a childlike christmas
i’m pleased to report that for the first time in recent history, we at el pozo have had the scheduling luxury to celebrate christmas AFTER thanksgiving as a ministry. and it turns out that we’re WAY better at celebrating christmas after an appropriate thanksgiving spread.
i wrote in my last update that we would be having a christmas party with the children and staff from a local children’s home that we work with throughout the year. we’ve had a christmas party with them for the last few years and it’s been so much fun…the kids from the home write letters and el pozo students take the letters and help bring christmas to these kids. we normally go out to the orphanage one evening, hang out with the kids, and give them the gifts, but this year we decided to invite them to OUR house for a big dinner, games, a piñata, and the encore performance of the first annual el pozo christmas pageant.
yes, that’s right…a dream of mine has come true. last april, i wanted to do a “pastorela”, or a christmas pageant, at thursday lunch instead of giving a 5 minute talk. my brave teammates talked me down and said we should think about doing a christmas pageant in a more seasonally relevant time, but i always loved christmas pageants and plays at church growing up and i really wanted el pozo to have one.
so, come christmastime, we did! and by we, i actually mean that heath wrote an amazing script that elsa and debora turned into a broadway-caliber theatrical production on a budget of right about $0 and on a week’s notice. my role last tuesday night during the pastorela was to sit in the crowd and laugh and cry and love every second of watching our students act out the christmas story during our last en vivo of the year.
from where i’m standing, i think the biggest leap of faith we have to take as christians is to believe that God really did become a baby named Jesus, live a perfect life while teaching us that the kingdom of God is at hand, die on a cross, and defeat death on the third day. by God’s grace i believe that story to be quite true, and my prayer is that the room full of students who participated in the pageant or watched and heard this story being told by their friends can begin to believe the same thing.
to the kids from the orphanage, you couldn’t convince them otherwise. they each love God with their entire heart and i know that their lives were a testimony and a blessing to the students who spent time with them on friday evening. they come from an entirely different economic and educational background than your average el pozo student but they gave from the abundance of their love to our students who all too often come up short in that department. playing games with college students, eating dinner with them, and being a wonderful audience for the encore pageant performance is fantastic for those kids, but i think el pozo and our students are far more blessed by events such as these.
our friend lizzet hancock (daughter of cmf missionaries todd and tonja) giving a gift to her new friend!
so that’s how we celebrated christmas as a community this year. call it childish, but i can think of about a million worse things to be called. christmas is way better with kids around, anyways…and i hope that this christmas, el pozo’s students can have a childlike faith and can believe, maybe even for the first time, that a Savior has been born unto us, and he is the Messiah, the Lord.
merry christmas from mexico!
much love – kami