Christmas Was Late This Year

Christmas was late this year. Oh, it got here, but not on the 25^th. December 25^th arrived, as expected, the day after the 24^th. We had a delightful day, with the usual opening of presents and enjoying guests around the dinner table. In the afternoon, our larger-than-usual group caroled its way around the hospital, and that was a special time. But something was missing.

I didn’t think much about it over the next couple of days, but it did cross my mind. There was one gift I had specifically requested from God, and I hadn’t received it. Oh well. My other obvious blessings and pleasures kept my mind busy, and I did not fret. But if I stopped and allowed myself to think about it, that “something” was still missing.

This morning, I was working at my desk when a soft knock came at the front door. I opened the door to find a man holding a rake and looking for work. Didn’t I need him to rake the front yard? Or was there something else he could do? His family had lost its house and was having to live in a small motel room, so he had to do whatever was necessary to earn a little money and keep things together.

The yard really didn’t look too bad, but then… I really hate raking leaves, and he needed the work, so…. I told the man he could rake the leaves. We didn’t discuss price, but I knew even then that I would be paying him more than the job was really worth. Somehow, I already knew that this situation was my Gift.

As the morning continued, I had several occasions to go outside. Each time I had opportunity for a little more conversation with the man with the rake, and each time, I learned a little more about him. Like so many in our community, he couldn’t find work, but he still had rent to pay and children to feed. And each time I looked out the window the man was raking fast and carefully.

I knew about how long it would take him to finish the front yard, so I knew I had a little time. I remembered that I had a couple of shirts, some new work socks, and a few other items that he might find useful. I also asked Patsy if she had some portable food items we could put together. By the time the raker of leaves was finished, we had a couple of nice bags filled and ready to go.

It was then that I asked the man whether he would like something to eat. I already knew he hadn’t had much this morning. He agreed that something to eat would be nice, and I invited him in. Very shortly, we sat down together for a meal of Patsy's Christmas leftovers, and you can be sure that when he pushed back from the table, there was nothing left on his plate but the fork.

During the course of the meal we talked. My new friend spoke very frankly of some of the bad choices he made in his life, and of the difficulties he now faces as he looks for work. I was able to encourage him and, perhaps, point him in some useful directions. It was during lunch, also, that he told me about letting God change his entire approach to life, and that of the doors he had knocked on this morning, only ours had opened.

Then it was time to go. I already knew that with the packages my friend would be carrying, he would need a ride, so I took him in the van to the little motel.

Yes, Christmas was late this year. The Gift I had asked for was that God would send a stranger to join us at our table. The Gift was three days late, but now I have had Christmas.

A Nation in Distress: Reflections on the 4th of July, 2013

I appreciate the 4^th of July and all it historically stands for – liberty, and the willingness of men and women to risk their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to have it. Many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence for which the day is famous actually lost those things for their ideal of liberty. Freedom isn’t free.

Freedom – liberty – is important to me. I once put my own life on the line and swore to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States – that wonderful-though-imperfect document that our ancestors established to describe a process and parameters for maintaining our hard-won liberty. I willingly, proudly, joined the Army in wartime.

I like fireworks, and bands and celebrations, and I have always enjoyed observing the festivities of “The 4^th.” An American flag waves in front of my house as I write. Long may it wave.

But I fear for that flag, and I fear for this nation that it represents.

I have difficulty this year getting excited about the 4^th of July.

What really are we celebrating?

We are remembering what used to be –what used to exist in our ideals, in our founding principles. We are celebrating things to which we once at least aspired.

We never completely reached those ideals, but, at least, we wanted to.

We intended to.

We tried.

Now, I fear, we have, as a nation, completely given up on those aspirations. We have sold our national soul to expedience. We have surrendered our highest intentions to our lowest inclinations.

We still wave our flags, and we still trot out the patriotic blather of speeches. We hold church services and public gatherings to cheer for our troops in their unnecessary wars, and we keep sending those brave young people off to “fight for their country.”

But, in the name of “freedom,” aren’t we really mainly sending them to extend the American Empire? Aren’t we really using up these precious lives just so we can be the biggest bully in the sandpile? Aren’t we really committing internationally some of the very same evils for which we condemned the British in our classic Declaration of Independence? (http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html)

For my generation, there was Vietnam. We drank the poisonous patriotic Kool-Aid while politicians talked of dominoes falling, and we marched proudly away. Most of us had no idea then how our own government was lying to us. We thought that our greatest danger was from some peacenik burning a flag. We didn’t realize that our true hazard might be masked by a pseudo-patriotism.

At least in those days, we had the integrity to be outraged when we finally learned that our President was breaking the law.

And now? Our once-great nation has completely forgotten the heights to which it once attempted to ascend.

There is a vast difference between greatness and mere power.

We are a powerful nation. Can we honestly still claim greatness?

I think not.

Neither major political party can claim any moral high ground. The politicians of both parties continue to put personal power before principle and party one-up-manship before national good. And they sell their souls, and their votes, to the highest bidder, whether such be a Soros or a Koch.

As a nation, we are divided like a husband and wife locked in a long-moribund marriage and for whom the other party cannot possibly do anything right. Every word and action is interpreted through a haze of suspicion of motives, and every fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We are divided “left” and “right,” but there is no balance.

We are divided “have” and “have-not,” but both are alike in their greed.

We are divided “liberal” and “conservative,” but the liberals are only liberal with other people’s money and with those who agree with them, while the conservatives have forgotten whatever it was they intended to conserve – except the money and power they have or wish they had. (Giving away other people’s money is not “liberal,” and selfishness is not really “conservative.”)

Oh yes … there are also the non-aligned, the would-be “third party” folks, but most of them seem to be wrapped in the self-indulgence of either the childish arrogance of some green/reform/justice “socialism” or just wanting to be able to do “their own thing.” 

We are divided “religious” and “secular,” with both claiming the blessings and support of our national heritage. The main difference, really, seems to be that the secular folks know they do not worship the God of the Bible, while the religious folks still think they do.

Both God and Lincoln have warned us that a house divided against itself cannot long stand.

But we keep talking of patriotism, while we and most of our elected officials have forgotten what real patriotism is.

We call wiki-leakers “traitors,” but we ignore a President and Cabinet officials who flout the law and their oaths. We certainly say nothing about the treason of a Congress that trades our freedom for false security and whose primary work is to keep itself in office.

Meanwhile, the Church – liberal, moderate, conservative,  or by whatever name, and with few exceptions – works hard to rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, even after she has struck the iceberg, thinking that some fresh combination of behavior-modification and political influence will hold back the frigid flood that is so surely sinking our ship of state – keep it out at least long enough for “us” to fly away. And we wonder why the watching world rejects or ignores us.

I love this country. Particularly because I have lived much of my life overseas, I love the United States and her history, her varied and mixed cultures, her interwoven strands of heritage. I love the liberty of personhood and opportunity for which the United States used to stand. As much as I enjoyed living in other countries, I was always proud and pleased that I was an American, and I was glad I could look forward to returning to these United States. Because I love the United States, my sadness for her is the greater.

I do not believe that any other country is doing “better” than we are. In fact, most are far worse, which is why so many of their people still want to come here.

Nevertheless, we are not what we could be.

We are not even what we were.

We certainly are not what we want to think we are.

If, as Lincoln said, we are “the last best hope of earth,” then the world is in deep trouble.

(To be continued….)

Hypnotizing The Chicken

Me n' Bill Carey

Once upon a time in the long-long-ago, dearly beloved, there occurred the Great Chicken Hypnotizing Experiment.

It wasn’t my idea.

I confess I went along with it quite willingly, but I can legitimately blame that lapse on boredom. Not that I wouldn’t have tried it anyway, but I am perfectly happy to blame it on Bill Carey. (Bill Carey was called by both names in order to distinguish him from his father, who was merely “Bill”)

Bill Carey was my friend and chief playmate in those long-ago days on the Ogbomoso Baptist Mission station. He was about a year older than I, but we were often the only kids of our age group around, so we were stuck with each other. He was also smarter than I, and he read about things that were far beyond my level of interest. He often tried – usually to little avail – to explain those things to me. (I remember the time, for example, when he tried to explain the binary system of numbers to me. With ten perfectly good fingers, I saw no use for counting with 0 and 1.)

So it happened, on a hot, dusty, dry-season late-morning, as we wandered past the Low/Wasson house in our typical condition of youthful boredom, that Bill Carey told me of something he had read – something about hypnotizing chickens by holding their beaks down on a chalk line on a sidewalk. That bit of information might well have fallen, unused and unnoticed, into some distant crevice of my memory, had not one particularly unfortunate chicken happened right then to wander in front of us. Instantly, we were inspired to be scientists, intent on proving out a hypothesis.

Nigerian chickens are not like the fat, ungainly fowls common in the United States. They are slim, tough, agile sprinters with an amazing will to live. They grow up dodging hawks, dogs and hungry cooks. Though unlucky, that particular bird was certainly not going to allow himself to be caught easily by mere boys.

The chicken seemed to know instinctively, as we changed course toward him, that our intentions were not to his advantage. He turned with a cackle, and the chase was on. Around and around the house – the water cistern – the mango tree – the flower pots – we raced, with the chicken keeping barely out of reach. Just as it seemed one of us would grab him, he would dodge, and our hands came up holding air. For at least ten or fifteen minutes, we ran the poor bird and ourselves ragged, before we finally trapped him by the cistern.

As Bill Carey and I took a moment to catch our breaths, the chicken managed to wriggle free, and the chase was on again. This time, the bird was tired, and we had become smarter, so the contest was much shorter. And this time, we held on tighter.

On with the experiment! To the chalk line on the sidewalk!

Suddenly, we realized we had no chalk.

Then, it occurred to us that we also had no sidewalk.

But surely, a good experiment need not be interrupted by such minor details? In best African fashion, we would substitute with available resources.

Bill Carey and I discussed the matter, and we decided that, if chalk and concrete would work, then a line scratched in the dirt would certainly do just as well. It was the work of a moment to create such a line in the bare ground under the mango tree.

Carefully, carefully … the now-firmly-held chicken was placed on the ground, with his beak on the scribed line. A moment to hold him there … then, a gentle release.…

The now-somewhat-rested chicken raced away with a raucous squawk. The two frustrated behavioral scientists were right behind. We had, by this time, refined our chicken-catching techniques, so the chase was not prolonged. We soon were again tightly clutching the subject of our study.

In fine scientific manner, we thought through and analyzed our experimental process to pinpoint the cause of its failure. Perhaps we needed to smooth the ground more? Perhaps our line was not straight enough? We prepared fresh ground for our second attempt. Since Bill Carey had held and placed the chicken on the line in the first try, I would place him on the second.

I slowly and gently placed the chicken on the smoothed and inscribed dirt. I thought he seemed more relaxed, but that may simply have been that I was holding him so tightly that he couldn’t breathe. With remarkable care and deliberation, I delicately bisected the line with the chicken’s beak, lay the bird on the dirt, and held him motionless. After a few seconds, I slowly withdrew my hands.

The chicken required only an instant to realize that his restraint was removed. This time, when he ran, he did so with both a remarkable athleticism and a previously unseen inspiration.

We just watched him go.

Bill Carey and I agreed that this particular chicken must surely be too dumb to be a good subject for a scientific study such as ours.

Reflections

Birmingham, Alabama, Christmas 1968

Boxing Day. The Day After Christmas when, in British tradition, one boxes up gifts to take to the poor (is this where we get “re-gifting”?). As good a day as any for reflection on the year past.

2011 has been a very good year for me. Exhausting, but good. My year was shaped by disasters. The very events that brought destruction and pain to so many others have been exactly the same events that provided fresh purpose and meaning for me. It seems that the greater the problems around me, the more opportunities I have to be a blessing and to be blessed.

The North Carolina tornadoes of mid-April left a trail of destruction and death such as our part of the country has rarely seen. The map of the storm tracks looked like some giant beast had ripped the land with massive claws, gouging out parallel lines of terror. All across the eastern half of the state, homes, businesses and entire communities were laid waste by the whimsical power of the swirling winds.

Then in late August, Hurricane Irene cut across eastern North Carolina, and gusting winds after hours of soaking rains made it a very bad day for trees and for any houses or garages or fences or wires under them. Large areas were described – accurately – as “looking like a war zone.” Electricity was out for days, or even weeks, across hundreds of square miles, and blue tarps spread like a fungal plague across smitten roofs.

There have also been other, less dramatic, disasters. Yesterday – Christmas – our church spent much of the day preparing and serving lunch and singing Christmas carols at the local soup kitchen. Fellow servants were there to distribute socks, towels and Bibles and to help with distributing the food. Dozens of men and women – young and old, black and white – came to eat. As I looked at the faces, many of them wrinkled like baskets of old laundry, I was aware that each one had experienced its own individual disaster.

In the afternoon yesterday, Patsy and I met with friends for what has become another of our family’s Christmas traditions: singing carols around the hospital. Starting in the emergency room and ICU, we then went to the top floor and sang our way down. I wore my Santa’s cap, and Patsy wore felt reindeer antlers to try to bring a little cheer to our audience. On every floor – except, perhaps, the maternity wing – we knew that each room held its own variation on the theme of personal disaster.

Christmas is about God’s response to the ultimate disaster of our separation from Him. As I reflect on the disasters and responses of the past year, I am reminded yet again of the huge privilege I have that when others suffer destruction and loss, I am allowed to be one of God’s personal representatives of His disaster response.

Henry VIII or The Notebook



Portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger
(1497-1543) made c. 1536
Madrid, the Thyseen-Bornemisza Collection


If we choose the easy way, not only are we choosing sin and the inevitable separation from God, but we make ourselves unblessable and we forego the opportunity for God to work His good through the situation. (Matthew Gilliland)


Henry VIII of England was, in his core beliefs, a good Catholic even after his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church. Interestingly, Henry’s Catholic principles were not allowed to get in the way of satisfying his personal whims, and, for all his kingly achievements, Henry is remembered primarily for disposing of inconvenient wives and for splitting the Church of England off from the Catholic Church when the Pope would not allow him to use divorce to “legitimize” his adultery.


Last Tuesday, September 13, Marion Gordon “Pat” Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and host of The 700 Club, shocked viewers by saying, in effect, that it would be OK for the spouse of an Alzheimer’s patient to use Henry’s trick of hiding adultery behind the scrim of divorce, because the Alzheimer's patient's forgetfulness is like a death. Reactions from both religious and secular sources was instantaneous, and almost universally negative.


As one friend, who is caring for her Alzheimer’s-afflicted husband, said to me, “How could I leave him just when he needs me most?”


I am certainly grateful that God does not abandon us when we forget who He is!


Granted, Pat’s comments were “off the cuff” at the end of a 700 Club program, and he did say that this was a difficult situation, etc., but still … he said that divorce would be preferable to adultery, as though one can justify one wickedness over another just because one’s situation is difficult!


The fact that righteousness is difficult can never be used as a legitimization for sin! And as one who helped care for a loved one through several years of Alzheimer’s decline, I am offended by the very idea!


I know human beings have shown a remarkable proclivity toward selfishness ever since Adam and Eve had their unauthorized snack, but it was probably not until the 1960s that we started to make our self-centeredness into policy. We proudly announced our depravity with phrases like, “If it feels good, do it.” We – particularly in American society – then went looking for any variation we could find on “self-fulfillment,” “self-realization” or “self-actualization.”


Now, a public religious leader, once-respected for his Biblical conservatism, has spoken out in denial of clear Biblical teaching regarding marriage and commitment in general and has affirmed selfishness as an acceptable basis for moral decision-making.


Interestingly, among the voices raised in reaction to Robertson’s statement, the only ones I have heard rendering even slight approval for the Henry VIII solution have been from aging “liberals.” Among the reasons so few from the younger generation have approved may be that they grew up watching the movie, The Notebook.

In The Notebook, James Garner plays the part of an elderly man who daily visits his Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife and reads to her from a notebook about their earlier lives together. The lady, played by Gena Rowlands, sometimes manages to retrieve herself from the mists of memory for a few blissful moments, only to lose herself again in the horror and fear of the Alzheimer’s.

When I watch this movie, I do so with, on the one hand, a mixture of awe and admiration for the James Garner character, and, on the other, the pain of familiarity with Alzheimer’s. I recognize only too well that loss of personality portrayed by Gena Rowlands, because I watched at close hand as my Mother fell slowly into that same abyss of disconnectedness. I also watch with peace, knowing that no matter how painful and frustrating those final years with Mother were, I would not trade them for anything.

It is a sad day when we can learn more about “goodness” and “covenant commitment” – about “for better, for worse … in sickness and in health” – from James Garner than we can from Pat Robertson.

Jesus said that there is a wide, easy way that leads to destruction, and there is a challenging, narrow way that leads to life. God’s people have no excuse for taking the easy way.
 
 

Trafficking With The Enemy

1/1/11 already! A new year, with new adventures and opportunities, even as we recall and reevaluate the old year.

What a year 2010 was! As I look back over the last twelve months, I can scarcely believe that so much has happened. Yet, as I look back, certain memories rise above the rest.

The Iroko Box.
Mother is buried in
A piece of Africa

When Mother died two days after Christmas 2009, much of life began to revolve around finalizing her affairs and arranging for her memorial service. In American society, we are generally sheltered from such arrangements of death. Usually, a funeral home takes care of all that, and the process is carefully sanitized.

Not so for us, and for a variety of reasons, most of the arrangements fell to me. Getting a death certificate and publishing obituaries [you would be surprised how difficult society can make those tasks!] – coordinating with the crematorium and the cemetery and the monument carver, and contacting a church and minister and musicians, all in another state – and making the box for the ashes.

Making the box was a special privilege. I had anticipated for years that I would have to do it, and I had a beautiful piece of wood ready. I had chosen a pecan plank, because Mother never met a pecan she did not like. But when it came time to make the box, that board just wasn’t right. A friend gave me a plank of West African iroko wood, and another friend planed it smooth for me. Then I set to making a box. Patsy helped with the final design (my first design looked too much like a bird house).

Making that iroko box was a particularly emotional stage in a very emotional process. As I worked the wood, I had a lot of time to think about Mother, and what a remarkable woman she had been, and how so much of me was shaped by her. She was not without her faults, but on balance, she was – in the words of her eulogy – “no ordinary woman.” As I worked on that box, I thought a lot about how un-ordinary she had been. And I cried a lot.

It has given me great satisfaction to know that my Mother’s ashes are buried in that iroko box I made – buried in a small piece of the Africa she loved so. And she was buried under a footstone that reads (borrowing from 2 Corinthians 9:8): “Always enough to share.”

Mother’s death and the subsequent arrangements prevented me from helping in the response to the Haitian earthquake, so as soon as the memorial service was over I began checking on whether my skills might be needed in some other disaster response. I ended up being asked to go to South Sudan to help with an HIV/AIDS prevention project for Baptist Global Response. I flew out of Raleigh/Durham airport on Easter Sunday, April 4, and spent most of that month in Sudan. In Africa, one can safely expect that little will go as planned. That was the case with most aspects of my anticipated project. Nevertheless, God was apparently working out His own plans, and I had the wonderful satisfaction of knowing that I was in exactly the right place at the right time to be in the middle of what the Lord had for me.

Sudan is not a particularly comfortable or fun place to visit. It is not for tourists. Creature comforts are in short supply and there are far too many people running around with AK-47s. And it is hot. Really, really hot – like 115°-120° every day, and no ice or AC. April is near the end of the dry season there, and so everything was not only hot, but very dry. The good side of that was that there were fewer insects (especially mosquitoes), and I could sleep outside under the stars almost every night. (Night by night, I watched most of a moon cycle pass over my head.) Breakfast each day was instant oatmeal and instant coffee, both mixed with tepid water. Supper was mostly beans-and-rice supplemented with special minerals provided by the included gravel. Lunch, if it happened, was probably a pack of cheap cookies washed down with more warm water.

Fortunately, the real adventures of life relegate this sort of less-than-comfortable circumstance to total irrelevance. The circumstances would not even merit mention except for the way they provided the setting in which I experienced the true significance of my time in Sudan.

The greatest privilege and delight of my trip to South Sudan was in the remarkable people I met and with whom I worked. There were the young-but-remarkably-mature-for-their-years Dinka pastors who helped us and prayed with us and taught us, and who quickly became our friends. There was the American mission doctor with his tiny hospital who, with his dedicated African staff, is making far more of an impact for people of a whole region than he ever could in his native South Carolina. There was the missionary couple who have given 17 years of heroic service, mostly under incredibly difficult conditions, to share the love of God with the Sudanese. And there were the bright, young, short-term missionaries – college students or recent graduates – with whom I spent most of my time. All of these had been contributing their parts to what God is doing in that area of Africa. What a blessing to be allowed to participate a little with them!

All of these fine people were involved in God’s invasion that is bringing His Light into that very dark portion of “darkest Africa.” They had been making meaningful inroads into the Kingdom of Darkness, and their true success in the spiritual realm would soon be attested by the counter-attack they faced.

The New Testament is clear that we are in a War – The War – and our enemies are real, but they are never human. They are not “flesh and blood” but are the spiritual powers of the Kingdom of Darkness [Ephesians 6:12].

The cosmic war in which we are engaged is very real and has physical manifestations, but its essence is unseen. More importantly, as Christians, our combat must usually take forms that are completely unnatural and counter-intuitive. But because of the Cross of Jesus Christ, we fight from victory, not for it. Yet we must fight. We fight to extend the blessings of victory to those who are still enslaved in Darkness.

The Old Spearmaster.
The people are never the enemy.


In our warfare, one of the great challenges is constantly to remember that we fight for the very people whom we see representing – in the natural – the interests of the Kingdom of Darkness. So it is that the King of Light can command us to demonstrate our preexisting victory by loving, even feeding and blessing, those representatives of Darkness. [Cf. Luke 6:27-28, Romans 12:20]. There is much more to spiritual warfare than this, but without this, all our prayers have little meaning.

As events progressed in South Sudan last April, the Kingdom of Darkness was represented locally by a group of occult practitioners known collectively as the Spearmasters. The local Spearmasters had collectively placed a powerful curse against the young missionaries. About the time we learned of this spiritual counter-attack, it happened that I went on a day-trip with Jermaine and Andrew to a nearby town. (“Nearby” in American terms; a long, hot walk in the African bush.) As we started for home in the Land Cruiser, we passed one of those Spearmasters (plus woman and small child) by the road, and we offered the trio a ride in the vehicle. The old Spearmaster presented an imposing figure with his giraffe-tail fly-whisk and his bundle of ceremonial spears.

Riding cramped in the back of our Land Cruiser was surely better than a long, dusty walk, but it was still hot and dry. We made several stops during our drive, and on one of those stops, I remained at the vehicle with our guests while Jermaine and Andrew visited local church folk. As we sat there, unable to converse, I grew thirsty and reached for a water bottle.

As I reached for the water, however, I faced a quandary. My Mother had always taught me never to eat or drink in the presence of others without being prepared to share whatever I had. I had plenty of water, but … I had no cup by which to share it. At times like that, I often find that my choices are really very simple. I pulled out my own drinking flask, opened it and handed it to the man and his family. Then, I dug out a couple of ever-present granola bars and shared those, too. As I did, I knew it was the right thing to do, but I was not even aware that my simple actions had such cosmic implications for The War.

Love can cast out fear! We really can overcome evil with good!

The old Spearmaster knew, of course, that we represented “the enemy” to his way of life, even as we understood that he represented our enemy. But thanks to the fact that Jesus Christ has placed His love in us, we were free to share. It is amazing how much of real importance can be accomplished with a little water and a granola bar.

Our “trafficking with the enemy” did not stop The War, and there were serious subsequent battles, but we faced them having already demonstrated before the watching angels that we were already more than conquerors through Him who loved us! [Romans 8:37. That is the verse on my Father’s footstone.]

As I look back over 2010, from the many vignettes that rise in my memory, these come to the top: honoring my Mother, who taught me to share, and honoring my God, Who prepares a table before me and allows me to share it in the very presence of my enemies.

Christmas Is About Giving

The Hospital Carolers, Christmas 2010
(not shown: Elliott, who took the picture)

In spite of childhood memories and fantasies, we move on to adulthood. For me, that transition demanded, among other things, a long adventure in trying to understand myself – my own likes and dislikes, attitudes, fears, beliefs, loves – everything about myself. Simply coming to understand my own response to Christmas required a particular effort.

Early on, after the side trips into university, the Army and graduate school, I had expected to be able to reach a point from which I could recreate the annual Christmas season into some semblance of my Ogbomosho memories. [Patsy and I even managed one Ogbomosho Christmas during that time, when I was doing my graduate field research in Nigeria in ’76.] But more Christmases in England, then visits to family each year, all failed to make me happy, and I resigned myself to further delay in creating The Ideal Christmas.

Please understand that Christmas with the in-laws was really quite nice of itself. “Mrs. J” had spent months cooking goodies and buying lots of gifts, and we always came away from her house carrying extra weight and far too many new things. But each Christmas Day, after a wild few minutes of opening presents, the day would quickly settle into that odd depressed boredom at which the Christmas afternoons of my childhood had previously hinted.


Year after year, I marveled that I could so anticipate the delights of Christmastime, only to end up depressed and disappointed that it had not met expectations.


What was wrong with me, I wondered? I had so much for which to be thankful, and yet – I usually came away feeling … empty. Why?


Then, one Christmas afternoon at my in-laws’ house, something different happened. Someone pointed out that my in-laws had no rail on the steps to the basement, and wouldn’t it be nice if they had one to which to hold?


I came alive! I could do that! I could make a safety rail!


So I did. And I had fun doing it. My in-laws kept telling me how much they appreciated my having done such a thing, and especially on Christmas, but I want to tell them: “Thank you for putting some meaning back into my Christmas!” The next year, I built a safety rail for the steps leading to the attic. Then a safety rail for Aunt Betty. And I loved doing such projects!



That series of projects, and the pleasure I experienced from them, set me to thinking. In the following years, as Matthew grew older, we began celebrating Christmas at our house in Rocky Mount. I had begun to recognize what I had been missing, and I knew what to do about it. Our Christmases started a subtle, but definite, change.



I had realized that a celebration, no matter how nice, and no matter how many presents I received, could never provide the personal joy and meaning for which I craved, so long as everything we did was about “me” and “us.” I realized that my joy came from giving, not from getting.


Christmas in Ogbomosho had been much more about sharing and giving, even if I had not really realized it then. For example, we never celebrated Christmas with our family by itself. We always celebrated with other people – we always had other families staying with us – And even for a selfish little boy like me, Christmas became a time of sharing. Even my Christmas afternoon depressed boredom only came on when the other people had disappeared and I was just trying to make myself “happy”!


There had been some hints along the way, too, even before I had my great revelation. While we were in England, away from family, we had little to do on Christmas Day, so we helped our local pastor provide a meal and entertainment for elderly people in our neighborhood. Patsy and I were all set to feel sorry for ourselves because we were so far from family, and we were amazed at how marvelous a Christmas we had when we spent it serving and making laughter for people we didn’t even know! For a couple of Christmases in England, we joined Geoff and Judith to invite various lonely people in for a Christmas dinner.


It was against the background of such joyful experiences of giving that we experienced the depressing disappointment of merely getting.


So – back in Rocky Mount, Christmas began to change. Never again would we eat a Christmas dinner with only family present. The visitors have been different from year to year. Sometimes older friends came who had no one else with whom to celebrate. One friend’s wife was dying of cancer, so they planned nothing special. She couldn’t even eat, but both they and we enjoyed sharing that time around our table. The next year, Bill came alone; Ruby had died. One memorable Christmas, we enjoyed the company of an ex-con who was freshly released from the hospital with a broken leg but who had no way to get home for dinner. [I drove him home later that afternoon.]. Each year is a little different in detail, but similar in that it is about giving.

When Matthew grew old enough to help, our church family began serving at the local soup kitchen on Christmas Day. After a few years, another church took over that service, and we began going to the hospital on Christmas afternoon to sing carols.

We sang carols at the hospital again yesterday. As usual, that singing to patients, families and hospital staff “made our day,” not merely because we enjoy singing with our friends, but because we know – from peoples’ responses – that what we did had mattered. We had a very good Christmas.

As I have come, with age, to understand more about myself and my response to Christmas, I have also come to realize that … I also shouldn’t be surprised!

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son ….”

Giving at Christmas time was God’s idea, anyway, but it works for me, too.