Falling rain, with its unrelenting patter and its own rhythm and tune of harder, softer, quicker and tenderer and more inward, has a charm that can hardly be compared to any other bringer of joy. A symphony with its own melody played on instruments like tin roofs, drain runnels, windows and overflow gutters. Whether it comes with cold or with snow, it always refreshes the hearts of everyone privileged enough to hear how it is sent from heaven, splashing down to earth.

Rain is a blessing. One that falls on the blessed. It feeds both the earth and the senses. It cleans and it renews. Sometimes falling rain becomes a judgement, when human beings and their deeds are weighed and found wanting and nature must suffer beneath the load. For God, who tests the heart, reveals through either the rain of grace or the rain of judgement where our motives and our sentiments have lost the blessed road.

After nine years, it is also Val de Charron's turn to come beneath the spotlight. What was the most obvious thing of all, the name itself, had been wrong for nine years. A French tourist is the one who pointed it out. Val du Charron is singular, and it ought to be written in the plural: Val de Charron. In this case it was easy. The spotlight only needed to shine. It did not have to search.

It is grace when God comes to lay His axe at the root of every notion and every sentiment in us whose fruit runs out upon the destruction of our physical and spiritual well-being. The little pain and discomfort we offer up for spiritual ripening and emotional insight bears no comparison to the long-term investment that is being made there where neither moth nor rust is permitted.

It is judgement when people come to stand before you with faces. But it is grace when God sends people with hearts across your path. Their hands serve, and their arms become wings when they must. Their prayers are a pleasing offering. Grace is grace, refined, on the day God's spotlight has finished burning through your life and all your efforts. The sheer realisation of how your impurities demanded the highest offering of all to make of you a whole human being — this tempers that thing in us that so longs for recognition, for compensation, for being put right.

Val de Charron, itself subject to a Higher authority, has been able to survive for nine years thanks to the generous hearts of people, businesses, schools and cultural organisations who understood that this paper wanted to be fed in grace because it too was born in grace and sustained from the hothouse of grace. The pen has been dipped in love with every issue. Love for a valley and its people, with their joys and their sorrows inseparably woven into the heart and soul of the paper. It is a deep love, but it is not blind. A love that, with every issue, keeps watch over the roots of the village, to serve its values and its sentiments and not to let them be undermined. Thank you for nine years that have made every month a demonstration of affection.

Groete Amanda Kreitzer