There is a (very special) Reason for this Season
It’s the end of the year and I get the sense that MANY of us are looking forward to saying farewell to 2022. A LOT has happened. We started the year in the clutches of a pandemic and are ending it in a global recession, amidst the worst cost of living crisis in living memory. We saw a brutal war emerge ‘seemingly’ out of nowhere and, in the UK, we rotated Prime Ministers in unprecedented fashion. It kind of leaves us all scratching our heads wondering… what in the world just happened and WHY did it happen? And why does so much happen at the same time? I think most of us have an insatiable desire to find meaning or purpose in the most random events in life, ESPECIALLY the negative events. Those events that seem to have no meaning or purpose, or perhaps even worse, seem to indicate that there is no meaning or purpose to life. That life is well… just random. The events of the past year would easily convince many of us that Richard Dawkins was right when he said, “Some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Merry Christmas. Everyone.
My struggle is this; even when everything is SCREAMING “random”, there is something in me that continues to scramble to find the good in the bad, the positive in the negative, and the purpose for my pain. What also strikes me is this; I don’t spend A LOT of time looking for a purpose in the good things that happen to me - and neither do you. I don’t spend a lot of time evaluating WHY I didn’t fall sick, WHY I still have a job or WHY the war didn’t start on my doorstep or in my backyard. I kind of EXPECT those things. It’s just good and therefore why evaluate it at all? Good things are means to my preferred end and so I don’t spend time on them. When things are going well we ALL have a tendency to assume that it’s because that’s what’s supposed to happen. Everything is going according to plan - but what PLAN? Whose plan? It’s only when things go off track from this ‘plan’ that we become interested in trying to understand it and even question it. It’s only when things don’t go OUR way that we look for reassurances that someone is in control. That’s not even a religious idea. Think of the phrases people turn to when things don’t go according to plan; “Everything happens for a reason”, “I don’t believe in coincidence,” “I guess it was meant to be,” “I guess her time had come.” This is virtually universal. When things don’t go our way, regardless of background, we GO LOOKING for meaning.
Once upon a time, I had a plan. After university, I decided that I would dedicate the rest of my life to serving God through His church. I enrolled on leadership development at my church and began the wonderful journey of church planting and ministry. Those days were long and difficult but I could see the fruit of my hard labour. I loved the hope I could see in the eyes of the broken and hurt when I shared the good news of the gospel with them. It was addictive. I loved encountering people who thought they were a lost cause and helping them find purpose and meaning in life once again. One night, however, that all came to a crashing halt. Our entire congregation was invited to a meeting where we would find out that our beloved pastor had been involved in things of a personal nature that meant he could no longer serve as the shepherd of our flock. It was dizzying. I had laid down a significant part of my life to follow this man and build something truly special. The details of his indiscretions still make me itch when I think about them. Needless to say, I left the church shortly after that and moved to London and never looked back. This was not the plan. Far from it. It was confusing, random, devastating and painful.
While the story of that night is deeply personal to me, I share it because the story of the first Christmas is NOT THAT DIFFERENT. Everything about that story screams - NOT ACCORDING TO PLAN. Mary had NEVER planned to be famous. Her plan was (I assume) to marry Joseph quietly and live a happily unremarkable life. That is NOT what happened. You know the story. What ensues is a story that so beggars belief it requires FAITH to buy into it.
A historian called Luke records the story of the first Christmas as such; “In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you.” Mary was greatly troubled by his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favour with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.”
So here’s Mary’s situation, in summary, she was;
A teenage girl
Engaged (probably to someone she hadn’t even met)
Pregnant
Didn’t know who the father was
Claiming to still be a virgin
Claiming to have been visited by an angel who told her all this
That’s a tough set of circumstances, isn’t it? Especially if you consider the time and society in which Mary was going through all this. She probably wasn’t full of good cheer or feeling merry at all. I think she must have been terrified and perhaps ashamed. I wonder if Mary was tempted to give up. I wonder if she considered running away. What would you have done? What are you about to do right now given what you’ve been through? I wonder if Mary wondered WHAT THE PLAN WAS?!?!? What was the purpose of that? What was the reason? Why did it have to happen to her? YOU have asked these questions about your own life I'm sure.
Now, what I am about to say next may seem so obvious and perhaps a little trite. Whenever you face trials of many kinds (like some of the ones described above), would you be willing to take a step back and reframe the situation and actually LOOK for ANY possible positives that might come out of it? I mean proactively seeking to discover HOW you can extract some joy from the difficulty that you may be facing. I know what you’re thinking - you’re thinking that I don’t know the circumstances of your life, that I don’t know what you’ve been through. And you’d be right, I probably don’t.
Back to my horrible experience the night my world came crashing down. The harvest of that experience is that I have found myself being MORE thoughtful, MORE grateful, MORE prayerful, and MORE aware of the reality of the fragility of everything around me. I share that story BECAUSE I believe it can help YOU to contextualise your pain and discover that God is trying to capture your attention for a purpose that may be bigger than you. Here’s the truth about THAT purpose - sometimes we find it immediately and sometimes we find it eventually. Now I have a life I could only have dreamt of on that night. I have a wonderful wife and daughter and I am blessed to do meaningful work for a living. I cannot say FOR SURE that the life I have today is connected to the events of that night at all, but I can say with confidence that I am a better person for it. My trust is no longer in the hands of fallible men but in THE ONE whose hands are capable of handling ANY random events that life may throw at us. The truth is, that night was not random at all. It was a paragraph in a chapter of the story of my life. A story of a plan I can never know in full.
At Christmas, we are reminded that life is NOT random - that there is a story going on, a divine story. And if we choose, believe and trust - we can participate. If we choose that, guess what? We’re in good company - we are in company with Mary the mother of Jesus - who was a teenage girl when her life got turned upside down to make way for all of us. So this Christmas, remember, your faith is not in vain - there’s a plan.
And with that, I say to you…
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire
Jack Frost nipping at your nose
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
And folks dressed up like Eskimos
Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe
Help to make the season bright
Tiny tots with their eyes all aglow
Will find it hard to sleep tonight
They know that Santa's on his way
He's loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh
And every mother's child is gonna spy
To see if reindeer really know how to fly
And so I'm offering this simple phrase
To kids from one to ninety-two
Although it's been said many times, many ways
Merry Christmas to you












