As I write this I am sat at the back of St John’s while 116 children from Key Stage 2 at Tatworth Primary School rehearse for their Christmas services on Friday.  It is a wonderful vibrant organized chaos as the kids familiarize themselves with the space; we work out where parents are going to sit; how to use the mics effectively for different voice levels etc etc.  It is also not discreet!  The church is alive with life, light and laughter – and this is just the practice!

So many of us are preparing for Christmas in our own way – be it rehearsals like the children; Christmas lights going up on houses and in gardens; cooking; cards; the list goes on.  It is easy to think it is all about Christmas Day, and of course that it is the focal point.  But it is also about the preparing – not half heartedly but enthusiastically!  Whatever we are doing to ready ourselves for Christmas, it is about actively waiting, embracing the present to be ready for the future.

On Monday we were very proud parents when we went to watch Andrew in his school nativity.  It had been postponed from the week before when the school had to close due to the floods.  Monday being my day off I had spent the afternoon putting up our Christmas lights on the trees in the garden.  Andrew did not know I was doing this as I wanted it to be a surprise.

As we came out of school and started the walk home in the pitch dark, Andrew was chatting away about all the lights on houses and in gardens and asked when ours would go up.  As we neared home he suddenly stopped and shouted ‘Wow! – whose house is that!  Is that the church?’  Michelle and I smiled and asked him to look again.  ‘Wait!  Is that our house!?’  Cue much joy!  It was the best reaction we could ever have hoped for.  It was a total joyous surprise of someone noticing something for the first time not somewhere new…  but right in their own place.

That is what is happening right now in church – it is a place of light, laughter and joy as those children prepare.  And it is what happened in the Christmas lights.  The lights are symbolic of the journey to, and through, Christmas.  But the joy is right now.  As you wait, as you prepare, take note of those moments of joy in the present and be reminded of what it is we wait for – Jesus born to us not in a distant land, but right here in our homes.