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The courage of Grace Darling
Grace Darling was born in November 1815. Within a few weeks she was taken to live on Brownsman Island, one of the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumbria, in a small cottage attached to the lighthouse her father ran. In 1826 she and her family moved to the newly built Longstone Lighthouse. Grace was…
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A Great Rescue
Early on Saturday afternoon Matt, a good friend of mine, who is a member of his local cave rescue team, received an emergency call. A caver was seriously injured in the Ogof Ffynnon Ddu cave system in South Wales and needed urgently to be rescued. Matt responded immediately and joined the 300 volunteers from across…
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I shall behold his face
On 11 July Richard Branson travelled as a passenger on Virgin Galactic SS Unity 22, a supersonic rocket-propelled spacecraft, to the edge of space. This test flight lasted one hour and reached an altitude of 53.4 miles above the earth. It was the first flight with a full crew and was the culmination of 17…
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Now thank we all our God
Martin Rinkart was a Lutheran minister in Eilenburg, Saxony, at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, which was fought between 1618 and 1648. It is estimated that between 4.5 and 8 million people, both military and civilians, died in that war, most from disease and starvation. In some parts of Germany as many as…