Nativity Time

I haven't blogged for ages, mainly because I have been working flat out. And I would have been a boring blogger. Plus we have had huge snow....and the car wasn't even over the door for two weeks. It was quite pleasant for a while but towards the end of the fortnight,if I had to trudge up our long road one more time....(the buses were off for two weeks)..I guess I had forgotten how heavy four pints of milk are!

In the past week or so, I have finished the parenting course with a wee group of parents from the local school and had an alpha reunion from my last daytime course. Both of these things have reminded me how much I love people; even when I am feeling tired, just some time in their presence invigorates me. I love just chatting and being myself and when that is coupled with the opportunity to bring something of the Lord Jesus just by being me, I love it even more. A real highlight this week was the midweek kids club Christmas party - I have just the best team running it, and I had planned to hold one of my most favourite kind of events; a social event for the mums and dads to come along to. Two fantastic folks cooked dinner and we served it to the parents in a separate room while the kids had their party.

One of the dads said: "I didn't expect this evening to have been THIS good!" It was a funny moment as he confided that he had come along filled with trepidation, wondering what the evening would be like. I love talking about how our church loves to welcome children and families - which it does - and you know from the interested faces as you say it that that has not always been people's expectations nor experience of the church.

This Sunday is our Christmas family service which I have put together to try and weave together testimony, story and song. I'm particularly looking forward to the Nativity which I have had very little to do with, and is being run by the kids team, and in particular one of our medic students has worked her socks off - it's got a lot of speaking parts in it this year. Another of my kids leaders has choreographed this year's "god rods", which is a worship with sticks thing I brought over from Toronto.

I want to try and weave in quite a challenge to "investigate" Jesus and his claims in the New Year on one of our two alpha courses (daytime and evening) - I still remember so clearly the first Christmas that I knew of God's love for me in a deep and very personal way - it felt so "alive" - the presents didn't matter so much but everything else around Christmas took on a new sparkle.

I love this time, the story of the Nativity has incredible power - it's from the word of God; it speaks over time and space and into a myriad of peoples' circumstances, fears, disappointments and worries. It brings hope, beauty and light into darkness. If you haven't heard about the BBC Nativity drama showing Monday to Thursday this week at 7pm on BBC1, then please check this out. As well as being on prime time TV, it's been scripted by the writer of Eastenders, Tony Jordan - and how about this for his motivation:

Tony wanted to write a nativity that his mates in the pub would watch, and that addressed some of his big questions about the story..

Wow!

Will post how it goes.....!