Only once or twice in a lifetime does someone come along who so pervades your thinking and moulds your perceptions that you cannot fail to be irreversibly changed and coloured by them. For me, Jim, you were one of those people.

You were the one that showed me that, no matter how deeply buried in the forest of neglect, physical, sexual and emotional abuse; how much the growth has been stunted, the tongue silenced and humanity nullified by the bindings of a cruel childhood, in JESUS there is a highway that leads to wholeness and self-worth.

You gently and patiently spoke the life and vitality of the Holy Spirit into my being, opened up the Scriptures, giving me a thirst for them that I pray fervently will never be slaked and you taught me the supreme privilege of crying out to God for my every need.

You took someone for whom oracy had shrivelled away and you taught them the power of the spoken word. You relentlessly made me open my mouth and repeat the phrases over and over again. You showed me how to make every spoken, read and written word and syllable be imbued with understanding. I balked at your regime; didn’t understand your persistence. Was the Newstead so important? I now know that you had a far greater prize in your sights.  I now know that, by the power of the Lord JESUS Christ, you were freeing a bird from its cramped cage, nurturing and encouraging it in its new found strength and releasing it to fly high, confident and secure in the ministries that God had ordained for it. I shall always be grateful to you for seeing God’s potentiality for my life and being obedient in conveying to me that precious gift of communication.

Thank you, too, for your unyielding honesty to me. You never condemned but always made it unflinchingly clear when you could not condone. I appreciated that. Your wisdom got me out of many dodgy situations. Thank you for laying bare the uncompromising nature of a life lived for JESUS, thank you for continuing to pray for me when I rebelled against that commitment and thank you for welcoming the prodigal home. May I be permitted to quote from the last letter that you wrote to me:

“… 1 John 1:3,7 exhorts us to ‘walk in the light’ if we are to have true spiritual fellowship with God and with one another. I am seeing increasingly that Christianity is NOT about ‘getting to Heaven’! – it is primarily about fellowship with God; and when we have that relationship right, we get to Heaven anyway!

The central issue in your letter, that you rightly emphasise, is of course the WORD. The Spirit stored in your spirit all those years ago, and the Scriptures are the Word of LIFE. When JESUS says (John 6:63), ‘The words that I speak to you, they are Spirit and they are Life’, we must recognise the inter-relationship of the Persons of the Trinity: the Father speaks the Word to us by the Son, through the Spirit. So all the Scriptures, OT and NT, are Spirit and Life; JESUS is in all His Word (John 5:39). What this has to say to us today is simply that our most important activity is daily Bible reading (not primarily Bible study). Unfortunately many believers neglect this today. They say, “I pray …” - but prayer is subjective; the WORD is objective, and it inspires to prayer!

So my counsel to you is, continue in the WORD! – as indeed you are doing, and you will be built up through it (Acts 20:32). The Lord bless you and yours and keep you all in His Will.”


You joked that you were the odd one out in a household of medics, but your prayers, words and quiet assurance brought their own gift of healing. I have been immeasurably blessed to have had my life touched by yours.           

Thank you, Jim.  I salute you.