I bombed my intro!
Being a new missionary still in language school and trying to be culturally relevant with my first Christmas talk in Japanese at a church Christmas outreach event, I began with a comment about the month of December being an unusually busy one.
I had done some research for my talk and gleaned an expression from my Japanese dictionary that said December was a “Teachers Run” month. Picture an oriental sage, normally composed and dignified, picking up his robes and scurrying about due to the increased social obligations of the season.
Without consulting anyone beforehand, I attempted to use the expression in the introduction of my talk and only got blank stares. Puzzled, I didn’t understand until afterwards, when someone graciously clued me in. I learned that I had botched the pronunciation of “Teachers Run,” and that no one had known what I was referring to!
This humbling moment only added to my stress and reinforced the realization that I was out of my comfort zone!
As I remembered this incident and the emotions of shame that went along with it, it occurs to me now that Christmas and discomfort are actually pretty good friends!
My missionary parents arrived in Japan with my older sister and me in March of 1951. Our family’s first Christmas in our new country that year came with the huge crisis of my younger brother’s death two hours after birth on December 16, followed by a subsequent raging infection that almost cost my mother her life and kept her in the hospital over Christmas.
Fast-forwarding to the present, my father-in-law will be spending his first Christmas away from his familiar and comfortable surroundings, ensconced in his nursing home room, unable to walk and struggling under the humbling process of recovery from an accidental fall.
Christmas can be a hard season for us, depending on what challenges we find swirling around us.
Perhaps you are being pushed outside of your comfort zone this Christmas. Whether it’s financial, physical, relational, or emotional distress, the season seems to specialize in highlighting our inadequacies and humbling us into realizing how desperately we need Jesus!
I am so grateful that He understands the duress of our journey.
For Jesus, Christmas meant an unbelievably lowly entry into our world as a helpless infant, born miles from home to a woman under stress and laid in a feeding trough, surrounded by the smells and sounds of nearby animals. I love that Jesus took on our humanity so that he could bear our sins and griefs and lead us to true life with God our Father.
Willingly stepping way outside his comfort zone, Jesus came to draw us into the comforting embrace of a secure and loving attachment with the God who made us to know and experience his love in the middle of our pain!
Whatever the source of our discomfort this season, Christmas means that Jesus loves and holds us, shares his heart, and makes his home in the messes of our distresses. He’ll do so until the day he calls us home to the true and eternal comfort zone of the universe—his very own house!
“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9)
“Thanks be to God for his inexpressible gift!” (2 Corinthians 9:15)
I look forward to seeing you this Sunday when Dave Reimer will be pinch-hitting for Pastor Jack (on a tour to Israel), and our Sunday School and nursery children will be blessing us with some special Christmas music.
Pastor Steve