Gift

I do not know how to thank the anonymous gift-giver, the 'well-wisher' who very kindly sent my family and I a voucher for a Tesco's shop, so I would like to say a great big thank you here. It could be you have followed our journey through the blog.

THANK YOU

At first I must admit I stared and I stared at your handwriting.

Perhaps you are one of the people I texted with an update of our situation, my goodbye and 'thank you for your friendship' which I really might have neglected a little in the recent busyness.

I then wondered if you were one of those ebayers who who have collected either plastic shiny toys that the children have surrendered to the great down-size or garden equipment that we can not take with us. Maybe. We had lots of opportunities to share our story with these people we would never otherwise have met and listen to their stories too: a man from Leeds who simply enjoyed the drive and collected a £2 tricycle, a woman expecting her second baby and thrilled with the nursery furniture. Tonight we're expecting someone who is even prepared to pay as much as ten pounds for a huge tree stump. Our computer monitor only raised one pound. There's no making sense of people's needs, all so individual.

You could be someone from one of the churches we have made relationships with, perhaps our sending church.

Ever the pragmatist, my husband told me not to stare too hard at that handwriting and just accept. It is free grace! And I was rather reminded of the way that as Christians we can have a tendency to scrutinise and intellectualise, complicate and struggle in acceptance of the great gift that is Jesus' sacrifice for us, that like that Tesco voucher, freely given, by that 'well wisher', we are invited simply to enjoy and live it out!

Bless you!