Surprise! Surprise!

  It was the week before Christmas. Imagine the scene.

  A quiet, picturesque country pub.  Plenty of good food and romantic candlelight.  It was the ideal way to spend a wedding anniversary or a Valentine's Evening.

  But no!  This atmospheric moment was enjoyed by our Men's Group alone!  How our wives would have enjoyed such a moment if any of us had ever thought to arrange it!

   It was so dark that a number of us almost missed the pub as we drove by!

  Unexpectedly, we found that our Christmas get together was coinciding with one of the not infrequent power cuts in the village - adding a new and unforeseen dimension to our evening of food and jollity.

  There is something of a parable here as we face the New Year.

  We enter into 2007 with expectations about what we’d like to happen and with feelings of certainty about the things that will happen.  But the fact is that God often surprises us in unexpected ways - just as he did with that power cut.  We embark on particular courses of action only to find that God is leading us into experiences that we had not foreseen or anticipated.

  The Feast of Epiphany, which falls on 6th January, marks the arrival of the Magi at Bethlehem.  They had expected to follow the star to find a new King but they were confronted by a number of unexpected circumstances.

  First, the new-born King was not part of the Royal family as they had, perhaps, assumed.  Second, they found themselves being asked to get involved in some nasty intrigue to remove this new-born King from the scene and then, when they did find the new-born King, he was not in a place of wealth and riches but was in a humble stable, born to a carpenter and a young woman.

  Despite their expectations being so roundly changed, the Magi found in the Christ Child someone who was beyond their imagining and they worshipped him.  Even though he was not where they thought he might be; even though to find him had involved them in a confrontation with a tyrant, and even though they were forced to amend their return journey plans, they were still able to worship the Saviour of the world.

  We have no way of knowing exactly what God has in store for us in this New Year.

  We may be very surprised.  We may be very challenged.  Whatever and wherever God leads us, it will be to a place where we will be in his care, he will dwell in us through his Holy Spirit and we will be able to worship him, 'who was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.'

by Graham Clarke.