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2007

9th July
Smells

2nd July
Smile

26th June
Waterlogged

11th June
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6th June
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21st May
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May 9th
Stereotypes

May 1st
Broken

April 16th
Climbing hills

April 9th
The Three Trees

March 28th
Toby the SuperDog

March 19th
Mountains

March 4th
Lone Daffodil

February 26th
Working hours

February 19th
Memory

February 12th
Piercings

February 5th
Patience

January 29th
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January 22nd
Wind

January 15th
Honesty

January 8th
My Car

January 3rd
Happy New Year

Stereotypes

9^th May 2007

If I were to wear a blue and white stripy jumper, a string of onions around my neck and have a black beret placed upon my head at a jaunty angle, and if I were to eat frog’s legs baguettes and drink red wine, you’d know that I am French. Obviously!

 If I were to have blonde hair and blue eyes, if I listened to Abba, shopped at Ikea and talked like the chef from the Muppets, you’d know that I am Swedish. Of course!

 It can be all too easy to stereotype people and cultures and put them into identifiable boxes – all Russians drink vodka, all the Welsh like sheep, everyone from America owns a gun…….. Some of them are true, other not so true. Some of them are helpful, but most are unhelpful and blind us into seeing who these people really are. To celebrate Eurovision I am having a party whereby guests are given a country they have to support. One of my friends was given Lithuania. She was gutted as she knew nothing about this country and realised she’d have to do some research. What did she discover? The capital city? The main industry? The population? The life expectancy? The country’s history? No, she found out that Lithuanian’s don’t like cake!

 On a website all about Lithuania, (which for your information is situated between Poland and Latvia, has a population of 3,706,000, and the capital is Vilnius) the author had decided that an essential insight into the Lithuanian people was their dislike for cake! Are you telling me that not one Lithuanian has ever enjoyed cake, be it fruit, sponge or the jaffa variety? How can anyone make that generalisation? Have they asked all 3,706,000 people in a survey and 100% of the population replied, “No, I don’t like cake”? If that is the case I strongly suggest that you not go and open a bakery in Vilnius!

 I was recently chatting to a volunteer who helps at a project I co-ordinate. After about 15 minutes of conversation I asked her which church she went to. She looked shocked and declared that she was not a Christian, and definitely did not go to church. Oops! When she’d calmed down she admitted that lots of people asked her the same thing, and that she seemed to have a look about her which screamed ‘Christian’. She didn’t have the usual Christian stereotypes about her – there were no Jesus sandals on her feet, no rainbow strapped guitar over her shoulder, no tambourine by her side, she didn’t wear those Christian-type clothes, she was not inanely smiling and she wasn’t overtly ‘nice’ and ‘gentle’. Yet she was right, because she looked every bit the Christian. What was it about her that made me, and others, assume that she followed Jesus? It made me, the actual Christian, wonder whether people could see my faith in me?

 By being a Christian, by going to church, we accept that this brings with it another cultural identity in addition to our nationality, our home town, our heritage. In some countries that identity means persecution, isolation and even death – for us in the UK it means we’re labelled as geeks and freaks. Although we are all united in Christ, although we all believe in the risen Jesus, it does not mean that we all think the same, dress the same, eat the same! I love the fact that if someone tried to sum up in a single sentence the millions of people who are Christians, they couldn’t. We are so diverse, so different, each of us created that way. Some of us like cheesy Eurovision music, some don’t; some of us like cake, some don’t. We don’t dress the same, we don’t do the same things, we don’t live the same lives. In that sense we can’t be stereotyped.

 But in the other sense, there should be something about us, something different, something good, which is so obvious to those around us that they can’t help but see that we are Christians. There should be the light of Jesus shining out of us (not literally – that would be quite scary to have light coming out of us!), our actions, our words, our very being should speak of love and peace. We should be set apart from the crowd, we should be a witness of the Gospel to all who meet us. People should be able to see our faith in us.

 I am proud to be a Christian, but it is a Cornwall sticker I have on my car, not a fish. I am proud to be a Christian, but it is an England shirt I wear not Jesus sandals. I am proud to be a Christian, but it is anger, bitchiness and selfishness which I display. I am proud to say I am a Christian, but how eager am I to act like one? How eager am I to give up everything in order to become part of the stereotype, part of the crowd who want to be seen as Jesus Freaks?