Some years ago when Sophie, my youngest, was about seven or eight, we were walking down the road at about this time of year and she noticed all of the adverts in the shop windows saying “Don’t forget mother’s day.” “Huh!” she said, “You don’t catch them having a child’s day!” I tried pointing out to her that this was because every day of a mother’s year revolved around children and their needs, but I don’t think she was convinced. She may feel slightly different now that she is a mother herself…
Nevertheless, it is perhaps the memory of this conversation that made me take 1 Timothy 4:12 to our Zoom Sunday School the Sunday before last: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity.”
We talked about the things that mattered to the young people in church and then wrote a prayer of thanksgiving. Here are the things that our young people wanted to give thanks for: for food and water, for all the living life on earth, for family, for clothes, for everybody being different.
Of course, the proper noun for “everybody being different” is diversity, and members of the Local Preachers and Worship Leaders Fellowship meeting had a great training session led by Revd Anne Ellis, in which she introduced the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion tool kit to us, helping us to think about some of our subconscious prejudices.
This theme of diversity has come up yet again in the wake of the interview given by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in America. Irrespective of where we stand on this particularly public family breakdown, we can perhaps all recognise the genuine pain felt by all concerned. We can do nothing to heal that particular situation but must do something to heal the hurt of racism, the conscious and the unconscious, in our society. Perhaps the first step is to join our young people in giving thanks for everybody being different.
Paul does this in an extraordinarily simple and yet important way in 1 Corinthians 12:12-30 when he reminds the church at Corinth that “The body does not consist of one member, but of many” and goes on to speak of each part having an important job to do: “If the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body’ that would not make it any less a part of the body.”
We can seek fairness by trying to give everyone the same or we can seek it by allowing everyone to flourish in their own glorious uniqueness. Brothers and sisters, let’s give each other the space and the time to say “This is what I like and this is how I like to do things,” and even if it’s not what we like, to say, “Let’s try that – let’s see what there is about it that speaks to us,” and in so-doing we will learn about each other. Let’s join our Sunday School in saying thank you to God for everybody being different.
God bless
Vicci