‘Praise God for big miracles’
A Mossel Bay woman, whose life story includes having a damaging hang glider accident and giving her baby up for adoption, is bubbling over, wanting to tell this story and believes it could encourage other people.
Heather Clarke has partial eyesight, is unable to work and battles to remember things because of the accident. Yet she comes across as radiantly happy and keeps talking of the grace and provision of the Lord.
“I’m a housewife,” she says with a beaming smile. I can drive if I have to, in an emergency,” she says. Spectacles cannot help her sight because she is simply missing part of her sight in one eye. “It’s just not there - it looks black from here to here,” she explains, holding up her hand and indicating from the middle of her eye outwards.
“I have to say things straightaway and do them straightaway, otherwise I forget.”
The hang glider accident took place when Heather was 21. “The first 10 years after the accident were the worst,” she said, indicating that healing took several years. Heather fell pregnant when she was 16. “I was a bit of a rebel. My father was a church minister and forbade me from seeing the father of the baby, which I’m glad about, because he wouldn’t have been good for me,” she exclaims. Sadly, Heather’s father died strangely, also in a hang glider accident - when she was just three months’ pregnant with her son, Emile.
She says it is only owing to the goodness of the Lord that she had total peace after giving up Emile for adoption when he was a baby.
“I just prayed for him over the years.”
Heather says that amazingly, everything that she had prayed for, for her son, came to fruition. “He had friends at school. He’s arty. He’s a goldsmith. He has a lovely wife.”
Heather has lived in several towns and cities in South Africa. She was chatting to a congregant at a church in Cape Town one day when the man suddenly turned as white as a sheet and said: “I need to speak to you privately.”
He told Heather he was the adoptive father of her son. Heather is amazed at the seeming miracle of this meeting. She says her son’s adoptive mother did not wish to meet her then and still, not yet.
On another occasion, when she was attending a different church, she was told someone wanted to get in contact with her.
When she got hold of Heather, the woman said: “I am married to your son.”
Soon after that, it was arranged that Heather could meet her son. “I wanted to see him on his own, first,” she said. “So we met at a coffee shop. He is such a handsome man,” Heather says proudly, shaking her head and laughing.
Her son Emile and his wife have four beautiful, healthy children. “So precious, so precious,” Heather says, showing photographs on her cellphone of Emile with the children.
Heather says she is extremely grateful that their birth dates are easy for her to remember and she reels them off happily. “That is just the goodness of the Lord,” she says.
Heather is married. She says that although she does not advocate teenage pregnancy at all, she is grateful to have had Emile because “when the Lord blessed me with Emile, He gave me peace that if I don’t have children with my future husband, I already have a son”.