Has your credit been crunched?\u00a0 This period of financial instability and austerity continues to have mixed effects.\u00a0 And Christmas just messes with people’s heads.<\/p>\n
I recall watching a news report on the way the crisis is affecting people in our region.\u00a0 In this report a young woman was being interviewed about the very real prospect of having her home repossessed by the bank.\u00a0 Her anxiety was tangible, but never more so than when she raised the immanence of Christmas; \u201cI\u2019m managing to keep up mortgage repayments now,\u201d she said, \u201cbut I don\u2019t know what\u2019ll happen when Christmas and all its extra expense comes round.\u201d\u00a0 My heart ached for her, but I must confess my sympathy was directed not at her financial need, but rather her enslavement.<\/p>\n
She was on the brink of homelessness, facing the prospect of her family having to move out of the home she loved if she were to default on her mortgage payments.\u00a0 Yet her comments seemed to suggest that extra expense brought about by the Christmas season was inescapable.\u00a0 In her head was what seemed to her to be a genuine dilemma; \u201cWhich \u2018bill\u2019 shall I pay \u2013 the bill for the house or the bill for the Christmas celebrations?\u201d<\/p>\n
Clear thinking about her situation shows there is no contest; the mortgage must<\/b> be paid, and Christmas luxuries can wait \u2013 forever if necessary.\u00a0 It would be wrong-headed to put them in the same category as essential household bills.\u00a0 If the young woman truly loves her family, she will surely hold back from spending on turkey and trimmings until she has guaranteed they\u2019ll be able to stay in the house into the New Year; far better to be housed than to have a new flat-screen TV and nowhere to plug it in!\u00a0 Her problem is the strong message being transmitted by the commercial world; \u201cIf you love your family you will buy them \u2026.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s a lie, but it\u2019s on every street-corner, and it has been carefully set up to resonate with our heartbeat until we begin to believe it and it enslaves us.<\/p>\n
It saddens me to see the impact of this lie upon peoples\u2019 lives.\u00a0 The consumerist culture we inhabit is so inhospitable and short of compassion.\u00a0 Market forces feel no sympathy towards the people they lead on, and ultimately their promises of deep satisfaction prove shallow and empty.\u00a0 Christmas comes at a dark time of the year, and commerce, whilst promising light, often ends up adding an extra layer to the darkness we experience.<\/p>\n
In light of the current on-going difficulties in the world economy, perhaps now is a good time to re-evaluate the way we celebrate Christmas and give a mind to what is truly important.\u00a0 If we are in any measure simply slaves to the system, it is my prayer that we would be like those mentioned in Isaiah 9:2; \u201cThe people walking in darkness have seen a great light.\u201d\u00a0 The good news of Christmas is that in Jesus Christ, his only Son, God has sent us a Saviour to free us from all that entangles and liberate us to be what he always intended us to be.\u00a0 This is something in which we can, surely, confidently invest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Has your credit been crunched?\u00a0 This period of financial instability and austerity continues to have mixed effects.\u00a0 And Christmas just messes with people’s heads. I recall watching a news report on the way the crisis is affecting people in our region.\u00a0 In this report a young woman was being interviewed about the very real prospect […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,18],"tags":[21,25,31,29,50,19,30],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-comment","category-gospel","tag-christmas","tag-consumerism","tag-fear","tag-freedom","tag-gospel","tag-jesus","tag-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hwwchurch.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hwwchurch.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hwwchurch.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hwwchurch.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hwwchurch.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hwwchurch.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112,"href":"https:\/\/hwwchurch.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hwwchurch.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hwwchurch.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hwwchurch.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}