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Good morning. The third and final series of Happy Valley concluded last night and with millions of viewers I have been gripped by it. For me it’s been a powerful story of beauty and brokenness in lives, families, and communities embodied in Sarah Lancashire’s Police Sgt Catherine Cawood, who after her daughter Becky’s suicide, raises her grandchild Ryan, supports her recovering addict sister Clare and confronts rapist and murderer Tommy Lee Royce. The brokenness is in poverty, drug abuse, violence and organised crime, resulting in abusive, and damaged people. Yet the beauty of compassionate love, humour and courage is found in the midst of this brokenness and matched by the visual backdrop of the stunning Calder Valley. There is beauty also in the yearning for justice and hope of redemption. Writer Sally Wainwright revealed that the series title Happy Valley comes from the name given to the area by some police officers because of its issues with drugs. She continued, ‘It’s…very much about the dark side of life, but it’s also about how within that people always find ways of being funny and warm and human.’ Perhaps the best-known Psalm of the Old Testament also speaks of a valley. Psalm 23, The Lord’s my shepherd, speaks of walking through the valley of the shadow of death. It’s a rare Hebrew phrase - meaning a very deep shadow or total darkness. In the midst of such darkness, the Psalmist however fears no evil saying, ‘for you are with me’. This phrase is emphatic, God saying ‘I am right here with you’. In recent years civil war and ethnic hatred have cast deep shadows across the mountains, valleys and plains of South Sudan. Over the weekend, the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland have been there on a pilgrimage of peace urging people to reject the ‘venom of hatred’. One of my friends who studied here in Durham was the late Francis Loyo, Bishop of Rokon. He felt God’s call to be with his people in South Sudan with the result that he was imprisoned, tortured and for many years lost touch with his family who fled into the bush. When militia swept through a village with rape and murder, Bishop Francis would go in after them, binding up wounds and burying the dead. He founded schools and an orphanage convinced that that evil will not ultimately triumph. I believe that God is never absent in the darkness. Beauty despite the brokenness of human beings will always endure. And I will miss glimpsing that beauty in the stories of Happy Valley on Sunday evenings!