St Johns with St Barnabas

Hello! I wonder how your January was?

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January always catches me out; November and December can feel cold, damp and depressing, but with the light and hope of Christmas and our Saviour’s birth on the horizon. However, to me January has all the cold and damp without the lights, hope and joy of Christmas to come. We pack away Christmas trees, chocolates and decorations, instead taking up New Year’s resolutions, diets and weathering a few storms. January is hard. . .

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But I wonder what things felt like for Mary and Joseph as the shepherds left, the Wise Men got back on their camels, the star over Bethlehem slowly disappeared and the dust and straw of the manger settled. In our Bibles we skip over the next 30 years of Jesus’ life, with little more than a verse; “Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favour with God and all the people.” (Luke 2 v 52 NLT) As a parent of young children it seems a little harder than Luke’s simple sentence as the realities of life were lived out by our Saviour as He grew up.

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But those experiences were formational in God being completely present in His creation. Jesus doesn’t preach, teach, deliver or perform miracles from a void but from a life already lived amongst people; as one who knows our needs, hears our cries, and feels our pain, because He has walked it Himself in those decades of Luke 2 v 52.

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Those “January” years of Jesus’ life were nothing as special as Christmas, or Easter, but integral to Jesus living the fullness of humanity, and so it is for us, the lows, lulls, and the darkness are times of perseverance, of presence, and dare I suggest growth. So I end with an invitation to look back over your January and ask the Lord to show you where He was with you, and begin to see that time as F. Scott Fitzgerald describes:

“One of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure, but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.”

 

God bless, Ed