The First Christmas on Half

It is the fourteenth of October and there are fairy lights on the kitchen chair.

Not up. Coiled, in a tangle, where she put them down two days ago when she went looking for the good scissors and got distracted. Rain on the window. A mug of tea gone cold at ten past nine in the evening with a skin on it. The dishwasher is on its long cycle and the children have been asleep for an hour.

The notebook is open at a page she has ruled into two columns with a biro and a bread knife, because she could not find the ruler either.

Fourteen names on the left. Her mother. His mother. The two boys. Her sister and her sister's three. The teacher. The girl next door who has been so good with the little one. Two she has written in pencil because she is going to have to think about it.

On the right, nothing yet, because the moment she starts putting figures in the right hand column the page becomes a real thing, and while it is only names it is still Christmas.

Since April there has been one wage in this house instead of two. That is the whole sentence and she has said it out loud maybe six times, always briskly, always with a little upward lift at the end so that whoever she is telling does not have to feel awkward.

They have managed. That is the honest word. Managed, all summer, with a lot of soup and a canceled week in Wales that nobody has mentioned since.

But August did not have a shape. December has a shape. December has a date and a morning and two children coming down the stairs.

Her eldest asked for one specific thing in July. He has not mentioned it once since April, which she noticed, and which is so much worse than if he asked every day, because it means he has worked something out and is being careful with her.

She puts the pen down. She looks at the fairy lights on the chair. And she gets up and puts the kettle on again, even though she has not drunk the first one.

And now I am going to stop calling her she.

Because you have got a version of that notebook, or a version of that list, or you have got it all in your head at eleven at night which is worse. You know the exact month it changed. You have got a brisk sentence you say about it with a lift at the end.

And you have got the thing underneath, which is not really about the presents at all.

It is that you cannot work out how to stop December saying something to your children about who they are and where they come from. Something that is not true. Something you would take a beating to prevent, and you cannot buy your way out of it this year, and it is only October.

December is not an examination you are about to fail

Let me say the honest thing before I say anything else, because a great deal of tinsel has been handed round this year and none of it fit.

This is not God arranging a difficult Christmas so that your family can learn something wholesome. He is not staging a lesson at your children's expense. Nobody in heaven decided that your household needed a thinner year in order to appreciate things properly. That idea gets said a lot in October and it is cruel, and it is not in the book anywhere.

Having less is not holier. It is just harder. You are allowed to find it hard, and you are allowed to want a good morning for your children, and wanting that does not make you shallow or worldly or any of the other words that get used on people in exactly your position. Nothing in Scripture turns a thin year into a verdict on a parent, and the Spirit who is in that kitchen at ten past nine is not standing there with a clipboard.

Now here is what Jesus actually said about this, and I want you to notice what He does not promise as much as what He does.

Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. How much more valuable are you than birds!Luke 12:24

Read it slowly, because it is more careful than people make it.

He does not say the ravens have a full barn. He says they have no barn at all. No storehouse, no reserve, no buffer, nothing put by for a bad week. That is the whole point of choosing ravens. He picked the bird with no margin.

And He says they are fed.

Not enriched. Not upgraded. Fed. Day by day, in the actual weather, by a God who has never once forgotten a bird.

That is the promise and it is not a small one, and I am not going to inflate it for you tonight, because an inflated promise is the last thing you need in October. Nobody is telling you that a number is coming. What is being said to you is this: the God who runs the world has your household on the list of things He personally feeds, and He is not squinting at the size of your need trying to work out whether it qualifies.

And then the last line, which is the one He actually wanted you to hear. How much more valuable are you than birds. That is a question about worth, in the middle of a passage about food, and He put it there on purpose, because He knew that in the small hours it is never really the arithmetic that keeps you awake. It is the fear that a thin year says something true about you.

It does not. It never has.

I want to show you one more thing, and it is the story that this entire month is named after.

The first Christmas was not a comfortable one. A young couple a long way from home, in a town with no room in it, and a baby laid in the feeding trough of somebody else's animals because there was nowhere else to put Him. That is not a decorated stable with a warm glow. That is a family making do, in a borrowed corner, with what was to hand.

And the people God chose to tell first were not the households with margin. They were shepherds, out on the night shift, on the worst rota there is, holding somebody else's flock. Nobody sent for the well provided. They were sent for.

If you have been quietly afraid that a thin December puts your family somewhere at the back of the story, look at where God put Himself when He came. He came in on your side of it, on purpose, and He has never once mistaken a small house for a small life. The shepherds are written into the record ahead of everybody else, and His Spirit did not leave that detail lying there as decoration.