I’m waiting too. Waiting for a child to be born. This too is a much longed for child.

I have had four responses to waiting for our child to be born:

1. Forgetting that I’m pregnant
2. Scurrying around buying and collecting things that the new baby will need
3. Enjoying the moment and not wanting it to end – the wonder of the niggles inside me – enjoying the bump – not worrying about childcare or feeding, it’s all so simple and taken care of
4. Fear about the child changing our lives forever. It’s this that gives me pause. Am I willing to allow this small human to take over my life? Is what I have to give to this child enough? What if I make mistakes?

When you think of Christmas coming, what do you feel? I confess my first thought is, ‘Actually, I haven’t thought much about it yet.’ It’s easy to get into the rhythm of life and allow the advent season to wash over me until Christmas is suddenly upon me. Andrew and I are notorious for not remembering to send out Christmas cards until 26 December. Usually we only send them to friends who are far away and whom we miss very much. The first line is always, ‘Sorry this is late . . .’

The other response that I often have to Christmas is dread. Yes, I am traumatized by the prospect of Christmas shopping. I am not one of those people who intuitively knows the perfect present for each person on my list. In fact, I find Christmas shopping highly stressful. Even if I manage to think of a present idea, I face the challenge of finding it and then (most of the time) working out how to post it the USA. I am now very grateful for Amazon wish lists and think that every considerate person should have one. But it is possible, isn’t it (let’s be honest) to spend the weeks before Christmas racing around shops and websites buying things.

People ask me whether I am ‘expecting’. (No, I tell them, I’m smuggling basketballs under my jumper!) Yes, indeed – I am ‘expecting’ a baby to be born. I have no idea whether the experience of parenthood will match my preconceptions.

What about you? What are you expecting? What do you expect Jesus will bring into your life this Christmas and New Year? Will you allow his presence to take over your life? Change your identity? Become the centre of all that you are and every activity that you undertake?

As Christians we not only think of the coming of Jesus as incarnate God in the form of a child. Our minds and hearts are drawn to the second coming of Christ – when he will turn the world upside-down (or right side-up!) and bring justice to human reality. Do you wait in expectation of this event?

It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the mundane practical necessities of life – I expect that I’ll soon be rather focused on the mundane! However, a wise friend of mine once said, ‘The things that count in life are the things that have eternal value.’ This truth can help us live our lives so that all of us are ‘expecting’ – living in anticipation of the second advent of Jesus Christ.

Fantastic. God is so much bigger and better than a religious system. But has this left us with a generation that who sees God more as fate than as an intelligent and purposeful deity?

Do we live in a world that is so cautious of judging the actions of others that all we can say is that they have to right to be happy? What is this right and why do we think we have it? Do we have the right to be happy if exercising this right makes others unhappy? And how do we know what will lead to lasting happiness or what is just happiness for the moment?

Researchers are increasingly aware that happiness is seen in contemporary society as the goal of life. Savage et al discovered this in their study of young people in the UK, which they write about in Making Sense of Gen Y. I also discovered this longing and almost idolization of happiness in my research among young people in former Soviet countries, which I wrote about in my book, Visualising Hope.

But there is a difference between happiness as the goal of life and happiness as an inherent right. It has progressed from something to aim for to something that is owed us, here and now.

Most of us would think twice about making a choice to be happy that by direct consequence made someone else unhappy. As Benjamin Franklin said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” But I think we live in a naive world of believing that we can all have the right to be happy.

Who bestows this right to happiness on us? Is it a matter of just reaching out and taking it for ourselves? And what about people who are not happy? Is it their fault for not trying hard enough?

 He was estatic to discover that we were both ‘committed’ to our faith. He asked me, ‘But don’t you find it difficult, all the persecution we suffer at the hands of unbelievers? They just don’t understand our belief.’

I said, ‘Um, most people seem fairly tolerant of my beliefs and are happy to accept that my faith works for me.’ I told him how I don’t preach to people, but I do share the difference that trusting Jesus has made to my life. I mentioned that an awareness of God’s love has helped me to be less selfish, something that I really became aware of once I was married.

He said, ‘Yes, a lady at my church said that “There isn’t any room for selfishness because it doesn’t leave space for God.” That’s true, don’t you think?’

By now, I was aware of other people around us, also bored by the long line and enjoying some entertainment by appearing not to be listening to our conversation. I said, ‘Can anyone ever be free of selfishness? Isn’t it essentially human to be selfish? Our selfishness is the reason we need God.’

He thought for a moment, and then said, ‘I don’t really know what that lady meant. I guess it’s just important to “put Jesus first in your heart and have a heart full of Jesus.”‘

‘Um . . . what does that mean?’ I said. I knew what he was getting at, but his use of these Christian cliches was starting to get to me.

He waffled a bit and said it was something like reading the Bible every day and praying. Then it was finally my turn to send my package, so we said good-bye.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful of this kind and keen man. I’m certain he is sincere. But I’m troubled by his use of these stock phrases. I worry that he goes to church and learns a slogan without really understanding what it means. It makes me wonder about the depth of the preaching at his church. And I also wonder whether he uses these phrases on people who have never gone to church. If so, it’s no wonder people don’t understand his beliefs. He doesn’t.

Barbara Doubtfire writes that “Hearing God’s voice is an intriguing concept/experience.  I think the simplest way I view it is that so many experiences, when I reflect on them, are ‘as if” God has spoken….experiences of fulfillment (feeling full)…of penitence…of a shove to change direction…a ‘knowing’ – out of the blue but with certainty …”

The Jesuit priest Gerard Hughes puts it in his classic book God of Surprises, “God is mystery, a beckoning word, and He calls us out beyond our narrowness … The journey to God is a journey of discovery and it is full of surprises.”

I think that God speaks to people more than they realise. I remember when I first recognised that the soft, gentle ‘niggle’ in my mind was God’s voice. I then realised that he had been speaking to me for a long time, I just hadn’t fully understood that it was him.

For those who want to hear from God, I think they could pray and ask God to help them recognise his voice. Jesus’ words at the end of John 9 seem to indicate that he opens and closes people’s spiritual eyes, so I imagine this applies to people’s spiritual ears as well.

 Bizarre.

I started to wonder whether we really have been reduced to this level of superficiality. However, what happened in the house was interesting. The first housemate was voted out – and the reason? Not his looks – but because he had annoyed the other housemates and distanced himself from them. In the end, it came down to being able to get along with others, and if he couldn’t do it, no matter how nice he looked, he was out.

Some of the housemates were asked about what sort of person they were hoping would come into the house. The answer:

‘Not someone beautiful, there’s enough of that in here. We need someone we can get on with and have a laugh.’

It seems that at the end of the day, people will want us around because of who we are and not what we look like.

 A woman was playing who shared that she had been through some difficult times due to a disability and was in financial difficulties. Noel praised because of her ‘positive belief’. Toward the end of the game, she had only two boxes left. She announced that she had ‘asked the Universe to put the £250,000 in box 22′. She opened the box, which contained only £5.

I guess the ‘Universe’ didn’t listen to her.

Does she realise that she is praying?

It isn’t praying to God, but it is certainly praying – what else would you call asking a higher power outside of oneself to perform a supernatural act on our behalf?

I believe that spirituality is a deeply personal urge to find ultimate meaning. Spirituality operates beneath traditional and exterior religious forms and is expressed through the symbols available in the social context in which people find themselves.

Yust et al. (eds) in their recent book, Nurturing Child and Adolescent Spirituality, offer this definition: “Spirituality is the intrinsic human capacity for self transcendence in which the individual participates in the sacred – something greater than the self. It propels the search for connectedness, meaning, purpose, and ethical responsibility. It is experienced, formed, shaped, and expressed through a wide range of religious narratives, beliefs, and practices, and is shaped by many influences in family, community, society, culture, and nature.”

This definition is helpful because it extends to how spirituality is formed.

I attended a day session led by Brian Thorne about the intersection between person centred psychology and spiritual direction. He offered an interesting (quite secular) definition of spirituality, essentially defining it as a yearning for transcendence and meaning. “There is a desire to uncover meaning behind the apparent randomness and contradictions of experience and nomore so than in grappling with the mysteries of birth, death, relatedness and suffering . . . “

Importantly, spirituality is not limited to Christian experience, but is a core human experience.

 A year ago I was talking with a newly married couple who has recently started attending church. The wife is a Christian who has struggled with the faith for a number of years, the husband is not a believer but is open to learning more. Although they liked the new church they were trying out, they were mystified by people’s insistence that the husband go to the men’s breakfast and the wife go to the women’s Bible study. They asked us, ‘Why do Christians divide men and women?’

It’s a good question. No other group in our society is so set up splitting up the genders. Are men and women really so radically different that they can’t grow together spiritually?

 I don’t think so. I’ve been in several fellowship groups with both men and women and we have studied the Bible together, prayed together and shared our lives with each other, and never did we sense that our mixed genders was holding us back from growing as Christians.

My husband is my best friend, and despite the fact that he is a man and I am a woman, we are fully capable of sharing our spiritual lives with each other, praying together, and learning from each other.

So, where does the great evangelical gender divide come from?

I can’t find any mention of a “women’s ministry” in the New Testament. And when I read passages about growing as a Christian, no where in the Scripture can I find advice to pray only with other women or that men will have a different experience of spiritual growth than women.

So, if this separation of men and women isn’t in the Bible, where has it come from? I have a few theories:

1. Conservative evangelicals believe that women should not teach men. However, there are women who are gifted leaders and teachers. Therefore, these churches needed to invent a ‘safe’ setting for these women to practice their gifts: hence, women’s ministry and women’s books. Then, in interest of fairness, churches have created men’s ministries.

2. Is the gender divide a sneaky way for Christian book companies to publish two books in place of one? Instead of writing about a Christian approach to dealing with a mid-life crisis, they can publish a book like Men in Midlife Crisis and another one for women. Or, people can buy Becoming a Woman of Excellence, a book which one reviewer says, “discusses 11 points that are necessary to understand the core of what it takes to become a woman after God’s own heart.” Whatever happened to just becoming a person after God’s own heart?

By no means do I think that men and women are exactly the same, but I am not convinced that our spirituality is so different that we can’t grow together sometimes. And I worry that instead of doing the hard work of discovering what it means for each of us to follow God, instead we take the short cut of reading a book that gives us 11 easy steps. In place of asking God who he wants us to be, we aspire to be like some cardboard cut out of the woman (or man) of excellence . . .