Resistance Fighter

Contents

Foreword by Patrick McDonald

Introduction

1. ‘What are you going to do about it?’

2. Childhood

3. A ‘Nightingale Nurse’

4. ‘We’ve never come across a disease like this before’

5. ‘You are a resistance fighter’

6. ‘So you’re the AIDS lady!’

7. Miracles of transformation

8. ‘Bring home Jem and Susie’

9. Holding up their arms

10. Breaking the silence

11. ‘Is something special happening here today?’

12. An odious crime

13. ‘The trumpet has been blown!’

Postscript: ‘Disturb us, Lord’

Foreword

Someone described Susie Howe as Britain’s answer to Mother Teresa. You should read this book and make your own judgment.

What Susie embodies, and her story so eloquently conveys, is nothing less than God’s boundless passion for the lost, the needy and the broken. In meeting Susie, you will find, thinly veiled behind her, a God tirelessly working to reach out to his beautiful creation: a creation made in his very image, to be creative, fun-loving, fearless, free, powerful beings in charge of their surroundings and in love with their community, and yet a creation sadly steeped in strife, overcome by trouble and broken by grief.

It should not be so, and Susie has joined God in his mission to make a difference.

Joining God in anything can be somewhat daunting! It is an adventure for sure, but one that will change you, just as it has changed Susie. It is said that you become like the people you hang out with, and if we join God on a journey, we will tend to spend a lot of time with him. The side effect of that is change: fundamental alteration of an otherwise predictable pattern of fearful, self-centred and somewhat pointless existence to one that is extraordinary. What is so compelling about this story is that it reminds us of what an awesome God can do with fairly ordinary people – if we allow him, if we say ‘Yes’ and, like Susie, join him on the journey.

In days of old, that sort of thing was called ‘pilgrimage’; these days, one can pay much money or read weighty volumes in order to find ‘wisdom’, but the trick is to realize that life is found when it is given away to others, just as Jesus showed us on the cross.

Reading this book will encourage you, overwhelm you and, hopefully, spur you on to follow Jesus in reaching a broken world, to lay aside other crowding agendas and find healing for yourself and others, as you journey in the extraordinary company of saints.

Go well.

J. Patrick C. McDonald

Chief Executive of Viva Network and Senior Associate for Children of the Lausanne Movement