andi oakes

Sitting by the window in a coffee shop, a guy walked passed with, what I assume was, his little daughter: dressed in the coolest three quarter length, big buttoned red coat over a pair of the funkiest looking flared jeans with pink flowers embroidered down the side. (The little girl was dressed like this that is, and not the guy himself.  Just thought I should clarify that in case you think we have styling issues going on down here)  

Looking no more than 3 years old, with blonde hair and a mischievous glint in her eye, she swaggered gracefully behind him with a bag of crisps in her hand and a carefree air about her.  I couldn't help smiling to myself.

Just as she drew level with me, a few inches away and separated by mere millimetres of glass, I expected her to pass on by, but was somewhat taken by surprise (and pleasantly so I might add), when she stopped outside and pushed her face right up to the window to give me a wide crisp filled smile.  I chuckled and waved...and this little angel, satisfied she had achieved her desired response, sashayed on her merry way.

How brilliant are children?

In one simple moment, this little girl invaded and brightened my world with her glorious smile.   A smile without warning.  A smile without baggage.  A smile without agenda.  A smile full of crisps.  

At what stage do we lose the freedom to smile so carelessly at people?  

At what time do we stop being so carefree in our walk through life?

At what moment are we introduced to so much fear that we begin to hide from each other?

At what point do we become so self-conscious?

I'm sure we were never designed to be so afraid, so suspicious: but somehow we get reprogrammed.

Maybe if we could just find the reset button we could all reset ourselves to our original mode: back to the manufacturers default settings?  Maybe we could find a way to undo all the programming that's clogging up our hard-drives and free up more memory space for all the good stuff that would make us smile more instead of all the junk and pointless applications that take up so much of our processing power and keep us bound in perpetual cycles of fear and suspicion?

Maybe there's a man we can get in, who could run a virus check and clean out our system?  Someone who'll delete all the rubbish and show us how to manage our programming and show us what to download and what to avoid.

Maybe there's a man who will help us to make sense of the manual and show us what it all means?

Everyone...I think it's time we got a man in to look at the system:

Jesus Christ: Ultimate system repair and refurbishment.