Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Official Report 841KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is Mr Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the chief executive and founder of Mary’s Meals.

About 20 years ago, I was on a dark street in Colombia with a group, looking for children who were living on the streets so that we could offer them a hot breakfast. We found a little boy of about six years old who was sleeping under some cardboard, and we gave him his breakfast. We began speaking to him, and one of us asked him, “Who’s your best friend?” He looked up at us and thought for a little while, then said, “God is.” We were taken aback. We knew that that little boy was not going to school and that no one had told him to say that. We asked him, “Why do you say that?” He said, “Because God gives me everything I need.”

That little boy did not know where his next meal was coming from and he had seen his friends murdered on the streets, yet he said that with absolute conviction. He evangelised me that day, and, in the years since, as I journey through life proclaiming myself to be a Christian, I sometimes ask myself whether I really believe that God gives me everything that I need in the way that that little boy on the street did.

A few years later, another conversation with a child led to the birth of Mary’s Meals, which provides daily meals in places of education for the world’s poorest children—now more than 1.2 million children around the world every day. That conversation with the child took place in 2002, in Malawi, where I met a mother who was dying and had six children around her. I began talking to her eldest son, who was called Edward and was 14 years old. At one point, I said to him, “Edward, what are your hopes? What are your ambitions?” He looked at me and said, “I would like to have enough food to eat, and I would like to be able to go to school one day.” That was the extent of his ambition at 14. The words that he spoke that day are really what triggered this movement of Mary’s Meals, which keeps growing around the world and has a vision that every child in this world might eat at least one good meal every day in their place of education.

The story of Mary’s Meals can teach us a few things. It can teach us the importance of listening to children when they speak. It can teach us that any of us can do something to make this world better, no matter what our qualifications—or our lack thereof, in my case. The story of Mary’s Meals also tells us that that little boy in Colombia was right when he said that God gives us everything that we need in this world of plenty in which we produce more than enough food for all of us to eat well.

Our vision that every child might eat at least one good meal every day is a vision that burns more brightly than ever, and it is one that I entrust again to God and to our Lord Jesus.