I must confess that I am worried about how much the government is borrowing. I don’t know if I am being ‘played’ by the tory spin on Brown’s handling of the international crisis, and I freely confess that I am glad I do not need to decide how to handle this whole situation, but I do get concerned when we solve today’s problem by handing the problem onto a future generation.

Of course, we see this repeated every day on a smaller scale; the level of personal debt in the UK is staggering. In Sepembert 2008 the personal debt of UK citizens was £1,457bn. The average household debt was £9,740, rising to £22,190 per household if you include unsecured debts. In October 2008 personal debt in the UK rose by £1m every 8.5 minutes and every 5 minutes someone went bankrupt. We are paying for today’s commodities with tomorrow’s earnings. Where those commodities are essential I guess that we have little choice, but so many purchases are luxuries. Is it worth the debt to have 300 TV channels to watch on a television bigger than the average double bed, surrounded by every game console known to man (and, indeed boy – they know more of them!)

These are complex decisions which we sometimes avoid by simply taking out another loan, but for all of us there are costs that we have to think carefully about. Will I sacrifice something to pay for something else? I guess it depends on how much we value what we want. I sometimes wonder how long it took God to decide that He would become incarnate in Christ at Christmas? For here is a real miracle; something essential for today and all our tomorrows which was paid for by someone else sacrificing all they had.