"The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and - the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word." - Hebrews, chapter 1 I’d like to try and paint three pictures in your mind, without PowerPoint, if possible! Please do bear with me. The first starts with a question! Have you ever seen a partial eclipse of the sun? You know, when the moon moves across the sun and it looks like someone’s taken a bite out of the sun itself. It’s usually a big thing, predicted for weeks ahead with lots of publicity and TV coverage. If the weather is good and it’s a clear day, you can see the passage of the moon really well. I remember looking at several over my life, one in Cornwall in mid-summer, which was quite amazing, one in the back garden here on the Wirral, six or seven years ago, and one when I was at school. The thing I recall most about that one was that the teachers distributed black plastic photographic film. We had to hold the film up against the sun
45 years ago my husband and I were working at a mission hospital in Nigeria. We came home during that winter as our daughter was getting married. For me it was a very special occasion as it was my stepdaughter’s wedding and I had never thought I would be able to be ‘Mother of the Bride’ at a wedding. it was a wonderful experience going to the wedding in central London and to the reception in Knightsbridge. It was a highlight in my life. A month later we found ourselves in a very different situation. We were returning to Nigeria but this time not by air but over land. A Land Rover ambulance had been donated to the mission and needed to be taken to Nigeria. We drove through France, took a long ferry across the Mediterranean to Algeria, and then across the Sahara desert. We reached the Nigerian border only to discover that there had been a coup and the border was closed. For 18 days we had to camp in the sand in no man’s land between Niger and Nigeria. From being at the mountaintop expe
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