One night our host walked into the church and said we needed to go unload a truck full of shoeboxes right now. Anne and I bundled up in sweaters, coats, boots, and scarves and piled in the back seat of a tiny car driven by a stranger. (Stranger danger pretty much goes out the window on the Race. Sorry Mom.)
We drove across town and then sat in the car, waiting for the truck to arrive, exchanging polite small talk and listening to Taylor Swift. The car was hopped up over the curb on a two-lane road between a warehouse and an empty soccer field. A fire burned across the field, the only spot of color in the foggy late-afternoon darkness.
Max*, the man driving, pointed down the street and said, “The border with Albania is maybe 10 kilometers down this road. In the war, we walked to the border. And then we were picked up and taken to camps or whatever.”
“How old were you?” I asked, to break the silence that followed.
“I was nine. He was six,” he said, elbowing his brother in the passenger seat. “The night before we walked, the town was bombed. We woke up and all the houses around ours were destroyed. But ours wasn’t because we were near a Serbian house, you know, so they wouldn’t destroy that one.”
“Wow,” Anne said.
“When we came back, in three months or whatever, our house was gone.”
Max said all this in a casual, informational tone. Then he went back to showing his brother memes on his phone.
//
I was seven when the Twin Towers fell. Before I turned eight, the United States would invade a far-away country I couldn’t place on a map. I’m 21 now, and we have been at war for the majority of my life.
I grew up in a country at war, and spent Christmas this year in a country that is more ravaged by 78 days of conflict than American has been since 1865.
But most Americans don’t have the kind of visceral stories like Max’s, like the countless other people we have met here who have talked about “the war”- the conflict in the Balkans in 1999 that ended with the U.S. and NATO bombing Serbia and what is now Kosovo. The bombs, Serbian and American, fell on Kosovo for two-and-half months.
Everyone here has a story of those 78 days. Every single one, like every American has a story of where they were on September 11th, 2001.
While there has been no war since, the scars of the violence are still just below the surface. Kosovars cannot enter Serbia. Kosovo is still not recognized by the UN or able to join the EU. Driving through the countryside, I can sometimes make out piles of rubble dotting empty fields through the ever-present fog. Homes that were never rebuilt.
//
Passing those burned-out heaps of brick as we went to unload shoeboxes and teach English made for an odd juxtaposition, in this already strange holiday season. The Christmas story took on new meaning for me this year. When the angels say, in Luke 2:10, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all people,” the hope of that statement shone brighter.
Often, I am unsure of this Jesus business. In the face of bombs falling around children, the children that are now sitting in cars on roadsides talking about refugee camps, it’s crazy to believe that the birth of a baby in a stable could be a great joy for all people.
In the face of the long years of war my country has gone numb to, it’s insane to think that the good news in this is a Middle Eastern refugee child in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.
But this Christmas, living with people who grew up with the shadow of war over them in a much more tangible way than I ever did, I felt the weary world rejoicing.
Christmas offers a fresh joy to the world, every year. It offers us a long-reaching memory to hold in our hearts of a moment when the Lord came to us anew, in the face of bombs dropping, of towers falling, of doubt and fear and long walks to the border.
It offers us hope. How wonderfully crazy. Hope, and good news for all people, burning like a fire across a cold, empty field, cutting through the darkness.
*Name has been changed
