Well it’s summer time and Christmas is almost upon us. Even after all these years as a missionary in the southern hemisphere, I still love the novelty of Christmas in summer. The tradition of sitting outside on warm evenings at carols by candlelight, with children running around joyfully is a beautiful one.

And yet, we are aware that elsewhere in the world, things are not so happy this Christmas. As I write this message we are seeing unimaginable scenes of human misery coming daily from the besieged city of Aleppo in Syria. And in Berlin, people have been killed in a truck attack on a Christmas market.