Have the  children come to the front and lie on their backs with their knees bent and their lower legs resting on the platform/dais - in our building it’s about a foot off the ground but you may need to adapt. Tell them to fold their arms tightly across their chests and close their eyes. Now, tell them that, without standing up or using their arms, they have to get onto the platform. Most will find it impossible, but you may, like me, find that one of them somehow worms their way up, in which case use him/her as your ’son’, otherwise get an older child or an adult to come up onto the stage to act your ’son’. Now publicly tell your ’son’ to go down and touch the eyes of each child to open them and release their arms. As each child’s eyes are opened and their arms freed, reach out your hand to pull them up onto the platform with you. Explain to everyone how we are all blind and bound helplessly by our sin, so that it really is completely impossible for us to truly know God or come to him by our own efforts, but that the Father has sent his Son to open our eyes to the truth and free us from the sin which binds us. God reaches out and saves us so that we can know him and be with him now and forever.

Remember, everything is going on low down, so make sure you explain what’s happening for the benefit of any who can’t see. Any ideas for improvement or comments, whether theological or practical are very welcome.

World Vision has identified at least five thousand children who need sponsorship in five sub-Saharan African countries – Mozambique, Niger, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Zambia – countries with among the highest child mortality rates in the world.

Launching World Vision’s Week for Children, British school kids gathered together to make a ‘high-five for health,’ urging members of the public to give just a little to make a huge difference in a child’s life. Each finger symbolises one year of a child’s life and the aspiration to get a child to the age of five. Sadly in 2009 each finger represents one of the five biggest killers of children under five: malaria, HIV and AIDS, pneumonia, measles and diarrhoea.

“We desperately need sponsors to help transform lives and are launching World Vision’s Week for Children to draw attention to the fact that 99% of the 9.2 million avoidable deaths of children under five occur in developing countries,” said Sharon McLeod, Head of Supporter Care at World Vision. “We are challenging 5,000 Britons to sponsor a child, for just 60p a day, which will change the life of that child and the life of that child’s community for the better in a real and lasting way”.

To understand the scale of the problem, data collated for World Vision by the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC), an independent not-for-profit organisation, shows a child in Sierra Leone is 43 times more likely than a British child to die between the ages of 0-5, while a child in Zambia is 27 times more likely to die before his or her fifth birthday than a child under five in the UK.

Sierra Leone has the highest rate of under-five mortality in the world. For every 1,000 live births, 262 - a quarter of all children – will die. Even if Sierra Leone were to successfully reduce current rates of mortality by two thirds, in line with the Millennium Development Goals, this would be 15 times the under-five mortality rate in the UK, where six children per 1,000 live births will die.

Through child sponsorship, World Vision focuses on improving the quality of life of children – often the most vulnerable members of poor communities – helping to meet their education, health and other basic needs. This may include things such as providing them with access to clean water, better nutrition, education, improved healthcare and economic opportunities.

“Children in the developing world urgently need our support now more than ever. By appealing to the British public, we can demonstrate that the act of sponsoring a child is one of the best ways in which Britons can help make a difference in the developing world today.” said McLeod.

To participate in World Vision’s Week for Children and become one of the 5,000 Britons to sponsor a child please visit www.worldvision.org.uk or call 0800 501010.

I know a number of people appreciated this last Sunday, so I’m posting it here.
Buy the album - Hello Love

• Don’t assume that formatting the hard drive will make data unrecoverable.
• If the hard drive is no longer needed, remove it from the machine and physically destroy it with a hammer - it’s effective and quite satisfying!
• If the hard drive is to be reused, use Darik’s Boot and Nuke to clear the drive before reformatting.

The direct flight was almost ten hours long, so I had a mini film festival, watching three films back to back from of the interactive smorgasbord on offer. It wasn’t deliberate in my choice but, as it turned out, they all dealt with issues of relationships between children and adults and like so many stories told today, they kept moving back and forward on the timeline.

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is about someone who begins life as an old man and goes through life gradually getting younger. It’s told through his diary as it is read to the love of his life at the end of her life. The earliest and latest years of his life are left largely to the imagination. It made me stop and think about attitudes to age and how people of different age relate to one another. I think it could have been handled just as well in about 2 hours rather than  the almost three which it took.
• Slumdog Millionaire was well worth watching. Tough experiences of three children from the Mumbai slums are traced in flashback as one of them takes part in the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. It mixes English and Hindi in an interesting way, but whoever did the subtitles didn’t forsee its success and plan to help people trying to read them on low resolution seat-back screens. I’ll definitely watch it again on a bigger screen.
• The Reader is definitely not ‘family viewing’, but it does interestingly explore the relationship between a 15 year old boy and an older woman and the impact of guilt in their lives. The film is also a reminder of how much must of us take literacy for granted. The timeline does shift, but not so much as the other two which was a relief to my timezone shifting brain.

Update:

Thanks BBC for a great programme on the hidden third level message in Narnia - watch it if you can here. I loved the clear statement of Lewis’ ’secret’ challenge to materialistic thinking. Praying that many will be challenged by it.

There’s an outline of Michael Ward’s thesis here.

Can you meet with friends to pray on the day of the G20 summit? As the sun rises across the globe, Christians will be praying throughout the day, covering the meeting in prayer Why not have an early-morning prayer get-together where you are? Click the banner for more information which can help you to pray together.