I recently parked the car at our local Co-op…gathered my bags and looked up and was stopped in my tracks…

 Turning in to the car park was a big red tractor…not a compact vintage Massey Ferguson but an off the field large machine replete with hi-vi clad farmer. He parked it neatly into a corner bay… jumped down from the driver’s seat and after checking it didn’t cross any lines made his way into the shop…

Nobody seemed surprised or gave this workhorse of our agricultural landscape a second glance…why shouldn’t the farmer nip into his local shop in his trusted vehicle?

This slipped from my memory until last night when I asked what my soon to be two year old grandson would like for Christmas. His father thought for a second or two and then said: “A tractor…he’s talking about tractors now all the time…”

The word tractor comes from the Latin ‘trahere’…to pull, or drag along and understanding this derivation makes me wonder: ‘What pulls us along through Advent?’ Is it the sheer prosaic inevitability of December days ticking through as marked by Advent calendars and the increasing number of references in the media to the ‘star’ event?

Or is it something more ‘left field’ than that?

I would like to offer you the blessing of the individual living their ‘truth’; the farmer nipping to the local shop in his tractor; the two year old loving his toy tractor and creating fields, livestock and stories that would surprise and delight…

May we all have the blessing this Advent of being pulled by our ‘internal’ tractor to places of surprise, creativity and wonder…may we not lose the drive that carries us when our spirits waver and we question where we are heading.

And here’s an early Christmas cracker joke: