How often I’ve heard something like: “If I knew what I was getting myself into, I never would have started / volunteered / signed up… ”

There’s an advert shouting up at me from the back page of the i newspaper – promising a great deal if I get their Broadband and TV. £23.49 per month is the headline price with freebies included. A little smaller is the cost after 6 months – £46.99.

Perhaps it is a good deal. It draws you in with the immediate gratification, but the cost will go up! And the even smaller writing at the bottom of the page tells you that the price will further increase from March every year.

It’s not an unusual marketing ploy. What interests me today is that I think it reflects the way life often works. Perhaps we’re hard-wired to count the benefits not the costs and to be attracted by what we see or get ‘up front’. It’s a form of optimism. So definitely not always a bad thing.

When I prepared people for marriage, one of the things I always did was to ask them to count the cost of the wonderful vows they make to each other: to love each other and to stick together come what may. To imagine good times and bad, wealth and poverty, sickness and health. And to ask how they might get through the hard times: times of poverty when they couldn’t afford the lifestyle they expected or times of debilitating sickness. Strategies to get them through certainly would include perseverance, but mainly focused on nurturing and growing their love and never taking it for granted.

Getting hitched, having a baby or fostering a child are all great acts of faith (‘trust’ is an equally good or better word). So are ‘lesser’ decisions like taking on a new job. Or signing up for anything new at all! Trust, and counting the cost, are both essential.

Jesus tells his listeners (Luke 14) that they should count the cost of following him and not be like a person who starts a building but doesn’t have the resources to complete it and thus makes a fool of themselves. Like all scripture this needs sensitive interpretation and application. Many people, probably most people, come to committed faith in Christ by a series of small steps which may involve ‘belonging’ in a Christian community on the way to ‘believing’. But Jesus’ words remain challenging for folk at every stage of faith.

The Christmas story is attractive and optimistic. It promises great things. Sure, the story is riddled with reminders of poverty, vulnerability and exile but it draws us in. Especially through the eyes of children – not least the child in each of us. It lifts our eyes with the shepherds to witness a vital moment of all human history, and to celebrate the glory of God.

The Church’s Bible readings leading up to Christmas, before and through Advent, paint a big picture of history, full of very messy hope and struggle and the promise of final healing, judgement and vindication. In a sense it is counting the cost. And so maybe it allows us ‘time out’ from the struggle to focus on one small scene at the heart of the great painting, a place of peace and joy as a child is born.

Not for the first time, and not for the last time, our (God’s) world appears in the grip of evil powers and principalities at home and worldwide. Meanwhile the same world is also riddled with light – with beauty and truth and love and hope.

I remember a line from a recent school Nativity play that one young sheep spoke to another sheep: “would you ever stop eating and look up.”

We will all need our strategies for maintaining the joy and peace through the coming year. But for now, sign up for Christmas, and may your looking up bring joy to you and all around you.