Glitter and Christmas

All that glitters is not gold, but most of it is Christmas.

Not even through October yet, another two months to go before the big indulgence, and yet the shops are twinkling bright with neon reindeer and tinsel Santas. 

The big Christmas extravaganza is underway again and once again, the Son of God is likely to get lost in the wrappings. Indeed, in some places he has been thrown out of the festivities altogether, deemed too divisive to be celebrated on his own birthday.

Maybe we should call this time of year the Big T. The Big Temptation. For it is very tempting to over-indulge in food and drink, to over-spend on gifts and party paraphernalia. 

I’ve heard of a family who give their presents on St Nicholas Day, which is at the beginning of December, and then spend Christmas giving themselves to others in acts of selfless kindness. 

Now that is a more suitable way for us to indulge ourselves on the birthday of the Saviour who gave up everything – more than we can imagine – so that we might step into his Kingdom as free men and women. 

He didn’t come with tinsel, reindeer or elves. 

His birth was announced by a host of angels lighting up the midnight sky, though. Kind of puts our twinkling lights in the shadow.

Visible or Invisible??

The fog brought the sky in low this morning, obscuring familiar landmarks and restricting visibility to a few yards in any direction.

Dusty and I were out on the usual stretch, but she wasn’t too keen to walk. Her back leg is hurting, I can tell, and she just wanted to go home. I stood and waited while she sniffed. I looked up at the pine trees rising into the grey mist. And smiled.

While the low cloud obscured some of the usual landmarks, it revealed some hidden gems. Well, I use the word ‘gems’ very loosely, because anything associated with a spider is hard to identify as a gem. 

However, there between pine needles in the canopy above me were thousands of intricate webs, their sticky threads picked out by the moisture in the air. It was beautiful.

It reminded me that what is invisible under normal circumstances becomes visible in special cases.

There’s a story in the Bible about a prophet named Elisha. One time he and those he was with were surrounded by enemy troops. Elisha’s servant was terrified, so Elisha prayed that God would open his eyes to see what Elisha could see – that in fact, God had a protective phalanx of angels encircling Elisha and his friends.

Nobody else could see the angels. But nevertheless, they were there.

Usually I can’t see the spider webs overhead. Nevertheless, they are there.

We think we are on top of our circumstances, that we live in the real world where all that is real is visible to the naked eye.

Ha!

I pray that today your eyes and mine would be opened to see the world as God sees it.

Stairway to Heaven

For reasons I won’t mention, I’ve been thinking – and weirdly, even praying – about scaffolding for the last couple of days. 

Anyone who has wobbled precariously on the top rung of a ladder knows the blessing of sturdy scaffolding underfoot. I’m not good with heights, so try to avoid ascending more than about shoulder height – on anything!

Jacob saw angels coming up and down a stairway to heaven when he camped out at a place called Bethel. And when he heard the message God gave him from the top of the stairway, he reckoned that he was at God’s gateway. He’d had a pretty rough night (I can’t imagine ever choosing a rock for a pillow), and was in a predicament of his own making, but still, God met him in an incredible way and revealed something the natural eye just could not see, and gave him an incredible promise. (Genesis 28:10)

Jacob didn’t stretch up a ladder or build a scaffolding, but God came down to him in his need.

Not sure which way to go on this whole idea of scaffolding. I can see an analogy with Bible study and prayer, erecting a base from which we can glimpse more clearly God’s activity in the world. Which is good.  But I’m wary of thinking that, in case that encourages me to equate the building of scaffolding with ‘works’, so that I beaver away at doing good stuff in order to get closer to heaven under my own steam.

Jesus has done it all. Nothing I do is going to earn me the right to get into heaven. I only want to be doing those things which God wants me to do because he has gifted me to do them. I don’t want to get entrapped into thinking that the good things I do are like scaffolding.

Because really that kind of thinking is like a wobbly ladder, off which I just might fall.

Though incredibly, having just read the passage about Jacob again, I’m full of faith that if I did fall off such a wobbly ladder, Jesus would be there to catch me. 

What a Saviour!