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Advent and Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere: Our bodies

Lynne Baab • Thursday December 17 2020

I am shopping for groceries in mid December in Dunedin, New Zealand, where I have lived for a few months. As I come out of the supermarket, I see a small stand where Christmas trees are being sold, and a man is walking away dragging a Christmas tree. He is barefoot.

I am bemused by seeing a barefoot Christmas tree shopper. I think about what he is feeling with his feet – the solidity of the asphalt, bits of gravel, maybe a random leaf. He connected to the earth in a way that I am not. And he is dragging a Christmas...

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Advent and Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere: The Light

Lynne Baab • Thursday December 10 2020

We left the United States on the summer solstice in 2007 and arrived in New Zealand in the dead of winter. I had a five year contract as a lecturer at the University of Otago in Dunedin, renowned in New Zealand for being cold. (We ended up staying ten years, and returned to Dunedin two months ago to wait for a covid vaccine here.) The outdoor temperatures in Dunedin aren’t much different than Seattle, actually a tiny bit warmer on average in winter, but many houses are drafty.

“Drafty” is an understatement. The house we rented for the first six months was...

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Grief AND thankfulness at Christmas 2019

Lynne Baab • Thursday December 19 2019

When I was a young adult, I read a book that changed my life: Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger by Ronald Sider. I learned about the great disparities in patterns of poverty and affluence around the world, and for the first time I saw the gap between my affluence and the poverty in developing nations. I learned that 25,000 children each day die from the effects of hunger. That’s more than 1,000 per hour, more than 150 per minute. That figure haunted me.

My husband Dave read the book too, and it influenced our prayers, financial giving, and lifestyle habits...

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Grief AND thankfulness in the Christmas story

Lynne Baab • Thursday December 12 2019

As a child I loved the carol “We Three Kings of Orient Are.” I loved the song’s two main themes: the perseverance of the wise men in following the star and the symbolism of each of the three gifts: gold to crown a king, frankincense to anoint a king (Messiah means “anointed one"), and myrrh for burial of the redeemer of the world. I understood the significance of the themes of this song by late elementary school. Even in junior high and high school, when each year I grew more distant from God, “We Three Kings” would remind me of the...

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