Don't you remember raffia? You know that ribbon sort of stuff that every primary school couldn't have survived without. Many an afternoon we spent in craft class, weaving raffia into various designs using a whole range of colours. Sometimes it tended to begin to fray in your hands after working with it too long and it was always a devil to tie up at the end. But the great thing was that all that sort of mess was restricted to the back of the piece of work you were crafting and all anyone ever saw was a beautiful finished piece of weaving.The sometimes we would get out the plasticine and build walls and houses and strange looking creatures that were supposed to be human but looked more like sausage dogs standing up on their hind legs. Yet it was great fun, working on the little plasticine boards still containing remnants of last week's playtime and using the small shaping knives with the wooden handles. Trouble was, as the weeks went by it was more difficult to get a piece of virgin plasticine that wasn't tainted with some other colour as we all loved to roll several different pieces into one and see the myriad of colours it would produce, in a sort of marbled pattern.
Occasionally we brought in our own bits and pieces and I remember well, acquiring a couple of Squeezy bottles over the year, one of which was covered with paper and converted into a lighthouse complete with paper mache rocks. The other one became a rocket with three wings that helped it to stand upright and had the letters CIJ emblazoned along both sides to represent the three people in the gang who had made it.
But the best time in cart and craft was when we painted. Not just the usual brush stuff, but creating patterns with a small piece of sponge dabbed on the page or painting water colours over a picture drawn with a wax candle so that the picture itself became visible against the background of paint. And then there was the potato, just an ordinary spud out of the larder at home but with an end cut off and a design, such as a star or a cross, carved into the bare flesh. When this was dipped in paint and pressed down on the page, in different areas, it quickly became a pattern that was easy to make and pleasing to look at. But you really needed a different potato for every colour for the paint soaked into the flesh and was there for all time.
These days any potatoes I encounter are usually making a quite different design, using a different liquid, on the plate beside the gravy, in fact. We were chatting today in class about the potato famine in Ireland and I doubt if ever such a situation would arise again as most people are not dependent on the spud as their staple or only food, Indeed, such is the diversity of culture in our midst, that many dinner tables are just as much at ease with rice, pasta or bread as their carbohydrate source and I notice that more and more of our children in school return their plates after lunch with their scoop of potato untouched. My dad would have been horrified for though he lived long after the famine, potatoes were still the mainstay of the family diet. The funny thing though is that, after all these years of dabbling in a variety of other accompaniments to a main course, restaurants are returning to the humble spud once more and now it's very trendy to have 'mash' or 'champ' with a meal or to dress up chips as 'garlic fries' , 'thick cut chips', 'hash browns', 'pommes dauphine', waffles, wedges or 'curly fries.' But they're all still potatoes at heart.
Doesn't it make you wonder why some folks want to so dress up Christianity to make it more palatable to others? I listened to a young lad the other night, who had always wondered why his local CE was able to keep such large numbers without providing pool tables, snack bars, dart boards and other attractions. Then he said he discovered the reason was because they just presented Christianity without the gimmicks. Sometimes I think there is a bit of a famine in some of our churches because people don't get the only thing that can satisfy a hungry heart. We're so consumed with civil rights, helping others, caring for and educating people in third world countries, renovating our church buildings and trying to be innovative to attract young people and non church goers, yet we forget that if we truly belong to Jesus, all these things come naturally to us because we share the compassion that He showed towards others. Jesus says 'But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.'
There's no need to dress up a potato when it's already got on its best jacket. If anyone has an image problem it certainly isn't God!
