Musings on faith and real life
Stories of mistakes I have made and wisdom gained
Reflections on this year’s Northumbria Community Easter weekend talks A few weeks ago a physio was chatting to me, talking about the impact of the pandemic on her and her patients. I was interested, because I was aware I had struggled to pinpoint the precise effects of COVID on me. ‘They are all so angry […]
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The chain chinks as I wiggle the key in the bike lock. My finders are clumsy in the December cold. I dump my bag in the basket, and I’m off, slowly gaining pace in the late afternoon fog. As I emerge from side-streets to turn onto the main road to the hospital, I become aware that this […]
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I lay shivering in my sleeping bag, muscles clenched against the cold. How was I ever going to get warm? 10,000 feet up in the Mountains of the Moon in a remote corner of Uganda, I wondered whether I would ever be warm again. I fretted about whether I would ever get out of those […]
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My great granny was awarded a degree by London University in 1905. The man she married (my great-grandfather) became Provost of University College London. Their daughter (my granny) won a scholarship to Girton College Cambridge and studied hard (though she couldn’t get a degree because Cambridge didn’t award them to women in 1932). Her husband, […]
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I stood in the middle of the African hospital compound and howled. I’d just received a message that my fiance could not visit that weekend. A tsunami of distress floored me. We’d endured so much during the last few months. We’d had the frustration of being posted to different hospitals. We’d suffered the lack of […]
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When I was a medical student, our teachers asked us asked to have a discussion about whether we were responsible for caring for our parents in their old age. To my shock, fully half of those present said they wouldn’t care for their parents when they were older. Some didn’t see why they should; others […]
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I let out an involuntary gasp as I turned over the price tag. This child’s ski jacket was unbelievably expensive. But of course it was. If someone needed to buy a ski jacket in this village high in the Austrian mountains, the shop owners could charge what they liked. A ski jacket when skiing was hardly an […]
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It was very hard to understand God’s guidance once I became depressed. My husband was convinced he was called to work as an overseas missionary doctor. When we met, he thought that in me he had found someone who would partner him in working overseas. We trained in cross-cultural mission, applied and set off to […]
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It helps no-one if you don’t ask for what you need We’d been in our new house in Uganda about a week when the hospital chaplain called. He’d come to make sure that I was going to behave as a medical superintendent’s wife was supposed to behave, it turned out. He’d been disappointed that my […]
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A candle in my treehouse 