Sunny days piled high with busyness have become the norm in this last little stretch of the year. Summer's hot hands feel their way along with sticky fingers in search of victims, for whose leaves and upon whose napes it can kindle its scorching ardour. To put up resistance against its fierce midday courting is a waste of time. It is healthier and more blessed to give yourself over to the warm embrace of the season when it stifles, burrowing its hot breath under your clothes and along your hairline, than to resist.

To resist sin is a requirement, but to resist circumstances or situations about which nothing can be done is a squandering of constructive energy and precious time. The moment you place your lot beneath the lot of fate, the situation can no longer bully you. Over death, and over what other people are willing to do to us, we have no control in any case. For this reason submission and acceptance bring with them an unheard-of liberation, and are, in themselves, the first step on the long road to restoration of whatever has been stripped bare inside us by the locusts.

Either you go under when the onslaught rages fiercely, or else you learn to know your enemy and make a plan. The Bedouin who travelled the desert learned through long practice, for the sake of survival, how to submit themselves to the annihilating desert winds when those winds defied all their strength and endurance. They simply lie down as low as possible and throw their cloths over their heads until the wind calms. If we do not want to be broken by circumstance or by wind, we too must learn how to submit. If it is not to the wind, then it is to those placed above us, or to reality, or to God. Delegated authority looms over us all day and everywhere. In any case, it is not the wind or any figure of authority that breaks us. It is the principle behind them. Or it is we, who smash ourselves against them. Any person who rises up in rebellion against authority stands all at once without protection — divine protection.

But there is one authority before which even the storms and the winds must bow. Even death had to give way before the supreme authority of the Redeemer — Jeshua — God's Son, to whom everyone, if not now then one day when He comes again to set up His peaceful kingdom here for a thousand years, will have to submit. Now willingly, or then under compulsion.

May the fleeting, temporary quality of this year and of all its doings — which fade so terribly quickly in importance — take hold of us and shake us awake out of our narcosis of self-obsession and of our own comings and goings that are set only on the making of money and on momentary pleasures, so that we grasp, with desperation, eternity and the God who waits there for us.

May Wellington, this season, bend its heart before the Son of God who was born for us — the only measure of truth and the only road-map to God and to eternal life.

Christmas greetings, Amanda Kreitzer