Tag: the lion the witch and the wardrobe

Categories
broken sweets

Sweets From Strangers

part three of thoughts from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe Musical

https://bananadarelo.weebly.com/turkish-delight-narnia-with-witch.html

Edmund is made to look mean by taking gifts from the White Witch, as are all the other creatures who follow her, but how often do we take “sweets” from a stranger because we are lost, cold, tired, and a bit fed up with those around us. [Do remember these are children that had been sent to a stranger’s house and their parents were “helping with the war effort”]

So thinking back to those unempowered people who are struggling with no jobs, no prospects, with generational traumas, and don’t quite fit the school system. They feel disempowered and want to blame “them”. So a stranger comes along and offers them a way out – for instance by blaming immigrants, by blaming the EU, by blaming ….

I think even those in good jobs, with good houses, with what one could call “prospects” can also, when life gets tough and they are tired, feel like “someone needs to sort something out” and finish up taking “sweets” from strangers who look hopeful and friendly.

Interestingly we’ve started watching The Escape Artist with David Tennant on Netflix. In one scene he says to his wife “The world is broken” and yet, if you look at it, he is part, and helping to keep in place, this broken world in his role as a defence lawyer who helps even guilty people to get off. [It is worth watching] His “sweets” are the huge pay packet he gets for being a barrister.

How often are we part of the broken world we bemoan and yet are doing nothing to change it. Going back to the last post of – are we using are gifts or do we think they aren’t good enough or that “someone else” should be doing it? Have we taken the “turkish delight” from a stranger because we were cold, tired and a bit fed up with everyone?

Categories
content gifts

The “Right” Gift

Follow on from “Gifts”

I was walking the dog yesterday and thinking over the post I’d just written and my gifts – and how content I was with my gifts now. Note “now”. I had many years when I wasn’t content with them and wanted something “better”. Like many of us I’d worked out a hierarchy of gifts and giftings, of things I should be doing, things that were godly and things that weren’t, things that were worthy and things that were a bit trivial.

I wonder how many of us, or is it just me, have amazing gifts and talents but are not using them because we are struggling to manifest some gift that just isn’t in us whether to please parents, or to be thought highly of, or because we think “just” smiling at someone isn’t really using our gifts.

Having done work in schools and with young people I see how they rate and value so much. I’ve done amazing writing projects with teens who were in lower sets and who saw themselves as “thick” to quote one teen. Ok so they weren’t grade A students but they had so many other gifts and talents.

Too often, I think, we rate gifts on how much we earn using them, how much other people give us credit for them, how much praise we get for them from those who are significant to us. When actually we should be looking at ourselves, be honest with what we love – because that is generally where our gifts lie and where they will blossom best. I don’t think a gift will flourish is we are trying to do it within something we don’t love.

I think, again, it comes back to that whole freedom thing. We can be fully free if we are using the gifts we were given, not the gifts we think we should have and that we know we are loved just as we are and don’t need to change to please others.

This I think is true freedom, where true peace and joy come from, and where we are without fear to fully walk the gifts we have and not try to be someone else. If we look back at The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe each of the children had different gifts and each had to use them to the full for the White Witch to be defeated.

Categories
joy truth

Gifts of …

part two of thoughts from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe Musical

https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/narnia-peters-susans-lucys-father-137608235

Father Christmas gives the Pevensie children gifts which he says are gifts of “joy and truth” – which is interesting as they are weapons but I’m not going down that one. Though after reading Richard Rohr’s latest about how direct non-violent action is about

redistribut[ing] the tension that is already there and puts it back where it belongs—at the source.

https://cac.org/daily-meditations/peacemaking-is-not-niceness/

maybe swords and arrows are a good representation of joy and truth but also of hope, peace and freedom?

But these gifts need to be used. Peter couldn’t kill the wolf if he kept his sword in his scabbard. Lucy couldn’t heal unless she used drops of her potion. In Prince Capsian the children couldn’t have come back if the horn had not been blown.

I believe all of us have been given gifts to make this world a freer, more peaceful, more joyful, safer place and yet too often there is the cry of “why don’t they do something” when it could be us.

Ok so I’m not going to be Prime Minister or anything major in business, in technology, on leadership worldwide, but I can via using my gifts of encouragement, of writing, of being able to chat to people, change one person at a time, who would then go on to change someone else and so on and so forth.

It is said there are only six degrees of separation between one person and the next – ie that each of us are only six people away from connecting with each other. And some of us are even closer. My next-door neighbour was telling me how when she was visiting a new friend she looked at her wedding photo and saw one of her close friends on that photo. Turns out my neighbour’s friend had been close to her new friend when her new friend got married.

So think this through – this means that each of us are six people or less, away from someone of influence. So if we are kind and helpful to the person in the park, they can take that kindness and encouragement to the next person in their sphere and so on. Very much the change the world one starfish at a time [this is an interesting read because it talks of the origins of this story too!]

So today I pledge to go out and use my gifts of chat, of encouragement and of words to help those in my sphere to know freedom from fear, know hope, know peace, know joy and trust. And from there to be able to fully live their lives as they are called to do so they can use their gifts for joy, trust, hope, peace and freedom.