Month: December 2025

Categories
Rachel Weeping

Belated thoughts on 28th December – Murder of Innocents

A belated post due to lots of dog training, beach and mountain walking and inertia!

I wrote a really fun play for my youth group which they performed on Christmas Eve looking at the nativity story from the point of view of Mary’s donkey, the Shepherd’s sheep and the wisemen’s camel. I also added in a dragon to show how the enemy tried to thwart God’s plans without success. Though there was always the bit that I had to miss out because it was a family/children’s service – and that was the murder of the innocents by Herod after Jesus and his family escaped to Egypt.

16 When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
    weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
    and refusing to be comforted,
    because they are no more.”

Matthew 2:16-18

There’s been a lot of talk this year about Jesus being a refugee and how one needs to be generous and supportive to refugees [which is only right and proper] but how do we deal with those babies who got murdered?

Many Bibles headline this piece “the murder of innocents” – so here’s my question “What do we about the continued with the murder of innocence?”

Yes still today, and possibly more so than ever, the innocence of children is being eroded. As I write this I’m also watching TV and seeing the contrast between the innocence of the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the adverts. The adverts are telling me that taking my children to a regular playpark is boring and that I should be taking them to Butlins where there is light and noise and implied fun. The simplicity of swings, slides, overcast days, regular cornflakes, is now seen as boring. The innocence of childhood continues to be eroded.

I read a great piece in a book called “Going Home Another Way” a devotional for the Twixmas time. For the 28th December there was a piece by a man who’d lost his leg when he was five and he talked about the youth he worked with and why it was the more difficult youth who were attracted to him. And he says he believes it is because he lost his innocence at five when he had his leg amputated and they have lost their innocence with things like their home life, their parents, their friends, etc.

These were children in poorer areas but I think so many young people lose their innocence due to expectations, materialism, “having to do well”, and more. I’m sure we can all name things that took away our innocence long before it should have been and it has caused us to make many of the life choices we do.

I got this via an email on 28th December and I think the first bit is great but I’d change the last line

Innocent’s Song by Charles Causley


Who’s that knocking on the window,
Who’s that standing at the door,
What are all those presents
Lying on the kitchen floor?


Who is the smiling stranger
With hair as white as gin,
What is he doing with the children
And who could have let him in?


Why has he rubies on his fingers,
A cold, cold crown on his head,
Why, when he caws his carol,
Does the salty snow run red?


Why does he ferry my fireside
As a spider on a thread,
His fingers made of fuses
And his tongue of gingerbread?


Why does the world before him
Melt in a million suns,
Why do his yellow, yearning eyes
Burn like saffron buns?


Watch where he comes walking
Out of the Christmas flame,
Dancing, double talking:


Herod is his name.

But I think by saying “Herod is his name” we’ve missed out on being responsible for the loss of the innocence of our children – whether we’ve given birth or not. I think “Herod” could easily be changed to “materialism/expectations/being too busy” and I’m sure there are many more.

Perhaps the Rachel’s of this world now need to keep weeping for our son’s who have lost their innocence and refuse to be comforted until something changes?

Categories
christmas

Christmas Newsletter

I asked AI to make a picture of a “round robin Christmas newsletter” and this is what it made me. Ok not what I’d expected but I do love it so I’m sharing.

Now I know there are lots of running down and bemoaning the Christmas newsletter, but I do like to get and send them. I love trying to think what I got up to over the past 12 months that might be of interest to people I hardly see from one year to the next but that I would like to keep in contact with. And I like to hear from others that I don’t see regularly to find out all that they are doing. What I really don’t like is someone I’ve not heard from in ages just to send a Christmas card with “love X and X and family”. I do shout at the card and ask it to tell me what the family have been up to but it doesn’t.

So anyway my lovely WordPress blogging connections here is my Christmas newsletter that I have added to some of my Christmas cards this year – compete with one wonky photo which refuses to go where I want it!!!

Christmas newsletter 2025Download
Categories
Artemis II NASA

Let’s Go To Space

NASA have come up with this fascinating piece of promotion for the next trip to the moon. You can get your own boarding pass. Ok so all it does is get your name on a SIM that will travel with the spacecraft. You don’t even have to give your email address so they aren’t going to be chasing you up. But I must say this cool boarding pass is well worth adding my name to a list of other names that I might just forget about when the time comes.

Over a million boarding passes have been claimed to date. I’m not sure what the limit is, but it would be really cool if we were all going to space [or at least our names] together. And it is a bit heroic

Here’s how you can join me https://www3.nasa.gov/send-your-name-with-artemis/

So you could gift it in a Secret Santa 🙂

Categories
Advent joy

Joy

It was interesting on Sunday because our church’s “Joy” candle struggled to light. I think it was a prophetic sign that joy is one of the hardest things we can grasp this year. There’s so much going on – wars and rumours of wars – and has been really since 2020 [the year of perfect vision] things just seem to have been spiralling downwards, or so the media would have us believe.

Even if we don’t grasp it for ourselves I think we find praying for peace and love in the world is something we can and should be doing. I think even when we get to hope we can manage that. But joy when things like the Bondi beach shooting happens, when children are kidnapped to be child soldiers, when sea levels are rising that poorest are losing out, then Joy is a hard, and feels almost callous to pray.

Interesting too that it is a different colour. I wonder if that is because whoever picked the colours in the first place knew that Joy would be of a different nature?

But I do wonder if the reason we have to keep coming back to Love, Peace, Joy and Hope is that we keep forgetting it. And we keep thinking it is up to us to manufacture it. But it isn’t. It is by leaning on God that we find these things. And at this season we need to be leaning into the promised Joy that was promised with the birth of Jesus which gets hidden further and further from the actual Christmas.

Much as I do not agree with the things Tommy Robinson is saying around his slogan of bringing “the Christ back into Christmas” I do agree that we need to bring Christ back into Christmas. When I was young all you seemed to be able to buy were Christmas cards with some from the Nativity story on them. Now it is harder and harder to find anything remotely Nativity based. And it isn’t people of other religions, young people, etc who are shying away from this. I was at a local writing group, made up mainly of white middle class retired men and women and we had 3 writing exercises over a 2 hours workshop, all Christmas based, and yet, apart from one I did, there was not a single nativity based story came from it.

So I do wonder if, in and out of Church, we forget Jesus and we try to muster all these things in our own strength which is why that poor old Joy candle spluttered and went out and had to be relit a few times. I think maybe we need to put the Real Jesus – the one of love, of acceptance, of caring for the poor, the fatherless, the refugee, the one who loved the WHOLE world – back into Christmas.

I’m going to finish with a quote from Christine Sine that helped me make sense of what is being asked with Joy

Then I realized: Is the problem that my understanding of the joy of Advent is all wrong? This is not a joy of happiness or of fulfillment, but a joy of anticipation. It is best expressed in the middle of disaster and heartache and violence that destroys nature and people and cultures. In the midst of these things, our hearts long for the fulfillment promised in the birth of Christ. And in that longing we respond in whatever way we can

Meditation Monday – What’s All This About Joy?

So I will take joy in the anticipation that what was promised at Christ’s birth – the joy to the whole world, the Christ at the beginning, middle and end of Christmas – will come to pass and wars and hatred will cease. In that I place my joy this season.

Categories
light sunrise

Light Banishes Darkness

Sunrise over my park but not this morning

This morning there was a sunrise very much like this over my park as I was walking the dogs this morning. What struck me was that all of us said “wow look at the sunrise” and no one said “look at the darkness”. We were all focused on the light.

I think this is what Jesus wants for us all. Not for us to focus on the darkness within us or within our world but he wants us to focus on his light shining and chasing away the darkness.

One of the things my QEC practitioner suggests is to not try and analyse why we feel a certain way – as in not try to look at where it comes from – and to not blame self or others or our past or our memories or whatever, but to change the now. Basically to look at the light of where we are now, to put in those new beliefs and to move on changed and healed.

I think Jesus, Light of the World, wants us to focus on their light, on the new creation we are growing into, and to let go of the darkness; our fears, anxieties, our not “enoughs”, our shoulds and oughts. Basically to let go of guilt and shame and to walk in the freedom and healing that light brings.

As we all know from dog walking as the sun comes up it is much easier to see not only who else is in the park but also to pick up dog poo when it gets lighter. We focus on the light and things are easier.

So even though the days are getting shorter I am going to do my best to focus on the 8 or less hours of daylight we’re getting but also focus on the light that is Jesus even in the dark.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:5

Categories
Appreciate freedom

Jesus Light Of The World

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:1-5

Too often, I think, we see the “darkness” as the world around us – wars, greed, poverty, world leaders, etc etc and we pray that “they” will change. Yes those things are darkness things. But I think too often we forget the darkness within each one of us, the darkness that makes us fearful, anxious, worrying, not able to give freely, not able to fully lean on God and trust them, that makes us always need answers rather than to live in the mystery.

For me this video from Instagram says much clearer what we can be like when we let the darkness take over and also how we can be. [Do try to watch it all because it helps make this post make better sense if you watch all of it]

So are we willing to do the work, to let Jesus, who is the light of the world, shine into our own dark places? Are we willing to surrender our dark places to a God we cannot see, often cannot understand, and who sometimes seems to do things we rather they didn’t do?

But if we are willing to do that via whatever means that change the thoughts that are so deeply imprinted in our minds then we can be like the guy on the video – at peace and appreciating what is around us.

Categories
change prepared

Perhaps it just is!

An excuse to put up a photo of my two dogs!

In the book of Matthew there is a piece Jesus is supposed to have said about not knowing when he will return and how we need to be ready. Matthew 24:40-41 says ….

40 Two men will be in the field; one will be taken and the other left. 41 Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left.

Common preaching is that this means that the one believing will be taken to heaven or the one who doesn’t believe will go to hell. All quite clear and simple. And it comes with the warning [in the preaching] that we who believe should be evangelising like crazy so that we don’t lose the person who is working beside us.

But what if it just means that life is full of unexpected turns and that we don’t know when our end or those around us – colleagues, friends, family – will die and go to whatever comes next?

Death is one of those things that, even if expected, still comes suddenly. My friend Tessa knew roughly when she was going to die, and put a lot of things in place, still didn’t know the exact day. I remember when we took her to the seaside in November she was planning to come back again in the spring but died in the February. Those of you who’ve been following me for a while know there are friends I’ve lost suddenly. [My end of year newsletter talks of a collections of sudden things that happened this year]

So we do not know when so we need to always be prepared for the unexpected – whether that is the person next to us being whisked away to wherever or things we’d hoped for not happening. In all of it we need to be in that Still place and be knowing that God is God and they are in charge.

Yes I think that section in Matthew 24 from verses 36-44 is about being prepared I think, as we seem to do too often when exploring the Bible, have made it too clear cut. I think it is simpler but deeper and puts God, not us, into the centre.

Categories
simple Still

Be Still And Know

“Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”

Psalm 46:10

This was a verse that was given to me on a bookmark over 30 years ago when I first met with God and I’ve been pondering it every since.

What struck me in church on Sunday was – this is not a moment in our day when we take a “mindfulness moment” but it is a lifestyle. The whole of our life and our existence should be still, calm, at peace, knowing that God has it all covered and that our whole role in the whole salvation of all the peoples of the world is just to be still and to know that God is God. But I think too often we see this as a moment not a whole.

So we take a moment to be still and then we go back to worrying, doing it in our own strength, stressing, when we can just still our whole minds and bodies and believe

This isn’t easy but, from what I’ve learned from QEC and being able to bring my autonomic nervous system into line regularly then it is possible to keep “resetting” and returning to that still and trusting place whenever we notice we’re not there 🙂

So simple!