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 This blog moved at the start of 2023 to www.silentinthebackground.org.uk. See you there!

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What is creativity anyway?

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Two childhood memories: One: "Our family is not creative!" I remember being told this in response to my frustration with my ineptitude with paints and pencils.*  I'm sure the intention was to encourage and let me know that I was not alone - that it was not important.  But the effect was that I grew up believing that I could produce nothing of any worth, even to myself, in the creative line.  To this day, I have a visceral pit-of-the-stomach reaction to any suggestion that I should express myself through any artistic medium. Two: "Write a story - it can be about anything at all, let your imagination run wild!" said my English teacher.  Imagination was something else I knew I didn't have, and any attempt to write a story led me into an inescapable paradox: For every idea in my head of a storyline or character, I knew its source in something else I'd seen or read.  This meant it had to be rejected as not a product of my imagination and thus unsuitable for i
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1 John 4 – Abiding, loving (and testing)

This letter of 1 John has themes that come around again and again. So in chapter 4 we read again about the opponents of Jesus (which John calls antichrist), the love of God, our sins, and the idea of abiding with God. In this letter these themes are intertwined, and John seems to be saying that they can’t easily be separated. We can’t look at one of these and then move onto the next. To gain a fuller understanding we must keep turning the ideas over and over. So, thinking about others people John gives a simple test: what do they think of Jesus? ‘Every spirit that confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh is from God.’ Perhaps you’re starting to think about Christmas. What happened at the first Christmas is really important, John says. Baby Jesus was God born in human flesh, and that is really important to who Jesus is and what he did. John goes on to say that this sending of Jesus into the world was a revelation of God’s love, and through Jesus we have life because Jesus was
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The original foster care story at the heart of Christmas

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This yea r’s   John Lewis Christmas advert   shows a fa mily preparing to welcome a teenager into their home as foster carers. The foster father’s attempts to learn to skateboard are part of his preparation for the arrival of a teenager into their home. This focus on the foster  father  is welcome. Approximately 40% of foster carers are male, but research shows that male foster carers are often seen in a negative light in contrast to female carers. Negative experiences The experience of male foster carers is that negative assumptions are often made about their ability to care for children and possibly even keep them safe. Male carers report being treated like a ‘risk to be regulated’ [1]  and feel that ‘the stigma of being a male foster carer runs deep… you are often portrayed as someone to fear.’ [2] Male carers also experience being seen as secondary to their female partner carers, who are assumed to be the main carers of the children. Even social work professionals admit to ‘resorti
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