Nettles

The other day i was walking my dog down one of the many narrow lanes that are a speciality of Haworth, when i found myself stuck in traffic. Today's tourist traffic was a group of young American girls who were stopping to take photo's of themselves stood next to a horse. Whilst negotiating the group with expert manoeuvres, performed by both myself and Blue (the dog), i couldn't help but overhear one of the girls complaining about a mysterious collection of itchy lumps that had appeared on the front of her foot. Meanwhile, in her attempt to give her friends the best view of said itchy lumps, she was hopping around on her other foot into the middle of a big bunch of nettles- no doubt acquiring a matching set of annoying itchy lumps.

Now, for reasons that remain incomprehensible to me i had, at this point, mistaken the true identity of these 'cute' American girls. In my head their American accents were clearly the sound of French girls attempting to speak English. Unperturbed by the apparent language barrier i decided i must help these poor ignorant foreigners with my local knowledge, and so in true English style i adopted the slow pigeon version of English that we always assume everyone the world over speaks fluently. Complete with pointing, actions, and wide mouth syllables i embarked on an explanation...... plant...evil....stingy......ow! They were all very pleased with this important piece of local knowledge and responded with many pleasing "ah's" and "thankyou's", but i had more. Surely even more exciting than the discovery of the existence of nettles is the discovery of the existence of doc leaves.

I could not wait to tell them of the healing power of this magical 'good' leaf that always grows alongside the nasty 'bad' leaf. However, by this time it had become obvious that these girls were in fact native English speakers and after my embarrassing performance earlier i was unsure how to proceed......i decided to stick with the pigeon English and embrace the legend i would become. While walking down a narrow lane in a remote English village these girls had encountered one of the few remaining true Yorkshire folk who don't speak very well but have mystical bush-tucker survival knowledge about poisonous plants and healing leaves!

It's amazing how something we English people know so well, like the fact that nettles sting, can be so baffling to a foreigner......it was truly tragic watching this poor girl bemoaning the unpleasant rash while vigorously acquiring another. It really made me think how much we all need each other with our different perspectives and different experiences to help each other out. All societies work by distributing skills and knowledge among different people and then working together to meet everybody's needs. We have some doctors, some teachers, some drivers, some farmers etc and only that way can we function. Imagine if you had to produce all your own food, work, build, cook, organise your taxes and then perform open heart surgery on yourself. Even in small tribes and villages different people take on different roles; trackers, hunters, farmer's, cooks.

This kind of helpful living was God's grand plan for the church. Some people think of the church as a School master, telling them what to do and making them feel bad. Some people think of the church as a building; impressive....but always flippin freezing! Some people think of church as a service that they attend once a week to keep God happy. But the Bible talks about church differently. The Bible talks about church as a body, a body with many parts, each with different skills and strengths and knowledge, but each part working together and helping each other to make the whole run smoothly. We're not supposed to live this life alone, struggling though trying to manage everything ourselves..... we need to rely on each other, we need to help one another. We need to point out the nettles and hand out the doc leaves (even if we have to do it in pigeon English) :-)