Yesterday…
…Visiting the Seagull Theatre… ‘The Pirate Show’ entertained the children with its songs, slapstick and silliness. A vague plot about pirates and treasure involved pantomime-style audience participation, children invited to ‘help’ on the stage…
Josh does ‘magic tricks’, so one magic wand ‘mysteriously’ became five… Plates of shaving foam appear on stage, but we weren’t sure who will ‘get it’… When there’s talk of a giant octopus, we just didn’t know what to expect!
You know the unpredictable will happen; it’s all part of the fun.
…Reading our local news and social media… Fire crews had been called at about midnight to a fire a couple of miles away to the Indian restaurant at Oulton Broad North station. Crews managed to extinguish the blaze by 6am.
The restaurant owners couldn’t have predicted the fire; the fire crews couldn’t have predicted their nighttime callout; those who use the train from Lowestoft couldn’t have predicted that early morning trains would be cancelled.
That ‘unpredictable’ is no fun at all.
…Going to our church community café… At FISH (Food In School Holidays) families came for a free breakfast. There were craft activities for the children, and all had a good morning.
I have heard it said that you can predict the families that will come – the struggling, the scroungers, the troubled. My experience is that such predictions are neither accurate or helpful.
FISH Families are unpredictable.
…Reading about Joash… Jezebel, presented as the wickedest woman in the Bible, has a mass-murdering daughter called Athaliah, whose Baal-worshiping son Ahaziah, unpredictably, has a good, godly son called Joash who becomes king and changes the country for the good.
In schools, in churches, I’ve encountered children who are expected, predicted to be studious and well-behaved but are scallywags… and children who adults expect the worst from, sometimes turn out to be treasures… Sometimes we ‘predict’ children and adults who are most likely to be part of a faith community…
Individuals, especially children, are unpredictable.
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