“So what did it feel like when you walked into church for the very first time?” I asked Paula an hour before her baptism. She paused for a moment, and then, with tears in her eyes, said: “It felt like I was coming home.”

Coming home. It’s a big theme at this time of year, as many seek to be home for Christmas, even crossing continents to see that ambition fulfilled. Home is about place: the house where we were brought up, perhaps, or the town where we’ve settled. But home is also about people: being surrounded by those whom we love.

There’s another, darker, side to this cosy domestic picture, of course, which becomes all the more heart-breaking at Christmas. There’s the crisis of refugees, prisoners and rough sleepers, who have no place to call home.

There’s the crisis of those who are isolated and lonely, who have no people to call home. And there’s the crisis of those caught up in the cycle of family tensions, relationship meltdowns, or even domestic abuse, where the idea of home as a place of sanctuary has been horribly violated.

And yet, whatever the realities, ‘coming home’ remains an aspiration for everyone on the planet. We may not have the pinpoint accuracy of the swallow to navigate the thousands of miles back to our nesting grounds. But the human homing instinct is every bit as strong as that of the birds.

Christmas reminds us that God is with us, whatever the crises we face. And at the heart of it lies an astonishing truth: that in Jesus, God has sent out a search party to call us home.

This home is a place where we are truly loved, truly accepted, where we can be truly ourselves. It’s a place where we find our true identity as children of God, with unique gifts and a unique destiny.

It’s a place where Almighty God becomes accessible to us in Jesus – God in a shape and a size that we can all understand - drawing us around himself, and not just us, but a wonderful array of others from all around the world who are now our brothers and sisters.

And the Church is very far from perfect, of course, but what a joy to experience this homecoming for ourselves. “Lord, you have made us for yourself,” as St Augustine once put it, “and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”

“So what did it feel like when you walked into church for the very first time?” I asked Paula.

She paused for a moment, and then, with tears in her eyes, said: ‘It felt like I was coming home’: not a nostalgic return to some cherished childhood memory, because Paula had never been to church as a child, but rather a joyous realisation that through Jesus her heart had found its rest.