Late for Christmas

                                    
        

I’m way late getting ready for Christmas this year.

 I haven’t started shopping for gifts. Guys typically don’t start until the last minute, anyhow, but I haven’t even made a list. Can’t seem to get motivated.

 Maybe it’s because our kids are more or less grown up — and, therefore, too cool to act excited about the big day — but have yet to produce grandchildren we can shower with gifts and hugs.  

Maybe it was the spectacle of predatory bargain hunters pummeling each other to claim the latest gizmos before Thanksgiving Day even ended — a symbol of the pagan orgy of consumption the “holiday season” has become.

 Maybe I’ve just become my father. After I reached the approximate age my kids are now, he used to grumble, “Can we just cancel Christmas this year?” At the time, I chided him for being such a Scrooge. Now I understand his weariness with the whole giving-getting business, if all it means is a boost for retail sales.

 Or … maybe I have yet to prepare a place in the “guest room” of my life for Jesus, the promised Messiah. 

 “And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn,” reads the Christmas story in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 2:7, KJV). However, as Ben Witherington III noted in Christianity Today several years ago, the Greek word for “inn” Luke used in his account of Jesus’ birth, kataluma, also can be translated “guest room.”

 Bethlehem was a “one-stoplight town,” Witherington wrote, and might not have had a separate inn for travelers — even during the time of Caesar Augustus’ great census. “Archeology shows that houses in Bethlehem and its vicinity often had caves [at] the back of the house where they kept their prized ox or beast of burden, lest it be stolen,” he reported. “The guest room was in the front of the house, the animal shelter in the back, and Joseph and Mary had come too late to get the guest room, so the [residents] did the best they could by putting them in the back of the house.”

 Is that the best we can do today? Giving a quick nod toward the “true meaning of Christmas” while gorging ourselves on holiday diversions doesn’t even rise to the level of putting Jesus in the back room with the livestock, spiritually speaking. 

 Nothing brings me back to the truth of the first Christmas like reading the Gospel accounts of that silent, holy night, when the Lord entered space and time via the portal of a “one-stoplight town.” And nothing reminds me of the living truth of Christmas like accounts from missionaries and followers of Christ about ways Jesus is revealing Himself around the world today.

n   “Last year on December 25, my friend told me she was going to church for Christmas,” writes a new believer in Vietnam. “I didn’t really understand and thought it was a bit strange. I’d heard of the holiday before but thought it foreign. Why didn’t my friend just go to the temple like everyone else? But now I know the truth. Now I know that Jesus was born for me. Jesus was born for everyone. Last summer someone shared a Bible with me. I read it and knew in my heart that I needed God. Now I can’t wait to celebrate my first Christmas as a believer in Jesus Christ. I’m excited to tell everyone around me about Jesus, born as their Savior.”

n  “Christmas is a time of giving, sharing and remembering the Christ Child who came to give the greatest gift of all: His life as a sacrifice so that we might live,” reflects a missionary in Africa. “When I look at the pastors in Zimbabwe, I see this same kind of sacrifice. Many don’t receive a steady monthly salary. They have difficulty paying their rent and putting enough food on the table so their families won’t go hungry. Yet they spend their days out among their people, witnessing to the lost, praying for them, visiting the sick and helping to bury the dead. Often people come to the house of a pastor, looking for help with money or food. Our pastors give to those in need, even though they themselves could be classified as the needy ones! These dear, faithful ones aren’t giving out of the overflow of their wealth, but out of great poverty.”

n  Another missionary in Africa writes: “The truth is … life on the field isn’t as glamorous as one might imagine when first stepping off the plane. We aren’t camped under a mango tree every day, bringing the Gospel to masses who’ve never heard it before or distributing food to starving people on a daily basis. There are plenty of mountaintop experiences like that when we just look at each other in awe because we get to do this for a living. But the truth is … life happens, and ministry sometimes takes a back seat when it does. Sometimes we find ourselves broken down on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. On our way to the capital to collect a volunteer team one month, the engine of our SUV exploded. Lottie Moon Christmas Offering dollars rebuilt our engine and provided a loaner car in the meantime. Sometimes we find ourselves scooping rainwater off the kitchen floor. Our recently renovated roof cracked in two during a rainstorm one night, flooding our house. Lottie Moon dollars paid for our rent and for the necessary repairs. The truth is … we need you and ask you to pray that people will give sacrificially to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering this year so we can stay on the field, doing what we came to do — glamorous or not.”

OK, that last one was a plug for Lottie Moon giving. But what better Christmas gift can there be than one that helps deliver the Good News of Christ to every “one-stoplight town” on the planet that has yet to hear of Him?

(Visit www.imb.org/offering to discover ways you can participate in the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions.)

 

 

 

Thank it forward

(Volunteer Tim Dortch, center, carries relief supplies to survivors of the devastating January earthquake in Haiti.)

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/120/12056/12056-66753.mp3

Gratitude is the memory of the heart, says a proverb.

If that is true, my heart will gratefully remember some of God’s servants as Thanksgiving 2010 approaches:

-- The Christian workers and volunteers who ministered — and continue to minister — to the survivors of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile, the flooding in Pakistan and other disasters this year. Volunteers like Tim Dortch, a bivocational pastor from Mississippi. He contacted the International Mission Board the morning after the devastating Haiti quake and offered his help. He was on the ground there within days, helping distribute water, food and medicine. “God’s given me a heart for Haiti,” Dortch said.

-- The Southern Baptists who dug deep in tough economic times to give nearly $149 million to the 2009 Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions — and who will faithfully give again this year.

-- Student missionary Jeremiah Johnson, 21, and mission volunteer Bob Finck, 51, who gave their lives in God’s service this year. Johnson, from Arizona, was killed April 12 in a motorcycle accident in Mozambique while devoting a college semester to work in the African nation. “We’re very proud of Jeremiah,” said his pastor. “He was serving the Lord to reach people who were unreached with the Gospel.” Finck, from Virginia, died Aug. 9 in a car accident during his third trip to Zambia, where he was working with other volunteers to lead a Bible conference and minister to young people. “He was very passionate about Zambia,” said the director of missions at Finck’s church.

-- The 60 retiring IMB missionaries honored in May for 1,730 combined years of mission service. Don and Edith Kennedy, for example, worked among university students in Mexico for 31 years. Hundreds of young Christians they mentored now serve as church leaders in Mexico and missionaries around the world. “Change the university and you change the world,” Don said.

-- The more than 200 new IMB missionaries appointed this year, including Michael Kim,* who grew up in South Korea. As the eldest son, he held the role of family priest, responsible for leading ancestor worship rituals. But he became a Christian believer at age 16, the first in 38 generations of his family. His enraged parents beat him, threatened to disown him and threw his Bibles into the fire. Kim eventually smuggled a Bible into his bedroom and read it while hiding under the sheets. Now an American, he plans to return to Asia to tell other hungry souls about Christ. “In order for me to hear the Gospel, there was a long flow of blood, sweat and tears of Western missionaries to Korea,” Kim said when he was appointed earlier this year. “As a debtor of the Gospel, I am … heading to Southeast Asia to share the Good News of Jesus.”

-- Doris Kelley, colleague, friend and substitute mom to IMB communication staff members for the past 48 — count ’em, 48 — years. In the days before personal computers and e-mail, she typed our edited news and feature stories into a hulking teletype machine to send to Baptist Press in Nashville. Many reporters got to know her during her more than 25 years of service in the newsrooms of annual Southern Baptist Convention meetings. She rarely missed a day of work, always greeted people with a smile, watched over her co-workers with love and took care of business without complaint. She retires in December. Without servants like Doris, many churches and ministries would quickly collapse. I hope we can make it without her; I’m not looking forward to trying.

Someone reminded me recently that God’s grace is His unmerited favor toward us. We sinners deserve judgment, but we receive the riches of His goodness and mercy at Christ’s expense. We also receive the great gift of people who model for us what it means to live in gratitude to God by loving and serving Him. Examples are all around us.

We, too, can live in gratitude to Him — by modeling that kind of love for others.

* (Name changed)