From the time I was a young girl I’d loved hearing stories from the missionaries who visited our church. I dreamed of serving God in a faraway, exotic land one day too.
So when I heard of an opportunity to teach a missionary couple’s children in the New Guinea bush I jumped at the chance. I was young and single. In a matter of months I’d quit my job as a nanny, packed up my belongings and sold my car.
Now I sat alone in the tiny living room of my cabin staring out the window into the pitch-black darkness, a single naked bulb powered by a solar battery the only light. When I imagined life in the bush I hadn’t thought about Christmas.
“Silent night, holy night…” The tinny sound of my battery-operated tape player seemed to emphasize how alone I was here in a village so primitive, so far from anything I’d ever known. There seemed no way for Christmas to find its way here.
How I longed to be home in the Windy City, Michigan Avenue lit with thousands of Italian lights, the glow from the miniature bulbs like angels, snow gently falling from the sky.
Living near the equator, the native people didn’t even have a word for cold. I remembered days before trying to teach one of them about snow. I tossed handfuls of packing peanuts into the air. “Snow,” I said over and over. He looked at me utterly befuddled.
I took him to my mini-fridge and held his hand against the freezer element. “Hot,” he yelled, jumping back in alarm. The concept was beyond the people here.
There had been so many things to adjust to since I’d arrived in July. Nothing could have prepared me for such stark isolation. The missionary couple and their four children were the only people who weren’t born in the village.
I’d made friends among the 200 or so native people, but we had little in common. They’d never been to a mall. Or a Cubs game. Never eaten a Chicago deep-dish pizza. Or gazed down from the top of the Sears Tower. It was all as foreign to them as lighting a Christmas tree.
But it was more than that. After dark no one went outside for more than a few minutes, the risk of being bitten by a disease-carrying mosquito too great. And night in the village was dark. No street lamps, no headlights, no lights in apartment windows.
The village, ringed by dense foliage and tall grass, was only accessible to the outside world by plane. It was a two-hour walk one way to the river for water. I felt so trapped, even the ever-temperate climate seemed oppressive.
At home I’d be making sugar cookies right now, I thought. I had learned to eat the local delicacy of roast grasshopper, but that was no treat for Christmas.
My mind went over everything I would be doing back in Chicago, bundled up in my parka. I peered intently into the night, imagining I was outside of Marshall Field’s department store, its windows blazing with lights shining down on mechanized santas and bears, nutcracker soldiers and ballerinas.
That glow. It seemed the very essence of Christmas, the star, the sky filled with angels, the triumph of light over dark. My imagination was no substitute for the real thing.
If anything, inside my cabin, my gloom had only grown. There wasn’t even the distant glimmer of a bonfire to break up the darkness. Just a solid black wall. Nothing to do but go to bed. I switched off my tape player. Then the overhead light.
I turned and looked back at the window—
Wow! Just outside my door the night was lit by a cluster of thousands of miniature blinking…Italian Christmas lights? Here? No, these lights were even more beautiful. Breathtaking. Like nothing I’d ever seen in Chicago.
I looked closer. They were fireflies. And yet…I’d never seen lightning bugs in New Guinea. God had sent me my very own holiday lighting display—on angel wings! Christmas had come. Just as it had to a tiny, dusty village so many years ago.
There were no malls, no crowds of festive shoppers, no tree that first Christmas. Just God’s angels announcing the true light of the world. This was going to be the best holiday ever.
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