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Good Morning, As people gather in their homes to celebrate the birth of the homeless God, news just in from Shelter says that 104,000 families in privately rented homes received eviction notices last month, putting 200,000 children at risk of homelessness this Christmas. And so the annual paradox is upon us again. On the eve of opening the double-doors of the advent calendar to reveal the crazy place where the homeless God first appeared, Christmas tugs our emotions in different directions. For me it creates both a yearning to hunker down and get comfy, and a powerful urge to get away from it all. It seems almost ungrateful and Scrooge-like to say it, especially when our ability to get together has been so compromised, but Christmas generates a longing for something that isn’t quite met in the celebration itself. Yes, we get glimpses of it - through lit windows, the giving or presents, the feasting; but it’s still not quite it. In his poem, The House of Christmas, G K Chesterton wrote that people ‘are homesick in their homes.’ It is a startling line that suggests a possible universal truth, that the home that we’re sick for isn’t quite here. It is somewhere else, but where? The Welsh have a word for this – hiraeth – which roughly translates as a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, and which maybe never was; it creates a nostalgia, a yearning – a grief even. It too has something to do with be-longing. Maybe this feeling is at its most potent at Christmas, precisely because we have a heightened consciousness of home – what it is, what it isn’t, what if could be. It ignites some primal memory of the way things were and perhaps could and should be. It is a paradox that Christmas is a festival of comfort and comforting; but if I get too close to its true nature it becomes uncomfortable. This god’s risky birth, and life, and death were filled with the things we try throughout our life to avoid. His arrival demands something of me. It makes me think about my own wants yet also the needs of others. The good news comes wrapped in layers of difficulty and challenge. And yet it is into difficulty and challenge that this God comes. Christmas wraps an answer in the question: How can I reach God? The message of this god is ‘You can’t reach me. You don’t need to because I have come to you.’ He’s not waiting in a heavenly palace somewhere to see if we make it. He comes to us. It could be to our houses, it could be on the street. And not just when we open the double doors of the 25th day.