I can't believe that today is Christmas. I have repeatedly had to remind myself of that fact throughout the day. It may have to do with the fact that it is 80 degrees out and I have spent the day sweaty and hot. Or maybe I'm in the small, African country of Rwanda living with complete strangers who don't really know English rather than at home surrounded by my family. Or probably moreso the fact that I am not spending the day in a kitchen roasting some succulent hunk of meat, making sauces, mashing and stuffing potatoes, sauteeing vegetables, kneading dough for rolls, whipping cream, and oogling over a warm, gooey dessert.
Whatever the case, this day hasn't felt much like a typical Christmas. Aside from my team's small efforts to make it feel like Christmas, like filling socks with goodies, singing Christmas carols, and making paper snowflakes it has felt like any other day. At just the point where I was feeling slightly saddened by this, that I didn't get to enjoy a real Christmas, I was reminded of the whole point of this day.
A day were we get to celebrate the birth of hope. True, genuine hope. A hope that was born in a dark and broken world. And what better place to celebrate that than here in Rwanda. A place that 17 years ago experienced a pain and loss that I can't even begin to imagine. More than 800,000 people were slaughtered over a 3 month period of time during the Rwanda genocide. Over 2 million people fled to refugee camps and many died there due to illness. Hundreds of thousands of women were victims of rape, often multiple times per day. It seems that every adult here has a story of loss from the genocide. Our translator that we are working with lost his father and all of his siblings.
And yet at our Christmas morning church service I watched these people, who have experienced such pain, sing and dance with abundant joy. They know how to celebrate hope. To have painful memories of the past and yet choose to rejoice in the hope that they have in Christ.
So this year I got to see Christmas celebrated, not with food or presents or fancy decorations, but with dancing. And they don't just reserve this celebration for one day each year – it's something they celebrate each and every day.
Merry Christmas!!!!
