19th January, 2007

DAVID ADAMS

Paul Daniel knows all about hate. Up until the beginning of last year it was, he says, one of the driving forces of his life.

But these days the 28-year-old professional bull rider also knows what love means. Last year he found Jesus Christ and since then, his life has been transformed.

Gone is the hatred, the swearing, his addiction to smoking, his problem with alcohol. He has changed, as he puts it, “from black to white”.

HANGING ON: Cowboy Paul Daniel says that it was eventually through his bull riding that God was able to reach him.   “Living from one day to the next, looking for a quick and easy way to get rich, living each day in a can of VB, trying to figure new ways of hiding my problems from everyone, having no future and not caring about life and hoping it would end,” Daniel says of his life prior to meeting Jesus. “Unfortunately it's a life that to many people lead...”

Daniel spent the first 14 years of his life in Traralgon and then two weeks after his fourteenth birthday, he told his parents he was either leaving school or running away.

“So they sort of had no option and so yeah, off I went to Melbourne to work full-time at 14 years old,” he recalls.

During the next 14 years, Daniel travelled across much of Australia picking up various jobs, getting in and out of trouble with police and, in his words, “just existing”.

“Living from one day to the next, looking for a quick and easy way to get rich, living each day in a can of VB, trying to figure new ways of hiding my problems from everyone, having no future and not caring about life and hoping it would end,” he recalls. “Unfortunately it's a life that to many people lead...”

While Daniel had been involved in bull riding as an amateur for much of his life - he can recall riding calves from the age of five, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that he decided to turn professional.

It was that decision which led him to a bull riding school run by champion bull rider Eddie Fisher in 2004. Fisher, who has been a professional rodeo competitor for more than 20 years, had won a swag of state and national titles including four Australian Professional Rodeo Championships and an All Round and Bull Riding Championship in Canada.

“I’d heard about Eddie for a few years he got inside the top 45 in the world and then when the opportunity came up - I saw an advertisement for the Eddie Fisher bull riding school - I jumped on it and thought yep, I’ve got to go there, I’ve got to meet this guy.”

Daniel says that while he can’t put a finger on exactly what it was about him, there was something different about Fisher, who he found out later was a Christian.

“He was just a calm, straight-talking fellow and I just thought this guy was unreal,” he says. ”It wasn’t the way he talked about bull riding, it was the way he talked about life and how your attitude in life makes you a better bull rider (and) how the way you conduct yourself outside rodeo and in your normal day to day life affects how you ride and I was just absolutely amazed how this guy talked.”

Daniel says that when he went to Fisher’s school, he was a raw bull rider - “I just tried” - but “when I left, he’d ironed out all my faults and I was able to take it to the next level”.

Looking back now, he says it was certainly God who led him to Fisher, adding that such was his passion for the sport that it was probably “the only way that God was going to reach me”.

While he had once prayed with a Christian friend many years before, his conversion experience didn’t come until last year when he was at a bull riding event in Corryong, northern Victoria. He had been speaking to Eddie Fisher after the event and started asking him questions about how he had found God.

In a written testimony, he recalls asking Eddie if he was damned for life because he had damned God.

“Eddie’s reply was instantaneous,” he writes. “’Jesus loves you no matter what your history is and still loves you no matter what you say or what you have previously said...ask Him yourself, He’ll tell you’.”

He was probably still pondering the discussion as he walked back to his campsite and it was then that five men attacked him. Apparently provoked by an earlier incident in which he had assaulted a female spectator a week before, Daniel says the five men “pulverised” him within an inch of his life, leaving him a “broken, bloodied heap”.

“I remember getting to the stage where it didn’t hurt anymore, I was just hoping they’d hurry up and kill me,” he says.

After they’d finished, he staggered back to his camp and there uttered the prayer that would change his life.

“When I laid down that night, I laid down to die. I didn’t want to wake up. So I asked for proof from God, pretty much.”

A COMPLETE ABOUT FACE: Daniel says encountering Jesus Christ one morning changed his life "from black to white".

His prayer contained three requests: that God prove Himself to him; that He take away his addition to smoking; and, thirdly, that He cure Daniel of his alcohol problem. But Daniel said he told God that if he answered just one of the three requests, he would serve Him for the rest of his days.

He recalls waking up at about 7.30am with the word Jesus on his lips. A few moments before he had a vision in which Jesus had revealed Himself.

“It’s such a hard thing to describe,” he says of the vision. “It was so dark and it was raining and I was on my knees and I was soaked and I was cold and I was crying and when He walked towards me, the rain stopped, the clouds parted, the sky just turned blue and the sun came out. He was just the most amazing thing I could see.”

He says Jesus was wearing the “most beautiful garment I had seen”.

“It was just not of this earth. Every single stitch was hand-stitched and the seams were made from pure gold. I remember trying to look at his face but I couldn’t because there was just so much light...It wasn’t burning my eyes but I had to shield my eyes because it was just a blazing light. When He reached out and took my hand and I walked off with Him, that’s when I work up to a new world.”

His first request already granted, on waking Daniel, who had been smoking since his was 14 and was at stage using a packet of tobacco a day, reached for his tobacco bag as was his habit.

“I reached for it and rolled it, put to my mouth and lit it and it was just the worst pain I’d ever felt,” he recalls. “If you can imagine just walking up to a fire and sucking in fire - that’s what it was like. It was pure hot coals going down.”

Thus ended his smoking habit. And it was based on that experience that Daniel says he hasn’t been game to touch alcohol since.

“I have not touched a drop of alcohol, I just keep thinking, ‘Man, if I touch alcohol, I’ll bet you it will be like acid or something’.

Daniel says this in the six hours between when he prayed and feel asleep to when he woke up, his entire life had been completely turned around.

“It was all instantly just gone - all them horrible things about my life were just completely gone,” he says.

Two weeks after his encounter with Jesus, on Good Friday, he walked into a Peninsula City Church in Frankston, Melbourne, and listened to a sermon after which he met with a member of the congregation and prayed the sinner’s prayer.

While it hasn’t all been easy since - he recalls, for example, that for two weeks after he was baptised he went through “sheer war with the Enemy” - he has never since doubted God.

Daniel says his mother Kath, in particular. had been overwhelmed by the change that had taken place in his life since last April.

He says while his parents often blamed themselves for what had happened to him, they were loving and caring people.

“It was just not their fault, it was just something else that was in me.”

While he says his primary motivation for bull riding used to be about money, that had changed and he now saw his participation in the sport as a “gift from God”.

“And my gift back to him is how I use it so I’m able to look at bulls - an animal I love - and rodeo and other things I love and have that as my job and be able to get a message about Christianity and God out to people through bull riding. So I’m very lucky.”

Others have already recognised his potential. Christian clothing maker 1 More now sponsors him after owner Adam Mazzocchetti heard Daniel speaking on a Melbourne-based Christian radio station, Light FM, in September last year.

Mazzocchetti says Daniel was so enthusiastic during the interview that he wanted to know more about him.

“I was quite impressed with his ambition, his direction, him being a Christian and also his profession was quite intriguing,” he says. “We caught up and I was blown away...”

Currently ranked 50 in Australia, Daniel did get as high as 16 in the Professional Bull Riders (PBR) Australia Tour before he was injured a couple of times last year and missed as many as 12 out of the 20 rounds in the national competition.

His goal this year is to get into the top 10 and the hopefully move on to the competition in the US the following year.

Alongside his bull riding, Daniel is these days speaking at churches and other groups.

“I’ve really recognised it as what the Lord wants me to be able to do - to help people that way...” he says. “When people look at me they see this big, tough bull rider whose not afraid to bow down and worship Jesus and who’s not afraid to live by God’s principles...The Lord is using me to tell those people that they dont need to just exist, there is a way out.”

LINKS

~ www.myspace.com/christianbullrider

~ View Paul’s promotional video at http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1710242890

~ www.1more.com.au

Paul Daniel is available for speaking engagements. For bookings contact Adam Mazzocchetti at 1More Promotions at adam@1more.com.au.