Learning from Pinocchio

By Kathy (as spoken at 6th Grade graduation ceremony)

When I started praying about what to talk about tonight, I immediately thought of the lessons these kids and all of us can learn from the play we worked so hard on “No Strings Attached.”

In the play, Pinocchio and the Purple Fairy let us know that being real is a goal worth reaching. As you all move into secondary school, things are already beginning to change. In some respects this graduation signals a goodbye to childhood. From now on there will be more pressure to grow up, pressure to act – not act in another play but in the hallways of middle school.

Act a certain way so that you will be liked, but please 6th Graders, don’t forget to be real. Be who you really are, not who you think you need to be so you will be popular. The Lord has made each of you so special and unique. There’s no need to act. Don’t copy an upperclassman, or a famous singer, or a movie star or an older brother or cousin . . . just be the REAL you!
I know that this year you have learned a lot about Canada and South America. About multiplying fractions and doing science experiments.

But more important than all those academic advances you have made, my prayer is that you will remember most what you learned in Bible and chapel, and how to apply it as you live out your Christian faith. On the soccer field . . . or in your own homes when no one from school is watching you.

When things don’t go your way.

When you feel like giving up.

Then sing and dance and smile all at the same time. Just like the fish and the marionettes in our play.

Some of you will begin the school year in the fall in a new place. We will miss you. I hope that you can carry the lessons from the play and how that affects your Christianity to your new school.

God made you unique, so don’t rob the world of the YOU that He wants you to be . . . He delights in you. I’m pretty sure that the Lord smiles when He sees you being real, and when He sees you smile and dance and sing . . . all at the same time.

"Radium Girls" and Stumbling Toward Dominion

Chernobyl.

Bophar, India.

These only begin the list of health and environmental disasters.
Thalidimide (see short video of a “thalidomide baby” who now plays
guitar professionally . . . with his toes. Please press "play" below.)




Radium.

When our school drama department recently presented “Radium Girls”, I
had no idea of this chapter of American history. In the mid 1920s, it was a miracle cure and Madame Curie was a celebrity. The dial painters of the U.S. Radium Corporation enjoyed neither health nor fame.



“Radium is one of the most dangerous substances known to man,” says Dr. Von Sochocy, a character in the play. But this was after he had founded and guided a successful enterprise that made luminous watch and clock dials, Von Sochocky then sold his Orange,NJ plant, but workers had already been tipping their radium-laden paintbrush bristles with their lips . . . and getting sick.

And dying. At the U.S. Radium Corporation, it was killing the workers who painted the watch dials.


The Love Canal.

Leaded paint.
Bysinosis (brown lung disease)
Leaded gasoline, something that concerned us personally here in the
developing world. Now it has been replaced with unleaded.

Madame Curie was said to have loved radium but it eventually killed her. She
evidently didn’t realize it had the power to kill her, just as the
character, Harriet Roeder, flippantly dismisses the radium sickness
deaths (as she takes a drag on a cigarette) with “science just wasn’t
as advanced, the way it is now.)

It is easy enough to adopt an attitude that science sufficiently
explains all, but God told Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,
“Multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; . . . “

In our confidence in science on such controversies as embryo stem cell
research and the scare about global warming, what is our attitude? A
flippant arrogance that looks back on society’s many accomplishments
and advances? Or utmost dependence on our Creator?

Sometimes the scientific advance is a juggernaut, pushing to explore
every benefit the created universe offers. But then again, sometimes
too, it is a stumble.

graphic arts: R. Sams