As we journey through this heaven-on-earth season, I invite you to reflect on the power of paying it forward, cherish precious Christmas memories, and enjoy an insider look at our Hansen family gathering. Join Anni’s inspiring story at the food bank and explore my favorite photos from this week. This email is filled with warmth, joy, and moments that celebrate the essence of giving and togetherness. Let’s make this Christmas season unforgettable!

A Christmas Celebration at our Home in Altamira in 1998

Christmas in Brazil

1. Many people could barely afford food, making Christmas a time when the gap between the haves and have-nots widened.
2. Many families had missing members, such as siblings or parents, and lacked a culture of warm family celebrations. When they did get together, the neighbor children told us, it always ended up in drunken arguments, resulting in the families not talking to each other for the next several months. (I had high hopes for a young boy who was deeply involved in our church activities and aspired to be a missionary. One December, he excitedly told me he had been invited to spend Christmas with his relatives, which meant he couldn’t participate in the church nativity play. His relatives lived in another part of Marabá. When the big day arrived, he went off on his Christmas adventure. That night, at the party in his home, his relative stabbed and killed someone and fled the scene with his girlfriend. The police showed up. The young boy was terrified and ran and walked all night through a swamp and across the countryside to return to the house where his grandparents raised him in a house adjacent to our church property. He did participate in the nativity play, and it was a good Christmas, but he eventually met a violent end at a young age. We went to his funeral.)
3. The Christian community often viewed Christmas as a pagan holiday, so many refrained from celebrating it with their churches. Instead, they celebrated New Year’s enthusiastically.
4. When our Brazilian friends attended a missionary celebration, they were surprised by our modest gifts, like coffee or a chocolate bar. They believed gifts should be expensive, sacrificial, and lavish to show the value of friendship.
5. In Brazil, we fostered a culture of Christmas celebrations that included cookies, communal meals, and sharing the goodwill God showed by sending Jesus. Now, all our churches eagerly anticipate the Christmas season.

Our Most Important Message

Missionary work is more about who we are than what we teach or our place in the org chart. As we live among people, they see how we treat our family, respond to disappointments, ask forgiveness, overlook offenses, celebrate, empathize, and react to a million situations.

Who we are is by far our most powerful message to our families, neighbors, and everyone we influence.

The Hansen Family Christmas Gathering
There isn’t one sibling or relationship among the growing Hansen family that doesn’t enjoy talking to everyone else. Harold and Joan often comment on the invaluable gift to their whole family, considering it one of their crowning ministry blessings. Harold told me, “I just wish everyone could stop, look around the room, and reflect on our blessing of unity.”

Seeing people who have served God sacrificially all their lives being blessed with a loving family just feels right. It doesn’t always work out like this because of so many uncontrollable factors, but it feels right when it happens.

Harold and Joan (Deanna’s parents) have ten Great-Grandchildren.

One is in Minnesota this Christmas.
The eight in this photo all have Brazilian moms,
children of Ross and Karin’s or our daughters.

Our oldest daughter, Anni, is responsible for the food bank ministry at Central Heights Church in Abbotsford. In this photo, Anni orients a group of volunteers on how to serve those who come just before the doors open. Once a month, they have the privilege of serving the marginalized with abundant free food. The food bank in Abbotsford rotates through several locations each month in Abbotsford.

It is so fun seeing people in different surroundings. Anni shines…

Lucy and Paul come to Grandpa and Grammy’s for a visit. Lucy is a talker. She is trying to figure out how the thoughts in her head can come out as sounds through her mouth. Paul, on the other hand, is more interested in Christmas lights and the big world out there.

Canadian Geese at Mill Lake

Do you know that great feeling of getting a new computer, and you can set it up any way you like when you do a clean install of all your programs so they fly? These babies started with a clean slate. By the time they are born, they already know many things, but they still need to work hard to understand what kind of world they landed in.

Imagine a baby who, whenever they look up, has an encouraging parent or relative trying to connect with them and meet their needs. Now imagine another baby, born on the same day in a marginalized community to a single, working mom who has a few siblings from different dads who are each working on their own issues. I think of this all the time. Who would I be, or who would you be, if we had been born into a home in our neighborhood in Marabá?

This photo is from a couple of years ago of a friend I met in jail. He claimed he was falsely accused of a violent crime because he had a similar motorbike and resembled the real culprit. He was arrested just a few blocks from the crime scene and had to wait in jail for seven months for his case to go to court. After his release, we visited his home several times and met his father, who raised him. He lived in a violent town about an hour from Marabá. Many inmates were young men from that town, and Deanna and I sometimes drove around looking up and visiting their families.

Merry Christmas, and we wish you the best week so far!