Christmas in Brazil

In Brazil, as in the United States, Christmas is a time for family reunions. Here, Alan (left) reconnects with two cousins: Tony and Nelsinho.

Below, Lalia (right) chats with her sister-in-law, Rosa.

Extreme makeover: A baby changes everything

Thanks to Marie Foote, fellow WorldVenture missionary, for a reminder of how babies break into our life story, and of how a certain baby changed history.

Marie's insightful comments can be found on her Facebook profile.

Marie, in turn, was inspired by singer Faith Hill's song, "A Baby Changes Everything."

My inspiration comes from a variety of sources. Every Christmas season I try to reread Philip Yancey's "Birth: The Visited Planet," from one of his best books, The Jesus I Never Knew. (You can find most of this chapter and more at Google Books.) Yancey contrasts the cheeriness of our Christmas greeting cards with "the starkness of the Gospels."

We get a Herod's-eye-view of the first Christmas when Yancey quotes a vivid W. H. Auden:

Today has been one of those perfect winter days, cold, brilliant, and utterly still, when the bark of a shepherd's dog carries for miles, and the great wild mountains come up quite close to the city walls, and the mind feels intensely awake, and this evening as I stand at this window high up in the citadel there is nothing in the whole magnificent panorama of plain and mountains to indicate that the Empire is threatened by a danger more dreadful than any invasion of Tartar on racing camels or conspiracy of the Praetorian Guard...
O dear, Why couldn't this wretched infant be born somewhere else?

Yancey jolts his readers with another startling paradigm shift:

"'God is great,' the cry of the Moslems, is a truth which needed no supernatural being to teach men," writes Father Neville Figgis. "That God is little, that is the truth which Jesus taught man." The God who roared, who could order armies and empires about like pawns on a chessboard, this God emerged in Palestine as a baby who could not speak or eat solid food or control his bladder, who depended on a teenage couple for shelter, food, and love.

Another book that Lalia and I are reading through again this year is The Handel's Messiah Family Advent Reader. It has 28 readings which cover each day of the four weeks of Advent. Each reading is accompanied by a musical selection from Handel's Messiah, on a CD included with the book.

Yesterday's reading about swaddling clothes was an eye-opener:

Everywhere, parents swaddled their babies because they loved them and wanted to protect them. Swaddling is a loving act, but it also means to tie up, control, hold down, restrict, and restrain. And... can you imagine? God was swaddled!

If swaddling clothes were so common, why did the angel mention them to the shepherds? Our theory goes something like this: If the shepherds were merely looking for a baby in a manger, they might think that it was an abandoned child. But the detail of the swaddling cloths told them that someone loved the baby and was taking care of him, in spite of the spartan conditions in which he would be found.

We challenge you to take some time this month to escape the ubiquitous year-end craziness and recapture the wonder of the incarnation.

25 years and counting

One third of a lifetime ago I arrived in Brazil, wet behind the ears, terrified.

I didn’t speak Portuguese, and didn’t know if I could learn. Not being a pastor, I was an atypical missionary. Would I be accepted? Could I do the job? Would my rigid Scandinavian worldview flex to the exuberant Brazilian heartbeat?

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Twenty-five years ago I would have read that verse and told you about my goals for the future. Today I see that “the things hoped for” are not about my pet projects, but about what God plans to accomplish in me! “And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”

Incredible! God says that faith is about drawing near to him. What about all the important stuff that I do every day? Extraneous at best.

How, then, do I write my 25-year report? In fear—that all of the stuff I have done is the only thing I have to show to God and to our steady ministry partners. In that spirit, Lalia and I send Christmas joy and thanks to all of you.

(In the photo above, Richard Sturz, right, wraps 25 years into 5 minutes at a celebration of Curt’s time with WorldVenture in Brazil.)

Intuition, wisdom and beauty. From left to right, Lucimar Davis, Jennifer Kierstead, Karen Sipes, Lalia Kregness, Mirian Sturz, Corine Thorp and Lois McKinney. At a recent WorldVenture fellowship near São Paulo.