I have recently spent a week working in a college in London that offers residential education for women, especially disadvantaged women. It was a real eye-opener, a small institution that placed great value on the whole experience of the people it served, devising tailored programmes for each individual, and cherishing the sense of community it engendered. It has the potential to change lives in ways that can’t be measured by league tables and inspections.
The sense of community reminded me of my early days of teaching at the Grammar School in Haywards Heath, where I reckon I had taught and knew every pupil by name before they reached the sixth form. Later the school became a sixth-form college, where students stayed only a year or two, and I taught only a few of the many local youngsters who attended. There was a palpable feeling that the sense of a community had been lost. A place with a real sense of belonging became more of a processing plant where youngsters were prepared for examinations and university.
But for some of those youngsters the college offered a new start – they could throw off the reputation they’d acquired at school. For some, especially free-spirited boys, this was a real chance to start again with teachers who had no preconceptions about them, how they might behave, how able they were. They started again with teachers who accepted them as grown, young men and women, with no memory of them as children. They were accepted for what they now were. And they thrived on it.
And this thought reminds me of one of my favourite stories in the Bible. Moses had finished his mountain-top experience with God, and descended the mountainside with the Ten Commandments inscribed by the finger of God on two stone tablets. He was confronted not by God’s faithful people eagerly waiting for God’s words, but by the sight of riotous celebration and revelry around the golden calf. Moses was so angry he threw the tablets to the ground and they smashed into smithereens, gone for ever.
Moses pleaded with God to be lenient with his people, and God agreed – he forgave and offered a new start. And God said to Moses – “Make two more stone tablets, and we’ll start again”. I can just imagine God as a gentle father, his anger melting away, sitting down and quietly saying “Let’s start again”.
And I’m reminded that life as a Christian gives us this opportunity, not just once but every time we stray from the strait and narrow. We can start again with a clean slate, no recriminations. Just the chance to make the best of what we are. Like the college in London, God values each one of us as an individual and is prepared to sit down with us and say “Let’s start again”.
Jonathan Rotheray
