Last year the radio told of a real life incident of a woman doing the Christmas shopping in a department store with her two children.
After hours of trudging around looking at shelves of toys and consumables, and after hearing her kids interminably asking for almost everything, exhausted, she finally made it to the lift.
She was feeling what so many feel during the Christmas season. She was fed up with the pressure to please everyone, to go to every school carol concert, cook the perfect turkey, buy the perfect presents, etc. Finally the lift arrived. The doors opened. It was al-ready crowded. She sighed and pushed her way in, dragging the children and bags in after her. When the doors closed, she felt she couldn't take it any more and angrily said out loud: 'Whoever started this whole Christmas thing should be strung up and shot!' From the back of the lift everyone heard someone say: 'Don't worry. We al-ready crucified him.' For the rest of the trip in the lift, it was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …