ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The Man Under the Hood

The concept of X-spozitor suits shy souls down to the ground, of which I am chief!

I was born Mark Darren Patterson on Sunday, 12th September 1971; carefully selected names that my mother thought couldn’t be shortened, as she hated such things. So, you can imagine how overjoyed she was when I was nicknamed ‘Paddy’ at the tender age of eight. And that was how I was known for my entire youth, a name, incidentally, many of my old friends still know me by.

Raised in the seaside town of Bangor, North Down, which, in fairness, was shielded from much of the ‘Ulster Troubles’ witnessed by other places in Northern Ireland in the 1970’s, I grew up an attentive child. Abandoned bags were never to be touched and treated as ‘suspect devices’; vehicles parked where they shouldn’t be were viewed as potential car bombs; no toy guns or fireworks were allowed in the Province; and the Army, of course, were often seen patrolling the streets.

It was a time of social paradoxes, when the reality of terrorism co-existed in a very religious society. Churches of all denominational persuasions were well-attended, especially those of a Presbyterian nature in my neck of the woods. Back then, my family’s church, Trinity Presbyterian, wasn’t the biggest in Bangor, but still had over seven hundred families on its books.

I was baptised there in 1972, attended the Sunday services, week in, week out, as well as the mandatory Sunday School. However, in my early teens, I grew disillusioned with the forms and routines of the ‘visible Church’ and drifted away. That came to a sudden halt when I surrendered to the fact that there was a God in heaven and I wasn’t living a life worthy of my Maker. I was barely sixteen years old when I came to this realisation, and thought it was enough to passively hold to this conviction and keep a low profile.

That was my state of affairs for a couple of years … quietly and timidly living my life until I was challenged that the Christian life was a life of witnessing. So, I volunteered to help out in a local Christian drop-in centre/coffee bar and within a year, I started preaching on the streets. That was in the August of 1990, a month shy of my nineteenth birthday, which eventually propelled me into the Christian Ministry in 1997.

Since those days, the path I have walked along has resembled something of David’s Twenty-Third Psalm. At times, I’ve been literally made to lie down in green pastures; been led beside still waters and refreshed, but I have also walked through some dark valleys. Regardless of circumstances, I have known what it means to be defended by the LORD’s rod and rescued by His staff. His ‘good, covenantal loyalty’ has indeed been following me over these past thirty-nine years, which has brought me to a new phase in my life.

So, after twenty years of being in the wilderness, so to speak, the launch of this website presents the fruit of those hidden years. May the Spirit of Christ use my written or spoken words to glorify GOD and thus help all exposed to them to live joyful lives ‘in Christ’.

© 2026 X-spozitor All rights reserved

"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path."

Psalm 119:105