This year, the holiday season looks and feels a little different. Right now, I am sitting in the “living room” of our home in Dzoole Village, Malawi. Just minutes ago, a chicken walked through the house, and goats paraded past our front door. Under the tree in front of the house, there are close to twenty children staked out hoping for us to come out and play. Life is so simple here. Some days, I forget it is even December and that Christmas is fast approaching. But there are days when I do remember, and I have moments where I wish I could be home for the holidays. There are moments where I wish I could jam to Christmas music in the car with my sisters while doing last minute errands for my mom. There are moments where I wish I could drive around looking at Christmas lights and just take in the happiness and energy of the season. But so quickly, I am taken back to my own reality, and reminded, that I am just where I need to be.
Although this Christmas is going to be a lot simpler, in the simplicity, I’ve received the greatest gift Christmas could offer: God’s love. This race has taken me on a journey of truly experiencing God’s love. About one month into the race, I was talking with a friend, and she asked me, “how do you experience God’s love?” When she asked me the question, I was dumbstruck. I blubbered through a response, but her question had me thinking for days after. How do I experience God’s love? And it finally hit me: I wasn’t. Through a lot of prayer, conversations with friends, and journaling, I realized that, deep down, I believed God’s love was conditional. Sure, I could quote the scripture that God loves you not for what you do, but simply because you are a child of God. I could offer encouragement to friends that needed to hear that they were more than what they could do. But I couldn’t believe it for myself, and for so long, I had no idea what was keeping me from experiencing His love. But through time, God revealed to me that my skewed understanding of God’s love was based in fear. Fear of rejection. Fear of failing. And those fears weren’t just earthly fears. I projected them onto God. Deep down, I feared that God might one day reject me. The idea of unconditional love was too good to be true. For so long, the fear of rejection controlled me. It told me that I was what I could accomplish. It told me that I was what other people thought of me. But those lies, the ones I was believing, never left room for God’s voice. The voice I really needed to hear. The voice reassuring me that “perfect love casts out fear, (1 John 4:18)” because God’s love is bigger than my fear. The voice that truly resting and experiencing God’s love sets me free from the try-hard life. And for the first time, I finally began to believe that voice.
And what I’ve found, now that I am truly resting in God’s unconditional love, is that I can extend that love to others. Now that I know what unconditional love feels like, I am free to show others that same love. My love for others is no longer bound by expectations. I am free to love them with a love that is selfless and full of acceptance. A love that reflects the nature of our Father. And so this Christmas, I am truly receiving the gift God gave all mankind 2,000 years ago: His prized possession, His true love, His precious son. And I’m letting it transform me, undo me, and knit me back together, making me more whole than I’ve been in a long time. So I am going to cherish this Christmas in Malawi. I am going to cherish the paper tree we painted. I am going to cherish the faces around our candle-lit table. I am going to cherish my peppermint mocha via packet. But most of all, I am going to cherish the unconditional love of our Father.
