Today is one of my favourite days of the year, because we use the proceeds from our massive church Christmas card (a brilliant design by the church children) to buy stuff from Present Aid, to benefit people in developing countries.
So today (using Jack’s credit card) we bought £150 worth of:
Brilliant gifts!
Sunday 16th December at 6.30pm
Come and enjoy our Carols by Candlelight service, accompanied by the RSAMD Brass Ensemble.
Evening commences with Hot Fruit Punch and Mince Pies
Donations towards theGlen Family Centre in Thornliebank which caters for children with Complex Learning Difficulties.
This is confession time. Although the whole world wide web thing is just amazing and I’m all for using it to the full, when it comes to “blogs”, I just can’t get excited at all. I reluctantly am coming to the conclusion its just my age, then I think to myself, wait a minute there are guys much older than me blogging away. Perhaps then, it’s my temperament. I never have been interested in gossip or trivial chit chat, and though some might salivate at the prospect of getting a sneak preview of what’s going on, in someone else’s brain, it just leaves me cold. Does that make me out to be an ice cold monster with no friends?
No far from it, in fact quite the opposite. I prefer to share my thoughts and feelings, within arm’s reach of the person listening to me. I’m not even that good on the phone. As a friend once described their relationship with their car, it gets them from A to B, that’s all, (and the quicker the better) whereas Jeremy Clarkson or the Hamster or the absentee personality of James May might get so excited about a car that they wet themselves (am I allowed to say that on the Internet??) that’s the way I even feel about the phone. Whereas for some, a two hour long chat on the phone is their idea of quality relational time, I would rather jump in my car, drive for 45 minutes, spend 30 minutes with the person, face to face conversation, and then drive 45 minutes back.
So, where am I going with all this? Well, how would Jesus use the Internet? Would he have spent 30 years blogging away to an audience of millions, or would he arrive as a baby, go through all the trials of growing up, to spend three years of close physical presence with a select few in a backwater district of the Roman Empire? I would still stick to the original script, whether he was to make his entrance in the first or the twenty first century, as John put it in his Gospel “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us”.
So although I want a new computer with the fastest broadband speed for Christmas, I much more want a Jesus who shares my humanity by coming in the flesh, though it limits him to being almost two thousand years too early for me to see him physically but who’s coming still makes a difference to my life and the world even yet!
Jack Quinn