Oh boy! What a week!

I worked hard the rest of Monday and on Tuesday preparing my sermon for this Sunday. This is quite a complicated text to handle as verses 3b and 4 are not in the good original texts. Nevertheless it all worked out in the end and by Tuesday night I was ready to roll. It was just as well as on Wednesday morning we received two items of shock news which were to change our week.

First of all came the news than an old Patos church member had died in João Pessoa and Liz and I would have to set off later for the funeral. The other was the horrific news of the Grenfell Tower 24-storey block of flats in North Kensington just a mile from where I was born and brought up - the whole area of which we know like the back of our hand. When it is somewhere close to home like this it really knocks you for six! I am very sad at the news and very angry. It is unbelievable that 24 storeys of flats can be burnt out so quickly! Outrageous! I am glad the Prime Minister has ordered an independent enquiry as heads must roll and lessons be learned. To spend millions on coating the outside of such a block of flats with inflammable plastic demands more than jail - it demands a lunatic assylum!

On Wednesday afternoon Liz and I left for the wake of Sister Euda in João Pessoa and arrived there in the evening to find it wasn't a normal wake but rather a service with the body laying there in the middle in an open coffin as one after another spoke for hours! I finally got to bed after midnight!

This morning the funeral service was equally long and participative. It was marked for 8.30 am and Liz and I finally had lunch at 2 pm pretty exhausted. I was asked to speak in the funeral service which I did. The whole event went off fine. It was just very long.

Tomorrow morning (Friday - 16th) I have an appointment here in João Pessoa with the surgeon who is to fix my hernia to set the date for the surgery. Then we plan to head back to Patos via Green Pastures. The Married Couples Fellowship from the Patos church spent a nice bank holdiday at Green Pastures today with Philip coordinating the event. On Saturday the youth go there. The place is in non-stop use. Tomorrow we have a group of scientists moving in for 3 days reasearch again with butterflies.