didn't realise this at the start, but she later on realised that she felt something there protecting and comforting her.

Four or five years later Lisa-Lee went through a very religious phase in her life, she went to church everyday, made sure she was properly baptized, she even went to confession once a week, Lisa-Lee says that she was practically a walking saint. This deep religious phase lasted a good few years, but as with everything else in her life, her parents hated this phase, they constantly laughed and made fun of her, everytime Lisa-Lee said or did anything that was slightly unchristian, in their view, they would throw all sorts of religious quotes at her and tell her how useless she was, but as she pointed out, "just because I'm going to church doesn't mean that I have to act like a saint, I'm a practising catholic nothing more, just trying to learn how to be a better person".

Gradually they stopped making fun, but Lisa-Lee did worry that the only reason why she was attending church so much was to annoy her parents, she said, " If my parents hated something that I did, I would make sure that I did it more and more and more, one of my problems in life was that fact that I am hugely stubborn, I am incredibly obstinate".

Over time and mostly to do with work, Lisa-Lee's religious phase did die down slightly, but Lisa-Lee went through stages, when she didn't mind missing church, but after a while she would hugely miss it, and she would begin to attend regularly; although she has found the people in a church difficult to deal with on times, she says that she would go through phases of being ill but no one ever called her to see if she was OK, they just left her, there is also a lot of bickering amoung different groups of a church and this irritates Lisa-Lee, she has enough of her own problems without having to deal with petty little issues in a local church.

Lisa-Lee says that although she has met a lot of nice people in church, she has mostly met very judgemental people, who gossip and put people down and Lisa-Lee wants nothing to do with that. The problem, according to Lisa-Lee, is that most of these people have no life and they're trying to show people that they are good because they go to church, going to church makes them feel superior, they're trying to look and feel important, but Lisa-Lee says, " it is good to go to church and believe in something, but it's more important what you do when you leave the church, I want to look back in so many years time and see that my life did something, I want to be of some help to others, I want my life to be useful, that can only happen by me going out into the world and making a difference, the smallest of things can help".

The one thing that Lisa-Lee knows from her religious phase is that, she understood that she has always felt a presence in her life, something guiding her, and she realised when she started going to church that she had a good understanding of lots of things within the catholic faith, although some people would class Lisa-Lee and her faith as being a fast food catholic, meaning that she's only interested in certain things within the faith, there are lots of things that she doesn't like or agree with, so she just ignores them. Lisa-Lee says, " Faith is good but in small doses".