I am constantly being showered with gifts. Every website I visit, every link I click on, every restaurant I eat at wants to offer me something: exclusive access, free postage, free pizza.  Even if I just want yoghurt I’m told I can have some as a gift if I’ll only buy twice as much as I need.

Now I am, admittedly, a curmudgeonly old git, but I hate these non-gifts.  They waste time and energy, they play on some false sense of loyalty and they end up costing you. Bah humbug. When a gift is a gift, though, it can be wonderful.  My favourite ever was a swiss army knife.  It’s beautiful and I have it with me all the time.  But I love it because I use it every day and in tiny ways it makes my life better.

At the first Pentecost, Peter realized that God had sent something extraordinary to empower him to speak about Jesus and he told the crowds gathered in Jerusalem to, ‘Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus…and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’.

Peter and the disciples hadn’t asked for it, or signed up for it or been spammed, but it was astonishing. It enabled them to be understood in foreign languages and gave the power to heal and to teach.

And it did more than that because there was a gift within the gift.  St Paul later described what happens when the Holy Spirit really gets to work:  ‘The fruit of the Spirit’, he wrote, ‘is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control’.

Provided we learn to use it, then, the Spirit can be opened up to reveal all those brilliant qualities; everything I need to transform this curmudgeonly old git into a more tolerable person.  It’s like a swiss army knife of the soul – and that is a pretty good gift.

This is the sixth or seventh version of exactly the same penknife. The others have been lost, broken, or confiscated by airport security in Chicago, Rotterdam and Denver.