蜜芽传媒

Good morning. A friend who was finding teaching rather arduous gave up this week. But it was a very tearful farewell as she realised how much the young people appreciated her, and she wondered if she had made a terrible mistake. I think many teachers are doing a heroic job at the moment. I once saw a play which focussed on the total chaos of a school playground, foul language and lewder stories than I had ever heard in the army. I asked some teenagers how true to life it was. Very, was their response. The play was called Mogadishu, the capital of war torn Somalia. Sadly, there are indeed schools like this where teachers are having to cope with children from dysfunctional backgrounds, and I hugely admire them. So its good to have the 鈥淭each first鈥� programme in which people teach before pursuing another career and other people entering teaching having done something else first.

For teaching can of course be hugely rewarding. I remember how my life was radically changed for the better when a new teacher came who seemed to believe in me, who somehow conveyed I had some potential-and thank goodness there are very many who can say the same about some teacher who encouraged them.

In fact there is far more potential in each one of us than we usually acknowledge, a seed of goodness that wants only a special light to grow. The Christmas message is that that this light has shone in our darkness to bring about that growth, to release our potential from its shackles of self-delusion and self-preoccupation. We are here, according to the Christian story, quite simply, to grow in the love of God and others, to develop a quality of life which not even death can destroy, because it is a partaking of the Divine nature itself. The beautiful music and carols of this time rejoice in a love that came to share that divine nature with us and unite our life with it.

On Wednesday I saw Paddington 2 with my young granddaughter. The appeal of Paddington in the film is that he really believed in other people, treated them as though behind the hard, blas茅 or cynical fronts they put up, they had some good in them. What was interesting is that the cinema was at least half full of adults who were there without any children. There was something in all us adults who were there which responded, almost tearfully, to the ideal which Paddington conveyed; an acknowledgement that there is a better side to us- and it is this which the Christmas story affirms- and can release.

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