Lights, camera, action! This was the atmosphere that captured the audience at the auditorium of the Learning Resource Centre, UWI on March 8 as the Catholic Students’ Movement hosted their annual Lenten Production. The audience comprised students from three different children’s homes, religious Sisters, UWI students, lecturers and others. The theme of the production was Black, white or gray, God is speaking your language.

The production consisted of four acts whose subject matter ranged from infidelity to drug abuse, to the danger of worldly possessions, to the unspeakable evil gang life offers. These are all life choice situations that we ourselves, or people we know are involved in. The play sought however, to stress the fact that in the midst of disappointment, loss and death comes life and new meaning.

This can only be achieved when one relinquishes earthly preoccupations and makes God’s word one’s joy. Additionally, the play also represented a stand against abortion. The consequences of acts such as infidelity, drug abuse and others were not downplayed, but the emphasis was centered on experiencing God’s resurrection in one’s life.

The evening started off at a high point with the “horner woman scene” that threw the entire crowd into laughter. It was a clear case of a husband engaging in extra-marital relations and impregnating his partner.

He then pressures the outside woman to have an abortion. His wife unaware of the situation tries to convince the woman not to abort her baby, but to offer it up to the Lord instead. As the wife relates her husband’s history of infidelity to the outside woman, the outside woman finally asks, “So what is your husband name?”  

The audience erupted in laughter as the wife pronounced her husband’s name, while the woman’s shock sends her into a coughing fit leaving the wife none the wiser. The intended message was conveyed when the outside woman decides she will not have an abortion but “will make God my baby’s daddy!”

This message of experiencing a new resurrection in one’s life was constant throughout the production. The sentiment was echoed again in the case of the drug abuser who used drugs to enhance her singing performance. Roxi started smoking marijuana as a result of peer pressure.

She then progressed to cocaine. The drug caused irreparable damage to her larynx thereby destroying her singing ability and music career. Then her doctor introduces the word of God as an alternative lifestyle for her and after studying the Bible she declares: “From now God is my inspiration and not coke.”

When we turn this CSM Lenten production around what we get is a picture staring back at us. Infidelity, abortion, materialism, gangs, drug abuse etc, are all activities that people choose to engage in or not.

These issues are real to us because people in our homes, neighbourhood, community and wider society actively participate in such acts. The secular world we life in today also promotes, glamourises and endorses these destructive lifestyle choices as noble, fashionable and worthy alternatives. These lifestyle choices are instead poisonous to one’s spiritual growth because they contradict Christian principles and teachings.

Additionally, they render us susceptible to a host of psychological and health-related complications that affect one’s well being.

Where do you stand in this mad life choice scenario? Are your life choices good or bad? Those who make good life choices must be mindful of the danger of turning a blind eye to the destructive life choices of our peers, our neighbours, our brothers and sisters. Our lives must be witnesses of the resurrection of God so that others may want to pattern their lives after us.

 Like the doctor in the play, we must not be afraid to share God’s resurrection message with the distraught, vulnerable and depressed. For turning a blind eye is tantamount to active participation or promotion of such activities. Even if our life choices are bad, God wants us to be ministers of his resurrection message.

Pick up you Bible and open you heart to his word. He will heal you and make you whole again. The Bible has all the answers to fulfil you for whether “black, white or gray, God is speaking your language.”