Light

Everyone has a favourite aspect of Christmas. It may be the decorations or the special food; it may be the presents or the music; for some it’s the smell of a pine tree in their living room and for others it’s excitement on a child’s face. My favourite is the sight of twinkling lights.

     The whole point of Christmas is to celebrate the fact of God coming to earth as a human child — Jesus — in order to live a perfect life in our midst. As the Bible says, ‘In him was life, and that life was the light of all human-kind’ (John 1:4). The lights on my tree remind me of God sending his light into the world.

     We all need light. It creates vitamins in our skin and it helps us to see. We’d soon be lost without it. And luckily light and dark can’t exist in the same volume of space, because the light shunts back the dark. Therefore, in proportion that our lives are filled with Jesus ‘the light of all humankind’, our souls contain this spiritual light. It also means that we can see, make spiritual distinctions, and find the paths that lead to God and thence eternity. And that light came into the world at the first Christmas, many, many years ago.

     So each time I see the lights of Christmas I’m reminded of the reason for Christmas: we celebrate the means of eternal life and we look for God, who reminds us to pray for help that we can see the path of glory.