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Teachers' Pet

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Throughout my schooling I swung like Tarzan between the high ropes of achievement. I used to get so excited on school report day. With no effort at all, I can bring to mind a mental montage of occasions where I was told how wonderful I was.  Sunday school teacher to my mum: ‘Doesn’t she know a lot?’ Art teacher glancing over my shoulder in year eight: ‘I have year eleven students who cannot draw as well as you.’  And then the montage shifts to clips of a more significant nature.   I remember Mrs Carter Saunders sitting me down on a bench (facing that place we used to queue for 50p cheese toasties and Yorkie bars) and telling me I had achieved the highest exam score in all of year seven.  I silently realised two things: firstly, there was no limit to what I could do if I put my mind to it and secondly, if this conversation ended before the bell, I was going to get to that cheese toastie queue first. In year ten the head teacher (Mrs Phillips) pulled me out of class to tell me that the s
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Why did Jesus have to die?

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It was Elias’ first day of school and my mind was set on trying to make his school trousers stay up.  As I pulled the trousers to their smallest setting and felt for that tiny clear button to hold it all together, Elias, in that nonchalant way of his asked, ‘Where is God?’  Here’s my opportunity I thought. Trousers - check.  Imparting godly wisdom - here goes. Me - ‘God is everywhere all the time.’  PAUSE  Me - It’s hard for us to understand this but we do know that God loves us. He loves us so much he sent his son Jesus to die for us.’ Son - ‘Why did Jesus die? Me - ‘Erm... because of our sin. Because we do bad things and God is perfect so we needed Jesus to cover our sin so that we could be with God.’ LONG PAUSE Son - ‘So why did he have to die?’ LONG PAUSE And there it was. Another unravelling. The trousers were up but my spiritual certainty was not. I have the answer to his question within the framework of Christianity : Jesus had to die because the cost of sin is death. God
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Blessed or privileged?

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Jon Tyson- Unsplash Whilst mindlessly scrolling through Facebook one night, I came across a post telling Chr istians off for the use of the hashtag ‘blessed’.  The post was ca lling reader s to question their privilege and not to mistake it for the blessing of Christ. I struggle with how to talk about the good things in my life.  The book of Jame s states that ‘every good and perfect thing is from above’ (1:12).  Taking this verse all by itself, one could be led to believe that my stable and secure upbringing, my education, my husband, my children, home, car and the plethora of other good things I live with are blessings.  I’ve always thought of them in this way but, knowing that many aspects of my life are drenched in white, middle-class privilege leaves me in a bit of a pickle.   Am I attributing all my stuff and status to God?  Is he in on the inequality of the world, heaping blessings and favour on privileged me and overlooking many others? My family a nd I are safe and secure; so
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Honest Questions

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Moving to Austria, I took it for granted that we would find and fit into a church community just as we had in Norwich.  Why wouldn’t this be a chart-topping priority for God? But church in Vienna was hard for us.  For a whole range of reasons, we didn’t find that place of being deeply rooted.  We became three out of five, sporadic attenders.  And with our regular attendance retreating, my doubts rolled forward. The doubts and questions didn’t surprise me; I knew they were there beforehand but the power of a church community, worship and spiritual practices had helped me keep them conveniently quiet.  I had tucked these problematic questions underneath the convincing belief that I could never expect to fully understand God.  When I felt less swept up in church, this belief felt more like an easy way out than powerful truth. And I am reluctant to write this. Perhaps Christian readers can relate more: I’ve been a Christian since my early teenage years and, if we’re expecting steady progre
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Dear Tired Mum, there's something I have to tell you....

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Dear Tired Mum, Photo by  Nathan Dumlao   I realised recently that there was something different about my husband. Was it his eyebrows? A new fragrance? His culinary charm? And then it came to me: he wasn’t asleep on the floor anymore.  For the last two years Zane has coped with torture-style sleep deprivation VERY well but with the unavoidable consequence of just nodding off whenever he stops moving.  This had become really normal; the kids use him as soft play when he falls asleep face down on the rug.   I’m happy to say that our dark days of extreme exhaustion are, for the most part, over and I’m writing to you Dear Tired Mum to comfort you with the details of how we arrived at this enviable destination. Firstly, I need you to understand how awful/terrible/torturous Ezra’s night-time sleep has been. I thought Elias (my first) was a bad sleeper.  He did the classic up five times a night thing but at about ten months, with a bit of encouragem
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Noah's Ark

I had a quick theological question I'd like your ideas on if you wouldn't mind. Those of you who have read it and decided to remain Christians. So today I thought I best get on with teaching Elias some bible stories. I thought I'd start with Noah's Ark because after learning the story Elias could paint a rainbow, listen to a song, think about all the animals etc.  It'd be nice, I thought.  I was misguided.   Choosing Noah's Ark as the starting point for bible stories is a bit like choosing A Midsummer Night's Dream for a primary school production; it doesn't take long before you realise that what you thought was a kids' play is actually choc-a-bloc with sex, drugs and fairy-styled rock and roll. So back to the Ark - the story of the flood is actually entirely not child-friendly: God decides to wipe out all of the humans by drowning them to death; he floods the earth and then he sends a rainbow as a promise that he won't do it again
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Getting out of the house

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Getting out of the house. I wanted to write something beautiful and poignant about the Duxbury transition to a family of four.   When I finally got the time to sit down and write (I’m 15 weeks in- that about sums it up) all I could think about was the process of leaving the house.   Michael Macintyre has famously ranted about how difficult it is to exit the house with children but, in the words of a very good book (Ecclesiastes) there is nothing new under the sun so, with this in mind, I’m going to have my own little rant even though it is by no means the first on the subject. As a mother of two, it is now impossible to ‘pop’ anywhere.   I realised this early on when I text a friend saying we were ‘popping’ over and it took forty minutes to get to her; she lives five minutes away.   That was a particularly bad run though - standard getting out of the house time is twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes is quite an achievement I can tell you.   Both children have to have
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