working together

The children at school have started their own radio station. This is their logo.

Broadcasting, not quite to the nation, but to just about anyone who cares to tune in. Try it yourself by clicking here.

The children who've set it up were given the chance to speak at the school assembly today. To explain it all and encourage participation.

They're on the ball. Communicating. And encouraging interaction.

I volunteered to be first to use their radio show to plug the coming event we're holding here about the environment.

They're into this as well. The environment. It's good to build on common ground and establish these links with the school.

So I took the chance while in at the school to hand out all the competition forms. Another little bit of interaction. Getting them involved. And not for a moment presuming that we've got all the answers.

We don't. We're only just starting to see that there's a problem here, in terms of how we have been treating the environment. We need the sort of fresh imagination which they bring, these children in the school, to think 'outside the box': to see what could be done, what should be done.

We need to work together and not adopt that ghetto-like perspective in our thinking which assumes that we and we alone have all the answers to the issues which arise.

God's world just doesn't work like that. We're made to be community. And that means interaction. That sort of communication. Sharing the truth we've come to know ourselves. Yet ready to learn from others as well.

Too often, I fear, at least in the past, we've understood ourselves to be the true and only guardians of all truth. And so we do the soap box thing and stand there and pontificate. Like we know it all. When we don't.

We have to work together. Which is not to diminish the importance of faith. Nor to belittle the place of God's truth. It's just to acknowledge the need for some humility.

I've been thinking of this quite a bit since Sunday past.

The drama we know as the 'Exodus' which saw a whole people who'd long been enslaved being brought to a new way of life - that drama began with the 'faith' of just five different women.

Who included the princess of Egypt. Hers, at best, was a pretty uninformed faith. I guess we'd have thought her a pagan. Avoided her like the plague (though the plagues had yet to come!).

But she was a part of the people who helped such a drama unfold.

God doesn't have such qualms, it seems, as we, his people, sometimes do, about engaging folk who may not be 'believers' in his work.

It's strange how a day like today can have a recurring theme. For having started the day like this at the school, it was also the way it closed.

I was round at P's and G's again at night (the couple, not the church which goes by that name). Along with a couple of others. And this was the theme we pursued.

The balance there is always meant to be between our eager, total honouring of God and, with that, too, our thorough-going engagement with society.

The only guy who ever really got the balance right was Jesus, I suppose.

The rest of us just tend to sort of gravitate between the Pharisee position (we have the truth and we won't have it sullied by contact with anyone else) and a palsy-walsy 'worldliness' (where anything goes).

I guess that's the issue I wrestle with most of the time. Today the same as any other day.

The drawing close to God - as in the lunchtime worship service I was leading once again.

And the drawing close to people in a range of different circumstances.

And getting the balance right.

The children at the school have got this right at least. They understand that good communication means a lot of interaction.