by Amy Peterson
So Joseph left Nazareth, a town in Galilee, and went to the town of Bethlehem in Judea. It was known as the town of David. Joseph went there because he was from the family of David. Joseph registered with Mary because she was engaged to marry him. (She was now pregnant.) While Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem, the time came for her to have the baby. She gave birth to her first son. She wrapped him up well and laid him in a box where cattle are fed. She put him there because the guest room was full.
That night, some shepherds were out in the fields near Bethlehem watching their sheep. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord was shining around them. The shepherds were very afraid. The angel said to them, “Don’t be afraid. I have some very good news for you—news that will make everyone happy. Today your Savior was born in David’s town. He is the Messiah, the Lord. This is how you will know him: You will find a baby wrapped in pieces of cloth and lying in a feeding box.”
Then a huge army of angels from heaven joined the first angel, and they were all praising God, saying,
“Praise God in heaven,
and on earth let there be peace to the people who please him.”
The angels left the shepherds and went back to heaven. The shepherds said to each other, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this great event the Lord has told us about.”
So they went running and found Mary and Joseph. And there was the baby, lying in the feeding box. When they saw the baby, they told what the angels said about this child. Everyone was surprised when they heard what the shepherds told them. Mary continued to think about these things, trying to understand them. The shepherds went back to their sheep, praising God and thanking him for everything they had seen and heard. It was just as the angel had told them.
Without any context, it doesn’t make much sense, does it? Who is Quirinius? Why do these people need a savior? Why did angels appear to shepherds? Is this an old folk tale no one believes is literally true, like the folk tales our students told of their annual festivals?
Whether the story made sense or not, telling it was a way for us to check a safe “evangelism” box in our minds, something we could point to and say, “See? We really are doing what we’re supposed to be doing here.” Anyway, I thought of Gladys Aylward: one of her chief methods of evangelism was to tell stories, like that of Noah’s ark, to the overnight guests at the inn she ran in China. If she did that, surely I should do this. I told myself that God promises, in a deep King James voice, that his word shall not return void. Doesn’t that guarantee that any time we share words from the Bible, we will see some sort of . . . results?
Growing up in the church, I’d heard that phrase a lot—“his word shall not return void”—but I didn’t quite know where it came from. Later that night I looked it up.
It’s from Isaiah 55, a chapter in which God speaks to his special chosen people, the nation of Israel. God promises grace to his people, and deliverance from exile. It’s in this context that he says, in verses 8 through 11:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the LORD.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”
All I’d ever heard in these verses was a promise that if I shared the Word of God, I’d see some result. The other parts—the specific context about deliverance from exile, the acknowledgment of the mysterious and confusing ways in which God works, or the fact that God’s words will accomplish what God desires, not what I expect—I’d never heard a sermon on them.
In any case, once we’d shared the story of Jesus’s birth, the students took over the party. The gingersnaps languished in a corner while we snacked on shrimp crackers and sour green mango dipped in spicy salt. The adorably dimpled Minnie, who gave me my cat Éponine, sang a traditional song, and everyone clapped; then they sang an old folk song together. Finally Tina gave a barely discernible nod, and immediately all the students stood up, saying, “I think maybe we should go now,” scrambled back into their shoes and crowded out into the hallway.
By the time Christmas arrived, Lisa and I were exhausted from so much entertaining. The university didn’t recognize the Christmas holiday, but Lisa and I did get the day off, according to a stipulation in our contracts. I woke up early and checked my e-mail. My parents had sent me an iTunes gift card. It took an hour or two to download each song on our internet connection, but I was happy for the chance to get new music. Then I hopped back in bed with a novel and read for two hours. As I was getting dressed around 8:30, there was a knock at my door. Three students stood in the hallway, one bearing a white slip of paper for me. There was a package waiting for me at the post office!
It seemed too good to be true—we were really getting a package on Christmas day?—but we skipped breakfast or coffee, and Lisa, Tina, and I hurried to the International Relations Office. There I could get the appropriate stamps allowing me to receive mail, then we were off to the post office to pick up the package.
The woman behind the counter asked me for money, about seven dollars, to release the package to me. Was this a bribe? Probably, but behind the counter was a cardboard box the size of a computer monitor from 1987, and I didn’t care. I passed the colorful slips of paper money over the desk, and she handed me the cumbersome package.
It was from China, and the postmark was two months old. Back in my room, Lisa and I wondered how long it had been sitting in the post office waiting for us, if it had already been opened, if the post office workers had found anything inside that they couldn’t live without. We opened it and found a letter on top:
Dear Amy and Lisa,
Our team of teachers in Changchun has decided to adopt your team! Since we can buy a lot of things here that you might not be able to get, we’re sending you this care package. We’re also praying for you! We hope your year is going well, and that you’re seeing the fruit of your work!
Love,
Team Changchun
Charley’s team in China had sent us a package, and I was suddenly in love again. We had DVDs, CDs, M&Ms, Strawberry Shortcake coloring books and crayons, all kinds of things silly and delicious and foreign and fun. Charley may have been uncommunicative lately, but the package assured me that he had been thinking of me. Everything was going to be okay. I couldn’t wait until I saw him, in just four weeks, at our mid-year conference in Thailand.
Lisa and I decided to spend the day together. A package from my parents had arrived a few weeks earlier, with Reese’s, and breakfast treats, and packets of taco seasoning, so we opened up the S’mores Pop-Tarts for our Christmas morning breakfast, sat under the small artificial tree that previous teachers had left for us, and exchanged presents.
Later, Lisa and I put on our nicest skirts and walked under a sunny, blue sky in 78-degree weather to the one fancy hotel our town boasted. We couldn’t think of any other way to treat ourselves, so we visited the hotel restaurant, the only place in town where our meal might cost upwards of ten dollars. We sat shivering in the air-conditioned, vast and empty hotel restaurant and ordered everything we wanted: sweet corn soup, stir-fried squid, chicken, spring rolls, fried coconut cakes, and rice. We walked back at one, and the town was hot and silent, with everyone taking their post-lunch naps.
We called our families briefly.
I missed mine, but I didn’t feel sad, exactly. It just didn’t feel like Christmas; I couldn’t imagine that, a world away, it was cold and festive, everyone singing carols and opening stockings and clutching hot cocoas. Actually, I was feeling happy—happy to be walking through a quiet town, sweating lightly in my swishing skirt, heading up the stairs to watch a movie on a laptop on my day off.
10
Solos at Karaoke
He seemed to “realize always that he must be about his Father’s business, and not wasting time in the pursuit of amusement.”
said of William Borden, Yale graduate who hoped to be a missionary to China but died of spinal meningitis before arriving there
Classes resumed on December 26. Our break between semesters was not Christmas break, but Lunar New Year break, which began in early January and lasted for five weeks. All the students would visit their ancestral villages, spending the week before the Lunar New Year cooking, preparing foods to offer to visitors on New Year’s Day. On New Year’s Eve they would deep-clean their houses, sweeping out all the dirt and evil spirits and detritus of the old year. On their New Year’s Day, they would receive gifts of money in red envelopes and new clothes; wearing their new clothes, they would walk from house to house in the village, visiting friends, relatives, and teachers.
But January 1 was nothing special in this country, so I scheduled a make-up session for Veronica’s class that morning. They needed a full review before exam week began, and I wanted to make sure they got it.
The weather had started to seem cold, staying grey and drizzly for days on end. A damp fifty degrees, in rooms without heating, left me chilled, so I wore a sweater and khaki pants to the make-up class Saturday morning at 7. I’d grown fond of this class: not just Veronica and her best friends Sarah and Cecilia, who also studied the Bible with us occasionally, but all of them. Henry, with big hands and eyes, the shy son of a farmer, wrote delicate poems about nature. Hallie, the pudgy girl in the front row who couldn’t understand a single word I said, but smiled constantly, her eyes nearly disappearing when she did. She could speak only a word or two of English, but wrote me adoring notes filled with love. The class monitor, John, was a mischievous, confident boy more likable than leaderly. His girlfriend, a petite, smart girl with short black hair, was one of my favorite students. She asked to be called Avril, after pop singer Avril Lavigne, and everything about her seemed to quietly question her culture’s status quo.
But none of these students were in the classroom when I arrived. Ten minutes later, a few showed up, apologetic, and we sat and waited for others. Finally, with less than half the class in attendance, I gave a halfhearted exam review. We ended early, and it felt like anything but a propitious way for the new year to begin. Gray skies, a failed make-up class, eight o’clock in the morning and a whole empty day stretching out in front of us. As we left the classroom, the monitor, John, invited us to go sing karaoke. Veronica and some others bowed out—karaoke was expensive, a rich kid’s activity—but John’s group of friends accepted his invitation, so I did, too.
Twenty minutes later, I was sitting on one of the sofas lining the perimeter of a small, dark room. John had rented this room for an hour, which meant we could choose our own songs, pass the microphone around the sofas, and sing along to the words on the TV screen in the corner. We could order shrimp chips, bottles of water, and cans of Coke. I’m sure if I hadn’t been there, they would have drunk beer, too, but out of respect for me, they didn’t.
This hour of karaoke cost John about three dollars, but his family was wealthy, and he didn’t mind. We started with Abba’s “Happy New Year,” which I’d never heard before, but all the students knew it by heart and sang with gusto. They sang other, older American pop songs, by Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, and pop songs in their own language. When my turn came, I chose Carole King’s “So Far Away,” and sang thinking of Charley and home.
It wasn’t my first time at Asian karaoke. All of us teachers had gone during our training in the capital city. Second-year teachers Melissa and Erin were anxious to introduce us to the wonder of karaoke, and took us out one night to a nice place—black and red pleather couches, plenty of space. Melissa and Erin loved the spotlight: they not only sang “Dancing Queen,” they danced it, too. I blushed when they tried to get me to choose a song, not confident at all in my voice, not one of the popular, performing girls. “C’mon,” Jack said, “I’ll sing with you.”
“I guess I could do something by John Denver,” I murmured, and added “Annie’s Song” to the list. I’d played it on my guitar before, and knew it was sort of in my range. When my song came up, I took one microphone and Jack took another.
Almost immediately I realized what I’d done. The words were incredibly romantic—about forests, sunsets, giving one’s life away in love. I’d known this was a love song, I’d thought of that when I chose it—but I hadn’t known how it would feel to sing it. I couldn’t sing this song, not with Jack, who loved Flannery O’Connor, who’d lent me Damien Jurado and Gillian Welch CDs to copy onto my laptop, who in the taxi on the way over had shared three silly limericks he’d written about me. I could have sung it with another guy, with my brother, or mockingly, with my best friend, but I couldn’t sing it with Jack—because it wouldn’t mean nothing to me. I passed the microphone around the circle for someone else to take.
I’d been insecure about my singing voice, and I hadn’t wanted to sing in front of anyone, regardless of whether the lyrics were loaded with meaning. But now, in a room with my students, I belted out the words to “So Far Away,” and the karaoke machine gave me a score of 93 percent. I smiled and passed the mic to Avril.
With only nine days before I would leave for Thailand to take grad classes and attend our organization’s annual conference, I began to pack and to dream. Lisa and I took Veronica out to dinner, and over spring rolls and stir-fry, we talked about her newfound faith. She wanted to know if she could keep my copy of the Jesus film while I was away—we’d watched it recently with Sarah and Cecilia, lying on our stomachs on my thin foam mattress, eating snacks. I told Veronica that she could keep it, but warned her that she needed to be careful. And I said that if she e-mailed me while I was gone, she should avoid certain words.
Veronica looked at me, something between pity and confusion in her eyes. “Amy, I’ve already told you that if I have to choose between my country and God, I choose God. And in the Bible it says that the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword. I have a more powerful weapon than my government does. I’m not afraid.”
Lisa’s head fell to one side, her mouth slightly open. I looked at her and quickly pulled my own jaw up, nodding at Veronica. “Okay,” I said, and spooned some more fried pork onto her plate.
11
Headless in Thailand
It is out of the question. I would never take the idea into consideration. I could not leave my work for such a reason.
Mary Slessor, when her mission board asked her to leave her post if she wished to marry her fiancé
In Swaziland, Malla Moe was evangelist, church planter, preacher, and bishop. Back home in Norway, she was not permitted to speak in church.
Ruth Tucker, Guardians of the Great Commission
In Thailand, the sun was always shining. In Thailand, there were places to eat bagels and strawberries and lasagna and avocados, things I hadn’t seen in five months. In Thailand, there were big air-conditioned department stores in three-story shopping malls. I bought a swimsuit in one of those stores, and sat by the side of the YMCA pool eating chips and guacamole in the sun with Jack and Lisa, watching Charley do backflips off the diving board.
My grad cohort stayed at the Chiang Mai YMCA, along with our professors who had flown in from Chicago. We slept two to a room and ate breakfast together in the cafeteria, then moved to classrooms in the same building for instruction in TESOL Methods and Spiritual Gifts. On bre
aks, we’d go out the back of the building to a convenience store across a quiet street and buy large cups of sweet, milky, Thai iced tea, the color of sunrise.
In our Spiritual Gifts class, I sat next to Rebekah, my companion for the master’s program welcome dinner months earlier. “So, what’s up with you and Charley?” she asked. Charley wasn’t in our cohort—he, like Jack, Lisa, and several other teachers, had come to Chiang Mai early to hang out with us at the YMCA for the week before conference began.
“I don’t know. . . . We’re together, I think? We need to talk more. We need to see if we can make this work. It was a tough semester for us, and I think he’s been depressed. He doesn’t seem happy in China, but I really want to come back to Asia for another year, at least.” I paused. “But it’s so good to see him. It’s really good to see him.” I knew Rebekah wasn’t Charley’s biggest fan, so I changed the subject quickly. “What did you get on this spiritual gifts test?” I asked.
Before arriving in Thailand, we’d read a book that identified sixteen “spiritual gifts” mentioned in Scripture, claiming that understanding and developing our own spiritual gifts would be the most important work of our lives. I disliked the book, its clinical voice speaking of my spiritual life like a fish to be caught, cleaned, and gutted, dissected and divided—like the Bible was simply a handbook to be parsed. I had a hard time believing that when Paul made a list of spiritual gifts in a letter here, and another list there, he intended for us, hundreds of years later, to create one exhaustive list of gifts to be defined, codified, made into a quiz.
I was willing to believe, though, that I might be wrong, that maybe this kind of study of myself and my individual spiritual gifts could be something important. I had checked the boxes and counted up the results. Teaching, discernment, and apostleship were my primary spiritual gifts.
