I’m really hoping that you are all having a wonderful Christmas full of laughter, love, food and drink.

Experience tells me though, that many will have battered hearts; that for some loss sings a dark lament in lonely rooms. How do you do Christmas if you are grieving or suffering or missing former times in a way that hollows you out with sadness? How do you do Christmas if your finances are threadbare? How do you sing carols as you clean up after your partner with dementia has soiled herself and the sofa again? How do you do Christmas if the painkillers barely touch the pain, and you lie awake all night afraid and in agony? How do you do Christmas if you are physically and materially fine but in despair about the world?

If any of those things are familiar you are not the odd one out! You are in fact uniquely placed to understand why there is Christmas at all! The reason we celebrate is that into a world of sadness and pain, of deceit, death and disease, violent inhumanity and injustice God came to be with us, born a slimy blood-streaked baby in the muck and the mess of it all. And he grew up and lived among us, knowing us better than we know ourselves, showing preference to those who needed him most, dying to put us right with God, and then rising again to break the old rule that death is the end.

I won’t wish you a ‘Happy Christmas’. Instead I will pray for each one of you to find the deep, quiet, unshowy thing that Christians call ‘joy’ which comes from knowing that you are not alone but loved and held by the love of God through all the good and bad bits of your life; that come what may and whoever you are God is with you on your side against the worst that life and death can throw at you.

There is more, so much more, than jingle bells and ho ho ho.

With every blessing,

Sarah