HOW will you be spending Christmas?
Some will be spending it with family or friends and some alone or some working.
If you lucky enough to be spending time with extended family this Christmas how will you spend the time you have together?
Will you engage in shared activity, or will your house be filled with a number of individuals each engaged in their own choice of activity?
A change from all gathered around one telly watching the Queen to each member of the family with their own screen, their own activity.
Will Christmas be all of us in the same house but focussed on our own world with people physically in the same space but in their own head-space.
Your family might be different – perhaps you will be all gathered in the lounge all playing a board game, everyone happily together, no rows no dramas.
We can put a lot of pressure on ourselves to have the perfect Christmas and perhaps that image of everyone together in shared activities is part of that pressure.
But is that what Christmas is all about?
Christmas is a time of recalling and rejoicing in God loving us so much that he came to live amongst us.
If we truly accept this as fact, then how do we respond?
Do we focus on our individual, personal, relationship with God or do we look at how we think about what it is to be community?
In Jesus, Christians say, “Love came down at Christmas,” we live in a time that needs to believe that.
To have individual choice is a great gift but a greater gift is to choose to share what we have, time, money, resources, with others.
This Christmas can we all seek to live out a famous phrase of the adult Jesus.
‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’
The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. Mark 12.30-31
May you all have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
Every Blessing
Rev Paul Lawlor
Redditch
