In a small city on the edge of the desert, a team of expatriates prepare food and gifts to celebrate Jesus’ birth together.

One of the team’s single women visits her neighbor to borrow a large pot for the vegetables. Inside, she greets a roomful of veiled women drinking tea and waiting for news, for gossip, for the next birth—waiting as Mary and Elizabeth did.

A man on the team goes to the sheep bazaar to select the main course. It is a foul-smelling, noisy  place. And yet perhaps this scene better resembles the first Christmas than any quaint nativity scenes with clean straw and caroling angels.

A wife goes to the market. She passes a young woman, heavy with child, waddling home where she’ll keep cleaning and cooking up until the day she gives birth. Young wives such as these are acquainted with the labor pains of the Christmas story.

Everyone gathers at a team member’s home for the celebration. On the street outside a man with a donkey passes by, loaded with goods. It’s not hard to imagine its ancestor, another beast of burden that carried the infant King.

In the early evening, the team steps outside onto the roof to quietly sing carols. They look into the clear, starry sky—the same sky that Mary, the shepherds, and the magi saw.

As we celebrate Christmas, surrounded by family and holiday delicacies, our friends in distant lands are living in communities where they might be the only ones worshiping Jesus Christ. But they are busy telling Muslim men and women around them about the Gospel story, so they can come worship Him, too.

We don’t treasure perfectly wrapped gifts, holiday music, and decorations.

We treasure the One who was sent to dwell among us and make a way for us to have peace with the Father.

Original article: www.frontiersusa.org/blog/article/merry-christmas-from-frontiers