ali's african adventures

I'd like you to meet Abigail Joy, my newest little niece, and a huge part of the reason that being home for Christmas this year feels sweeter than ever.

My sister-in-law and I are planning a longer photo shoot later this week, so I'll hopefully have some more to share with you after that!

About that time Caesar Augustus ordered a census to be taken throughout the Empire. This was the first census when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Everyone had to travel to his own ancestral hometown to be accounted for. So Joseph went from the Galilean town of Nazareth up to Bethlehem in Judah, David's town, for the census. As a descendant of David, he had to go there. He went with Mary, his fiancée, who was pregnant.

While they were there, the time came for her to give birth. She gave birth to a son, her firstborn. She wrapped him in a blanket and laid him in a manger, because there was no room in the hostel.

There were sheepherders camping in the neighborhood. They had set night watches over their sheep. Suddenly, God's angel stood among them and God's glory blazed around them. They were terrified. The angel said, "Don't be afraid. I'm here to announce a great and joyful event that is meant for everybody, worldwide: A Savior has just been born in David's town, a Savior who is Messiah and Master. This is what you're to look for: a baby wrapped in a blanket and lying in a manger."

At once the angel was joined by a huge angelic choir singing God's praises:

Glory to God in the heavenly heights,
Peace to all men and women on earth who please him.

As the angel choir withdrew into heaven, the sheepherders talked it over. "Let's get over to Bethlehem as fast as we can and see for ourselves what God has revealed to us." They left, running, and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. Seeing was believing. They told everyone they met what the angels had said about this child. All who heard the sheepherders were impressed.

Mary kept all these things to herself, holding them dear, deep within herself. The sheepherders returned and let loose, glorifying and praising God for everything they had heard and seen. It turned out exactly the way they'd been told!

(Luke, Chapter Two. The Message translation.)

I'm home this Christmas, surrounded by babies small enough that when I hold them in my arms, I can live that night two thousand years ago. I feel their tiny weight and try to imagine the power of God crammed into such a fragile frame. They blink up at the light, eyes crossed, and I marvel that the One who created light would suffer himself to be blinded by it. They whimper in small, mewing sounds and it's impossible to me that the voice that spoke the stars would limit itself to such stunted cries.

Holding my niece and nephew, I am near tears when I realize how much He gave up to be near me. I know Christmas isn't really a time for crying, but these are good tears.

There's a song by Dallas Green called Coming Home that's been running through my head for the past few days. (If you click on that link and are sensitive to swear words referring to poo, just be slightly careful right after he mentions Lincoln, Nebraska. At 1:17 you might want to just turn down the volume for a couple of seconds, after which you're home free. Pun intentional.)

At any rate, for what seems like half of the song he just says, over and over, I'm comin' home, I'm comin' home. It's firmly embedded in my inner ears right now, the ones that have been taking care of the music for me during these four months without computer or ipod, and it's on some kind of endlessly repeating loop.

I'm not complaining, because, to be honest, I think I've checked out. For the first time on this trip, I'm not anywhere close to fully present in the moments I'm living, and with less than four days before I board my last eastbound plane, it's not surprising that I'm taking comfort in the thought of coming home.

This probably has much to do with the fact that there are babies coming out of the woodwork, apparently timed so that I would be able to meet them all at their maximum levels of squishiness. Anyone who knows me knows I'm a sucker for chubby cheeks and fuzzy hair, so Jonathan and Maryn and Abigail and Ava had better prepare themselves. Also, so should Tommy, although he lives further away and I don't quite know how I'll get to North Carolina. Ideas anyone?

It probably has even more to do with the fact that it's less than two weeks until Christmas. We weren't home for it last year, which will make this one all the sweeter, but it's hard for this little Canadian-American hybrid to actually realize that it is December without the trappings of hot chocolate and snow and a giant tree at Rockefeller Center. This part of Mexico is dusty and dry and warm this time of year, with overnight temperatures low enough to freeze my African blood but not nearly cold enough to actually convince me that Jesus is about to be born.

Someone asked me an innocent question yesterday that had me 2,500 miles away in a matter of seconds. So what does your family do for Christmas? A thousand traditions and memories and sounds and smells flooded me and I found that I couldn't answer at all. It was impossible to explain why Grampa's old black socks with a clementine in the toe were the absolute best Christmas stockings in the world. Telling about the elf that hid ornaments in our house, one for every day in December like a hide-and-seek Advent calendar, wasn't going to convey the anticipation we felt every single morning waking up to see which one was new that morning. There was no way to talk about climbing the fence at the skating rink for a midnight session without making that little piece of delinquency seem petty rather than exhilarating.

But my family gets it. My cousins all remember waking up on Christmas morning, crammed together on floors and in beds, to see those long socks filled with goodies, our names scrawled on scraps of paper and fixed with straight pins that we were expected to refrain from poking ourselves with. My mother is still on a first-name basis with that elf, even though he/she doesn't visit these days. After more than four months of being on foreign soil (nearly twelve if you count the outreach in Togo, which, strangely, I don't, since Africa feels like home, too) it's comforting to think that I'm coming home.

Home means not having to explain myself. Not having to ration my underwear until we find the next washing machine. Not wondering where my next meal is coming from or whether or not we'll make it on time for the next flight. Not being stared at in the streets. Home is my own bed and my parents and my sister and cousins and brothers and nieces and nephews and home is just around the corner.

Until I make it, I'll leave you with this, the first time I heard a Christmas song this year. We were on our little tropical island in Fiji, in the lounge of the resort when the woman singing launched into my all-time favourite carol. I sat there, sunburned in my lappa and tank top, feet up on a wicker chair, and started thinking about home for the first time.

Today, for the first (but hopefully not the last) time, I'm going to fly over the International Date Line. I've never given it much thought before now; an arbitrary line drawn somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean didn't have a lot to do with my day-to-day life. But in just a few hours, we're going to wing our way across it, landing in LAX, magically, before we ever left Fiji.

Today, I get an extra day.

Before you start in with all your logical, rational explanations about how I'm not really gaining those hours, how all the traveling across time zones we've done is only now catching up with us, I just want you to think about it for a minute. What if you actually did get an extra day instead of just arriving, bleary-eyed and disoriented, at an airport where all that mattered was finding your next gate? Put aside what seemed obvious to me at first, the ingenious idea to cross the line over and over, thus amassing weeks on end of free time to be frittered away as you please; even I can see the holes in that plan.

Let's just say you get this one day. It's not just the clock turning back this time, like when you cross into a new time zone. The whole calendar has shifted back one page, and there's this extra twenty-four hours just begging to be filled. What would you do with it? If you didn't have to spend it on a plane and waste it on jet lag and overpriced airport food, how would you spend an extra day?

I don't know what I'm going to do with mine. For now, I think I'll just tuck it away, hold it in reserve for sometime in the future when I'm tired and stressed and there just isn't enough time. (Not that I ever feel that way. I'm super-nurse and super-wife and super-missionary, didn't you know? This is clearly hypothetical.) I started making a to-do list for when we get back to the States (which is in less than two weeks, somehow), and I get the feeling I might need my extra hours sooner than I thought...