It’s a great privilege to be alive to attend this congregation of God’s people,” delegate Fidelia Belta Queen Uche says. Uche, a lecturer and director of the Entrepreneurship Development Center at Captain Elechi Amadi Polytechnic (Port Harcourt Polytechnic), is attending the Session as a delegate from the West-Central Africa Division. No stranger to the United States, she also attended the San Antonio Session in 2015.

Uche’s husband passed away four years ago. The two had been married for more than 30 years and had raised four children together. She is proud of her family — two of her children are medical doctors, one is an accountant, and another is a lecturer at Clifford University, an Adventist institution in eastern Nigeria. Three of her four children are married, and she has six grandchildren.

The variety of natural beauty found in Africa is often known to people in the West only from scenes in movies and documentaries. Uche is proud to speak of the beauty found in her home of Port Harcourt in the southern part of Nigeria. “Port Harcourt is called the garden city. It is beautiful. We are by the coast and have so many creeks and beautiful beaches. I appreciate nature and love flowers, and there are many places there with beautiful flowers,” she says.

Uche loves creating gardens on her property and has a penchant for looking for and planting new flower breeds she hasn’t seen before. She is also a fashion designer. “My intention is to teach others,” she adds. “When I retire I will open a sewing institute, where I will teach young people to design clothes and be self-reliant.”

Transcontinental travel during a worldwide pandemic is not for the faint of heart. But Uche could not stay away from this Session, which was postponed twice. “When I was invited to be a delegate, I was so elated, so excited. I decided I had to take it up and come.”

This lifelong Adventist’s passion for the church centers most on the coming of Jesus. “That is my best topic,” Uche says. “Anytime anything is said about the coming of Jesus I feel so happy. Songs about the coming of Jesus, sermons about the coming of Jesus — that is the passion of the church. That is what I like about the Seventh-day Adventist Church.”

“We have so many other churches around us, but they deviate from the coming of Jesus, deviate from telling others about the kingdom of God that is coming soon. It is only the Seventh-day Adventist Church I can see that has the pas- sion to point people to the soon coming of Jesus Christ. I was born into a Seventh-day Adventist family, I have been in this church all my life, and I will die a Seventh-day Adventist. Nothing will distract me from it.”