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Early morning in a London park I had a conversation with a young man who was sleeping rough. His pillow was a Bible covered in a tee shirt. His only other possession apart from a sleeping bag was a book by David Attenborough. He’d stopped me to ask the time as he didn’t have a phone or a watch. We talked about the Attenborough book – he was a big fan. The young man spoke of his own love of the natural world - and he smiled as he mentioned that he was surrounded by birds and squirrels in the park he’d woken up in - although I could see he was shivering and wet. He was creative and funny, interested in science. He insisted on giving me the book to give to someone else I thought might like it - and as I walked away, he put his head back on his Bible. This weekend, we had delivered to our church little plastic bags, each to be given to a homeless woman. The bags contained (amongst other things) soap, chocolate, some tampons and a hairbrush especially for tangled hair. They were from two girls about 10 or 12 years old who, with their parents, were spending the day in the week before Christmas giving these out to anyone they thought needed them. Each bag had a personal hand-written note from the girls wishing the recipient well and assuring them that everything in the bag was brand new. And this month, I had a conversation with a businesswoman at a Christmas lunch. She became tearful as she spoke about seeing more people sleeping rough. But when I suggested she set up even a small direct debit giving to a charity helping people going through homelessness, she became somehow resistant. We agreed - of course it's not all about money - but she felt too reticent to speak to the people she was seeing either. It’s so easily done but like many of us, she had let the perfect become the enemy of the good. And so she remained stuck, feeling sad, feeling helpless and somehow unable to act. In this final week of Advent church services, Christians are listening to the Hebrew prophets in the Bible who imagined a more just world and urged their audiences to act in accordance with that vision. And shortly, Christians will celebrate God becoming human at Christmas in the rather mystical phrase the Word became Flesh. In these cold days, practical compassion from individuals remains important, even while the political arguments continue about why there is such a steep rise in people going through homelessness. To live humanely and compassionately, we need imagination, empathy and energy. For Christians, the hope is that this empathy translates into practical action to celebrate the Word made flesh. But alongside that, we need to refuse to give in to our anxiety that because we can't fix it all by ourselves, we turn our actions back into words again.