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A few years ago, I decided to do something different for Christmas presents and went to a local charity shop where I bought two certificates transferring the ownership of two African goats to me. Now, I live in the suburbs and have little enough space for a cat, let alone two migrant goats, but it was my intention to hand over the title of the two said animals to two friends as a somewhat trendy and environmentally friendly Christmas present.

As they each opened the large green envelope - perhaps expecting a sensible token from a large chain store - and gazed upon a smiling face of an African goat, to which they had now become adoptive parents (or
shepherds perhaps), they looked at me with a face that said, "What do you do with a goat?"

Dealing with the unexpected is never easy and despite the kind thank you offered by the two friends they had clearly been flummoxed and I am sure that the goat certificate is in the same drawer as the unwanted socks and ties accumulated over the past decades.

As Christians, we should be used to dealing with the unexpected as our God is a God of the unusual, the supranatural, the unexpected. Despite knowing this - at least on a theological level - we continue to develop comfortable defaults in how we live, worship, interact with one another and probably, worst of all, what we expect from God. There is little doubt that routine is comforting and that being challenged is never an easy option, so it is easy to see how this drift into complacency can happen, almost by osmosis.

We can and should fight back.

Christmas is a time to reflect on God becoming one of us, being born as a baby, to unmarried teenage parents, in a small cold corner, in a third-rate Roman backwater town. How unexpected was that?!

Christmas is a time when God broke convention, set aside the rules and norms of comfortable society and, in so doing, gave us a glimpse of his heart. Yet year after year we gift-wrap God in the frenetic, albeit well intentioned, children's services and hide him in the liturgy of the nine lessons and carols where the local dignitaries deliver their annual readings and choirs perform well-rehearsed music to the rapt congregations. In and of themselves these are not wrong - but what if we allowed space for the unexpected to break in? How could we plan for this? What would it look like and would we miss it because of its inconspicuous nature? Do we really allow any "blue-sky thinking" to enter our Christian discussions?

In a well known Michael Card song, The Promise, he reminds us that in attempting to reflect on the nature of the coming Messiah, although God's people let their imaginations run loose, "the dreams they dreamt weren't wild enough"... What about your dreams for this Christmas? Are they wild enough to ask for the unexpected from God?

Michael Wardlow