By Bishop Ken Howell.
THIS Christmas we gather for the annual festivities with the background pressures of rising interest rates, Covid still lingering, anxieties through inflation, and our usual family trials and challenges.
However, we are intent on celebrating this event as we couldn’t imagine our lives without Christmas.
With all the lingering demands in the background of our busy lives, we look to a day that celebrates something that helps us make sense of all of life’s realities.
Central to this is family and our essential need for love that we can both give and receive.
With all the “warts and all” of our families, we look to a simple rough stable where, in a moment of time, family life was changed forever.
All of this beckons us to gather and to celebrate the Christ who was born for us to help us make sense of all the wonder and challenges of living.
His birth was precisely so that we have a saviour who enters into every aspect of our joys and trials.
If Christmas is the celebration of Emmanuel – God with us, then what we celebrate on this day is precisely that: God is with us!
In the midst of these uncertain times we are reminded more than ever that we need both faith, hope, and love to sustain us.
Faith to look beyond the surface and to see the deeper realities. To see other possibilities and to find someone wonderful to believe in.
Hope to carry us forward, to look at problems in a different light shining into the crevices of doubt and loneliness, of uncertainty and lack of direction.
Love to sustain us, supported by loved ones, to face not just difficult times, but to see all the possibilities that the birth of a tiny child can have in every situation of life.
May we know deep in our hearts that having the Christ child with us in everything means we are never alone or in darkness.
