beside the manger

Hi friends 🙂 I don’t know about you, but when Christmas comes around each year, it brings me back to memories of Christmases past.

This Christmas, I write to you from an AirBnB in Denver, Colorado. It’s 9:43a.m. and the house is quiet as my sister is asleep.

I think for many of us, Christmas this year looks different from how we’re used to it looking.

So this morning, I was thinking about the first Christmas I spent in China and how it was devoid of what usually characterized the season.

And yet, it brought me to reflect on really what is the centerpiece of Christmas:

a naked, wooden manger that carried the hope of the world.

I am brought back there again this morning and I invite you too in the midst of your Christmas preparations to kneel beside this manger.

From the treasure trove of the blog I kept in China, here is the post I wrote in December 2016, as I sat in my little apartment in Shadi Village, Fuzhou:

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It is that time of year again. I miss it with a bittersweet melancholy.

I was walking through the mall the other day and it felt somehow stripped, bare.

Silence where there should be “Joy to the World” ringing through each store, and empty corners where there should be flecked-white snowmen holding signs enticing you to spend more money over the Christmas sale.

The days pass without the snow-dusted pine trees, the smell of peppermint mocha, the carols that inadvertently make their way into your humming repertoire and all the other signs that make it hard to forget the season’s here.

But, in the absence of what is perhaps the commercialization of the holiday, my meditation of Christmas has been driven back to the location of the original one:

the stank, damp manger, the birth-place of our Savior.

For isn’t that what Christmas is, stripped of its romantic glory – a crudely constructed manger, maybe even a pig’s trough Joseph had to clear off its slop to make room for the baby.

It hits me, sometimes: the King of the world, who had the pick of where he could be born, chose to be sequestered with the animals and their feces.

He had the choice and he chose less.

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Once, a staff asked me out of the blue where I got the financial support to stay in China.

I replied that people who are led to support me, and that I live on trust.

“So, what would you do if you didn’t have that support anymore?”

it was the only natural counter to my statement, but it caught me off-guard.

I have seen Father supply all my needs and more while in China and so it never really crosses my mind.

I paused for a moment and really thought about it.

“I would adjust the way I live,” I finally replied. “I wouldn’t be able to go out and eat, or buy anything. If I still didn’t have money, I would sell my house and move in with someone else, or sell my bike and take the bus everywhere.”

Living with less, that’s what I would do – and it actually wasn’t that scary.

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In the moments that we are overwhelmed about a bad grade, a demotion, or simply restless because we feel like we need to be in a better job, a better house, a better school, perhaps the question that is lingering beneath that fear is –

are we okay with living with less?

That was a question I had to ask myself as I kneeled beside my bulging suitcase in front of the airport check-in counter.

My suitcase was indiscriminately zipped open, its contents spilling out in awkward fashion as I sorted through the countless tubes of Colgate I had packed (because apparently toothpaste in China is nasty), sweaters I kept but never wore and pens of every different color.

I had to pare 2 suitcases down to 1, because I was unwilling to foot the extra hundred just to lug deadweight across an ocean.

It’s funny those moments when your whole life fits into a suitcase, well sort of (and it did, after the removal of many Colgate tubes).

The insatiable desire to have more is instead replaced with a strange sense of satisfaction:

I can actually live off one suitcase.

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It is Elijah telling the widow to just keep bringing him jars and her jars of oil never ran dry.

It is the boy with the five loaves and two fishes that kept on multiplying to become lunch for the thousands.

The kingdom starts with less and the paradox is: when we have less, we actually have more.

I didn’t come with much; yet I have everything I need – and more (in fact, after a deep winter-cleaning two days ago, I ended up with a large garbage bag of assorted items to give away).

People routinely give away bags of secondhand clothes which I scavenge with delight (at present, I have on one of my favorite sweaters – it’s my Dad’s, dark blue and holes in random places just the way I like it).

The school staff buy me thick leggings and hand warmers when they see me shivering cold.

The place we rented for dirt cheap doesn’t have a kitchen but we bought a hot plate and transport the portable oven from our neighbor’s house whenever we need to bake.

It’s amazing how well we get by with our makeshift kitchen.

We sweep rat poop from the shelves in the mornings, left over from their nightly tour of the living room for any food.

After our resident rat, Jake, tore into our bags of nuts and even completely chowed down our potted plant outside, we stopped storing food outside, but the rats still come in to check (and defecate).

I found a hole-in-the-wall sushi stand that served me 14 pieces of maki/sushi for 20 kuai (around 3-4 USD) and being the first time I had eaten sushi in a year, I was ecstatic.

Our Internet sometimes chooses to shut down; it could be due to a thunderstorm, or simply our landlord moving the modem down to his house on the first floor so that the connection could be better for his online gambling habit.

But then you get really excited when YouTube videos load without stopping every few seconds.

And you would think I would wish for more (for sure, better Internet), yet, never before in my whole life have I felt like I have everything, really.

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and so, it’s the break of dawn and I walk slow down the dust-concrete.

freedom is having options but choosing simplicity, Leah says.

I pause and agree.

It’s my turn and I whisper into the dark the truth Adam and Eve didn’t believe: freedom is contentment.

It is doing what baby Jesus did that one Christmas night: having the choice and choosing less.

and so, this is my prayer this Christmas season – that we would walk past the screaming Christmas sale advertisements and for just a moment return to the side of His manger where the King who had all gave all.

Where the One who had had much chose less. and perhaps we will find that the answer to our pressing problem of ‘more’,

the answer to being truly rich is found –

as we kneel beside the manger.

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