The Saturday Message, with the Rev Kevin Logan, Vicar of Christ Church, Accrington. . .

I WAS lost outside Bethlehem when the hijacking happened.

I came to a puzzled halt at traffic lights, desperate for a guiding star. What I got instead was a frightening, swarthy Palestinian.

"Bethlehem?" he yelled, yanking open the passenger door and sitting down. "You go left!"

"Excuse me!" exclaimed I, as we English do when we've done nothing wrong, "would you please get out?"

"I take you birthplace. LEFT!" and he wrenched round my steering wheel.

"OUT!" huffed I, tinged still with English politeness, while massing traffic to the rear became less polite.

"You no understand," he ranted. "Zere's two Bethlehems. You in wrong one."

"NOW!" I shouted at the precise moment every car driver on the West bank declared war on earth, with me as Enemy No. 1.

Hours before, I'd driven discreetly through nearby Hebron's infamous and dangerous Molotov cocktail district. Now, every eye was on my Israeli-hired car and me.

I turned left. Quickly!

When life gets lost, we sometimes demand a deity not unlike my hijacker.

"Why can't he jump in and guide his world better?" we pout. Detour around the tragic Sohams? Put a break on Gulf wars? Run over Hitlers and Husseins before they flatten us?

Instead, he comes as a saviour child, who grows to show us the way to live and how we can be saved.

He then offers all who are lost his powerful Spirit as a personal guide. Now, that's what I call a Christmas present!