Picking up on yesterday’s theme, I found some inspiration from another children’s film. Ferdinand is a film about a bull who starts life in a school for teaching bulls to fight (there’s probably a proper term, can’t think of it off the top of my head). He sees his Dad get taken to a matador fight, and the trailer return empty. He runs away and ends up on a farm with a young girl (and her father). He grows up being loved and with no one telling him who he should be. He discovers he loves to dance and roll around in the flowers.
Now, Ferdinand is a very fine specimen of a bull. He is huge and strong. When he goes to the local flower festival, chaos ensues and he gets sent away to a bull school. The same one he ran away from. The other bulls recognise and remember him, and aren’t impressed. Both them and the trainers try and make him into a fighter. Ferdinand refuses to trade in who he is in order to please the trainers or the other bulls, and in doing so is a positive influence on the bulls around him. One particular bull, the alpha bull, says at one point, “So I should dance around and care for flowers?” (Or something like that anyway…) and Ferdinand replies, “No, that’s me. You do you.” (or words to that effect).
It is a great film and teaches about the importance of being who you were made to be, and not who others want you to be (basically, yesterday’s post) but it also shows the effect that can have on the people around us. If we have the courage to be who God made us to be and not give in to the pressure to conform, maybe, just maybe, that courage can be contagious. And just imagine how varied and interesting life would be if we had the courage to be ourselves, if we had the courage to ‘do us’ instead of fitting the mould! How much fun would it be to show off our individual styles instead of being told they were wrong! What would you do if you weren’t afraid of what others thought? What would happen if we celebrated what makes each of us unique instead of criticising it? What does ‘you do you’ mean to you?
And while you ponder on that, check out what ‘you do you’ meant to the bus Ferdinand met…
The Reason for my Hope Blog 