Christmas this year has no dazzle or interest for me. I usually love any Christmas music and can’t wait in the fall to begin playing it, but this year I cry when it is on. Putting up our large tree at Thanksgiving is always a highlight, and gifts are my love language—giving them that is. I love to think of some special surprise for each one in my family. However, this year is majorly different.

Our daughter, Lydia, 18, left earlier this fall to work with a missions group named, “Youth with a Mission,” in Hurlach, Germany. Having her there might be far away, yet I never worried about her well being. After all, Christmas in the Alps sounds romantic and inviting. However, she has moved locations to Liberia, Africa, to serve in that nation for the next ten weeks. It has forced me to fully trust the Lord with things out of my control and a mother’s wishes.

Lydia is with a team of seven. Their living conditions are incomprehensible to this Dallasite who has always loved the city. They have only a dirt road, living twenty minutes outside the capitol of Liberia, named Monrovia. The transportation is mostly walking in the heat of the equator and its scorching sun. Lydia has no running water, and the water they have must be drawn from the well. Her bath water is filled with lizards, and she tries to wash her hair in the African rains when they come. Her food is rice and bread, with more bread on good days.  There are only a few hours of electricity each evening. Three girls share a room with bars on the window, and the noise of busy life and fights in this war-ransacked region can be heard outside the door. There is no mailing address, so receiving any packages from home is impossible. Garbage is everywhere, as they breathe the dirt of Africa and wash their clothes in a bowl.

Simple good drinking water is questionable, and the water they are given is filled with chlorine. No juices with electrolytes were present when Lydia first got there and suffered a heat stroke. Candidly, there is nothing described that comforts a mother’s concerns about her beautiful daughter, except for what also is transpiring.

Lydia has grown in a new depth, and her heart to serve others increases. She is surrounded by hundreds of African children daily who ask her to take them to America. She teaches them Bible stories and makes them laugh. She has learned dependence on His divine purposes and love as she simply loves the children in His name. Lydia walks for hours to tell others about God’s love for them and gives hugs to all along the way. She listens to God’s promptings and instructions closely, telling us, “I can never let my guard down here. I must always be on alert…”

Upon her first two days of arriving in Liberia, Lydia was sick and dehydrated. She said she had never felt such oppression within her and she sensed warfare like she had never known. We worked fast in case arrangements needed to be made for her to return home. However, she determined to wait one week to see how things were. She has decided to stay as of this writing. Africa has become her love, and the people have captured her heart.  We ask for your prayers for our daughter and the YWAM team.

Christmas, as we once knew it, will never be the same. Reflecting on it all as I write, I am mindful that “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.” Joy to the world is for every pocket of mankind around the globe. The King has come. He alone is the Gift.

Merry Christmas, dear Lydia! May His presence and peace surround you as you love others in His name. May we do the same.

We love and miss you!!

When you choose to look past the horizon… the sky is the limit!