Hamster Potter and the Blog of Dumb

A couple of years ago I was sitting in Berlin’s Tegel Airport waiting for a flight back to the UK. I was coming back from the Baptist World Youth Conference in Leipzig, Germany, and was with my son, Thomas, who had been at the Conference with me.

We had a long time to wait.

We were bored.

I am not sure exactly how it began but we started reimagining film titles and TV programmes with hamsters in them. They might not seem funny now, but they were funny when we were bored and had a long time to wait. Perhaps you had to be there…

And that’s when it happened. Hamster Potter was born in Thomas’s fertile imagination. We started thinking about other characters and soon Dumbledormouse, Ron Weasel, Hermiceone and others emerged. By the time we got home Thomas had decided to create cartoons of Hamster Potter’s adventures very loosely linked to the Harry Potter books.

We now have:

And here he is…

If you have never seen an episode of Hamster Potter you have missed something very… erm… unusual. Actually they are quite funny!

Hamster Potter aspires to greatness and imagines he is more capable than he is in reality. The episodes usually end in failure, often with a calamitous explosion invoked by ‘Super evil killy spell’!

There are two reasons for mentioning Hamster Potter today. One is that it is Thomas’s birthday and I said I would mention Hamster Potter in his honour. The second is that I reckon there’s a bit of Hamster Potter in all of us.

Maybe we all imagine we are more capable than we are sometimes. Maybe we aspire to greatness and never quite get there. But don’t be downhearted by that.

I think it’s great when we stretch ourselves, step out of our comfort zone, attempt new things or aim high. God longs for us to do the same. Why do you think Jesus invited Peter to step out of the boat? Why do you think he sent out his disciples on a mission trip with no resources of their own? Why do you think the third servant in the parable of the talents is castigated by the Master for not doing anything with the money he was given to look after.

Jesus wants us to grow in our faith, to experience new things as we follow him. He does not want us to be static or even content with how we are now – there is more that he wants to bring out of us. I have often wondered about Yoda’s instruction to Luke Skywalker in The Hamster Strikes Back:

“Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”

Sorry Yoda, you’re wrong. Jesus would rather we try in his strength than we do nothing.