Medway Messenger column, 29th November 2002: I'm Allergic To Soaps

I’m allergic to soaps. 

Put me in front of Eastenders and I want the anti-depressants. Make me watch Corrie, and it brings back memories of three horrible years spent living in Manchester. When my wife has her nightly fix of Emmerdale, I try to engross myself in my dinner. And as for Brookie losing its prime-time slot – well, it only got what it deserved, in my opinion. 

Lately, however, I’ve been involved in a soap with three storylines. Can Ben forgive his brother for running away from home? How will Kylie cope with her fears, as her friend lies ill in hospital? And can Jack rise above the tide of rejection he swims in, because he is overweight?

But you haven’t seen these storylines in the TV listings, and you haven’t seen them on the box. Yet somewhere over a thousand students of Medway secondary schools have been engrossed in these stories as they watched them not on televisions but on computer screens. And then they had to offer some advice to one of the three troubled characters. 

One girl asked me if the stories were true, because they seemed so real. Other students have said that it is as if the stories were written about them personally. 

Perhaps the themes of the three stories – forgiveness, fear, and rejection – are particularly relevant to teenagers. But it hasn’t just been the students who have been caught up in the stories and the issues. Several of their teachers have taken part, too, and become just as engrossed as those they teach. 

It’s all part of a project called GSUS Live, which – in the form of a high-tech multimedia RE lesson – helps teenagers think about what Jesus and the Christian faith has to offer in these areas of life. RE certainly wasn’t like this when I was at secondary school, back in the Middle Ages. Not for us what these kids are getting with GSUS Live – 3D video, film clips, Internet, and contemporary music. We lived in a shoebox! 

Using these media, local Christians are trying to show that Jesus is as relevant to Millennium Three as he always has been. The issues of forgiveness, fear, and rejection are universal. 

When we face such problems, I believe we need two things. Firstly, we need a God’s-eye perspective, not our own. But secondly, we don’t need a helper who is remote: if you’re anything like me, then when you face a crisis, you don’t just need the clever answers, you need someone who has lived through similar pain. 

For Christians, these two needs are combined in one person, Jesus himself, who was both divine and human. As God, he can speak to us because he knows how he designed life to be. As a human being, he can speak to us because he has drunk the cup of suffering to its dregs. Dying on the cross, he needed to forgive, to confront his fears, and cope with rejection. 

No wonder Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian martyr who died at the hands of the Nazis, wrote: ‘If Jesus is not true God, how could he help us? If he is not true man, how could he help us?’ 

It is he who enables us to forgive, overcome fear, and replace rejection with divine acceptance – this GSUS.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.