Home Page News 18th January 2010

At church yesterday the speaker asked us all – ‘what puts fire in your belly?’ ‘What, in your life, excites you when you think about it?’ He was particularly asking us to reflect on the work that we do for the Lord, and especially inviting us to focus on those areas that we are especially called to minister in, over and above everything else. As I sat there I thought about NorthStarUK and also about gifts – not the sort that we receive at Christmas, but rather those that our Creator gave us at birth. For many years I worked as a special needs teacher. Many of the students I worked with were amongst the weakest in the school, in terms of their academic prowess. But each and everyone one of them had gifts; they all had abilities given to them by their Creator. Often these were talents that school did not notice or value; nevertheless, they were still gifted individuals – indeed, much of my most important work, I felt, was to try to convince them that they had abilities, because many years of schooling had often caused them to lose confidence and led them to devalue themselves. It also struck me that schools do not have a very good track record of working with exceptionally talented individuals, either, unless these talents coincided with what schools were looking for. I thought of Mozart – a child prodigy; how would he have got on in one of our local schools – now it has to be admitted, he would almost certainly have known more about science or geography, but would he have had time to compose – he was writing music from the age of five! Schools inevitably aim at producing generalists; our Creator, however is more concerned to produce unique, talented individuals who have a role within their community. As parents, teachers and educators let’s spend some time this week reflecting on the gifts that each of our children has been given and help them to have a fire in their belly as they develop those gifts and talents in the coming years.