Richard Littledale
Richard Littledale
radio microphone
BBC Radio 2Janice Long Show
Alex Lester Show
Pause for Thought
Richard Littledale: Series 19, Number 3
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Wednesday 2 May 2012

We held a family birthday party at our home recently, and it was a joyous occasion. It was a special birthday, and all in all almost fifty people turned up to help us celebrate. The theory was that we would 'expand' into a small gazebo in the garden - but lashing rain and heavy gusts soon saw to that! Instead we were all squeezed into different rooms of the house - young and old together. The youngest was aged under two, and the older ones were in their seventies. Despite our worries, it turned out that there was plenty of food and drink for everyone, and no-one went hungry.

Of course after every party comes the clearing up - and this was no exception. A few balloons had met their match inside and out, and the shrivelled remains had to be thrown away. Many hands made for light work and all the dishes and glasses were soon packed away. Here's the thing, though. For days afterwards I kept finding little fairy cakes in odd corners, usually in places where only a small person would have put them. They weren't the whole fairy cakes though. Oh no - the icing had been carefully gnawed and licked away, leaving just a crumpled case and a sorry looking cake behind.

We tell our children, don't we - that you can't have the icing without the cake, just as you can't have your pudding without eating your greens? Most of us, though, spend the rest of our lives wondering whether it really has to be so. Do we really need to have the pain as well as the pleasure? Can't we just pick the nicer bits of life off the top and leave the duller bits behind - like the gnawed fairy cake behind the sofa? Sadly, it is not so.

I'm never a big fan of those day-glo posters outside churches. Sometimes their blunt messages and their zingy colours feel like they are SHOUTING at every passer by, rather than beckoning them in. I do remember one, though. It had a picture of a fire extinguisher and said "faith is not for emergency use only" How true! Faith has to be of some use in the nice AND the nasty bits - or its not worth having.

Faith is about the whole cake - and not just the icing.

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© BBC 2012
This talk by Richard Littledale was first broadcast as BBC Radio 2's night time "Pause for Thought"
at 01:30 during the Janice Long show and at 03:30 during the Alex Lester show.
It is reproduced here by permission of the BBC.