Christmas in the Amazon

Bernie May was a missionary. He grew up in Pennsylvania, but he ended up serving the Lord in the tropical jungles of South America. Though his family didn’t have very much money while he was growing up, Bernie had rich memories of Christmas. Because back in Pennsylvania, Christmas was the most special time of the year.

Bernie and his brothers and sisters all went to bed early on Christmas Eve. That night, their parents would put up the tree, string the lights, and put out the presents. Christmas morning, Mom and Dad would make the children wait upstairs so that they could all come down together and see how the house was transformed. They weren’t poor anymore, because it was Christmas!

After opening their gifts—just one for each child—they’d get dressed and go to church. The pastor would always give a sermon about the reason for the season. Then it was home for the biggest and best meal of the year. That afternoon the kids would each take their gift—maybe a ball, or maybe a glove—and play outside until dark. It was the most wonderful day of the whole year.

When Bernie and his wife Nancy arrived on the mission field in South America, everything about Christmas was different from the way it had been in Pennsylvania. Christmas day was hot and humid. There was no turkey for dinner. No pine or blue spruce for a tree—they’d just hang decorations on a banana bush.

One Christmas, Bernie gave Nancy a can of Planters peanuts that he had bought months before in the city. She gave him a Hershey bar. It was soft and half melted from the stifling heat.

They would gather their three boys together and read the Christmas story from the book of Luke. As they read, Bernie thought back to those early sermons he had heard as a boy on the reason for the season. He found himself wondering “Why doesn’t this feel like Christmas? Here in the Amazon jungle, we seem to be so out of it.”

But gradually a new idea began to dawn on him. They were not out of it. In fact, they were right in the middle of it. And when the significance of this fully dawned on him, Bernie turned to his wife Nancy and said “If any of our kids ever decides to serve the Lord on the mission field, I hope that he leaves home on Christmas Day.”

You see, for Jesus Christ, Christmas meant leaving home. It meant giving up everything that was familiar and friendly and secure. It meant going to live in a very strange place. And it meant doing that out of concern for the well-being of the people who lived there—people who weren’t even aware that he had come.

Yes, Jesus entered a foreign land on Christmas day—a land that was far from his home. He crossed some incredibly large boundaries to come to Earth. And he did so because he cared more about us than he cared about himself.

That’s worth pondering as we celebrate Christmas this year.

The postscript on Bernie and Nancy May is that several years ago, they sent their youngest son off to North Africa to be a missionary. He left on Christmas Day.