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Available for over a year

Good morning. There’s a field, not far from here, where I walked my dogs and where my children played. Until the diggers came, and the turf and the trees were dug up, the concrete poured and the bricks put together to build houses. For a year I walked my dogs around the perimeter of a building site, and watched the frenetic activity and noise, and through another year, during the pandemic, where nothing happened at all, and another when the builders returned, and gradually I witnessed the homes rise up from nothing. I prayed as I walked, for the families who would come, for the babies that would be born, for the life that would happen there. I prayed for our town and this new addition to it. I prayed that God would make something good from nothing. The first Christmas after the builders left the new families worked together to put up lights on their houses and in the streets. They played music and blew fake snow from a machine. The new estate became known as the Christmas Estate. And people came from all over the town to see. Signs went up asking for a donation to be given to the estate’s chosen charity, and people gave. This year the lights are bigger and more extravagant than ever. Cars queue to get onto the estate. People jostle and sometimes become fractious with one another. The fame of the Christmas Estate spreads and more people come, and more money gets dropped in the charity tin. I walk by with my kids and they love it too, because it really is spectacular. Everyone loves it, except for those who don’t, and who can’t escape the annual extravaganza. Some people prefer the quiet and the dark. In the new year, when the show ceases, the money will be totted up and given to the charity who will be beyond grateful for it. I sit in my bedroom, in the dark, and think about my prayers for the new estate. “That isn’t quite what I asked for,” I tell God. And in the dark, which enfolds me as surely as it enfolded Mary in another darkened room, two thousand years ago, I imagine I hear God laugh. I ponder how answers to prayer sometimes don’t look like how I expect them to, and as I sit and pray in the dark it reminds me that when the Christmas lights are taken down, there is one true light which remains, and it’s one which never goes out. Another unexpected answer to prayer, who started in the dark.