Christmas greetings!

Kia Orana and Christmas greetings! It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the season of hope, peace, joy and love when we celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus.

It’s a happy and fun-filled time with get-togethers with families and friends, Christingle and carol services, nativity plays, parties, festive food, giving and receiving of presents. However, while many look forward to the 25 December, others look forward to a quiet Christmas without their extended family. Christmas can also be full of hype, commercialism and stress. And then there are those who are devastated that Christmas will not be what it has always been. Perhaps there might be an empty chair at the table and it can be lonely, a blue Christmas, a time of great sadness and sorrow.

For many, this has been a particularly difficult year and Palestine remains in our prayers as do those worldwide who have been impacted by conflict, war, displacement and personal loss (in its various forms) but especially those who have been bereaved. None of us will ever escape the effect that personal loss has on us and none of us will ever escape the effect of grief’s claim on our lives. In our living each one of us will know loss and grief of some kind. Loss and grief are universal and can leave us feeling isolated and alone, and more so at Christmas time.

Whether it is the most wonderful time of the year or a blue Christmas, the words of Psalm 139 are comforting and give us hope. God loves each of us with an unconditional love and comes to us in the distinctiveness and uniqueness of our individual lives, each of us knit together in the womb of our mother who birthed us, each one of us fearfully and wonderfully made, each one of us fully known by the One who created us. Consequently, there is nowhere we can go, nowhere we can flee from God’s presence.  At the height of joy God is there. In the depths of our sadness and sorrow God is there, even when He is silent. And because of this, even though we will all know loss and grief in our lives, we all have within us the capacity to know love, to know healing, to know we are not alone in our personal loss and grief. Emmanuel, God with us in the uniqueness and specifics of our own lives, our daily lives.

This Christmas time, we gather around the greatest story ever told about light that comes into the darkness of our lives.  We gather around the mystery of how it is that this light comes to us in human form as a little baby, to a certain man and a certain woman, in a certain location in our world as if to say this is how God, how light and love is revealed in our world, in the distinct circumstances and uniqueness of our individual lives to bring us a universal message of hope, peace, joy and love, of healing and grace.

Wishing you a blessed Christmas and a peace-filled New Year.

Louise Bowes, Chair
Carole Bourne, President