ILO. No three letters any teacher wants to see on the day sheet with their name attached. Especially in December.

Only way to get around it? Organise your own ILO (a legitimate one people, come on…).

You know a camp or excursion is coming up. You’re not going and you teach that year group at that time…

Definitely the time to book in a day for programming. Totally legit. You genuinely have to get it done. And, apparently, at exactly that time.

I’m not making this up folks. This is what you’ve got to do to survive.

And this is sometimes what happens to get through a nativity play with a small group of children. In lieu of their being no others, one child is Joseph, Herod, an angel and perhaps even a Wise Man.

How many parts does one have to play?

Hopefully some of them will be mime only, otherwise that’s a lot of lines to learn for a small child.

Or perhaps that’s not your ILO at Christmas time. Perhaps it’s the humble gift card. In lieu of actually having any idea what to get the person, a gift card will have to suffice.

A lot of people think that Christmas is a lovely, nice time of year. I too am tempted to think like this but I know, in reality, it’s not.

Christmas is actually a reminder of just how sinful we all are: myself included.

However, we usually say that we’re not too bad. If we consider ourselves like anyone in the nativity we’ll consider ourselves some of the “good people.” The shepherds. The angels. The Wise Men.

We’re definitely not considering ourselves like Herod. He’s the bad guy who orders infanticide to try to kill Jesus.

But maybe you’re a woman reading this and you find it hard to connect yourself with an ancient, male dictator.

Then connect yourself with Jezebel.

She was a Queen in some of Israel’s darkest days, along with her husband, King Ahab.

It’s not only men with murderous intent in the pages of the Bible. At one point, Ahab wanted a vineyard belonging to a guy called Naboth. Naboth wouldn’t give him his ancestors’ land and fair enough too. Ahab is not happy about this and becomes sullen.

Jezebel tells Ahab to snap out of it. The word ‘empathy’ is not in her vocabulary. He’s not allowed to be down in the dumps.

Jezebel his wife said, “Is this how you act as king over Israel? Get up and eat! Cheer up. I’ll get you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.”

So she wrote letters in Ahab’s name, placed his seal on them, and sent them to the elders and nobles who lived in Naboth’s city with him. In those letters she wrote:

“Proclaim a day of fasting and seat Naboth in a prominent place among the people. But seat two scoundrels opposite him and have them bring charges that he has cursed both God and the king. Then take him out and stone him to death.”

Jezebel will deal with the situation herself and have Naboth killed so Ahab can get the vineyard. In lieu of Ahab dealing with the situation or writing letters, Jezebel will write her own letters instead.

Calculating and wilful manipulation. With an air of spiritual superiority and leadership, proclaiming “a day of fasting” to celebrate Naboth, she is really working to completely undermine Naboth, being anything but spiritual.

It’s no wonder Jezebel has a bad rap. Rightly so. And we’re likely to think ourselves a peg or two (or ten) above Jezebel and Herod, for that matter.

But you know what Christmas tells us? It tells us that in our hearts we are all the same as Herod. The same as Jezebel. That’s not lovely or nice, but it’s the truth.

And that’s why Jesus was born into our world. He’s the greatest ILO the world has ever seen. If there was no need for it, Jesus wouldn’t have ever turned up in the first place.

But he came to take our wrongdoing and deal with it, once and for all.

Christmas isn’t lovely or nice, but it is amazing and full of grace.

Yours needing an ILO,

Alison