Remembrance Day

I love going to Church on Remembrance Sunday. That might sound like an odd opening sentence, but it's become such a focal point in my year that I look forward to that moment at 11am, when we're silent, when we stop and reflect. This year I was unprepared. Don't get me wrong, I was there and dressed respectfully, yet I hadn't emotionally prepared myself.

Last month I came back from Colombia, where I learnt about the work Christian Aid support in a country where conflict has continued for 50 years. We travelled into Cacarica, in the midst of the rainforest. We heard how whole communities were forced from their patches of paradise to live with 4000 other people in a sports centre. We saw the 'Hill of Terror'. When I was in Colombia, I heard these stories, took them in, processed them as best I could. Only now, sitting in my cosy church in sunny Southend, did I understand the scale of pain and suffering and struggle they went through.

That personal experience gave a depth to Remembrance Day I've never realised. 'Lest we forget' is a call to let the memory of servicemen live on, to vow the horrors of the World Wars will never return and simultaneously to recognise there are nations and militaries at war today, and ordinary people who get caught in the crossfires of conflict and the instability it inflicts on their lives. In Colombia, I met Father Alberto. He personally receives death threats for helping displaced people back onto their land. We asked him why he did such risky work, when he could display his Christian love in simpler ways, like feeding the homeless in his city. He replied:

The puzzle is when there's so much conflict in the world, how can I not do something...

To not act would be treason to my faith

We can and must all act to end conflict, and I'm so grateful we don't need to risk our lives to do so. Peace and justice are twin words, they have to come together. Without peace, there's injustice and without justice, there's conflict. I was really challenged by our Remembrance Sunday service, as our Vicar emphasised standing for peace and justice is not a light-hearted commitment. It means looking at the world, all its problems and deciding how I can personally relieve them. That might be not using 'banter' as an excuse for bullying, boycotting Amazon because of their aggressive tax evasion policies or praying and standing in solidarity with the people of the Philippines. I, a Christian Aid intern, have shied away from the news in recent days, trying to block out the devastation that's happened. Then I heard Father Alberto's voice again.

'And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.'

Micah 5:8

This Remembrance Day for me, the penny dropped. 'Lest we forget' goes far beyond a passive act of reflection on the past. It is a call for use to be peace and justice bearers in the present, and look to the future hope that is promised through Jesus.

Movember: Mr Men

I love Mr Men books: the block colour illustrations, the quirky characters and the punchline on the last page of every book. Over the years my favourite has shifted. Looking back on my well-loved collection, I found a simple question in the back of one copy. 'Who's your favourite Mr. Men?' I wrote Mr. Worry. That's pretty worrying in itself that he was my favourite as a child. Of course, Mr Happy is now up there too. Unlike my Disney sleepwear, my Mr Happy pajamas don't have my name sewn on the front on them, so let's hope I never lose them. But recently a new favourite has come into my life, Mr. Nobody. I really can't recommend it enough and the power lesson of self-esteem it teaches....

Here's the spoiler alert (for anyone who doesn't like their Mr. Men reading ruined).

Mr Nobody learns he's not a nobody, he's a somebody and I'm a somebody. He has dignity, and I have dignity. He matters, and I matter. I really believe we need to live in a world where everyone understands that, embraces the parable of the Good Samaritan not as 'just doing my good deed for the day', but as helping even helping your worst enemy, because gentlemen and gentlewomen help. As I learnt from Colombia last month, helping can be as simple as standing in solidarity with someone, listening and sharing their story. Throughout Movember, I stand in solidarity with men with prostate or testicular cancer, with their families, with my family.

There's a new Mr Men in town: Mr. Mo, published especially for Movember and available on Kindle. I gave it a 5 star rating.

The Clergyman and the Mo

Last week at work I led a youth session on the theme of 'Heroes'. I love superheros and convinced myself everyone else does too. It went well, less well when they decided a superhero would beat up playground bullies, but by the end we'd learnt about some heros of social justice and found the common denominator: heroes do something. It might be organising a mass march on Washington and and delivering arguably the most famous speech in American history, or it might be not using the word 'gay' to mean anything but someone's sexuality. Whatever the scale of impact, heroes do something.

On Wednesday I met a hero at Liverpool Cathedral, a clergyman aged who is about to retire. He told me about the different parishes he worked in before coming to the Cathedral, where he noticed an anomaly. Liverpool Cathedral is an incredible building that draws many vistors in, yet there was no-one with a dog collar ready to welcome them. So he began 'working the floor' as a clear religious presence, should anyone want to talk to him. People did talk, he listened and he helped them.

This hero was recently diagnosed with prostate cancer but he's not ready to call it a day yet. It makes me so frustrated and angry and sad and a mesh of all kinds of emotions that cancer comes along and does this, zapping people of energy, just as kryptonite zaps Superman. That's why this Movember, I'm  going to do something and grow a moustache. I might raise a bit of money from it - great. I might make my friends more aware of health issues and cancer checkes - awesome. I will tell people the story of heroes like the clergyman and my Dad.

Day one: perhaps I should invest in some selfie lessons? You can track my progress throughout Movember at mobro.co/JoeyKnock

Scream and Shout

Last Sunday was a bad day, a very bad day. Mum and I had just come back from a lovely holiday on the Isle of Wight - breakfast outside every morning by the lake, cake everyday for afternoon tea and Pimms every night with dinner. It was glorious. We came home to realize the boiler was broken, the Freeview remote wouldn't work and I had to pretty sharpish find somewhere to live for my new job in Liverpool. With all this on my mind, I was screaming and shouting and threw somethings. (Well some thing - the 79p water sprayer from Wilkos, which is a good buy because it didn't break).

I don't despair like that often. I remember doing it before my Christmas Tea Party, stressed about how my bakes were progressing and probably still drunk from the night before. I hadn't been this despairing since writing a non-assessed (and non important) class essay last February, when I just couldn't work out what to say. I scream and shout when I don't feel in control and don't know what to do. And then I get angry and stressed with myself, that a nice cuppa tea couldn't just sort me out.

Well last week I went for a walk, sat on a roadside bench that I shared with Mike, a Yugoslav pensioner, then went home and started dealing with things. I went to bed, woke up happier (not happy) and by Wednesday I had a spring back in my step. And yesterday i had found a great room for me in Liverpool, at least for the short-term.

What if I hadn't woken up more content? Or  didn't have a loving Mother to look out for me? What if I scream and shout more and more? That thought genuinely upsets and scares me. But it shows I'm human, and that means I have to manage my mental health and wellbeing. 1 in 4 people suffer a mental health problem each year. It doesn't mean they're 'crazy', it means someone you know needs (and hopefully gets) support and help. And I think in out social networking/internet age, there's new pressures on mental wellbeing, from jealousy through to the fatal effects of cyber-bullying. Mental health is too big an elephant to keep in the room.

So at Southend Mind, they've built not just a new room but a whole new centre for it. The Jubilee Centre on Southchurch Road is a drop-in centre where anyone can walk through the door, ask for help and be sign-posted/offered to the right support. Astonishingly, it's the first centre of it's kind in the UK. I'm proud I can tell the Scousers I meet that in the heart of Southend is a mental health centre for everyone, and If I'm worried I'm screaming and shouting a bit too much, I can walk through the right door.

I'm selling 'Summer Tea Selections' to fundraise for the Jubilee Centre Appeal. 12 different tea blends to sample for just £2.50 (£3 posted), with every penny going to the appeal. Simply ask me to order one!

You can read more about the Jubilee Centre and make a donation at www.southendmind.org.uk

Enough Food If we all #YOLO

Have you ever written a letter of complaint? I have and it's becoming quite a speciality of mine. Over the last year I've written to Natwest, Virgin Trains, Virgin Media, c2c and Disneyland. Natwest gave me £10 for a delay in my new debit card. Virgin Media wrote off our final bill because I told them we're nice people. c2c gave me the money back I spent on the wrong train ticket. Sadly Disneyland didn't give me a free holiday, but it was worth a shot. When it comes to injustices against me and my wallet, I'm not gonna stand for it.

And yet there are genuine injustices in the world that I do far less about. I spent 90 minutes writing to c2c for the sake of £5 while 30% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa are under-nourished. When I first heard that statistic, my first though was 'oh good, it's only 30%.' It's a classic case of 'compassion fatigue', where the media give us so many images and stories of suffering that we become desensitised to them. We don't don’t bat an eyelid when Huw Edwards briefly tells us there was a suicide bomb set off in Iraq, or when Ewan McGregor is asking us to donate to Unicef during an advert break.

However compassion-fatigued we are, it is nothing short of a disgrace that 1 in 8 people across the globe are hungry. That's 865 million people, more than the populations of Europe, Australia, USA and Canada combined. It sounds like an unimaginable amount of people, but they’re all real individuals struggling to live now, and again tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. That is scary and shocking and angers me that we live in a world that knowingly lets that happen. It upsets and confuses me that I  sit in my cosy home, my cosy clothes, consuming all the chocolates and I tea I want, writing letters of complaint for the sake of £5 while there are people with nothing. And even if I donated that £5 along with every single penny in my bank account to a charity like Christian Aid or Oxfam, it's not enough to end world hunger. It seems like a lost cause.

In those hopeless moments, I think '#YOLO': You Only Live Once. It’s a phrase popularized by the rapper Drake and the footballer Mario Balotelli (hip-hop and football being two topics I’m an expert on). I can live the Yolo-lifestyle like anyone else. It’s about going out, getting wasted, not caring about the consequences. Look through my Facebook photos, and you'll see I can enjoy a night out. This month, I 'YOLO'd' more than before. When I was in Brighton celebrating my birthday, I had such an amazing time doing the Joey dance and so much more on the dance floor. I kissed a guy. I danced with another, he propositioned me and I let him go. And when I went home I was kicking myself about the missed opportunity: he was (through my beer-goggles at least) hot. So I downloaded Grindr  (a smartphone app allowing you to talk to other gay men nearby) and started spending 2 hours a night on talking to desperate guys asking how big your penis is before they ask your name. 2 hours a night not practicing for choir or planning my Christian Aid volunteering. After a few days I realized I don’t want to be chasing faceless fantasies through my phone if it takes time away from all the things I love doing (baking, singing, reading, writing, watching Disney), all the things that I hope one day a guy will look at and think ‘I love Joey.‘ I only live once, so I want it to be the best life it can be. That allows for going out and partying like Drake and Balotelli, but it has to go far deeper than wasted nights. But it goes deeper than that for me, and I want us now to read the parable of the Good Samaritan. (Luke 10:25-37, discuss)

The Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) is a parable that speaks to anyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, It's message is simple: love your 'neighbour', who is anyone you come in contact with, from your the person living next door to the homeless man to pass on the way to work and the factory worker in India who made your cardigan. #YOLO means living life to its fullest because you only live once, on one Earth, next to 7 billion neighbours. It is central to my Christian faith and my human decency to love and respect everyone of those neighbours. If the parable was retold today, the Samaritan wouldn't simply help the poor guy up, call an ambulance and go on his way, posting a Facebook status about what a hero he is. He would ride in the ambulance to the hospital, come back daily during visiting hours and help him at home once he was discharged. The Good Samaritan parable tells us we should totally and sincerely care for our everyone else in our world. That is an enormous challenge, which is why it’s one we have to tackle together.

There is enough food for everyone in the world if we challenge the systems we have right now (like legal tax dodging) and examine the food we eat in our own lives. The 'Enough Food If' campaign is calling on all of us to stand up and shout out, to show governments and businesses that we care about people in Africa, Asia and South America just as much as we care about people in Southend, Essex and Britain. If we give our voices to the life-and-death injustice of hunger, huge leaps will be taken that bring us closer to the day needless hunger is eradicated. If we YOLO now by caring for our neighbours, they'll YOLO by not being held back by hunger and poverty.

'If we can conquer space, we can conquer [childhood] hunger'

Buzz Aldrin

www.enoughfoodif.org

Facebook.com/EnoughFoodIf

@EnoughFoodIF

Happy Salad Day!

Today is Salad Day. You probably won't have seen any cards for it in Clintons, or any special set-menus for it at restaurants. It's not as well known as Valentine's Day but it is more important to me. It's a story of friendship. Three years ago to the day I had a fantastic day out in Banbury with my friend Clare. We'd been to the cinema to watch Princess and the Frog, had a great lunch and now I was on my way home, but that old enemy of British public transport was waiting for me. Snow had turned Warwick Campus into gridlock. I was a first year, so I had to trek a bit to my halls but I made it home.

Thursday night was Cell group night (like a Bible study grop if you don't know) but the snow made it clear we wouldn't be getting off campus to my friends Peter and Ed's house any time soon. So some of the cell group came to mine. I cobbled together any food I could find, including a bag of salad that was half frozen in the fridge. No problem I thought, I'll zap it in the microwave to freshen it up. And I did. 'Here is salad'. Since that day, my friendship with Peter and Ed and everyone else in the cell group, in the associated choir, in the Chaplaincy grew and grew and grew. We've gone on to share masses of (non-microwaved) salad. We had it for my 21st birthday meal. I love salad. I love eating it and I love sharing it. That classic episode of The Simpsons where Homer sings 'you don't make friends with salad!' simply isn't true to me.

This year, Salad Day is extra important to me. I've given up meat for Lent. Someone told me it's a strange thing to surrender. I don't look at vegetarians and think they're strange. Lent to me means giving something up that you like and is a luxury in your life, to prove you can live without it. It's a food type that people across the developing world do live without. It's also a food type that is processed in such a way that uses vast resources. 40% of grains produced in the world feeds livestock while almost 900 million people go to bed hungry each night. Global hunger is a complicated issue, but one we can act on through the 'Enough Food If' campaign. I'm not saying we all have to be vegetarian to end global hunger. I'm just using Lent this year as a chance to reflect on the food I eat.

I'm going to thoroughly enjoy my salad tonight. I hope you thoroughly enjoy whatever's on your dinner plate tonight, and the people you share it with.

Role Models

Looks Like We Mo’d It...

I have one role model each my Movember: my Dad. He had an brilliantly bushy moustache back in the day, and he died from prostate cancer 4 years ago this month. I took part in Movember again this year to remember that, and had big ideas for it. I was going to talk about prostate and testicular cancer to everyone I met and write a song called ‘Check Your Balls’. But I didn’t get much further than the atrocious daily photos.

It’s not that I lost my passion for the cause or remembering Dad. I just threw myself into ‘Advent Tea’, my little Christmas fundraising project for Christian Aid. ‘Little’ is a major understatement for an operation involving 3000 teabags and sales worth over £600. But with the help of Mum I did it. And I know Dad would have been busy labeling envelopes with her, selling them to everyone he knew and supporting me with his encouragement and determination. Making Advent Tea was a way to put his legacy into action: an unwavering belief in working hard to achieve success and the need to never stop helping other people.

I can’t be the only person you’ve heard call their Dad/Grandpa/Mum/Grandma a role model. They become huge inspirations to us because we live with them, seeing with our own eyes how they deal with the joys, stresses and sorrow of life. I have celebrity role models too, like Ellen DeGeneres: ‘coming out’ in real life and her sitcom was groundbreaking, and she continues to inspire me with the infectious joy she spreads on her daily talk show. But I don’t know what Ellen’s like at home. I guess she’s just as lovely and funny, but she can’t tell me how to react when a friend’s in trouble or there’s a power cut. Dad did.

It’s so blindingly obvious that however inspiring celebrities are, the people we see everyday of our lives become much more powerful role models. That also means I’m a role model to the people I see everyday. I don’t say that arrogantly; being a role model doesn’t mean being perfect. It means I lead life the best way I can, and hope some parts of it seem ‘right’ to other people too. No one person can give us a perfect example of 21st Century living, no idol can spoon-feed us the answers however much we worship them. But as one person you need to live as a role model. What kind of life are living if you don’t want anyone to follow it or learn from what you’ve done? 

That’s why I always help other people when I can, because I know life can be too overwhelming to struggle through it alone. That’s why I made Advent Tea, to support Christian Aid’s work to end poverty. That’s why I grew a moustache, because I knew sharing my Dad’s story would raise money and awareness that will stop other role models dying far too young.

You can sponsor me for Movember at www.MoBro.co/JoeyKnock

You can find out more about Advent Tea at www.facebook.com/AdventTea