Diocesan News19 Dec 07

Bishop Ken Good's Christmas and New Year Message 2007

For many of us, Christmas and the New Year can have associations that are tinged more with sadness than with hope. Job losses, financial pressures, bereavement, sickness or relationship breakdown can all erode our inner sense of hope.

Yet hope lies at the heart of Christmas; the hope that in an uncertain, confusing and often hurtful world, there really is an ultimate reason for living, a deeper meaning for being alive, a hope which makes sense of our human existence.

No matter how many setbacks, discouragements and frustrations any of us may be facing right now, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem can give us sure historical grounds to believe that God wants to be involved in creating a future and a hope for all people. The fact that God has chosen to involve himself not just in a messy stable but in the untidy lives that we live, makes all the difference in the world. Here lies hope.

Martin Luther King Jnr. once said, ‘We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.’ Christmas gives us reason to seek and to find that infinite hope; because at the centre of it all is One whose coming is like a light shining in the darkness. In him we can discover hope as we embark on another unpredictable year.

::derrydco:;