Every day throughout December until Christmas Day I have committed to counting my blessings… and hopefully helping others to count theirs too! The Advent period is a time of pondering God’s many blessings to us, and I can’t think of a better way to let my heart prepare Him room than to fix my attention on who God is and what He has done for us.

I love children’s songs, for they focus our attention on essential truth. ‘Jesus loves me, this I know’ is one of the greatest blessings we can ever experience. To be loved is to have a permanent security blanket that can be wrapped around us at any time. Love holds us secure and provides stability, comfort, reassurance and hope.

God’s love is not fickle, capricious or temporary. It’s a tough, abiding, everlasting, unfailing love which can’t be earned, only gratefully received. God’s love was the motivation behind Christmas, the reason Jesus came to our world. (John 3:16) Even if no one else loves you and you have no other blessing to count, God’s love is there for you.

Some moments are easier to embrace than others. Some moments are full of joy, capturing innocence and exultation – that moment of complete surrender as bride and groom exchange vows, looking deep into each other’s eyes with love and promise, that moment of satisfied exhaustion as the pain of labour is forgotten in the joy of holding the newborn baby. But it’s harder to embrace the moment when the beloved snaps tetchily and a full-blown row escalates, leaving us fearful, angry and resentful or when the snuggly baby screams incessantly and vomits all over for the nth time in 24 hours, leaving us exhausted and desperate. It’s harder to embrace the moment as we lie in bed feeling ill and lifeless, nausea wracking us and robbing us of sleep. Such moments seem impossible to embrace.

Richard Rohr comments that God deals with reality, with what is. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, an 18th century Jesuit, said it’s key to want God ‘as God is, not as we imagine or would like Him to be.’ This is the key to embracing the moment, as we understand afresh who God is.

God is love. He is good. He works in all circumstances for our good. The disasters and catastrophes of life – and there are plenty of these, often striking us with breath-taking swiftness – can be embraced with gladness, not because they are good, but because He is.

To embrace the moment means to pause and to breathe God in, no matter what. As we do this, He then pours in grace and the capacity to carry on. We can then exhale gratitude and learn to give thanks for everying in all circumstances. (Eph 5:20, 1 Thess 5:18).

Stop. Embrace. Breathe in. Breathe out.

He’s got this. He’s got you.

One of the privileges of being with 4FrontTheatre yesterday was the chance to see ‘behind the scenes’ of a professional theatre company. I’ve often thought that being ‘on tour’ is a very odd way of living. It sounds glamorous – a different place each day, the adulation of an audience, the buzz of performance and so on – but to a homebird like myself, it also sounds very scary. I would hate to be away from home and family for days on end, and these guys don’t have the glamour of luxury hotels like the mega-rich!

Their days involve a lot of travelling, a lot of eating what other people put in front of them, a lot of setting up and taking down. Not for them the lifestyle of the rock star, with roadies to do all the heavy work: they have to carry everything out of the van themselves, set it all up, take it all down and carry it back to the van, often with time constraints chipping away at their sang-froid (dinner ladies in schools can be intimidating people!) I was amazed at the kit they had to bring with them: drills, glue guns, cable ties, scissors, sewing kits, allen keys, screwdrivers, gaffer tape galore! They looked like they had shares in B & Q!

Rob waiting for the glue gun to heat up:

Have step-ladders, will travel…

Sometimes they do all this twice a day, moving from one venue to the next.

In Goldthorpe, they did 3 shows, not two, and there was a brief lull between the afternoon performance and the evening performance. Apart from eating lunch and phoning friends and family, what did they do? Surprisingly, perhaps, they did not go to sleep… instead, they reviewed the performances and rehearsed. Again. And again. I was reminded of the quotation which tells us the difference between an amateur and a professional: ‘An amateur practises until he gets it right. A professional practises until he can’t get it wrong.’

They reviewed what had gone well. They were ruthless with themselves, freely owning to mistakes I’d never even noticed. They listened to each other and accepted both praise and criticism with the same desire to be better next time. They cut lines, revised lines, reviewed movements (each performance space is different and needs their careful choreography, especially in the very physical world of pantomime). They were still rehearsing when the audience started gathering outside the building before 6 p.m.

I was a spectator to most of this, unable to help because I didn’t know where everything went or how they could improve the show. But what I learned from being with them was that preparation and perseverance pay off. I may never be able to do what they do, but I know those things are crucial in every area of our lives and so the ‘behind the scenes’ lessons these guys taught me were as valuable as the ones I learned from the show itself. I also learned they are grateful people (polite, thanking us for food and accommodation) who truly love God and are happy to serve Him in the way they can do this best. We’re all different and these differences don’t diminish us, but truly give us many different methods to reach out to people.

Wow!

We had a truly fantastic day yesterday with 4FrontTheatre. Their show ‘Back In Time For Christmas’ was seen by 260 pupils at Goldthorpe Primary School, 140 pupils from Sacred Heart Primary School and 137 people at the evening show at GPCC… and safe to say, they had a great time!

The show’s main character, Justin Time, had invented a time machine so we could travel back in time to witness the first Nativity (and find out if the wise men really did arrive at the same time as the shepherds and if the shepherds really did wear tea towels…)

Inevitably, the time machine didn’t work perfectly, and even with the help of the faithful ‘Clockie’, Justin encountered some historical events he hadn’t anticipated… meeting Charles Dickens and a caveman and finding a helper in George (aka Tim)…

Eventually, however, they arrived in Bethlehem, in time to meet an insurance salesman and an over-zealous innkeeper…

They found some not very smart shepherds:

… and eventually, after many chases and fights, managed to give some gifts to baby Jesus.

Maybe these ‘three wise men from the East’ learnt a lot about Jesus… and the real wise men were still travelling at the end as our intrepid time travellers made it back in time for Christmas to celebrate all our wonderful Saviour has done!

The well in this story (Gen 29:1-14) sets the scene for us; it shows us a place of watering, a place where the shepherds gathered to water the flock. It’s significant because Jacob and his family were shepherds and so it’s perhaps inevitable that the watering wells were important places to them. The well was the place where water, essential for life, could be found.

God not only provides for our physical needs but describes Hmself as the bread of life and the water of life. Just as we cannot exist without food and water in the natural realm, we cannot exist without the sustenance God provides for us through His word and through His Spirit. We need to learn the daily disciplines of prayer and reading God’s word so that we can grow spiritually (see Heb 5:11-14). If we only connect with God’s word in a church context, we will become spiritually famished because we need to receive from God on a daily basis.

Hebrews provides warnings to us to pay attention to what we have heard (see Heb 2:1) and reminds us that the word did not do all the people good because they failed to add faith to the mix. (Heb 4:2) Just as a cake needs all the ingredients to make it taste good, so we need to add faith to God’s word so that we can see His promises come true. Jacob reminds us that God is able to direct and guide our lives without us having to plot or scheme; we too can therefore enter God’s rest (Heb 4:10) and know that He is able to provide us, no matter what our circumstances.

In our series ‘The Wells of Salvation’, we’ve reached the story of Jacob, son of Isaac and Rebekah and grandson of Abraham and Sarah. Jacob is a reminder to us that God’s promises are for all generations and that these promises are not dependent on our goodness. Jacob was a schemer, one who plotted to get his father’s blessing and the birthright despite being the younger son; yet we see that God’s promises remain steadfast throughout (see Gen 28:13-15). This encourages us to hold on to God’s promises as we not only reap the benefit of all that has gone before but can be active in sowing for future generations through our lives and prayers now (see Ps 102:18); we can be ‘agents of blessing’!

Providence is defined as ‘the governance of God by which He, with wisdom and love, cares for and directs all things in the universe.’ In Gen 29:1-14, we see God’s providence at work as Jacob, fleeing his brother’s anger, is led by God to Harran, where he meets servants of Laban, his uncle, at a well. There, he meets Rachel, who will later become his wife. He is overwhelmed by the awareness that God is in every situation of his life, working for his good, and we too can be confident that God ‘works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will’ (Eph 1:11) and is working for our good in every circumstance of life. (Rom 8:28) As Michael W. Smith sings,

‘Oh, the Hand of Providence
Is guiding us through choices that we make.
Oh, the Hand of Providence
Is reaching out to help us on our way.’ (‘The Hand of Providence’, Michael W. Smith & Wayne Kirkpatrick)

God’s providence is closely connected to His provision, for He works in the everyday details of our lives to care for us and provide for us. He provided for Jacob (without Jacob having to plot and scheme) and He will provide for us too.