Merry Christmas!

Our first Swiss Christmas tree. Like everyone else in this country, the tree is kind of skinny. :-)

     Since it is almost Christmas, your alien friends are thinking about gifts. Our Nativity Wise Men are travelling across the living room, on schedule to arrive at the manger with their gifts for Baby Jesus on January 6. Our skinny and fake Christmas tree is surrounded by gifts (mostly thanks to Grandma and Grandpa Waggener, recently arrived from the U.S.), waiting to be opened on Christmas Eve. We're headed to some Christmas markets next week to put some final touches on our own Christmas shopping. I asked each family member to share one gift that the past year has brought. Here are our responses.

     Lucas: School. Lucas began school in Geneva with a great amount of trepidation. After being warned that he would probably be beaten up on the playground, he was pleasantly surprised to find the other children at Institut International de Lancy to be kind and welcoming. He has a nice group of friends who get together at each other's houses and support one another on the playground. He can bike or ride the public bus to and from school, giving him an unprecedented amount of freedom. Not only that, he's also enjoying most of his teachers and subjects. I do think that the social aspect has been the real blessing, though.

     Johanna: Learning French. One of the things that Johanna looked forward to most about moving to Geneva was the opportunity to learn a foreign language, and she has worked really hard these first few months. Besides taking French at school, she's joined a running club where most of the kids -- and all of the trainers -- speak only French. I'm sure her determination will pay off!

     Drew: Skiing. This is something that is not a natural sport in Ohio, but here, the second question everybody asks (after, "Where are you from?") is, "Do you ski?" After one lesson and one day on the slopes, we are certainly not veterans, but at least we can answer that question with an enthusiastic, "Yes!"

     Me: More time with family. Since we have arrived in Switzerland, we have eaten more meals together, played more games, and gone on more outings than we were able to with our busy schedules of last year. I love watching the kids play Ping-Ping in the sun room, spending time playing Scrabble and Yahtzee, and taking walks on Sundays.

     Eric: The opportunity to experience a new culture together. We've loved getting to know people from all over the world, experiencing a truly international workplace, city, and church. One thing we've learned is that while a lot of national and cultural sterotypes certainly have a basis in truth, it is also true that people are the same all around the world. Of course we knew that before, but to truly experience it is a gift.

     The greatest gift: For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith, and this not from yourselves. It is the GIFT of God. Ephesians 2:8

Merry Christmas to all of our wonderful friends and family!

L'Escalade

     In December of 1602 the Savoyards attacked the city of Geneva. As the story goes, a woman poured a pot of boiling soup over the head on one of the soldiers as he was trying to scale the city's walls. This innovative defensive strategy not only killed the soldier, but created a distraction that allowed the Genevans to repel the attack.


      So how does one celebrate an event that includes military history, wall climbing, and soup? Geneva's answer to this thorny riddle is the Fete de l'Escalade, a two-weekend celebration that includes historical reinactments, parades, chocolate, and a race through the city's Old Town, which is hilly enough to deserve the name "escalade" (which means scaling walls). The Escalade is one of Geneva's biggest events. Our family, predictably, chose to take part in the running and chocolate portions of the celebration.

Johanna with a marmite. They come in all sizes, from even smaller than this one all the way up to models that are fit for Hansel and Gretel's witch and cost more then chf 200.



     The chocolate portion of the festival involves marmites, or chocolate caudrons. Every store sells them. I bought ours at Migros, which had a convenient 3-pack of some of the smaller kettles. You then buy bags of marzipan shaped to look like vegetables, and fill the cauldrons. We combined this with a Thanksgiving tradition by having the kids put a vegatable in their kettle each night and write something for which they were thankful. We returned to the Escalade tradition last weekend: What you're supposed to do is break the kettle while crying out, "Thus perish the enemies of the Republic!" Then you eat the kettle and the vegetables. I find this a delightful way to celebrate a military victory, and would advice other governments to try to work out commemorative ceremonies that include chocolate.

     The race portion of the celebration is huge -- more than 28,000 people participate. We arrived in the morning of December 3, having ridden an extremely crowded 19 Bus to the Bastions Park area where the race begins and ends. The park was so packed that we could barely fight our way through the masses of people to the IIL tent, where Luc and Johanna were supposed to meet their classes. They had to leave for the starting line 40 minutes early in order to make it in time. I was very thankful we had signed them up through their school, so I didn't have to find their numbers or take them to the start of the race. Drew and Eric watched from the middle of the race, and I watched at them finish and was able to take some good pictures.

    

     Typically for a Swiss race, Luc ran at 11:50 a.m. and Johanna ran at 12:00, my race was next, at 1:30 p.m., followed by Eric's, which wasn't until 4:15 p.m. Both Johanna and Luc ran 2.5 kilometers, I did close to a 5k, and poor Eric had to do 7k. In between our races were different ages and distances, including the really fun-to-watch Escalade Elites. We also got to see the woman who nearly beat Eric in the Trans-Onesienne. We cheered for her as she raced with the over-50 women's crowd (she was close to the front, of course). The race is beautiful, winding through the cobble-stoned streets of Old Town, right past St. Peter's Cathedral where Calvin preached, and back down to Bastions Park. A huge screen showed runners throughout the race, and huge crowds lined the entire course (which again, typically, we had to do more than once -- I don't know why they like loops so much here).
    By 5:15 p.m., we had been at the race for more than 6 hours, it was dark, and it was starting to rain (apparently it is always cold and rainy for the Escalade -- part of the tradition), so we did not stay for the Marmite Run, which is like a parade where everyone dresses up in crazy costumes and runs through Old Town. Maybe next year.
     Luc's favorite part of the day had nothing to do with chocolate, history, or running, but with finding one of the world's best climbing trees right near the course.

     Drew's favorite was something that I have never seen at a race before -- nor expect to ever see at a race outside Switzerland -- the Alpen Horn players stationed along the course. We watched Eric's race next to them and enjoyed the music of the Alps the whole time!

My Testimony

             We've had some wonderful testimonies this fall at the Bible study I attend. Like all the other groups around here, the study is a truly international group of women, and I've gotten to hear stories from people raised in Lesotho, Jamaica, South Africa, Canada, and Czechoslovakia (when it was still a country), among many other places. Zita's family had to hide the fact that they were Christians in a country where it was illegal. Ruth was among the first missionary women to give birth in a mountain hospital. Jenny participated in a march of reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa just before the first free and fair elections. It was my turn today, and I felt a little outclassed. But God work in everyone's life is something to share and celebrate. Since I'm not great at thinking on my feet, I wrote out my speech. Here it is, for anyone who is interested.   

*    *    *

             I’ll begin my story around this time of year, in the late 1970s, when I was 7 or 8 years old. All the students at McGuffey Elementary School, of which I was one, were practicing for the annual Christmas Program. We still called it a Christmas Program then, even though I did not attend a Christian School. One of the songs we were going to sing was, “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” One of the lines in that song is: “With God as our Father, brothers all are we.” During that line, I quietly closed my mouth. I didn’t sing the words. The reason was that I thought my parents wouldn’t like me to say the word “God.”

            We didn’t believe in God in our house. My parents had never told me not to talk about God, but it was clear to me that He was not part of our life. This was not an angry rejection of God. We were just perfectly happy without Him. My mom had grown up in a Christian home, but had forgotten her faith when she married my dad. My dad came from a long line of really good people who didn’t believe in God, and we were like them. We believed in education – my grandma and grandpa had been to college and my grandpa’s sister had a master’s degree, which was very rare for a woman of her generation. My dad was a college professor and my mom was a school librarian. We were educated, and educated people don’t need God. We believed in doing good. When my grandpa’s business partner died, my grandparents took in the man’s three children. They helped revitalize the small town of Rushville, Indiana. We planted trees and took care of the environment. We went door-to-door collecting signatures on petitions for nuclear disarmament. We ate tofu instead of meat in support of efforts against world hunger. We were good, and good people don’t need God. Most of all, we believed in family. My parents were incredibly loving. They read to my sister and me. They took us on long walks. They played with us. They were the parents all my friends wished they had. Our family fulfilled us, and fulfilled people don’t need God.

            We were very happy. But God loved us too much to let us stay that way. I imagine us in a car, driving along, singing, playing games, eating snacks, and having the time of our lives, never realizing that we were headed in exactly the wrong direction. Because if the Bible is true, that’s our situation. We thought that we were fine without God, and if God had not stopped us, we might have continued blithely down that path, happily singing and snacking ourselves straight to Hell. Because if the Bible is true, no one is fine without God. We’re dead in our sins, whether we know it or not. So, though it may seem cruel, the kindest thing God can do for us is to show us the truth – and show us His salvation.

            This is how God showed us that we really did need Him. My mom, as I said, was raised in a Christian home. Her mom – my Grandma Elsa – never stopped praying for us. When I was 10 or 11, my mom went to visit Grandma Elsa. While she was there, she had a vision that terrified her. It actually wasn’t anything scary. She just saw a man standing at the foot of her bed, talking. When she opened the Bible on the nightstand, she read, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That experience somehow brought back to her all her Christian upbringing. She started to read the Bible hungrily, and she came home a recommitted Christian. My dad thought that she had lost her mind. I was angry with her. We had this wonderful, loving, perfect family, and she had to go and bring strife into it by becoming a Christian? Because strife is what her conversion brought. All of a sudden, she and my dad disagreed in a major way on something very important. She took my sister and me to church. My dad didn’t complain, but he didn’t come. I could hear them talking sometimes at night, arguing. I was terrified that they would get a divorce. But they didn’t. God used one of the very things that had kept us from God to bring us all to Him. My dad had been raised to believe in the importance of family. Not only that, he deeply loved his family. And he was going to wrestle with God for his family. But God wasn’t going to let my dad win. Basically, what he showed my dad was that the family belonged to God, and if my dad wanted to be united with his family, he was going to have to submit himself to God as well. My dad has told me since that one night, he was awake for hours, in agony, pleading with a God that he didn’t really believe in. One of my dad’s biggest obstacles to belief was his intellect. He had always thought that Christians were kind of stupid. This was a problem for a highly educated man from a highly educated family. After this night of pleading, he happened to turn on the radio. What he heard was the pastor of the Oxford Presbyterian Church. Pastor Harris was a brilliant man and a gifted speaker. My dad thought, “I could listen to this man.” And that’s what he told my mom when she woke up.

            We started attending the Oxford Presbyterian Church, and God used Pastor Harris to lead my dad to faith. By this time I was a young teenager, socially awkward, nerdy, introverted – so it wasn’t too difficult for me to see my need of God. Both my dad and I were baptized when I was in seventh grade. God used youth workers and pastors at that church to grow my faith. He has continued to put people in my life who have taught me more about Him: professors at Calvin College, good friends, and my husband and his family.

            I have now been a Christian for more than 25 years. I’ve been to a Christian college and I can write you a one-pager on the Reformed Worldview without batting an eyelash. I’ve taught at a Christian school, and I can tell you all about the Intertestamental Period and recite questions and answers from the Westminster Catechism. I’ve read the Bible through, and I even know the names of most of the kings of Israel and Judah. My family doesn’t miss church unless we are seriously ill. And I find that the trap I fall into now is exactly the same one that my family fell into all those years ago. Sometimes, religious people don’t think they need God. I am very thankful that God loves me enough to not let me be happy in my religion, and that he continually puts people and events in my life to remind me that my religion will not get me to heaven or even help me get out of bed in the morning or make my children turn out right. God continues to show me that it is the relationship with Jesus that is both necessary and sufficient. I need Him.