Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Going against the flow - being different

(Key stage 2 and 3)
Christmas Fayre. Everyone is going one way. You are going other way. It is hard.


Dinghy at beach. The tide is going out. You paddle hard. If not, the air sea rescue ambulance will come and you will look a bit of an idiot. You went with the tide.

Sometimes we need to make a stand and go against the flow.

You go to the cinema with friends and your mother said you must be back at seven but the film ends and your friends say let's go round to someone's house. You have a decision to make. Do you go with the flow or do you say, "sorry. I've got to go home".

There is a story in the Bible about the King called Nebuchadnezzar. King Nebuchadnezzar was ruler of the Babylonian Empire. Story of Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego (my shack, your shack and the bungalow).

It's very hard to be different, especially if you're going to be fried alive if you are different.

But God was so important for shaped rack, Meshack and Abednego that they were going to make a stand – even if it meant they were thrown into the fiery furnace.

Story of Father Kyrill: We met Father Kyrill in the theological college in St Petersburg, when my wife and I were living there for two years. He was the spiritual father of the seminary. He had been battered and smashed by life. He had been sentenced to 10 years of hard labour (on three different occasions) in Soviet labour camps, simply for responding to the love of God in a society which said that God did not exist. He could have become so hard and bitter. But he wasn’t. Despite the suffering, he had begun to love, to forgive and to give, and his face was literally radiant.

Dead fish float with the current; living fish swim against it.