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A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Bishop Jo Bailey Wells

Good morning. I was at a community gathering when someone said, ‘I hope you survive Christmas’.

For shopkeepers and clergy and delivery people that’s surely about the seasonal workload of crackers and carols and cards – it’s a case of surviving the busyness. But for the person I was sitting next to, it was about surviving the family and financial pressures. She’s a single mum who struggles to make ends meet in a normal week, quite apart from when there are expectations of a special dinner and stockings from Santa. She desperately wants to avoid taking out an expensive loan yet at the same time desperately wants to give her son the present he longs for. In the past she’s used a savings club over the course of the year to help her in December, but a change in financial regulations means that savings club has been discontinued.

‘I hope you survive Christmas’. I wonder if anyone at a community gathering in heaven said the same thing to Jesus before he came to earth as a baby. The expectations, the workload, the regulations… surely there would be problems galore! But Jesus came anyway: he straddled the gap from heaven to earth, so that our horizons could be stretched from earth to heaven. We’re certainly stretched, and that can be stressful – yet it’s intended not to bring us to breaking point rather, to transforming point.

Lord Jesus, you know our hopes and our fears at this time of year. Come down and be with us in all the expectations and hard work, yet raise our sights to heaven so that our horizons may be transfigured by the beauty of your holiness and the power of your grace.

Amen.