大象传媒

From Revered Kate Bottley, Vicar of the churches of Blyth, Scrooby and Ranskill:

As any parent of teenager鈥檚 or soon to be teenagers will tell you there鈥檚 a need from time to time to venture into their bedrooms and attempt to find a glimpse of the carpet beneath the clutter. So this weekend, with bin bag in hand, I girded my loins to do just that. I have to report Chris I didn鈥檛 get very far.

I began by trying to thin out the book shelf. That鈥檚 where I started and that鈥檚 where I stopped. Books that I鈥檇 forgotten we even had, it was like an unexpected reunion with a group of old friends. There was my son鈥檚 favourite that I read every night for what felt like years, he was not a brilliant sleeper and I鈥檇 often fall asleep reading it before he did. There was my daughter鈥檚 children鈥檚 bible that her Godmummy gave her at her Christening. I got a bit tearful and a bit nostalgic as I thought about reading those stories to my babies who were now too grown up for such things.聽 A little while later, my lovely husband Graham came in to see how I was getting on only to find me cross legged on the carpet, snotty nosed and red eyed reading Thomas the Tank engine.

Books and the words and pictures they contain are like a sort of tardis zooming us back into our memories or catapulting us into places where we have never been before.聽 A good story and a ripping yarn can stay with us long after the books they are written in have become too tattered to keep. Jesus knew the power of a good story and was amazing at telling them, painting a picture with the words of the parables to help make difficult things easier to understand, to teach and perhaps even to entertain , some of the jokes he told are a bit lost on us, but I鈥檓 sure the first century crowd found them hilarious.

So this weekend I鈥檓 planning on venturing back in to the teenagers bedrooms but instead of a bin bag and a duster I鈥檓 taking a massive mug of tea, a fistful of biscuits and some tissues to dry my tears, because聽 perhaps we are never too grown up for parables or even 500 word stories, and I think I might find that sitting cross legged on the carpet and reading a good book is a far better use of my time than tidying a bedroom ever was.