'Dear Blue Peter... I can save lives'

Do you remember the remarkable story of the team who last year gave a woman a new windpipe - and hence new life - using her own stem cells? Thirty-five years earlier, the lead scientist/surgeon, Professor Anthony Hollander, had written to Blue Peter, saying:

...he had a "strange" belief that he knew how to "make people or animals alive".

The letter, which by his own admission today was "eccentric", went on to ask the programme to help him acquire the necessary materials to carry out these life-saving tasks. The shopping list included a "model of a heart split in half" and "tools for cutting people open".

Every child who wrote got a personal reply - and thankfully, he was no exception. The reply gave him just enough encouragement not to give up his dream... and more than thirty years of investing his life in the pursuit of his dream, he's beginning to see the fruit of it.

There are special individuals, I guess, whose lives we look on with some wonder and awe, who just seem to know what they're meant to do with their days and never waver.

Most of us feel rather that we have fallen in to what we're doing - some of us even that what we are doing is a proof of our failure to find that 'call'.

But the sermon I preached on Sunday, from Jesus' Parable of the Talents (in Matthew 25) puts a lie to that sense that unless we have a clear "one call" purpose, we're no use to God.

The key contrast between the first two servants - who are called "good and faithful" - and the third wasn't so much their investment strategy as their relationship with the Master. Did they see their 'talent' (or gold) as a gift to be invested for a return, or a burden they'd rather not be responsibile for? Did they trust the Master enough to take a risk, or sulkily complain that he'd probably be too hard on them if they even tried?

If my life is a gift - if each hour, day, week, month, year is a gift - then the question of where and how I invest it for a "good return" hinges on whether I recognise it as such (a gift), not whether I turn out to be a great surgeon or philanthropist. God has no hierarchy of professions, but a family of children who look to him as their gift-giving Father and live accordingly - whether that be in unemployment, parenting, banking, teaching, friendship, fund-raising, writing...

What return will the investment of my day bring today... and for whom?