Musings – November 2024
As Remembrance passes, how do you react?
Are you reliving the Lawrence of Arabia sequence … Christmas approaching ever so slowly through the haze of life, building the anticipation and tension to an almost unbearable level?
Are you more of a Back to the Future person … wanting Christmas to be like you think it was, how you remember it from your youth, yet somehow sensing that it will be just the same as always?
Are you a Wall-E … carrying on with the normality of life and its routines until suddenly Christmas interrupts, like a polished, shiny EV dropping from the sky?
Survey over!
So we enter ADVENT – a time of preparation for the big celebrations, a time when we are reminded that Jesus is three-dimensional (past, present, future), a time when we think about HOPE, PEACE, JOY, LOVE. How will you get ready?
Perhaps we should first decide what it is we are getting ready for!?
I suspect that that is where many of us go wrong at Christmas. We are getting ready for the wrong things … eating to excess, straining our credit limits, re-gifting to the ‘right’ people, children struggling with old-fashioned words or dodgy scripts, finding the ideal matching jumpers or costumes for the children, planning a trip to the Boxing Day sales, avoiding sprouts, spending time with people we normally avoid, etc.
Although the timing of our Christmas celebration in the West has links with the old Mid-Winter and Solstice, the battle against darkness and the return of the light, it is about more than that.
Christmas is actually about how much God loves you. We sometimes miss that in the familiar stories and songs. This year try to hear those stories and songs with new ears. Try and see them with new eyes. Try and receive them with new hearts!
Back to the movies …
Is your life feeling like a desert as you wait for something to happen, someone to come over the horizon and rescue you? Jesus rode on a donkey – meek yet majestic!
Are you wanting to recapture some ideal time from your past or hoping to re-invent the present? Jesus is the same, yesterday, today, forever!
Do you feel surrounded by other people’s mess, working tirelessly to please others, or getting swamped by the chaos of life’s debris field? Follow the star to Bethlehem, to Jesus the Light of the world, who came down from Heaven for you (and would have done even if no-one else existed)!
Whatever your expectations, hopes, needs, try to make your own Christmas (whatever traditions there are in your family) about Love, Hope, Peace and Joy. Don’t just open presents … open yourself. Open your heart.
So why not join us at Dunscore Church:
to discover the real depth of Love – the Love that brought Jesus to Bethlehem all those years ago;. to find the comfort of real inner Peace – the Peace that breaks through the noise and chaos;
to experience the deep Joy of knowing you are loved by the One who invented Love!
Just as Mary and Joseph travelled in Hope to Bethlehem, not knowing what to expect next, so you may be surprised by what God has for you – if only you are open to it!
May God Bless you.