For many of us, the uncertainties and precariousness around are deeply unsettling.

Yet this is the natural setting for the celebration of Christmas, the story of God entering precarious human life and filling precisely that precarious, unpredictable and often tough life with hope and joy.

So our Christmas celebrations don’t have to be perfect and we don’t have to be heroic.

To prepare us for the new year, Christmas wants to open our hearts to the gift of joy, the gift that is “a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes. Even nailed to a tree.

"What Jesus is saying is that people are made for joy and that anyone who is truly joyous has a right to say that they are doing God’s will on this earth. Where you have known joy, you have known God.” (Frederick Buechner)

I wish you and your loved ones such joy, this Christmas and in the coming year, a joy that energises us to join with others in supporting one another, and growing in faith and hope and love.