I’ve
always been a volunteer leader in the Girls’ Brigade and I’ve been a member since I was five. Before I started working there as a paid member of staff I worked for the British Standards Institution. I’ve never been quiet about my faith - everybody knew I was in the Girls’ Brigade, everybody knew I was involved with Church and everybody knew that my faith was very important to me. You take a bit of ribbing from work colleagues but you get used to it.
I was at church one Sunday morning in October 2004 when we sang the hymn 'Take my life and let it be'. Then in the evening service, we sang the same hymn again, but with a different minister. I happen to like that hymn so there was no problem.
At a mid-week meeting the same hymn was used again, so I started thinking, 'Take my life? Now which bit of it have you not got God? You’ve got all that Girls’ Brigade time, all my Church time - you’ve got everything about me. What haven’t I given you?’ The only bit that wasn’t Christ-centred was my work environment. That was the only thing I could think of.
So I mulled on it for a while.
The following weekend there was a Girls’ Brigade training course at a church in Birmingham. Up on the wall were the hymn numbers for the previous Sunday’s service and because I used to be in a choir, I always like to see what people are singing. So I sat there flicking through the hymnbook and there it was… 'Take my life and let it be'.
I was thinking, ‘Ok. You’re really shouting at me this time. What is it? What do you want? You’ve got to be more specific than this!’
At the end of the training session, our national director told us about a couple of job vacancies within the organisation: a development officer and a communications director. So I took the advert, read it, and thought, ‘So that’s it then. Communications director’. I’ve never seen a job spec that so closely mirrored what I think my skills are. It was like it was written for me. So I applied, had the interview, and that was that.
But at the time this was happening my mum was taken poorly, and on the New Year’s Eve of 2004 she was diagnosed with lung cancer. I mainly work from home, but I go down to the office in Didcot for two days during the week. So at that time, for the night in-between, I’d stay at my mum’s. Before then, we only used to see each other once every couple of months, so all of a sudden I’d got this wonderful job that I loved to bits and I was seeing my mother every single week. That carried on through the whole of 2005 until she died in the November.
It was just so God planned. One, that I’d got a great job and two, that I could be with my mum at a time when she really needed me.
