The world can wait

 blurb: Seeing someone you love hurting, and feeling like you can do nothing to help, is hard. We are so nervous about making their suffering worse that we are paralysed into doing nothing. James and Jennie Muldoon are familiar with suffering. They tell their story here, explain how they were supported and comforted by their brothers and sisters in Christ, and give ideas for where to start when we are helping those in pain. And here's a little excerpt from the moment Elly was born, all of us waiting anxiously to see how her spina bifida would affect her... At 10:59am, our baby girl was born.  We’d already decided to call her Elyania, roughly the Hebrew for “God has answered”.  And, just as we’d prayed, she came out kicking and screaming.  There was a thin layer of skin over her lesion, giving some protection to the neural tissue which was exposed there.  The staff weighed her, wrapped her up, and handed her to us. It was a jubilant but surreal moment.  All ...

On Christmas Eve in 1965 something unusual happened in Barwell in Leicestershire.  Suddenly there was a blazing light in the skies.  A deafening crash boomed across the countryside.  People were alarmed.  Strange things started to land on the ground.  And then, as quickly as it began, it ended. What had happened?  A meteorite had struck.  Appropriately, astronomers think that it was about the size of a turkey when it broke through the earth’s atmosphere.  It was followed by a sonic boom as the rock became a fireball and exploded into thousands of pieces.  So there was light.  There was noise.  There was alarm.  It was all very unusual. Luke 2:8-20 tells us about another occasion when there was light in the sky, when there was noise, and when there was great alarm.  A crowd of angels appear.  There’s a blazing light in the sky as they come.  The countryside reverberates to the explosive roar of their wor...

Today I have a guest post by Pastor James Muldoon of Carey Baptist Church, Reading. "Yesterday at church we thought about how startled those shepherds must have been in Luke 2 when suddenly an angel appeared and the glory of the Lord shone around them.  That wouldn't have been what they were expecting when they left home to look after their sheep that night!  It's even more surprising, though, that Jesus - God the Son made man - should have come into the world at all.  And the greatest shock of all is that He came so as to die to save all who would believe in Him. "If you're a Christian, have you lost that sense of shock at what happened that first Christmas?  If so, this year, just stop and think for a few minutes about how stunning it is that Jesus should be born and should die to be your Saviour.  And if you're not a Christian, why not make this the year when you really look into the astonishing teaching of the Bible about the one who came those...