Generally, no info is good news: something like, ‘Here’s Brian’s feature’ means it’s solid and pretty ready for the mag. ‘What do you think of this?’ means that the sender isn’t sure and wants a second opinion without saying what they don’t like about it and prejudicing the next reader. Then there are the bad news ones that include phrases like, ‘Have a look at this, do you have time to work on it?’, which is code for, ‘We might need to rework a lot of this’. Obviously, by the time it gets to you all this is cleaned away and everything looks like it was brilliant first time!
This month Jamie sent me his first message as co-editor and it simply said: ‘Here’s Krish’s feature. It’s not what I expected.’ Intriguing, I thought as I scanned down to see the file name of the attachment. It said ‘Slaughter at Christmas’. Nope, not what I was expecting either, and not a subject of many Christmas features. However, when we read it we loved it; Krish was doing something really important by casting some dark into the sparkly light of Christmas and helping us find new depth in that most familiar story as a result.
One way we do children a disservice is that we try and shield them from the tough bits of the Bible by using all the skills of the political spin doctor to distract our groups from any unpleasantness. Noah’s Ark is a classic example of this. There are countless ways I’ve seen that story tackled for children to keep them from noticing the most significant part of the story. We talk about animals, we get them out in the car park drawing the dimensions of the ark on the floor in chalk, we do a million endless rainbow-based things, but you never see a session focusing on a time when the God who we sing to killed everyone alive apart from one family.
When we leave out the tough bits we serve up a very bland version of the Bible that lacks the resources children need to help them through the tough bits of their lives. Too often children only get to hear about the people it went well for, or at least the people God rescued at the last minute. Think Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in a furnace rather than Stephen being stoned to death. A fundamental part of a walk of faith is knowing that God is still there in the darkness and never leaves us, no matter how dark it gets. Stories full of light and dark are how we can find meaning in dark times as well as light.
So while we won’t lie and say that Krish’s feature on the darkness of Christmas is what we expected; I applaud him for tackling it head on and showing us that God was still there. How can we do the same this Christmas? SD
