January 2015

Dearest D

I have decided to ask a few friends if they would be able to pray for Bink. Please don’t feel the slightest pressure: you have plenty to pray for already and this will probably be the 5,000th email in your Inbox...

But if you would like to be included please let me know and I will send some initial information and updates from time to time.

Dearest Anne,

No, the spring cleaning has been done and the total in my inbox is 1!

Thank you for this idea of praying for Bink. I would love to. I confess I am no powerful intercessor, but will be so glad to join you in praying for your lovely, currently-diverted daughter. I remember so well how I felt while [a mention of someone we both knew]. I would so LOVE you to be in that place one day too. But I will be a slightly haphazard pray-er I fear; it will be loving and meaningful when I do get down to it, but she will not be on a reliable list for every Friday or something. Did you and Rosie see her on Tuesday (after delivering, as ever, a fantastic Thought for the Day)?

When you do send the initial information, I'd be so glad if you basically assume I know nothing and start from scratch, so I am put properly in the Bink-picture. I will pray much better when I feel I know more, whereas somehow over the years one gets bits and bobs in conversation.

MUCH love as ever

D xxxx

Dearest D

Well, in a nutshell she is almost certainly in a far, far worse place than [name] ever was.

You ask about faith: she is so very, very ill that such questions are almost meaningless. She has had a mental illness since she was a young teenager, in the sense that depression is now classed as a mental illness; and in a very acute form. But in the last two and a half years she has gone truly mad in the conventional, old-fashioned sense. She has lost touch with reality, she can’t do anything, her life is nothing. She imagines bogeys. She disappears for months. She posts insane (actually, libellous) allegations to hundreds of people on Facebook... She is living with a friend who makes her far worse.

And then she comes home because we think my father is dying, and brings chess to play with him because that’s what they used to do when she was a child, and gives me a long, long hug and I think, It will be all right: it will.

It is desperate, D. Except that it isn’t desperate because, as Fleur keeps telling me, where there’s life there’s hope. She hasn’t killed herself so she can get better. She has wasted the most glorious years of her youth (and knows it) – or rather her dæmons have – but where there’s life there’s hope.

I will send you the first email, which I have sent out to just three friends. It will leave many gaps but to fill them would take an evening or half a lifetime or all the years she has been ill.

I am keeping it simple. We will start by praying for one thing. Item a). Then when God gives us a) we can give thanks for a) and move on to b). And so on down the alphabet, painfully, slowly until she reaches full health.

I no longer believe it as I used to when she was a teenager. But I will pray as if I believe it.

Thank you.

I’ve only written to a handful of friends but I might add a few more.

Axxxxx

Dear [Names]

Over the last ten days or so I have asked a few friends if they would be able to pray for Bink. To those who have said yes I am sending a brief email, approximately once a week, with a few things to thank God for and a few things to ask Him for.

Please do not feel any pressure whatsoever! I didn’t ask you immediately because you don’t know her well, you are busy people and you are already praying for your godchild. And it is excessively boring to be bombarded with “Olivia’s latest adventures in Thailand (don’t you wish your offspring were as adventurous as ours) and by the way this is a prayer letter really.” I’m afraid here will be no glowing, crowing successes thinly disguised as intercession.

But I remember how kind you have both been to her and concerned for her. If you would like to be included, please let me know.

See you soon, perhaps?

xxx