This painting means so much to me because it is a reminder to me of God’s goodness.   The moment was in Broken Hill, Australia, on the day of my mother’s funeral, January 2018.  It has made me realise just how much a picture can prompt an emotional response.  Every time I look at this panting I feel a jolt of God’s goodness and love.

As no family was living in Broken Hill we had the sad job of dismantling Mum’s house and sorting through so many memories.  It was my very privileged job to sort through Mum and Dad’s huge collection of photos.  Over and over I found photos of us siblings all lined up eldest to youngest throughout our lives.   I thanked Jesus that we have been blessed as a family to be able to do that.  So many times over those four days when we were all together, we would stop and cry and hug each other.  With both Mum and Dad now having died it was the end of an era for our family, yet somehow in God’s amazing goodness we were drawn together in this sweetness of a moment in time.  A moment of sadness and love.

I loved painting this portrait and I cried and prayed and laughed throughout the whole experience.   Perhaps my favourite moment was painting my big tough rugby loving older brother who is wearing his wife’s sunglasses because he had forgotten his, and we wanted to all match.   I wanted to shine God’s goodness at the funeral so I wore all Mum’s sparkly jewellery, and sparkle I did!  In so many of those old photos of us all we were sitting on a ledge of some sort but at the top of the Broken Hill mine site in C40 degree heat the only fence was a thin metal and mesh one.  So we all climbed on with much laughter and a wee bit of anxiety that the fence would collapse under the combined weight of five not so slim adults.  I think that is also captured in the painting – a slight tension as we each thought of how we would explain to the ambulance driver how all five of us broke our legs at the same time.  But no, disaster was avoided and the precious moment was captured.   God is indeed Good!