Christmas letters

Much as I enjoy receiving newsletters at Christmas, I also enjoy writing our own. It's always a challenge to encapsulate our news to give friends a yearly update of where we are and what we have been doing.

I always try and stick to a (relatively) simple formula.

1. One side of A4.
2. In a font size that is not so tiny that one needs reading glasses, nor so large that it looks childish.
3. Informative, yet not boastful.
4. Does not contain extensive details of holidays or other achievements.
5. Mildly amusing, if possible. I quite like a self-deprecatory style if I can manage it.
6. Sometimes a common theme is quite useful: it has the advantage of concentrating my mind and keeping me from waffling on.

Any of you reading this may not think I have achieved the criteria - oh well, at least I tried!

Links

We have just made acquaintance with a family who we might have met, twenty odd years ago: almost twenty years exactly, to be precise. (I say 'might have' because we discovered we had all gone to the same conference, at the same time, but do not remember ever meeting.) In Kenya, where we have all lived, loved, worked...

So we are sitting together, the conversation flying with 'Do you know...?' and 'Do you remember...?' until we must, in the space of an hour or so, have mentioned over a hundred names.

And here we are in Guernsey.

And what I am wondering, is, Why?

Why, God, have you brought us together? For what purpose? For there is purpose in everything, our task is to find out what GOD's purpose is in the everything.

Apart from a delightful sense of community, what is your purpose here, O God?

I am wondering.