Dear Friends,
Welcome to my website.
I need to begin by answering a question for you: why write a book? And in particular, why write this one? All my life the idea of writing has been way down on the bucket list – some day maybe, too busy now with other things.
The events of 2013 when my only 38 year old single daugther was diagnosed with stages three and four cancer in her femur – osteosarcoma – and mets in both lungs, birthed this book. The eleven months that followed the diagnosis brought out in Shirley what you’d expect – fear, panic, horror, pain and suffering. Her words ring in my heart: “What’s it all about? Am I really going to die? Me, who only wants to serve and love God? Is He really going to let me die?”
But, as I stayed by her side, those months unfolded to me her growing faith and relationship with Jesus, a most beautiful thing it was my privilege, in all my pain, to witness. At one stage, Shirley said, “At times when I reached out to Him I felt Him holding my hand.” This was the Shirley who said she’d never been happy, who had fought to get out from under the cloud of a life-long clinical depression so dark that she even attempted suicide, and who threw out her Christmas tree in 2012 because she was furious with God.
I remember the feeling, my hand on her chest, as she breathed her last breath. I remember marvelling, “So gentle? Can a human life really end like that?”
The four months that followed were pain over my loss so deep that at times I physically squirmed in my chair. Then God gave me a dream: Shirley was running in a relay race and coming up to the baton exchange. To my surprise she passed the baton on to me.
She had so longed to do life “all over again – and do it right – and do itfor God”. In fact, in the last week of her life, to glorify Him she took herself off morphine to record her testimony on video. (Extracts from that incredibly powerful testimony are available to you on this website).
I saw clearly that to tell her story so that her dearest wish could be gratified was now my job – this was what baton had been passed on to me.
To write her story has been an incredibly difficult thing to do – a journey God wanted me to travel. I don’t think it has been the grief alone but also the power and wonder of such a story which He regularly illumined for me that has changed me forever. Now I humbly offer it to you so that you too can be raised up an blessed, if God so wills.
Thy
22 April, 2019