I have loved writing letters all of my life and since being diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia my accustomed onward journey of preaching and teaching the Scriptures across the world has changed direction. I now have a remarkable opportunity to write more letters. Hence this website.

After diagnosis I was placed in an isolation ward for over forty days and one evening, in the wee small hours, I thought those to whom I have been privileged to minister or witness might appreciate knowing if what I had learned in the light worked in the dark. I got out of bed and wrote a letter for my church website. The response was so immediate and widespread it both humbled and astonished me.

Currently out of hospital in remission (I call it ‘permission’!) I am receiving chemo injections as an outpatient. I feel these extra days that the Lord has graciously given me are not given for private indulgence but should be used in all lowliness within the will of God to encourage others across the world. If I can by the work of the Holy Spirit inspire by my letters just one person who desperately needs inspiring then this website will have accomplished its purpose.

I particularly want to use the simile of a pen being as a lighthouse. Being brought up in Newcastle, Co. Down by the Mourne Mountains as a child I was always inspired by the fact that Dundrum Bay was swept every seven seconds at night by the famous lighthouse at St. John’s Point. Still functioning and now fully automated the lighthouse was first established in 1844 to guide ships safely into Dundrum Bay, which had a reputation for being a ship’s graveyard. Even Brunel’s famous Great Eastern ran aground in the Bay! The lighthouse always filled me with a strange sense of longing. If then my pen can bring some points of light as lighthouses have done for centuries, marking danger and pointing to safe entries to safe havens, I will be thrilled. Lighthouses have always been regarded as the archetypical public good, highlighting the fact that no one can be effectively excluded from using the good. So may it be with my lighthouse.

Outside the City Hospital Cancer Centre where I receive treatment my friend Ross Wilson has created a very memorable statue to the lady who established Belfast’s first nursing school. In her hand Ross has recreated the letter Florence Nightingale wrote to encourage her hand in God to go for it. When I see and experience the dedication of the nursing profession as I have done in Ward10 and at the Cancer Centre at the Belfast City Hospital I think of Dr Ward Hewe’s letter to Florence Nightingale who had spoken of her ‘unusual’ desire to ‘nurse’ wounded men in Crimea. He wrote:

‘My dear Florence,
It would be unusual and in England whatever is unusual is thought to be unsuitable; but I say to you… if you have a vocation for that way of life, act up to your inspiration and you will find there is never anything unbecoming in doing your duty for the good of others. Choose, go on with it, wherever it may lead you and God be with you’. Those were brave words in the world of the 19th century but I and millions of others have reaped the fruit of that letter in the wonderful nursing we have received when in dire need.

The very last recorded letter that John Wesley ever penned was written three days before Wesley died to the anti - slavery campaigner and British parliamentarian William Wilberforce. Encouraging him to take action for change he wrote ‘Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw sun) shall vanish away before it.’ Wilberforce lived to see the Abolition of Slavery Bill passed in the House of Commons three days before he died. Ah! The power of letters in the good hand of God.

How many times have I driven my car down the little side road to Anwoth in Dumfries and Galloway to the ruins of the old church building where the beloved minister, the Rev Samuel Rutherford left a controversial passage in his sermon one day and began to speak of Christ. So moved by what he said one of his congregation, the laird of Glandirston cried out, ‘Ay, hold it there, minister, you are all right there!’ It was also at Anwoth that Rutherford suffered the loss of his wife and two children. I have stood there silently praying and memories have come of Rutherford’s beautiful and stirring letters. Imprisoned in Aberdeen and stripped of his ministry in Anwoth for nonconformity by the authorities, he wrote letters to his congregation. He also wrote to individuals. ‘I see’, he wrote to Lady Culross, ‘that grace groweth best in winter.’ We still sing A.R. Cousins beautiful hymn ‘Emmanuel’s Land’ inspired by Rutherford’s letters and last words. ‘When we are dead and gone’, wrote CH Spurgeon, ‘let the world know that Spurgeon held Rutherford’s Letters to be the nearest thing to inspiration which can be found in all the writings of mere men.’ Now there is commendation indeed!

In 1967 Clyde Kilby edited and published Letters to an American Lady by CS Lewis. The great writer and academic had deep antipathy to letter writing; he certainly did not have the time for it. But he made time. In 1951 he began a correspondence with an aristocratic Southern lady who had fallen upon privation and into serious family problems. The letters, over one hundred of them, continued right up to his death in 1963. He even arranged a small stipend for the lady with his American publishers. Lewis believed that if only ten percent of the world’s population had holiness the rest of the world would be converted quickly. Those letters to that fortunate lady over twelve years show just that very holiness. 
 
I have been deeply involved in helping the Queen’s Foundation with the new CS Lewis Reading Room at Queen’s University, Belfast. In the room a friend of mine has donated a letter Lewis wrote to her when she was ten years of age, after she had written to him. It is the most important letter in the world on the Chronicles of Narnia explaining to the child that the Chronicles are Christian. What if Lewis had not bothered to write the letter? Christians would have been forever hearing people say that they were only surmising that the Chronicles were Christian!

Of course the greatest letter writer of them all was the much maligned, often sorely beaten, twice shipwrecked Apostle Paul. What would we do without his letters, which are part of the inspired Word of God? To the Thessalonians Paul wrote ‘I Paul, write this greeting in my own hand, which is the distinguishing mark in all my letters. This is how I write.’ In other words Paul wrote his letters in his own hand to distinguish them from forgeries. There are no letters more precious, nourishing and challenging than Paul’s.

So through the unbelievable international reach of the Internet I humbly launch my letters hoping they will always be as points of light helping you to discover and follow the Light of the World. This is the light that came from behind the sun that lightens every person that enters the world. These letters come from my heart to yours.

In the fellowship of the easy yoke,

Derick Bingham