WEIRDLY EXCITED BY NEWS OF AN IRON

It's like one of those puzzles. A man looks at his phone one evening and sees he has a message informing him that he 'no longer needs to buy an iron or an ironing board'. He immediately leaps up and celebrates as though he's won the lottery. Why?

Nope, it's a perfectly normal iron (at least I think it is) and there's nothing special about the ironing board. Neither am I freakishly excited by the thought of smoothly pressed shirts or clean-lined trousers. It's not that ironing equipment is expensive or difficult to find, and I'm not somehow suddenly betrothed by text message to a woman who loves ironing almost as much as she'd love being married to me. It's none of that.

It's my friends, Winners and Teebs (and their daughter) who've just been told they've finally got their visas to move to Africa.

I reckon they're over the moon! I asked Teebs (who is Zimbabwean) the other day, what a perfect night would be for her, and she said sitting out on the moonlit verandah overlooking the Serengeti. Winners too has been longing for the adventure and won't mind me telling you how hard it's been to wait for it over the last year or so. Both have believed that God was planning on sending them there all along, and against all the odds, against all the people advising them to settle here in the UK and work out jobs and futures, He made it happen. 

That's what I was celebrating - the breakthrough in the hardest of times, the victory at the end of the story that gives me hope for countless other stories. I punched the air and thanked the Maker.

Oh, ages ago, Winners told me I could have their iron and ironing board if ever they got to go Zimbabwe to live. I tell you what, every time I steam it across a shirt or press a pair of trousers, I'll smile as I think of Winners and Teebs, sitting on the verandah, listening to the crickets in the moonlight.