Christmas is here! So who loves Christmas parties?
This month Lucy and I planned two Christmas parties for our Asian friends! We had one at our apartment and one at the guys’ apartment on our team. This has been the busiest month yet!
Christmas Party 1: We had about seven people come to this one, and it was an all girls party. It was at 6pm on Saturday, Dec. 13th. The beginning of the day wasn’t so good, because Lucy and I were exhausted and we weren’t feeling up to having this party. So you know what we did? We lifted our burden to God. We praised him and told him that we needed his strength to run this party.
Everything was planned for that night, but not everything went as planned. We played Christmas charades which didn’t go well because our friends didn’t know what sledding was or any other term that we thought was simple enough. We then tried to play pin the star on the Christmas tree, which consisted of a paper Christmas tree taped to the door and a paper star to put on top. It was too easy for the girls, until we started to move the Christmas tree while they looked for it blindly. After fun and games, we decided to share the Christmas story. First we started to show a movie clip from The Nativity Story, but the crappy Wifi here made this task impossible. The story was then shared by our mouths, and people listened intently as we continued to share about Jesus. But as we talked about Jesus more, some girls started asking questions, and then a debate started to form. We were respectful of what these girls had to say, but we didn’t want this discussion to get out of hand. Then God showed up. I could feel his presence as Lucy started to ask people if anyone was sick and needed prayer. One girl had a sinus cold and told Lucy she wasn’t feeling good. Lucy asked if she could pray for her and the girl said yes. After the prayer, the girl started to react, her face lighting up. “Its completely gone!” Everyone was shocked, and the girl’s friend Linda, decided to follow God that night.
Christmas Party 2: This party was on a Friday, Dec. 19th. The two guys on our team, Coulton and Ricky, had the party at their apartment and together we hosted the party. Both the guys and Lucy and I invited our friends, and 20+ people came! We met our friends at the intersection near the apartment, and some friends were about and hour late, so we had to take two trips to the apartment. There were games played in the beginning to introduce everyone, and snacks were brought to share. Then we had our friends join an interactive skit called The Christmas story. We gave them scripts and had them play the characters from the birth of Jesus. There was a Mary and Joseph, two shepherds, a donkey (my roommate played this part), a narrator and innkeeper, three wise girls (none of the guys choose to be wise men) and an angel. We took a video of this, because it was hilarious! It was a fun way of introducing the true meaning of Christmas to them. After it was over, we split up into groups and talked about the story. There were 4 groups with about 5 people in each one. We shared with them the whole story of Jesus, and then invited them to have a relationship with the Savior of mankind. No one accepted, but we knew seeds were planted that night. After we talked, we decorated sugar cookies! Everyone loved it, because it was something they had never done before. The party ended with multiple Asian people wanting to take pictures with us like we were celebrities. When everyone left, we thanked God for helping us that night.
P.S. I went to three other Christmas parties this month! One was a hot chocolate party at one of the long term worker’s apartment, another was for our Asian friends and was hosted by our city leaders, and the last one was just for our whole city team and it was hosted by a couple who works for Campus Target.