The Burnt Page
Tuesday, 16th February was Jenny's 62nd birthday. That day on page A13, the first page of the World Section of the New Zealand Herald, there was a large image of a badly charred page from a book. The caption beneath it read: ‘SALVAGED FROM THE FLAMES: A burned page from a Bible found in the remains of St Peters Church in Kinglake.’ It was clear that the caption writer was not a church-goer, for the burnt page was not a page from a Bible, but one from a prayer book It was part of the Order of Service for a day in the Church’s Calendar. The burnt leaf, singed around the edges, still had most of the text clearly legible. However it wasn’t any old day but a singularly significant one. It was the page for Advent Sunday, the first day of the Church’s year.

But there was more to that day, much more. That burnt page brought the whole saga full circle, for the Judgement sequences began at Advent in 2008. Water had gone to fire. The Air New Zealand Airbus A320 crash off Perpignan came on Friday, 28th November, the last working day before Advent. And I wrote my first paper about the meaningful coincidences surrounding that disaster on Advent Sunday. Jenny finished typing it at precisely 3.20 pm on her computer clock on that Advent Sunday. Remember the words of that Advent hymn, Hills of the North rejoice. The first verse ends with the line He judgement brings and victory.

Then the Alpha and Omega Prophecy and Coincidence Codes marked out the days to Christmas, almost like the windows of an Advent Calendar. And thus via all the signs on buses it had come back to the beginning, Alpha which is Omega. And was not that date not most telling for that image to appear in the Herald? For it was the exact 26th Anniversary of the Ash Wednesday fires which had claimed 47 lives in Victoria in 1983. It was called the Ash Wednesday fires because that year, the First Day of Lent in the Christian Calendar was 16th April. In church services around Australia, people were having the sign of burnt ashes placed on their foreheads, just as we did in Sydney Cathedral on Ash Wednesday, 21st February, 2002.. Was this all not intended to emphasise the Divine Hand in all of this?