While cataloguing my book collection recently, I stumbled across a book I haven’t looked at in years. “A Day in the Life of… Creative Writing” is a collection of short stories from talented primary school children across East Anglia on the theme of “A day in the life of…”. Subjects ranged from a bee, a dying macaw, Charizard, Christina Aguilera, a pack of ice lollies and a carpet. It’s all rather sweet if undeveloped.
But the reason I own a copy of this book, as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, is because my primary school entered 30 of us into the selection process and an eleven year old me was one of the four chosen to be published. My subject? Was it a day in the life of a carrot, a policeman, Benjamin Franklin, or a spoon? No. At eleven years old, I chose to write about a day in the life of Jesus.
And we are not talking the children’s Jesus who smiles a lot and walks on water. No, my story touched on Jesus’ baptism, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the problem of evil, and the corruption of the Pharisees. Not bad for someone who still played with teddies.
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A Day in the Life of Jesus
Blessed four people, healed ten beggars, gave a lesson, made three blind men see and disrupted one of Dad’s corrupted temples. Also was baptised by John the Baptist. A holy man if ever I saw one. He was born the same time as I came out Mary’s (my mortal mother) womb that I had nestled in for nine months (got a bit bored of the view) under the orders of Dad, who said that I was going to be born of a mortal woman whether I liked it or not and if I didn’t like it I would have to go anyway because I had to purge the world of some evil and then die for it. I asked why. He said never mind why, and I had to be on my best behaviour or he would send my favourite pigeon Whitey down to Lucifer, the head devil. I was so good that Dad sent Whitey down to Earth as I was being baptised and said “My dear son”. John was so totally and utterly gobsmacked, he nearly fainted. I was so pleased I could hardly contain my excitement. I had to hurry to disrupt the temple with their money grabbing greedy priests before bedtime and went to sleep looking forward to the next day.
Sarah McCulloch (11)
Glenarm College
Sarah, thats brilliant,i recently found some old RE books where i asked the teacher, how do u know god is not a woman? and lots of other questions that left me as it has now, with lots of questions and no answers, i find it interesting that people so young have such brilliant and to the point thoughts and ideas, i thouroughly support your recent work, and may spend some time reading some more of your stuff xxxx
Hi Clara,
thanks for the compliment! It’s obviously not well written, but I was quite struck by my grip of Christian theology at the age of 11! Ken Robinson tells a story in his Ted talk about a little girl who was normally very fidgety in lessons but was very quiet and absorbed in a drawing lesson. The teacher asked her what she was drawing and she said, “I’m drawing a picture of God”. The teacher said, “But no-one knows what God looks like”, and the child replied, “Well, they will when I’m done!” :D
My entire website is getting a massive overhaul in the spring, so extra things that I have written will be going up and everything should be much easier to navigate, if you can remember me that long. :)
Sarah