Advent 3

It may not prove particularly thought-provoking, but here's my Advent reflection for this week.

Actually, I'm abruptly changing directions. I'm not going to write about what I sat down planning to write about. I suddenly feel inspired to follow a different line of thought. Here goes...

When I started these Advent reflections a couple weeks back, I quoted D&C 88:63, "Draw near to me, and I will draw near to you." Dating back to the time I was a kid, I can say that part of what's fascinated me about the Nativity story is the various worshippers—shepherds, Magi, etc.—having to travel to the Christ Child. My family used to have a single long rope of tinsel that we would wrap around our tree in a helix from top to bottom, and as a kid, I would edge around the tree over and over, following the trail of tinsel from the base to the top, making up little stories about the Magi winding through the landscape of our ornamented Christmas tree until they reached the top, where the star led them to the Christ Child. I'm remembering another year, when I was in grad school the first time around, when I drew individualized Christmas cards for my parents and each sibling, each with a different scene from the Nativity story. I don't recall now all the scenes I created, but the ones I remember showed people on their way to Bethlehem, not actually there gathered around the manger.

I could go on, giving other examples. But my point is, for a long time that aspect of the Nativity story has called to me: the aspect of having to travel to Christ. This is the "Draw near to me" portion of the promise from D&C 88:63. And what unexpectedly popped into my head as I sat down to write this reflection was an anecdote from my LDS mission that I think embodies what it means to draw near to Christ in the real world—in a tangible sense.

Near the end of my mission, I started giving away a lot of my possessions—bike, clothes, etc. Among the things I wanted to leave behind were a collection of toys my parents had shipped me over the course of my mission to use when interacting with children: those little puzzles where you arrange shapes into what look like origami animals, some powerful little magnets, that kind of thing. I decided I was going to bequeath them to the children of a couple let's call Aricelis and Leo. Leo was a musician, and unfortunately the only place he'd been able to find steady work was playing at a nightclub in a tourist town out on the other side of the island, whereas Aricelis and the kids lived in Santo Domingo. This meant that Aricelis became, essentially, a single mother except for during the occasional weekends when Leo could come home to visit. It was a clearly stressful situation for the family, compounded when one night someone broke into the house while Leo was away, woke up Aricelis, put a knife to her throat, and demanded money. The local ward rallied around her, ward members started staying the night with her, etc.

So one night a couple weeks before I went home, my companion and I stopped by Aricelis' place. When we walked up to the house, I could hear her inside screaming at the children. The moment we knocked on the door, everything went silent inside, and she said in this meek voice, "Who is it?" "The missionaries," I said, and when she opened the door, looking sheepish, I grinned and said, "We are here to save you." My companion and I bustled inside, we sat the kids on the floor, I spent the next fifteen minutes or so unveiling one game after another. The magnets were the big finish: they stole the show hands-down once the kids saw how you could make all the silverware in the house stick together.

So once the kids were off on their own figuring out what in the house was magnetic, my companion and I sat down with Aracelis. I said, "How are you?" in a tone of voice intended to convey that this question was not a pleasantry, we really wanted to know... and she spilled, much more than I had intended, actually, to the point where I quickly began to feel I was in over my head. Problems with Leo, problems with the thief's family (she'd identified him on the street and had him arrested, and now the thief's family were harassing her), problems with a relative over ownership of their house. And of course, there was nothing I could do about any of these problems except listen—well, that, and give her a few toys that she could perhaps use to bribe some obedience and peace out of her children.

When she was done, I pulled out the hymnals we always carried with us to sing during discussions, and the three of us sang one of my favorite hymns, the pre-1992 Spanish translation of "Abide with Me." (The more recently correlated translation sucked all the poetry of it for the sake of making the translation more literal, a sin for which I hope someone is made to sweat very hard in the next life.) It was one of the most beautiful moments in my mission—the tangible peace afterwards. We prayed and left.

The lesson it occurs to me to take from this anecdote is this. Christ says that where two or three are gathered in his name, he is there. I know—testimony time—that Christ was present during that visit with Aricelis and her children. But Christ drew near to us because my companion and I drew near to Aricelis. We got on our bikes, we rode to her house, we walked up to the front door even when the screaming inside might have given us an excuse to "come back another time," we knocked, we bustled inside, we sat on the floor with the kids, and then we pulled our chairs closer to Aricelis' and asked her how she was in a voice that said we really wanted to know even though we ended up getting more in response than I was prepared for. I cherish the memory of moments like that. I've said in an earlier post that I worry, in fact, that I'm prone to fondle the memory of these moments instead of getting out there and making new moments like this. And the lesson that I'm hearing the Spirit convey to me today is that, yes, drawing near to someone involves taking initiative, taking certain risks, getting out of my comfort zone, lowering some walls. But that's what I have to do if I want Christ to be present with me in the way he was that night at Aracelis'.