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The two biggest events in the Christian calendar are easily Christmas and Easter. I don’t know about you, but the way I always saw it was that Christmas is a lovely story about Jesus coming to us in love, whereas Easter was more traumatic, centring on Jesus death for us (but still in love).

But I don’t think the story in the bible is all as beautiful and candlelit “no crying He makes” as we like to picture it. And it’s not just that He was born in a smelly stable, or laid in an animals feeding trough.

God’s son was sent from heaven to earth with the purpose of dying for us at Easter, you can’t have one without the other. And while we know that Easter was a massive massive sacrifice, a couple of years ago in my housegroup we started to realise that actually, the transition from the perfection of heaven to this sinful earth and realising that that’s a sacrifice too! Not in the same way as the sacrifice we remember at Easter of course, as that’s when Christ took the sin of the world on Himself, that was the ultimate.

Wasn’t Christmas a sacrifice for Christ too?

[Disclaimer: I’m not very good at words or structuring sentences, so if I’ve said anything theologically inaccurate it may not be intentional, just badly put, so my apologies!]
[I like to think of my blog as the beginning of a thought that could probably do with some refining and rewriting a bit later – maybe I should put that somewhere!]

Happy Christmas 🙂

I’ve finally managed to sit down and watch the first episode of “Fry’s Planet Word”, which is a five part documentry with the marvellous Stephen Fry all about language. I’d tell you more about it, but so far I’m only 15 minutes into the first episode!

(It turns out this episode is only available on iPlayer til 9pm tonight, but can also be found here.)

What’s really struck me is a piece near the beginning (around 10min in) about a monkey called Lana. She’s been taught to make sentences on a machine: things like “please machine give piece of apple fullstop” and “please machine give chocolate fullstop”. Fry tells us that while this is clever it’s not using language like a human does. Lana can construct a basic sentence, but can’t initiate conversation. She just request things; tries to get what she wants.

Fry says that this is different to humans, and a lot of the time that’s completely the case. But I think there are times we can, unintentionally, be just like this! Maybe it’s just me, but when I pray, sometimes it’s so easy to just focus on what I want. It might be asking for something selfishly, or it might be something as well-meaning as asking for healing for a friend, but either way, it’s so easy to come to God with a shopping list of requests, and not be focussing on developing a relationship with our God as our Lord and Friend.

Sometimes, in prayer, our language skills can be very chimp like indeed!

(As an aside, I’m now 45min in and there’s a fascinating sign language segment – very worth watching!)

So I read a blog called Stuff Christians Like, which is basically a humourous look at the funny things we do as Christians. (And I thoroughly recommend it!). It’s kind of about the stuff that get’s between us and God is you want to Jesus Juke it!

I found myself doing something the other day that sounds like an SCL post, so I thought I may as well share it!

At housegroup, normally within the study there’s a few bible passages to look up right? Well, when I was in Sunday school and at Girls’ Brigade, I was pretty good at sword drill (click the link, it’s not as violent as it sounds!), I could find a passage (especially in the New Testament) pretty quickly!

So bringing it back to the housegroup evening, if you hear “shall we look at John 3v16?” You think “easy – only one verse and I know I can read it without fumbling!” But, if they ask for a whole chapter which you just *know* is going to be full of long and complicated words, I don’t know about you, but after initially going into auto-pilot and finding it at speed, I’ll find myself slowing down, flicking intentionally past it, maybe pretending I can’t find it, (all the time with a finger in the right page), so I look like I’m trying hard but just can’t find it! Just waiting for someone to get there before me so they can face all those words.

Then as soon as they’ve declared they’ve found the passage then, oh look, I’m there ready to follow it 🙂

Does anyone else do this? Or was this just a confession I shouldn’t have made?!