I’ve been doing a lot of tidying up lately.  If you were to ask the rest of my family they would say that this is because I am a strangely obsessive and troubled little man; if you ask me, it’s just that I think it’s important to live in an ordered environment.  An obsessively tidy, ordered environment. Ordered by me.

As I go around the house, though, muttering grumpily to myself about everyone else’s inability to put stuff away or fold stuff up or load stuff into the dishwasher, I am constantly struck by other things I haven’t thought about but which have, miraculously, been done.  There is milk and cheese and ham in the fridge.  The bathroom sink is clean.  The hamsters have been fed.

So, the jobs I forgot (like getting us fed) are the ones that someone else remembered.  Family life, it turns out, is a team effort, and apparently neatness is not the single goal towards which we all must strive.  Who knew?

We spend our whole lives in teams of one sort or another, at work, at school, socially, even if we never play sport, and being in a team requires a certain etiquette, and a recognition that we alone are not always at the centre of things.  We don’t always see that.

Jesus’s disciples, who were a team with a fairly obvious leader, spent their time on the road arguing over which one of them was the greatest.  Two of them, James and John, even asked for special seats in heaven.  They at least had the decency to be embarrassed when Jesus caught them bickering, but it’s pretty clear that each of them had the sense that they were somehow more important than the others. 

Jesus’s advice was simple: ‘If anyone wants to be first’, he said, ‘they must be the very last, and the servant of all.’  The team that wins is the team where every member is in the service of every other: no tackling from Richard Hill and Phil Vickery, no moment of glory for Jonny Wilkinson.  When everyone serves, everyone gets served.

This was my first Pause for Thought, recorded with Hannah Mayo on January 17th 2014.

I’m not sure when the late night scripts were broadcast, so they’re posted here in the order they were written and given dates that mark their relation to certain fixed points in the calendar relevant to the themes I was supposed to be writing on – Valentine’s and Whitsun, for example, or the Six Nations rugby.