Poets

Francois Hoon was born on the 18th of January 1982 in Pretoria, South Africa. He grew up in a middle-class suburban household and a reformed traditional Christian culture. Christianity had for a big part of his life been a good set of intellectual beliefs and morals to hold onto as a good way of life. A bunch of nice but not really very practically realistic stories in a Book that you read and then try to get a lesson from for your life. In 1996 at the age of 14 he went to a youth Christian gathering and for the first time experienced the God of the Bible to be alive, and to be a Person with whom individual and personal interaction was possible. He gave his life and his heart to this God and this new interaction caused a new source of life and joy to well up inside of him. Nine months later, in March 1997, he wrote his first poem, The Rose, to a girl he had a crush on. In that same year while praising God once, he received in a brief moment a vision from Him, which he felt compelled to express in writing. This was the first time he felt satisfaction in poetic expression, and it gave birth to his second poem, and the one to usher in the rest, One Night. Through highschool the guidance and support of an English teacher encouraged him to continue writing and to further explore the art and expression of poetry. It was in these years that his love and appreciation for classic poetry came to fruition, and poets like Matthew Arnold, William Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas opened up new inspiration for him. His first poem to be published in the school paper was Lying Love in 2000. In 2001 and 2002 he studied English, especially prose and poetry, at the University of Pretoria as part of the degree Multimedia. During these years he studied poets such as Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Frost, John Donne and William Wordsworth as well as others that influenced his writing. In 2001, after being baptized in the ocean a day before his 19th birthday, God revealed Himself to him in ways that challenged and built up his faith and his trust in Him and in the practical realness and applicability of the Bible and of the power of God. He awoke one night coughing heavily from Bronchitus he was suffering from, and after feeling lead by God to pray for this he was healed completely within half an hour. These revelations of Gods power continued through the years following and Francois' devotion to Him grew in likewise fashion. During his third year at University he realised that the course he was studying was not going to lead to a lifestyle and a life that he wanted, and he eventually pursued a career in professional tennis in 2003. Earning no money pursueing this, he decided to become a tennis coach after a bit more than a year, having reached a national singles ranking of 133. In 2006 he decided to answer God's call on his life for full-time ministry, and joined a youth adventure camps ministry in Pretoria for a year. In recent times authors such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis has served as an inspiration for his writing. From an early age Francois Hoon has had an appreciation and a love for beauty and believes that poetry shouldn't merely be the expressing of self, but should be a fusion of expression and beauty, and should stir something inside of a person that causes him to see and to seek something of a greater meaning and of an ultimate beauty. In 2007 he travelled around the world as part of The Global Challenge team, journeying to countries and places across the globe and ministering God's love, compassion and Gospel to people and to places in need of His touch and of His truth. In 2008 he started a ministry called Megiddo Ministries and went on an outreach to Israel and to Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the moment he is preparing for an outreach to South America in 2010. (See http: //megiddoministries.blogspot.com)