Garry told a story last night as part of our ‘Little Big Church’ and like all good stories, it started with…
So, once upon a time there was a single thread of cotton. The thread was very small – so small people could easily miss it. So small people took ages trying to thread a needle with it. So small the best way to see it was with a magnifying glass!
The cotton thread didn’t feel very important or useful or strong.
The little thread wound up on a reel, left on a shelf, where there were some others like this little thread.
The thread still didn’t feel very important or useful or strong, even when one day someone came with boxes and took all the cotton reels off the shelves and took them away.
Someone opened the box and the reel was taken out. They put it on a machine and started to thread it along and did the same with many other reels. The thread was wrapped and pulled and twisted and pulled some more!
It seemed to go on for a very long time and then there were lots of threads altogether in a huge group and people called the group of threads a rope. The rope was rolled up and taken to the docks and put on a large ship, with one end fastened down and the other end fastened to the land.
The thread felt more important: it had a job to do, to hold the ship. The thread felt more useful because it had a job to do. But it still didn’t feel very strong.
After a while, the ship began to move and the rope began to stretch out. The only thing holding the ship was the rope. The thread didn’t feel very big – and this was a very big ship. But the thread wasn’t on its own; there were lots of other threads in the rope. And even though none of the threads felt strong on their own, together they held the ship. Together, they stopped the ship drifting away. Together, they were strong.
Like the threads, if we work together, we can do things we can never do on our own. But we are different to these threads, because we are not all the same. We are all different, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work together. Instead, when we work together, we work in harmony. In music, when notes are played together which go well together, the result is called harmony and it sounds good! When we work together, our differences don’t matter, because we produce a work that is better and stronger than we could produce on our own!
