Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts


Feliz Navidad and God Jul! A Venezuelan and Swedish Christmas
Wednesday, December 27, 2006

My Christmas Eve and Christmas day turned out to be more fun and family than I could have imagined! The Venezuelan family who lives beneath me invited me over for their Christmas Eve celebration, complete with traditional hallacas and pan de jamon. (The same stuff my family ate every Christmas Eve when we were in Venezuela!) I was warmly greeted by the Quevedo family and their three Mexican friends who joined us for dinner. We had a great time eating and joking around about how weak Venezuelans' tongues were with spicy things compared to Mexicans' (all in Spanish, of course.) It's amazing how quickly my Spanish comes back when I'm immersed in it again! After dinner they opened gifts and we sang a lot of songs together, including a very energetic version of Feliz Navidad!

Christmas Day I was invited to join the Olson family who lives across the alley from me. This is the family of a good friend of mine from Wheaton. They have welcomed me in and become like a home away from home. We stuffed ourselves with traditional Swedish food and generally took a relaxed and lazy approach to the whole day. Christmas night I finished off with another grand meal with another great Wheaton friend in Cottage Grove, a suburb about 30 minutes from Phillips neighborhood.

All in all, though I sorely felt the lack of the other Washam 7 back in Rimrock, WA, God provided families here to make me feel at home.

Posted by Benjamin Washam 12:08 AM 3 comments  

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I'll Be Home For Christmas, If Only In My Dreams
Sunday, December 17, 2006

Sad news - because of the work situation and the money situation, I won't be able to travel home to Washington for Christmas. This will be my first Christmas away from home and family.

I will be working at Target on Christmas Eve until 6:30pm or so, then I might catch up with a church I've been visiting (Solomon's Porch) as they go Christmas caroling around Hennepin County Medical Center, the big hospital in downtown Minneapolis. Last year when the group went caroling, some crying nurses ran up and told them to come quickly to one particular room. Inside this room, a man had been comatose and unresponsive for two weeks. When the church group had walked by singing carols, he had awaken from his coma, walked from his bed, and was standing at the door of his room, bawling.

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. Isaiah 9:2

Christmas day I'll be chilling with the family that lives across the alley from me, Sam Olson and his family. They have a tradition on Christmas day of rounding up as many "homeless" friends (some literally without a house, others simply without a home, like me) to go out to a state park for a bonfire and winter picnic.

I am/will be thinking a lot about my home in Rimrock, WA - the remaining Washam 7 will be gathered around a 12 foot tree in the living room for the first Christmas up at Camp Ghormley. The house will be snowed in with feet and feet of snow all around, surrounded by the Wenatchee National Forest, in the Cascade Mountains....

But enough for feeling blue - even if I am the lost ornament from the tree (see picture above for resemblance??). This will be a Christmas like no other, I already know that. My hope is that in this season of the unfamiliar, I will be able to see and hear a new rendition of the story of the incarnation. With a fresh telling ringing in my ears, I hope to take steps to love my small part of the world that God loves so much.

Posted by Benjamin Washam 4:31 PM 0 comments  

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Christmas Reflection no.1
Saturday, December 16, 2006

Christmas, more than anything else, reminds me every year that this thing I'm in - this movement of people after Jesus, this insitution called Christianity - is for the whole world. I can spend an entire year drawing lines, defining boundaries, treating "non-believers" different from "believers", and shoring up the flying buttresses of Christianity. But the minute December rolls around and I start reading again what the Prophets had to say about the Messiah, and what He actually said, I've got to throw away my boxes and categories and open my arms just a little wider than the year before. God did it so many times that by the time John wrote his gospel, He had His arms around the whole world in love. This is not an argument for universalism, as I hope you can see - this is simply a call to the Church and myself to BE the good news we talk so much about - to obey Christ and fulfull God's promise that His people would be a blessing to all peoples, not just those on "our side."

Posted by Benjamin Washam 10:22 PM 1 comments  

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