Wonders of His love

It’s December. My head knows this.

And yet, as I type, I can feel sweat beading behind my ears, dampening the tendrils on my neck. Tropical birds are sharing some kind of stories with each other out my window. The strings of lights and clusters of Christmas knickknacks are nowhere except the tree when I walk from one set of flung-open doors to the other. Christmas in the developing world is markedly…simpler.

I like this. I do. And yet, part of me wistfully pines, in this land that probably hasn’t seen snow since the Ice Age, for the sparkling events and frost and Christmas TV specials and calories that my senses associate with Christmas.

I suppose it’s this contrast—of my sensory expectations against the eternal springtime of the equator, garnished with the few strands of tinsel strung up at some local stores—that matches up with other sad realities at the holidays, away from home. My family won’t be throwing our arms around the necks of extended family as we stamp off our boots. Most of our Christmas gifts are brought over in advance (we stuffed ours in suitcases back in May). As thrilled as I am to be in Africa year-round, I always find myself muscling through a bit of melancholy in December, brushing away a rogue tear or two while I blast Christmas music and roll out sugar cookie dough.

But Christmas brims with odd contrasts, right? It’s the beckoning, warm technicolor of light displays in frigid darkness; the cheery fires while we peer out at naked, frozen trees; the heartache of the empty spot at the table in the midst of bubbling conversation; God arriving on earth in a barn. Historically, too, there’s the replacement of a pagan festival of death, lust, and frightening destiny with a holiday celebrating life, sacrificial love, and freedom from slavery.

Here in Uganda, to say that the holidays lack a richness would be somewhat of a misnomer. I find it in gathering unattached friends to our celebrations like a ball of playdough. I find it in the very simplicity: that my housekeeper’s grandmother is delighted, for example, with the gifts of a chicken and a kilo of sugar. That rather than multicolored, cinnamon-scented, artfully-wrapped cues, I remember that Christmas is about Jesus. The contrast elevates my sense of true Christmas.

It’s strange, you know, this melee of contrasts. Sometimes I find myself not wanting to focus too much on God’s love at Christmas (I know, I know)—because I’m afraid I’ll lose the awe, the reverence of this God of whom the Hebrews would not even speak or write His name. I mean, what if I allow myself to get caught up in this engulfing, crazy form of love, and somehow that swallows up the sheer holiness of the God of the universe?

But Christmas, when I get down to it, is not a contrast of these at all. The immense, blinding brilliance—the above-ness of God–and the love are one and the same. This baby was God with us. The high and holy with the dirty and lowly. The King of the Universe in diapers, carried around by a young girl, and visited by hired hands. I am so holy, He seems to say, that I can’t help but love like this.

I glimpse a slice of this, I think, as a mother. My hugs and yummy food and cuddle time with my children are not of a separate part of me than my discipline, my careful guiding of them. They are both from the love that seeps out from my pores for them. My love punctuates the truths I tell them—and the truth punctuates the love.

My answer to myself is not to focus less on God’s love this Christmas; it is to understand the sweeping, tour-de-force nature of that love, which is never satisfied with leaving me stinking and bleeding. It required a baby whose sweet, tender skin would decades later ooze scarlet for me, a lamb who’d double as my Shepherd.

So yes—Christmas seems replete with contrasts, its dark and light shades tightly braided, its bitter cold and tantalizing warmth kneaded into the season and the story. And though the weather outside is, well, delightful here (and I wish it were a little more frightful), I have a lot to celebrate anyway.