What is it that brings you to your knees? What is it that makes you fall before God and cry out to Him? Maybe there has been a time in the past few months this when you have done just that. Perhaps there has been a point when you have needed to know God’s hand and His presence close beside you.

Take a moment now to ask the Holy Spirit to guide you to a time when God met with you in this way and thank Him that He was with you “¦

As I look back over these last few months, I can already begin to see something of the fulfilment of the prayers and dreams I have prayed. I can see some of the footprints of God, the people he brought into situations I faced and the way He guided me through what has undoubtedly been the toughest year of my life so far. He has been in control, even when I have felt that I was just freefalling.

However we feel about the immediate past, it is good to remind ourselves of some truths we hold dear.

Cast your mind back briefly to the Nativity story. Try to get past the tea-towelled heads of your childhood and think back to the simplicity of a tiny baby, born to a young girl, in a backwater some 2000 years ago. Imagine the pregnant girl, probably no more than 12 years old, frightened and tired in a strange place, with a man she may not have known well. She knows she is having a chosen son, someone promised by God. But other than nothing feels special or beautiful. This is not how she has dreamt it.

Giving birth to a King must have made her dream of palaces and splendour, riches and servants. But instead she finds herself sharing the squalid quarters of the local dairy herd. This is no special throne room or private maternity suite. A drafty cold stable at the back of a humble inn. What could God have been thinking? Didn’t he say that this baby was to be the King of the world?

But of course, we who have read the end of the story know that the whole company of heaven turned up outside the town. They were announcing the special news of the Lamb of God being born, to those who normally looked after lambs. Mary did not know that as she was straining in labour. We also know that God had sent a star to guide wise men from the East to visit the baby. We know that they had presents for him that would symbolise why he had come. Mary had no clue of these visitors’ impending arrival when she wondered where she would lay her baby. We forget that it is not actually recorded whether she or Joseph saw those angels or that star. We forget that they had to rely on what had been promised them all those months earlier. They had to believe that God would keep His word. They had to rely on both local peasants and clever men with Persian accents to tell them what was taking place around them.

Mary and Joseph were tied into the biggest dream that God has ever had for all mankind. But it wasn’t plain sailing. They had to keep trusting and believing that God would keep His promise. They must have wondered what sort of King their son was going to be. He didn’t exactly have the most normal start in life.

Over the next few weeks, perhaps you need to remember that this young couple didn’t know the ending. Remember too that whilst you do not know the ending of your own story, you have a loving Father who does. Pray big prayers this season. Who knows what you might see happen?

“Prayer makes the soul like God; when the soul wills what God wills, it is then in a state like God, as it is like God in nature. And so God teaches us to pray and to trust firmly that we shall obtain what we pray for.”
Revelations of Divine Love by Mother Julian of Norwich