As I write this, its’ been a difficult week for fans of music and of chocolate-voiced English actors. In the space of 5 days last week, I lost two of my favourite celebrities on the planet.
David Bowie, whose music, style, manners and energy was just beautiful, died of cancer on Monday. I once had a picture of him taken in New York in the Early 80’s. I thought that picture represented the most beautiful person (note the lack of gender) that could ever be.
And then a few days later, one of my all-time favourite English actors passed away, also to cancer. Alan Rickman had a voice like cooled melted chocolate. Try it, it’s the most sublime feeling in the culinary world and how chocolate should be consumed. His acting spanned generations from Hans Gruber to Professor Snape. I first fell in love with his moody, sulky style when I saw him in the British Film “Truly Madly Deeply”. If you haven’t seen it, treat yourself to the most wonderful love story committed to film.
The word “Hero” has been used to describe both the above performers. This got me thinking. Looking in the Bible you will find many Heroes, and this week I aim to look at 5 of them and how their actions are seen as heroic and how they earned this title.
Noah was a devout man and lived in time where everything was wrong and rotten. So much so that God had had enough and decided to wipe the slate clean and try all over again.
When I was a child this worried me. On one hand my RE Teachers and Vicar were telling me God loved me so much and he would never hurt me and here, in chapter 6, yes six, of the Bible, God was venting his anger and wiping humanity off of the face of the Earth. It took me a while to work this out, in fact when I was a trainee baker. It’s not often a popular Bible story is compared to making a fruit cake, but bear with!
Fruit cake is very expensive, involving expensive fruit and nut ingredients. But before you add this to your batter there is a critical point where the batter will be good, or bad. As you are adding the egg there comes a point if you add the egg too quickly the mixture will curdle. This leads to a crumbly and dry cake, which you don’t find out until after the cake is baked.
Maybe God was at that point. He made a wonderful world and the humans were spoiling it and so he decided to throw it away, but keep the good stuff and add it to a clean earth.
Noah! A man of truly heroic proportions, and yet like most heroes, quiet and unassuming. Can you imagine being asked to build an ark, in the desert, and then tell your friends that God told you to do it and there was a flood coming? In a time when there was hardly any rain and never any floods. How brave was that?
More so, how brave was he to accept the full challenge? To know that he would start again from the beginning, that he would be the man from which the human race depended upon. His family. I get nervous when my kids ask me to help them with their homework!!
Would you step up to accept the challenge of the One True God and become a hero? Could you be a hero to somebody today?
Steve Fogo
No comments:
Post a Comment