Beware of practising your piety before people... or of posting pictures of your charitable giving!

By the wonders of advance posting, this is written on Saturday to appear on Monday.

This is my gift bag for Refuweegee... I bought a ladies' back-pack handbag thing and started to fill it with the requisite items... and soon it was overflowing.  So I bought a sponge bag into which I placed the toiletries. Then to keep it all together, I placed the two into a sturdy 'bag for life' except that said "Team GB" and was decked out in lions, so that wouldn't really do, and I popped the whole thing into a jolly Christmas gift bag!!

The shopping for the items I needed proved quite challenging...

What kind of book so you buy for someone for whom English might be their umpteenth language? I found a beautiful photographic book about Glasgow.

What might signify 'Scotland'? A teddy bear with a saltire tee-shirt and a mug depicting landmarks in Glasgow.

What sort of notebook would be a nice gift?  Which brand of shower gel? What foodstuffs would be enjoyed rather than confusing? And so on...

I spent almost seven hours trekking round shops today - at least three times as much as I would normally do - and in the end I filled my gift bag more or less to my satisfaction.

I had fun, and I hope the person (female age 14+) who receives it enjoys opening it and using its contents.

Buying gifts for a stranger.... I suppose that's a bit like the Magi who travel the weeks of Advent along the window cills of 'high' churches bearing exotic and seemignly inappropriate gifts for a child.  Suppose instead that Refuegypt had existed and drawn up a list, I wonder what might have featured on that!

Choosing and wrapping presents... very much part of Advent as it's lived.  And I will be travelling one of my 1000 mile-ish day trips when this goes live, taking the gifts I chose for my mother and hoping that she, too, will enjoy some surprises as well as some practical things.

Enjoy your own choosing and wrapping, whatever form it takes.

Advent 3 - Gaudete Sunday... or Steeleye Span Day for those of a certain age!

The day of pink candles, the 'day off' from the traditional fast, the day to rejoice...

A reminder that we all need a few treats, that abstension is OK and temperance good, so long as neither renders us miserable.

The old practice of counting blessings, and more contemporary ones of finding one thing every day for which to be grateful seem to relate to this gaudete moment, suggesting that it can be found in every day, even the very darkest, if only we take the time to recognise them.

This gaudete Sunday, I will be meeting a friend from Warrington who is in Glasgow whilst visiting relatives elsewhere in Scotland.  It's very rare we see each other, so it will be a special time of catching up and sharing.

With two full weeks to go to Christmas, this year we are given out 'rejoice' break with still a long way to go on our journey... but maybe that's no bad thing.

Many friends and acquaintances have had very challenging times of late, so my prayer has to be that gaudete will not have a hollow ring for them but, rather, will allow them, if only for a moment, to smile, laugh, enjoy and re-joice.

Apologies to anyone who might have been looking for this earlier - I've spent most of today trekking round shops looking for things to put in my Refuweegee gift bag tomorrow, and to wrap up for my Mum and take south on Monday.

After an early trip out to a big out of town centre, I ventured into the city centre which was, as the saying goes in these parts "hoaching"... busy, mobbed, whatever word you may like.  Walking along the streets, I found all sorts of people trying to attract my attention - giving out flyers for restaurants and shops, chuggers for oodles of charities, beggars, Big Issue vendors, street entertainers, charity tin shakers, side-stall holders, buskers and bands.

It was the buskers and bands that drew my attention.  Small boys of varying experience playing bagpips.  Small girls singing pop songs.  Music students with trombone trios, string quartets and vocal groups.  An amazing contemporary pipe and guitar group (similar to the Red Hot Chilli Pipers in style) and then, finally, the Sally Army band.

There may have been two Sally Army bands, not sure, this photo is of a smaller group who were playing carols in Sauchiehall Street. I later saw a bigger group in Buchanan Street.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but hearing the Sally Army band is part of my preparations, part of what makes Advent special.  The pipers and balloon modellers and jugglers were fun.  The atmosphere was vibrant and joyful.  But it was the familiar tones of Victorian carols played by a brass band whose aim is to raise funds for the poorest of the poor that felt like Advent to me.

Lots of charities were being supported today, from hospices to animal shelters, medical research to mental health support groups.  All of them are important and valuable and I'm glad people were giving to them. perhaps that's one of the good things about Advent that transcends religious and cultural boundaries.

It's been a long day, but I have my gift ready to take to church tomorrow, and have done some other gift shopping too.  I wonder what the band members are doing now, and who will be blessed by the loose change offerings of today's busy shoppers...

(Picture stolen from t'internet)

I've been something of a rat-bag of late (no, don't be nice if you know me, and say otherwise, I have) which has given me cause to pause and think, which is no bad thing.  That so much of how I feel is related, implicitly or explicitly to choices I or others have made is hardly rocket science - all emotions are linked to experience, and all experience arises from choices. 

Choosing to be obedient to what I understand to be the call of God on my life has in turn led to many significant, binary (I think most choices probably are binary in the end) choices, and those choices have consequences.

On Tuesday I was at a training day where we spoke about call and its testing or affirmation.  One wise person rightly, in my view, noted that the robustness or resilence of a call to ordained ministry needs to be examined to ensure that it will survive the day when, for two pins, you'd walk away.  At age thirteen since ordination, and nineteen since call, I wholeheartedly agree... there have been, and always will be, days on which I have to consciously remind myself of that call; days when, as I noted just three days ago, the importance and signficance of those ordination vows is very acute.

For the most part, I love what I do.  I get tired and ratty because I love it too much, and try too hard, and get frustrated because I can't do and be everything I'd like to do and be.  So it's good to pause for a bit, name all of that and remind myself that in December 1997 I made a choice to step along a 'road less travelled' and that has made all the difference.

The poem "The Road not Taken" by Robert Frost is one I first heard when I was 8 or 9 yeras old - I can still see myself sitting alone in the very back desk of a Victorian classroom with fold down benches attached to the desks (it had never been modernised!) and listening with rapt attention as our teacher read it to us.  At various times I have, and still do, wonder how life might have turned out had I made different choices, taken other roads... but of course return is never possible, life is always moving forward.

Somewhere in all of that is something Advent-ish.  About people who said 'yes' or 'no' when faced with startling life-choices.  About what might have been and what what was. About real emotions and questions and doubts and hope and fears. About doing what you trust to be right, even when it's costly or lonely or scary or frustrating or disappointing.  About a journey along a road less travelled...

In many churches, the evening service on Advent 4 takes the form of 'lessons and carols' or 'carols by candlelight' and it is a warm, upbeat, nostalgic, sometimes evangelistic, hopefully missional and community welcoming, experience.

The model here has been ecumenical and choral - combined choirs from local churches and a children's choir from the school where our choir-leader teaches and a 'lessons and carols' format of traditional and contemporary readings.  For all sorts of reasons, that isn't feasible this year, and yesterday I met with A to think about what we might offer instead this year.

From the muddle of books in my still-being-sorted study, I took along 'Doing December Differently', a book I bought many moons ago (it sat on my bookcase in Dibley) and from this emerged the germ of an idea which we have developed into "A Quiet Christmas - Reading and Songs for those who will find Christmas difficult this year"

So many people we know and love are approaching Christmas recently bereaved or having faced significant personal or familial challenges and life events.  The physical work of packing up and clearing out our building has taken its toll.  Whilst we need, and will offer, promises of hope, what we don't need, and won't offer is glib sentimentality or gaudy jollity.

Here's one of the poems we aren't using on the service, which shows how honesty and authenticity and hope and joy and tears and laughter can co-exist...

Let the bells jingle but make time for tears to fall.

Eat, drink and be merry but do not go hungry in that inner place.

Rest, reflect and remember, Be true to yourself.

Many of us can't play happy families at this time of year.

December is for a difficult diagnosis as well as dreaming of a white Christmas

December is for divorce as well as decorations.

December is for death and dying as well as discos and dancing.

December is for distances that separate us from people,

even those in the same room.

Disappointment in December is especially hard to bear.

Sometimes the light no longer shines in the darkness.

The desolation swallows us up and we die a little.

Yet a kindly word, a bird in flight, a tree alive with hips and hoars

can drown out despair and kindle determination to move on.

Dig down deeper than the tinsel to the place where hope is found.

Maybe, just maybe, the flickering flame will be fanned gentle into fire.

Helen Jesty Doing December Differently pub. Wildgoose Publications, 2006, page 32