A very special day with Bishop Pike

Bishop Eric Pike and Evangeline Class

Last yearI was invited by a friend to attend a retreat on Celtic spirituality. Since I needed a break and it was being held in a beautiful country side retreat, I went and it was there I met Eric Pike, who retired as the Anglican bishop of Port Elizabeth in 2001 and who now lives with his wife Joyce about three minutes from me. What attracted me at first to Eric and still does was his love of Jesus and the sense of Christ's presence you feel when you meet him. Added to that was the fact that he grew in in the Eastern Cape, home of our students, and was an evangelist to the iXhosa people there. To find someone like him who not only love the Xhosa people but speaks their language was such a treasure to me that I immediately asked him if he would speak to my class then. As it happened Joyce who excels at craft, was instrumental in getting the retreat ladies to agree to give us two beautiful praise tapestries for our rather bare classroom. We made it a grand occasion for them to come and hang and bless the banners and as Eric spoke then I could see how much that October class loved it. And so I prevailed on him to come to this class and he did today. Prior to this I attended his book launch as as I read the riveting account of his life what happy insights I saw. His book about Jesus describes how God led him through high school to teaching and through the loss of his first wife to cancer. And then in one of the surprising turns of his life, God called him to ministry and more improbably, to be an evangelist in the townships around him. In all of this, go gave him the courage to protest against the apartheid system and stand up with people like Desmond Tutu when priests were beaten and jailed. This cost him a relationship with his father, which eventually was repaired. I was so moved by the way in which the Holy Spirit touched his life and amazed that he and Joyce walked the Camino de Santiago at the same time my dear friends Ian and Betty Bain did. So today Eric came and conducted a service for the class and he spoke, they sang and he then prayed for each person individually with a blessing. It was a time of celebration and though I could not understand all he told them, I could see the powerful effect and their tears and his. It was a time of pure love, God's love for His precious children, so beat up by township life and its hardships who today felt His gentle but so pwerful presence of love.

What a very special day, and thank you Eric` and Joyce and you dear Lord Jesus!