In 2005, Revd Harold Good OBE, former President of the Methodist Church in Ireland, was asked to be an independent witness to the decommissioning of IRA weapons in Northern Ireland, spending a week with IRA quartermasters and others, literally watching, minute-by-minute, as their weapons were put beyond use.

During the decommissioning process Harold gave everyone involved a copy of the prayer of St Francis: Make me an instrument of your peace; and many years later heard from one of the former paramilitaries that he’d continued to carry the card and say the prayer every day.

He describes early experiences in the US, helping out as an interim pastor in a black church in Indianapolis in the late-60s, and the humbling grace he found amongst the congregation as they insisted he continue to minister to them in their shock and horror at Martin Luther King’s assassination. And all he learned there he brought back to Northern Ireland, to a church on Belfast’s Shankhill Road, just as the violence, mistrust and fear of The Troubles was starting to escalate.

Harold carries a lifetime’s wisdom about how to rebuild relationships and trust, and what it means to forgive, and to be forgiven.