After 17
years of marriage, I can truly attest that my wife, Annette, is the most
wonderful human being I have ever met. I could write about all the personal things
I adore about her, but that is my treasure; instead let me write about her
immense heart.
The world,
so beautiful is also brutal and this mysterious dispensation called life, is
complex, creative yet often cruel. The path of progress has brought immense
benefits and ease, but also a selfishness that consumes rather than cares.
Annette approaches
life so very differently.
She values
love above all else.
Her waking
thoughts and daily endeavours are centred in loving and serving others.
She is like
a morning songbird, meeting the dawn with a music of bright hope. Her first and
last thoughts are for others. Her manner is sincere and solicitous.
It is as
though she awakes with a replenished ball of golden wool and manages to weave
it wherever she goes. Amid the everyday humdrum, life glistens with her
presence. Every human encounter affords an opportunity for her to connect,
respect, appreciate and love.
Shop
assistants, check out staff, hair dressers, nurses, carers, builders, whoever
she encounters trust her with their secrets and their truths and even if 20
years pass, she will not have forgotten the tiniest detail.
Her willingness
to forgo any and every one of her own needs and wishes is unparalleled. Never
once have I witnessed her being selfish. Not a drop of alcohol during her
pregnancies. Countless nights lightly sleeping, with her babies on her arm,
watching every rise and fall of their chests, during early lung development and
asthma episodes.
Through the
years of their developing needs, responding to every outlandish request they
deliver.
Never has
anyone exhausted the well of her compassion.
However, not
alone for her children, is this extravagant love. The wider family are
similarly embraced. Her phone sounds throughout the day with a myriad of family
issues and concerns. Presently, when the majority of people would have placed
their Mum in a nursing home, without a qualm, Annette is tending to hers at
home.
Listening to
her nurse, wash and care for her Mum, with patient tenderness, in the early
hours and the late reaches, is to experience the presence of an angel.
And yet
again, her love is not for hers alone.
When those
in need knock, her heart has every sufficiency.
Even when,
one Christmas Eve, I returned home with a middle aged homeless
Jamaican woman, who stayed with us for three months, nothing had the power to
stem the flow of her gentle goodness.
Our door is an opening, in this stretched and severe
world, of mercy, and many avail themselves of the love they find here.
Annette is also wise. She has the eyes to see through
hypocrisy and pretence and can detect the disingenuous in a moment. The crystal
clarity of her goodness provides an open perspective and with it she can
navigate, well and safely, the shadows and evils of the night hours.
She is not interested in wealth, fame or material
possessions, only, in the ultimate, to cradle in her hands, that which brims
with life, love and goodness, and play her part in releasing this butterfly
beauty to a sadly dystopian world.
She is my world.
I love her.
ARCHBISHOP JONATHAN BLAKE IS INNOCENT-HE HELPED STOP A PAEDOPHILE
"You brave, courageous and wonderful man. To stand up for the truth in the face of suppression and oppression is truly an act of a pure heart."
