Dear PipI do hope you don't mind me contacting you, I appreciate you're a very busy man, but your work came up in conversation today and after visiting your website I wanted to drop you a line.
You don't know me, I was just one of many people you met many, many years ago at two youth weekends organised by the illustriously titled 'Anglican Young People's Association' (AYPA) and you made a tremendous impression on me.
Two things I remember most of all - the first is that we are Beautiful Human People! The other was this.... on both weekends you brought a young man who, if memory serves, was called Patrick (I could swear his pic is on the website). Anyway, he'd been on a trip to South America and he told us some of the things he'd seen on that trip and sang to us. That was to be a pivotal moment in my life as just a few days earlier I'd experienced God's very real call to work for Him abroad. As immensely intense as that experience had been, I'd asked for two signs to confirm His request! He kindly obliged - once by a friend suddenly handing me a leaflet that week with the words 'Is God calling you to mission?' emblazoned across it, and then again during the time that 'Patrick' was talking to us. I did indeed go abroad for 6 months to Uganda. I thought I'd be going back to work there again for a few years but, of course, God knows the plans He has for us and I ended up marrying a Ugandan I had known even before I went there!
We will have been married 15 years next week.
All this was a very long time ago now, in fact next week I'll be 40!
I fell away from my faith for a couple of years but even through my failures and insecurities I've never forgotten your words, that I'm a 'BHP'.
So that's why I'm writing to you - just to say '"thank you Pip".
Sometimes we just don't know how, or even if,
we're touching someone's life.
You have been such a blessing to mine.
God bless you and yours.
With love in Christ
Amanda
