Christ would have liked a lump of coal, but it’s too late to put him back in our stockings.
After all, a large number of people who are currently pushing their way across Mother Earth’s terrain still cook without electricity.
Therefore, before you start complaining about reduced fishing and hunting bag limits and increased license and tag costs (yep, those are coming up in the new year), battle for socks at Fred Meyer, or sort through the never-ending requests for your debit card data in the form of Cyber Monday extensions, consider this:
At what point did Black Friday surpass Good Friday in importance?
Or any Friday at all for children like Steven Mgombi in Maua, Kenya, over twenty years ago?
He and his companions had just drawn across a shallow pond and tamed a swarm of tiny tilapia-like fish using mosquito netting from their bed (yes, there were multiple children per bed).
Fish are kept in and insects are kept out by double-duty bedding.
I watched as Mgombi, using just twine to spin a tin can, then a little baited hook hooked to a rock far out into the sea, proudly handed off his haul to an elderly man nearby.
There were other Maua, Kenyans at the pond as well, some washing dishes and clothes, some bathing, and yet others cleaning wrecked automobiles. Some even had soap.
Thus…
This Christmas season, what do you have to be grateful for? How many packages do you have beneath the tree?
Just being alive appeared to be enough for Steven and his friend.
Together with my brother Jim and his wife, Sue Owen, who are both Methodist preachers who led teams into Maua to construct orphan houses and work at a hospital that was urgently trying to serve almost a million people, it was the first of three mission journeys I would make to Kenya.
Everybody could use a little more perspective on these significant days spent with their loved ones at a table.
Most of the temporary residents of the planet are not quite as wealthy, sometimes even here at home.
In rural Kenya, brother Jim remarked, “Christmas is regarded as a sacred day, but not the way we treat it.” They take Christmas very seriously yet have little to offer.
Though not Santa Clausians, over 80% of Kenyans identify as Christians.
Jim and Sue attended a Nativity performance given by the hospital staff in the chapel, and they also decorated a tree inside their quarters and set lights on the porch, which attracted a lot of attention from people throughout the city. Somali Muslims were among the audience.
For the majority of the 800,000 people living in the area, Jim stated, “If they have a Yule log, it’s over their cooking fire so they can eat.”
As only children can, I recall watching youngsters sprinting through forest communities while pushing old bicycle tire rims with sticks.
It was a young boy’s time to travel a few kilometers into town, so he was lugging a water jug in one hand and a blank piece of paper in the other. He intended to sell the blank paper for enough money to buy a couple of potatoes for supper.
He grinned and assured them that God would provide for his family, despite Jim and Sue’s desire to assist.
Elderly grandparents, Kenya’s equivalent of social security, look after AIDS-orphaned children in rural Kenya. They frequently live together in shanties made out of twigs, cardboard, or whatever else that can provide a place to stay in the squalor. Goat meat is a luxury and porridge is a need. Pet dogs are uncommon and are always kept on leashes to prevent theft.
Donated fish aquariums with warming lamps for babies were employed in the hospital’s maternity section. Since electricity is so erratic and costly, open flames are used for all cooking. Women with AIDS-related open sores show out their pockmarked breasts to guests because they want us to know that they are alive and present! What the hospital has to do with their unclaimed bodies is something you don’t want to know.
We get to enjoy going fishing with our spouses and girls.
Thus,
Before you share those Christmas green beans in the hopes that someone would eat them, pause before claiming that you have the right to more than one fish every day and join Steven Mgombi in celebrating your life.
We still live in the most amazing and diversified country and region in the world, despite all its bothersome distractions. I can’t think of another place that is nearly as spectacular as the Pacific Northwest, with its ocean beaches, snow-capped mountains, and desert stretches, which may have the best variety of fish to catch and animals to hunt anywhere.
Although their circumstances may differ, Kenyans, unlike far too many of us, thrive on their confidence in God and the future because they have no other choice but to be happy every day when they wake up.
So perhaps this year, tuck a little bit of it into your stockings.
if space permits.
–Bill Monroe for OregonLive/The Oregonian
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