In our household, Lydia is now 16, Simon is 14 and Emily is 10 and you would think that in a normal household we may have grown out of nursery rhymes, cbeebies, and all the rest. But not a bit of it! Simon goes into every room in the house, and if there’s a radio or TV or CD player there, Simon will have on, cbeebies which is a digital television channel for very young children, as well as nursery rhymes and Christmas Carols. Carols are popular at the moment (actually since the middle of summer) and he will leave them on and then depart from the room, thus creating a cacophony of noise all over the house. We wonder will we ever see the end of this; probably not! You get to the stage where if you think you’ll ever hear Humpty Dumpty, again, you’ll go insane. I don’t know how larger families cope.

You get so worn down that you end up wondering who or what Humpty Dumpty was! And, as far as my research shows Humpty Dumpty was actually a huge canon which did sit on a wall, it did fall and it smashed in to so many pieces that all the military might couldn’t put it together again. ‘Hey diddle diddle’ rhyme reflects all sorts of characters in the court of Elizabeth I. The ‘little dog laughed to see such sport’ is supposed to be Sir Walter Raleigh, and the dish who ran away with the spoon were a couple who had eloped!

All this curiosity got me reading the original story of ‘Cinderella’ by the brothers Grimm. It’s a horrible story! (It’s a bit like Dickens’ ‘Oliver Twist’; if it hadn’t been made into a musical, it would never have been as widely known as it is now.) Back to Cinderella; in it the so-called ‘Ugly sisters’ are not ugly at all. In fact they are very beautiful. When the story would be portrayed on stage or film, the audience had to see they were ugly by the way they looked.

When Robert Louis Stevenson published a book in 1886 called “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll (Jeekll) and Mr. Hyde”, the ‘ugliness’ of Mr. Hyde was nothing like how his ugliness has been depicted when that famous book was made into many films and plays.

When we go to see a movie or a play, we seem to have to portray evil in a visual way. So, like the ‘ugly’ sisters, Dr. Jekyll turns into a grotesque looking monster, which isn’t in the book at all! Because we have to see their ugliness, we make them look ugly!

The truth is that, although these are all works of fiction, the writers were right to portray evil and ugliness as not things which we see on the outside, but which exist on the inside.

We are very visual people; that is the fact of the matter! We judge people and we look at people and we study people as they appear to us on the outside. How we appear to others is very important, and perhaps moreso now than ever before. How we present ourselves in business is incredibly important. In a famous line from another children’s film, ‘Matilda’, Danny de Vito says, “They don’t buy a car, they buy me!”

We have become obsessed by the way we look, how we present ourselves, and our physical appearance is of crucial importance in relating to others; the list of things we do to ourselves to make ourselves more beautiful is endless (men included). Cosmetic surgery is commonplace. I should’ve had it done years ago!

You know, the actress Michelle Pfeiffer appeared on the cover of a famous magazine with the caption, “What the Michelle Pfeiffer Needs Is...Absolutely Nothing!” Now, however much we men might agree that Michelle Pfeiffer needs ‘absolutely nothing’ to add to her look, it was later revealed by the reporter that Michelle Pfeiffer did need something after all. In fact, once the photo was taken, there were thousands of dollars spent on ‘retouching’ the photo. The list of things that were done to make Michelle Pfeiffer look beautiful was endless: clean up complexion, soften eye lines, add colour to lips, remove neckline and the list went on and on. There were 19 ‘touch-ups’ done to that one photograph, and the bill ran into thousands of dollars.

The Rev. EJH Nash was a nineteen year old clerk in an insurance office when he became a Christian. This was written of him, “There was nothing particularly impressive about him, he was neither athletic nor adventurous, and he claimed no academic prowess or artistic talent”. Yet John Stott, the Rector Emeritus of All Souls, Langham Place in London who became a Christian through Nash, said of him, “Nondescript in outward appearance, his heart was ablaze with Christ”.

Jackie Pullinger has spent over twenty years working in Hong Kong with prostitutes, heroin addicts and gang members. She once began a memorable talk like this: “God wants us to have soft hearts and hard feet. The trouble with many of us is that we have hard hearts and soft feet”. She went on to talk about being physically tough to combat evil and suffering, but inside to have a soft heart, a heart of forgiveness and compassion and love. We are concentrating, she said, so much on having soft appearances, that we neglect having soft hearts. We’re neglecting the beauty therapy which is needed on the inside; cleaning up our ugliness, which every writer knows isn’t on the outside, but on the inside.

In that extraordinary scene in Caesarea Philippi when Peter confessed Jesus as the Christ, Peter was surrounded by very physical and obvious statues and surroundings that would have said to him many things, but he knew that contrary to what he saw, he knew that Jesus was the Christ. In Matthew’s version of this event, Matthew says, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to by man, but by my Father in heaven”.

We do not need to depend on what the outside world is telling us, but we need to listen to what has been revealed in our hearts.