OCTOBER 2025.
For a combination of reasons, discouragement and anxiety decided to pay me a little visit this morning, but by noon they’d been sent on their merry way by a heart-warming testimony that left me encouraged and with a restored perspective: A woman going through a difficult season had been given a poem by her father. Her father had been given the poem while in hospital years before. The woman was so moved by the poem that she decided turn to Jesus. On a recent trip to Guernsey, she visited a local church and it was the pastor of that church who told me of her story. He also told me the name of the poet: Our dearly beloved Daphne, who attended NLC for many years and went to be with the Lord in 2020. I doubt Daphne envisioned her poems having such a profound effect, and yet, through her faithfulness, a woman whom she hadn’t met in this life was introduced to the eternal love of Jesus.
I’m encouraged by Daphne’s faithfulness, and I hope that you are too. Let’s all be encouraged to press on, even when the fruit of our labour might not be immediately apparent. After all, we never know how or when God might cause the seeds that we have planted or the vines that we have tended to burst into fruition. In the words of Psalm 37:3, let’s be encouraged to “trust in the Lord, and do good,” faithfully dwelling in the land for the time allotted to us, remembering that God is sovereign and that it is in Him and for His glory that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).
