Now we’re in the last full week of Advent and we’re approaching the winter solstice, I’m posting a few imaginative thoughts based on the story of Jesus’s birth. This week in 2025 holds dreadful news and new sadness and fear has entered the world. It’s into just such a world that some messengers speak.
Now’s the time of year when my name gets mentioned, my words are read and someone’s idea of what I look like is scrawled with messages of love, hope and happiness, enveloped and popped through letterboxes. I smile at how the great artists of the world have tried to outdo each other by making me look opulent, over laden with dazzling feathers, gorgeous with golden robes and lightening the darkness with a shining halo.
Really, it’s all a bit more basic than that and my work is literally very down to earth. Christmas is a very down-to-earth time. Delivering messages is my job. It’s not always straightforward and to be honest, Happy Birthday cards aren’t our responsibility. Our busiest time is when life gets tough on earth and on the rare occasions we’re seen, it tends to be on battlefields or by deathbeds.
We live outside time and space, so we’re not bothered by clocks and watches and delivery time targets, but one earthly season, we had to make multiple visits to one small place.
Some messages are trickier to deliver than others. Just think about this:
I told an elderly man, that his elderly wife was going to have a baby and he’d got to give the child a name the family would disapprove of.
Then I told an unmarried teenage girl she would have God’s baby.
Then I told the man she was engaged to that he’d still got to marry her and bring up the child as though it were his own.
You can see that my job isn’t always easy. When it came to telling a band of shepherds that the saviour of the world had been born and was lying asleep in a manger, I took along a whole choir to back me up!
I always start my messages by saying Don’t be Afraid!
My name’s Gabriel and I know that earth is going through a dangerous time. My hope is that people on earth are not dazzled by Christmas glamour and hear the true message of Jesus. God with us, peace on earth and light in the darkness.
Wandering Through The Land Of Nod. 