An Adventure in Ministry

  Very soon, people in the UK will be celebrating Mother’s day. This day is difficult for many people, for many reasons. There are those who no longer have their mums, mums who no longer have their children, women longing to be mums, those whose mum’s weren’t always what they should have been, to name just a few.  For me Mother’s day has been a challenge for many years. I am step-mum to three beautiful women and I first really realised how tricky it can be when I overheard two of them having an argument in church one Mother’s day about whether they should give me a gift if it would upset their mum. This difficulty around mothers day grew more complicated as year after year I didnt hear the patter of feet and that little voice called me mum. When my mother in love (my mother in law!) was promoted to glory there was an extra layer of grief. Now as an adoptive mum, the joy of motherhood on mother’s day is tinged with grief as there is a mum out there grieving the loss of her daug...

  Re cently I was watching my beautiful daughter playing and reflecting on our journey to becoming a family. At age three my beautiful little girl is still not quite walking yet and has few words beyond Mumma, Dadda, Good girl, the wiggles and cake – obviously the most important words! You see our perfect daughter has Down Syndrome, which means that she takes a little longer to do the things that come so easy to others. I smiled as she managed pulled a photo of her nana out of her photo bag, signed her name and clapped herself in congratulations and pondered on the truth that although this wasn’t what I had planned when I began my journey to become a mum, it was full of the golden threads of his grace.   As many of you know my journey to motherhood wasn’t an easy one, in fact I became the step-mother to teenagers before we even tried to extend our own family! We journeyed through years of trying to extend our family but never getting anywhere. Eventually in 2018 we decided t...

A few months ago our lives were turned upside down (in an utterly gorgeous and beautifully fulfilling way) when finally, after over five years of praying, waiting and believing we brought our beautiful adopted daughter home to her forever family. It has taken me  a while to get used to the title of ‘mum’ and to realise that those aisles in the supermarket that were once too painful to walk down are now the ones I frequent the most!  Having now settled down with miracle I have begun to ponder some of the things that God has taught me through our journey to grow our family. They are lessons that I am still  learning daily and there are burdens that are still very real. I am painfully aware that  although I now have the most perfect little poppet to call me mum, I have never seen a positive pregnancy test, never given birth to a baby and I’m still know as someone with unexplained infertility.  Over the next few week I would love to share 5 th...