Well, here's a how de do! Plans made for Christmas - and now changed. A bird ordered for Christmas Day, and now it's the wrong size. Bubbles negotiated and now abandoned. It's not fair!!!
This isn't the post I'd been planning all week which is totally appropriate because nothing that anyone has been planning all week will happen. Boris has spoke and now we're all stuck, and some of us are more stuck than others. I don't think it was a decision taken lightly and it's a decision which no-one wanted but it is necessary.
Overseas readers may not know that since yesterday we have new rules which mean that Christmas celebrations have to be very small (they weren't allowed to be big before yesterday but for some areas it's just one household now) and even in areas where we can meet it's just one day now, not the four days we had been planning. Travelling is out for some areas and severely discouraged for others.
Mary and Joseph too must have had very different plans for their whole lives but both of them set aside their personal preferences for the good of all because God had asked them too. They'd probably planned a quiet life in Nazareth pretty well the same sort of life as their parents and everybody else had. They would probably have been quite glad not to have travelled first to Bethlehem and then to Egypt.
But it was not to be. They had to go along with the divine plan and do what was necessary. They seem to have done what was needed and to have done it graciously.
If you have had to change your plans, I really wish you had been able just to carry on. The changes to my own plan are comparatively minor and my disappointment is correspondingly small. I hope, however, that you will still be richly blessed this Christmas. And if you are a carer or health worker, I thank you from the bottom of my heart that despite 67.000+ deaths, so many of us will still have some sort of a Christmas because of your heroic efforts. May God bless you.
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