DEAR News Of The Area,

REMEMBER as a child, making a list of presents you wanted for Christmas?

Or maybe your children or grandchildren are in the process of making such a list now.

As adults, we could make a Christmas wish list too – naming ways to make our society kinder, fairer, more joyous.

Reducing domestic violence should be on the list – violence against women is an epidemic.

Considering that more than one third of Australian marriages end in divorce (44 percent based on ABS figures of 2,275,690 marriages and 994,918 divorces between 2003 and 2022), providing effective pre-marital counselling may help keep families together – especially counselling young men on how to truly love a woman.

This should also be for de facto couples, whose failure rate is much higher (ABC Fact Check 2014).

Related to this is homelessness, especially of single mothers from broken relationships, and of older women too. Safe refuges and low-cost housing are essential.

We all want peace, but in our world, conflict abounds – Ukraine and the Middle East are horrifying war zones.

And there are plenty of potential conflicts too, not least between China and Taiwan.

Our list could include poverty, racism, on-line bullying, sexualisation of our children, on-line pornography, child-abuse, unwanted babies and destruction of our natural environment.

Who can fix these things? Can the government stop domestic violence?

The root cause is much deeper.

Our society has turned away from God.

The message of Christmas is that God so cared about us that he sent his son Jesus Christ to save us.

What if Australia turned back to God?

The Bible says that those who truly believe in Christ would become new men and women, loving their neighbours, forgiving enemies, and their sins forgiven.

With Christ as our foundation, maybe less women would suffer domestic violence, and maybe less people would be homeless too.

We can’t post our Christmas wish-list to Santa, but even better – we could send it to our Heavenly Father, aka God, through our prayers.

Regards,
Ross FERRIER,
Fingal Bay.