Our Christmas Letter

Christmas 2016

Dear Friends,

Sometimes life is pretty ordinary.

Today, is a lazy Saturday. We just ate breakfast.  Logan made pancakes and eggs.  We shared jokes.  I explained my fitness plan for the New Year.  I am going to a nice restaurant and ordering mussels.

Linda worked at the community garden again this summer.  Planting things, watching them grow, and helping the 32 gardeners feel comfortable – ordinary stuff common to the human race since Adam and Eve negotiated where to plant the next pomegranate tree.  We’re thankful for the ordinary beauty and simplicity of this special plot in our community.

I, Lowell, had a chance to work with local employers to form a business association.  We are expanding our job training program to include other business services.  As part of the project I participated in a leadership training course during which I reflected on my leadership style.  I found myself coming back to ordinary things like character and just doing the next right thing.   I sat with other community leaders like someone from the Times Square Alliance, the Downtown Alliance in Lower Manhattan (where the World Trade Center is), and other world class neighborhoods.  I on the other hand represented Cypress Hills, a somewhat forgotten neighborhood tucked in a far corner of Brooklyn.  All we have is a long row of small businesses with an average of 4.2 employees each.  Small businesses with emphasis on the word small – scrappy, immigrant-owned, mom and pops where folks work 14 hr. days to keep the laundromat, or take out restaurant, or barber shop open.  These are ordinary sort of folks, and I am blessed to work with them.

The big event of our autumn was sending the boys back to Followers of Jesus School.  Somehow this ordinary routine repeated by millions of families across this country seemed to be an accomplishment for us.  Starting a new normal with unpredictable tweens proved to be a feat.  Linda began an ordinary job as middle school part time teacher, and I volunteered to teach PE.  We are now very familiar with teenage eye-rolling.

Yesterday was an ordinary, brisk day.  I walked 2 ½ blocks to work and stopped in at a local merchant, Juan Diaz’ corner store, one of the participants in the business association.  I found him opening the business like he does every day.  Looking closer I saw he had stitches in his lip and forehead.  He had been robbed the evening before and spent most of the night in the ER.  I asked why he is at work after such trauma. In his thick Dominican accent he said, “I had to take my son to school, so I came on in.  It could have been worse.  I am grateful.  There is no sense him missing school because of me.  That is what America is all about.  You keep working to be successful.”  An ordinary man doing ordinary things like working every day and taking care of his family.

I couldn’t stop thinking of Juan all day.

It turns out there is a fine line between the ordinary and the extraordinary.  Juan reminds me of another ordinary/extraordinary father,  “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all--how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).  Could it be that the Father has ordinary feelings of compassion, pain, and thankless sacrifice?  I am not sure if anyone noticed that Juan had his store open again less than 24 hours after a gun was put in his face.  Did anyone notice his gutsy, painful, vulnerability?  If it were not for the angels, would anyone have noticed the Father’s own ordinary-looking sacrifice on the first Christmas? 

I pray that we can all notice the ordinary/extraordinary gift of God this season in the middle of our ordinary lives.