Communication is one of the interesting challenges of our world today.

I started writing this article, while away from my home base and am not sure that I will find my way into the internet to deliver it. There is my excuse for being late posting this.

I am hoping to complete it before I go off on a bus and train journey, and so I have just phoned the person I am due to meet to say what time my train gets in. In seeking the train time ‘on-line’, I found an e-mail from my brother. That takes me to where I thought I would begin.

In our home, growing up, we lived with only our personal possessions, the rest were supplied by the Army as my father served in the Royal Army Medical Corp, but those few item helped to say ‘home’, wherever my father was required to pitch his tent. First reflection, what is the difference between ‘house’ and ‘home’ for you!

But I digress. One a wall somewhere in that home was a small plaque on which these word were engraved: ‘Every time you think you are going to make ends meet, some one moves the ends’.  Maybe a reflection on how my mum felt inside about the itinerant life we led. This is the mum who wrote a letter to each of her sons away in boarding school every week, only to confess years later that as she saw us go to boarding school at the age of eleven she expected us home to live at sixteen, not what actually happened. I reflect that those letters, were part of her building the strong ties that bind her five sons close still today. Second reflection, which are the people to who you are bound, that make you feel good and help in your sense of belonging!

Well when I began to think about writing this reflection I was in the midst of two weeks in which through ‘Muslim Awareness Week’ and a day course on ‘church leadership in a multifaith context’. What I really wanted to say was it is absolutely amazing the incredible range of ways in which we have to communicate with each other. Just stop and think, make a list, go through the day observing the different way you use to communicate or are communicated to, come to the end of the journey with a sense of thank fullness. Yet also I have to acknowledge with all these possibilities at my disposal I often fail. Might it be that it was in this context, the need for effective communication that Jesus came.

Imagine if you will, God aching with every bit of God’s ‘every ness’, to say to the world, ‘I love you’, and ‘living by my law of love works’, but all systems of communication seem to have been compromised. So this birth that gives us Christmas, this life that shows us the way, this death and resurrection which shows that love’s deep magic will have it’s day.

Something I hope to think about, as we prepare for the great Christmas feast.

Yours in love,

Bill Anderson