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CHRISTMAS 2005 MESSAGE FROM BISHOP JONATHAN
Last year at this time we had our own special Christmas gift in the shape of our first grandchild. I’d quite forgotten the upset to an ordered life that a new baby brings! A year later she’s starting to take her first, tentative steps unaided, and we are waiting for her vocabulary at present limited to “Da – Da” to expand toward “Mum – Mum” and then of course “Granddad!”
When you hold a baby in your arms you can’t help but worship. One moment she cackles with joy and you know joy. The next moment there’s a puckering of the lips and a look of apprehension – and your heart aches. A baby is so full of possibility, and yet so vulnerable. I well remember the day when I was very small and undertook to explain to my mum how an electric plug fitted into an electric socket and demonstrated with my fingers…
I wonder if God feels some of a parent’s feelings about us. Sometimes the TV news focuses for a moment on a refugee orphan in a war-zone.
You see that same puckering of the lips, that same apprehension in the eyes –with a thousand times more good reasons. And your heart aches again, longs to be able to adopt, to care for, to smooth those frown lines away from the little face.
I wonder if God feels like that about us too, his adopted children.
Well, I think he must because instead of protecting his Son, he loved us all so much that he gave his only begotten Son, so that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.
How does that ‘believing in him’ start? It starts when we know ourselves loved and treasured by God and we open ourselves up to him and, like the Christmas gift he is, we receive his love, as a child receives love and is willing to be enveloped in it.
A very happy Christmas
Jonathan Gledhill