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... of Christmas

It's Christmas eve here.  Our first Christmas completely separate from any of our families and our first Christmas in a country where the large majority doesn't celebrate the holiday the way we do.
That did not mean, however, that there weren't massive amounts of people at Carrefour (the Wal-Mart equivalent) tonight or the worst traffic that we have yet to be stuck in (including our after rain street lake driving).  It took us 30 minutes - and I am not exaggerating - to get through the checkout line at Carrefour.  People cutting in line and other people's credit cards getting declined and having to ring up their large purchase twice were the main culprits.  We were trying to get the our church's Christmas eve service that started at 7pm, knowing we would have to leave at 8 to get the kids to bed within at least an hour of their bedtime.  But the traffic was so bad that they started the service at 7:30 to allow people time to get there.  But then we still had to leave at 8 because Selah was melting down and refusing to eat because of the noise, much less sleep.  We had parked really far away, so we had a 15 minute walk back to the car and then the drive (which would normally take a little less than 30 minutes) took us over an hour.  The kids were hungry and grouchy and tired and we were grouchy.  We almost got broadsided, were forced into taking two left turns that we didn't want to take and were overall pretty stressed when we got home.  We fed the kids and put them to bed and then looked at the sink full of dishes and mountains of laundry that needed to be done and decided to put them off.  I don't know until when, but it's Christmas eve.  I guess they won't be getting done tomorrow either.  Although I'll have to do the dishes in order to cook breakfast, which will have a sad lack of protein, because we weren't able to get to a store with a non-Muslim meat room.
Overall, it's not the way we expected to be spending our Christmas eve: stressed out, tired, and a little lonely.  I told Quinn that I just wanted to post a Christmas blog with this picture that we got of our family today and he said to me: "just don't make it too depressing" right before he fell asleep next to me on the couch.

I did get a tangible sense of God's presence in our car on the drive home and then felt so much more peace about the fact that this was apparently the way that this first Christmas was supposed to happen. I hope tomorrow will be more joyful and restoring, but I think the point is to be able to find Christ in it all, regardless of how stressed we feel and not to let unfortunate circumstances rob us of our joy.
So that's the goal for tomorrow as we open our very few gifts (we have 4 boxes from friends and family that were sent for Christmas a few weeks ago, but haven't made it here yet) and try and teach our kids that Christmas isn't about gifts anyway.  I think it will be good.  It's Selah's first Christmas so I want to to be kind of special.

Here's hoping your Christmas is full of the kind of joy, hope, peace, and love that can only from understanding that the greatest gift of all was born as a baby all those years ago in order to bring us back to Him.











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