‘New beginnings are always delightful, the threshold is the place to pause.’ So said Robert Louis Stevenson.

I’m not sure I fully agree with him. New beginnings, full of promise though they may be, are often close to endings which may have been painful. New beginnings always mean change, and there is something in all of us that makes us want to hold on to old, familiar, comfortable things. There may be quite a few of us who were given new slippers for Christmas, who are keeping them for best for the time being – they are too good for doing the housework or the gardening in; thinly disguised excuses for hanging on to the old.

But the threshold is the place to pause, yes. Thresholds are places of promise. In biblical terms they mark off something holy, a place where God is. We stand at the beginning of a year, a year where we shall find God We don’t have to take God with us into the new year, God takes us with him. That’s what Christmas is about. Emmanuel, God with us. We don’t have to cling on the Christmas, for Christmas is never over. God is with us.

I recall a time when I had been working with a group of children and we had been thinking about words to do with the Christmas story. One of those words was ‘Emmanuel’. When I asked one little boy what he thought that word meant, he simply answered back ‘It means – I love you’.

That’s not the official theologian’s answer, but he’d gone right to the heart of it. ‘I love you.’ What we take with us into the new year, as reassurance and also as challenge, is the unfailing love of God. God’s love isn’t always comfortable. It doesn’t always make things right for us. It doesn’t mean we won’t suffer, or find the world a difficult place to live in. God’s love means that God is with us, right in the pain and the mess as well as the joy and the laughter. Christmas will never be over, it is always just the beginning.

Fr Simon

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Priest-in-Charge – Rev Canon Simon Scott – Tel: 01408 633614