L is for LITMUS

I thought it was magic because he told us so and it certainly was very convincing. We all sat on the high stools, like toddlers waiting to be fed, huddled around a big glass bowl, waiting expectantly for something to happen. 'Today, boys, I'm going to show you some magic,' said Mr. C. We were already drawn into his ruse, eating out of his hands, a captive audience ready to applaud his every move and take every word he said as gospel. Our ears were open, our eyes were bulging and he sat there, on the other side of the bench, in complete control, like he had done this a thousand times before. He was an old gentleman, at the wrong end of his career for us but probably just right for him, full of grace and understanding and a personality that seemed to sit uneasily with the strictness of the regime that had been his workplace even before my uncles had attended the school. And he taught Chemistry in a manner that showed his love for it and made us want to embrace it in similar fashion. Not everyone saw him in such a favourable light and there were those, especially among the boarding pupils, where he was a house master, who had felt the sting of his words and his cane but I only ever saw the magician at the front of the lab, who conjured up an interest in all things scientific and made me realise that what he believed could be infectious. Within a year, however, he was gone, attracted more by the Isle of Man and his immediate retirement than another year with his magic wand.

''Are you ready?' he said and we responded with a slight shifting on our high chairs, a few nods and expectant grins. The liquid in the bowl was a deep blue colour. As he lifted the beaker of clear liquid, which he had never said wasn't water, but in our ignorance we assumed it to be, he spoke softly, with a slight gravelly tone, a legacy of his penchant for pipe tobacco. 'Now watch carefully,' As if we wouldn't! As he poured the clear liquid into the bowl, amazingly the blue colouration began to lighten, first turning a purple shade and eventually a deep red. Open mouths and wide eyes and a few giggles filled the room but as quickly as we had been sucked in, we were spat out again as the wonders of the effect of clear hydrochloric acid on blue litmus were explained in great clarity and the magic had gone.Still, I never forgot the lesson and some years later performed the same sorcery for a junior science class on my first teaching appointment.

When Jesus pours His Spirit into our lives, the change is just as radical, for Paul tells us in his letter to the church at Corinth that, 'if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.' Let us always show that change in the way we live, the things we say and the thoughts we have and remembering that 'wisdom brightens a man's face and changes its hard appearance.' (Ecclesiastes 8:1) And when others notice it, that's the real litmus test.