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.