We’re not out of the woods yet. Christmas is past but there’s still New Years day, with relatives from the other side of the family. And you know how you get when you’re with your mother. It’s as if the last 20 years never happened — your conversion, your marriage, motherhood, sanctification, are all a parenthesis, and you become twelve again. Even your accent reverts.

You know you will feel awful in the morning if you sell out like last year. So how will you go in prepared this time? Prayer is a good idea. So is being forearmed, by the following forewarnings:

Peter, within about an hour, went from Jesus’ champion to a skulking wuss. That’s how fast it can happen. One minute you’re pledging to die with Him (Luke 22:33), and the next you’re shriveling up before a servant girl and a clutch of pals warming their hands by a fire (Luke 22:54-62). They say it was fear of arrest and torture that made Peter do it, and maybe that’s so. But all I know is that when I’m at a party with mostly non-Christians, I suddenly see my Christian self as fanatical in my own eyes, and I end up blending in.

It’s useful to remember what God warned the post-exile Israelites, poised on the threshold of Canaan with its teeming pagans: Be careful, because the tendency will be for them to change you, and not for you to change them (Deut.7:1-4). I don’t know why that is, it just is.