Christmas is a time of celebration, of joy, of rest and of peace. At least that’s how the script goes. But sadly for many, it’s a time of loss and of loneliness. Some will spend their very first Christmas having lost a loved one. Others will live through the annual statistical spike in domestic violence and family breakdown known as the “festive season”. And others still, will carry heavy burdens into Christmas.
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Christmas rolls around with almost monotonous regularity doesn’t it? Even the ever more extravagant retail displays hardly raise an eyebrow these days. The thing I really struggle with is the gap … the huge gap between Christmas AD 2011 and Christmas circa AD 33.
That very first Christmas was such a humble affair.
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There’s an interesting question. When you’re dead and gone and they put an epitaph on your headstone, what will it say?
I was at a 60th birthday party recently. Not quite the same as a funeral, but it was nevertheless a time when family and friends stood up and eulogised – literally “spoke well of” – the birthday boy, David. A lot of it was humorous, but there was one thing that one of his sons said about dad, that hit me between the eyes:
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At some point, we all get to feeling burnt out … like life’s passed us by. Doesn’t matter how successful we are or appear to be. It hits us all sometime. We look at all those smart, clever, brilliant people all around us and kind of figure that God must be done with us.
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The older I get, the easier it seems for me to fall into the trap of thinking “I’ve seen it all”. But fortunately, God keeps bringing things across my path to convince me otherwise! Like the other day on the bus – there was a young Jewish teenager wearing a black yarmulke (those little skull caps that Orthodox Jewish men wear). That’s fine, we have a strong, vibrant Jewish community around where I live.
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After a pretty spectacular start to His ministry – the voice from Heaven and all that (Luke 3:21,21) – Jesus embarked on a rocky road. Forty days and nights starving in the desert with just the devil to keep Him company (Luke 4:1-13), a lynch mob in His home town (Luke 4:28,29) and then years of being criticised, tested, plotted against.
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Every felt like that? Completely at the end of your tether? And we kind of look at God and whether we say it to His face or whether we just think it to ourselves – what we really want to know from Him is …
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There are few things as frightening as a stormy ocean. I’ve often watched the grey waves whipped up by a storm, crashing on rocks below, from my very safe vantage point on land. I’m definitely a land-lover – solid ground beneath my feet … doesn’t get any better than that.
I suspect that’s pretty natural. We all like security.
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