Milagro de Navidad

Through church, I reluctantly signed up to go on a service project. I know, I should serve with gladness and enthusiasm, but frankly, my cowardly introverted personality makes it difficult -- especially here in Mexico.

So I hitched a ride with Tonya, and off we went to Ora's house. Ora is a little Buddhist Thai lady who's been living here in Mexico City for something like 20 years. About 15 years ago, her birthday was coming up and her kids asked what she would like. And she replied that she wanted to serve the less fortunate people in her community. So her kids asked around and found how she could help, and she opened her home for 12 poor people from nearby. She cooked a good meal for them, and made arrangments to do so every month. Now, she provides a meal at a nearby church every month for 250 people. And during the rest of the month, she hosts fund-raising dinners to keep the leaders of the community abreast on the needs of the poor and allow these people a chance to help out.

We arrived bringing cooked turkeys and a half-gallon of gravy each to an average middle-class home with cars parked outside all up the street. Inside, every table surface was being used by people preparing food. In the kitchen were these two ladies stirring massive amounts of mashed potatoes. Ora (seen behind the potato ladies) was like a circus ringleader, and no sooner had she dumped our gravy into a 5-gallon bucket, we were handed knives and cutting boards and set to chop tomatoes.

Costco donated a metric tonne (not really) of salad. While we chopped, in our conversation about how I like bagged salad because it comes pre-cleaned, I found a bug. I think Tonya is now off salad for a while.

Behind us, we could hear two ladies working on the shrimp cocktail and the logicstics of thawing the shrimp. I thought, certainly we're preparing a fund-raising lunch with all of this fancy food. When all was finished, we loaded all of the food into the cars and went off in a grand cavalcade to our final location.

Before we knew it, we were in the little town of Navidad, named for the Christmas holiday that was rapidly approaching. We turned down tiny little streets, and suddenly, we were there. Parked in front of who-knows-what. We went through a tiny little door with our bins of delicious-smelling food and found ourselves inside a tiny little church. Children and old ladies were setting up a table in a side chapel, and looking around at these humble surroundings, I realized that this wasn't a fund-raising luncheon. This was Christmas dinner. I've spent so long thinking of service as giving what you have leftover -- the change in your pocket, the canned goods that got pushed to the back of the pantry. But here a tiny little lady prepared an elegant dinner, gave the best to the least among us. I was left humbled by a little Buddhist lady, schooled on the gospel in a town called "Christmas" by a person who doesn't even celebrate Christmas.

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these thy brethren, ye have done it unto me."