2. Thou God of Truth and Love

‘Regarding a hymn to represent my wife,’ Jonah went on. ‘I’d like to choose Thou God of truth and Love. It started out as a love poem from Charles Wesley to his wife.’

‘Really?’ Bethan noted this down. ‘I’ll get that checked out. It’s just the sort of titbit of information that our viewers may be interested in.’

‘But the reason I’m choosing it,’ Jonah went on, ‘is the second verse, which goes:

‘Why hast thou cast our lot in this same age and place,

‘And why together brought to see each other’s face?

‘It was such an amazing conjunction of circumstances that brought about our meeting that it’s hard not to imagine that it was part of some grand plan. We met in the A&E department one Friday night – she was doing her postgraduate medical training and I was a humble police constable. She had come up to Oxford from Bolton and I was still living with my parents in Kidlington. I escorted a couple of drunks to A&E after they’d got into a fight and injured themselves. Margaret patched me up when one of them turned on me in the waiting area.

‘It could so easily never have happened. Margaret could have gone to train at a different medical school. My parents could have moved down to Kent a couple of years earlier than they did and I might have gone with them. Margaret might not have been on duty that night. If I’d been more experienced, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to be caught off-guard and I wouldn’t have needed medical attention.

‘So we were very lucky to have met at all on that fateful Friday night back in November 1979.’

...