I guess many of us thought, this time last year, “Well, at least we’ll never have to go through this again” as we settled down to Christmas without the friends and family we had hoped to be with. For most of us, that meant waiting longer to share Christmas presents. For others, it meant missing the last Christmas we could share with a person because they died this year. For some, it meant that their final Christmas was spent alone. For pretty much everyone, it was a very Silent Night when we celebrated that Holy Night.

And we hoped that we would never be facing such a Christmas again: but we are. Cases of omicron are rising fast, and whilst we don’t know how poorly people will be, we need to be realistic about the potential impact on the NHS. Those of us who follow Jesus, who call ourselves Christian, try hard to follow the fundamental law: love God and love your neighbour. As never before, we are having to practice what we preach: working out how our behaviours, our actions, our choices are going to impact on ‘our neighbour’. Those neighbours might be the people who care for us, shop for us or do our hair; they might be our ambulance drivers, doctors and hospital porters; they might be politicians, scientists and those who work out how to get a million jabs into a million arms every day. These are all ‘our neighbours’ and, whilst it’s very difficult to be certain about how best to ‘love our neighbours’, the call from Christ is to try, to imagine how it will be for them, to think of others before ourselves.

The second thing we Christians are good at is holding onto hope. There’s a big difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is sitting down with your lottery ticket and hoping for a win. Hope is trusting, believing, knowing that the truly awful things of this world, whether they are highly personal to you or the impact of a global pandemic, will not have the final say. Hope knows that the darkness is real. But hope also knows – and knows just as passionately – that light that shines in that darkness. We may feel that it’s not bright enough, that it’s flickering, quavering in the gloom.

But faith is not determined by our feelings, but our decisions. The decision to follow Christ, to kneel in wonder at the babe in the manger, to sing “Glory to God on high” with shepherds and angels, means we have hope and together can we proclaim:

the light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall never put it out.