“For me, France has always been like one huge playground; the place you go to relax, spend time with your family, eat good food, soak up the sunshine and soak up a bit of culture too… Sometimes we treat holiday destinations like they are little bits of the New Perfect Creation to come, and in some ways holidays are like that, they do allow us to dimly glimpse what some aspects of life in heaven will be like. The attacks on Friday night in Paris are in some ways not a huge shock. We all know that there are people in Europe who want to do these things. However it is also deeply shocking because we are confronted with the realities of death, evil, the precariousness of life, the limited protection even a good government can provide, and we are confronted with the fact that no part of this world is heaven, not even classy and beautiful France… It is a badly broken country like all others, not as badly broken as it could be (by God’s grace) but desperately in need of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Our final destination is not France, and we are not on holiday. We are here to prepare to go back to Mayotte and exactly the same things could be said of Mayotte… Mayotte, as you know, is part of France, it is an overseas department. Please pray for Mayotte and for Mahorais people (people from Mayotte) who are living here in France. Pray that they won’t be ‘radicalised’, pray that they won’t be ‘secularised’, but pray that they would meet Christians, read God’s Word, encounter Jesus Christ and God would draw many of them to himself.”