Tuesday 30th July 2019

Personal thoughts.

It really moves me, that I might have the opportunity to serve in this way. Serve the people, the prisoners, the children and families of those people, serve the Lord, Jesus said, ‘I was in prison, did you visit me?’

I’m nervous, and excited, and occasionally feel something like fear, but I move on.

What if it is possible? To intervene in these lives and change their day, their course? What if I can provide hope, and faith, and material resources to call provision?

It feels like the greatest opportunity of my life, to be able to be in a position to heal and help.

I have an additional idea, from an artists perspective. I will draw people, and perhaps take photographs, people I meet that I can return and see again. I hope to convert the drawings and photos into oil paintings, small paintings, portraits.

Then I’ll have an exhibition and sell them, and split the money with the subjects, so each painting changes the life of the subject. What then are people buying, the painting, or the change?

Both, and more. A different future for the subject, a change in the course of their life, a path that didn’t exist before, the creation of an alternate realism. Lives. Like Oscar, my friend Oscar Schindler, he bought all those lives. As Jesus did, paying with the coin of his own.

Legacy. None has created a more lasting and expansive one than Christ. Yet Him aside, Oscar, a legacy of thousands of lives, tens of thousands, a change in the course of history itself. And inspiration to how many? Me, for one. Millions of others, I’m sure.

What if it’s possible. To save a life, change a life, make change.

Power is the ability to make people happy.

I’m sitting in Kommune, a big open plan eating space in Sheffield. There’s an elderly man, sitting at a table in the middle, looks like he’s waiting for someone.

I must call my own dad and arrange to meet him. Perhaps it will make him happy.

A young man just arrived, sat down at the table with the elderly chap, his dad? His granddad? His dad I think. He does indeed look happier.