What a neat Christmas! I do miss being home, but I think this has been about as good as an away-from-home Christmas can be. You sure can't beat the weather--mid-50s (upper teens Celsius) at night, upper 70s (mid-twenties) during the day. Sunny and warm. Nice.
We are amazed at how much Christmas is celebrated here. Looking at the decorations in the malls (and ignoring all the folks in robes), you might think you were in America somewhere. True, they don't mention Jesus anywhere, but then again neither to the malls in America these days. I've had several locals--Arabs, Indians, or Pakistanis--wish me a Merry Christmas. A lady at church this morning expressed her amazement at the same thing, and said it was a bittersweet feeling because, while we enjoy broad (for this region, anyway) religious freedoms in Qatar, people in America, the land of the free, are being forbidden from displaying a creche in a public place, or singing Christmas carols at school, or even saying "Merry Christmas" at work. All I can say is that the ACLU had best watch out for the Muslims, because they typically aren't as nice as the Christians when you start tromping on their religion.
We had a nice Christmas Eve service at church. It was long, but nice. Several people from the congregation sang, played instruments, performed skits, puppets, etc. for a couple of hours. The Shaw twins--they have five kids, and two of the girls are redheaded twins--played a piano duet, and Dr. Shaw (he's a hawk vet) and their oldest daughter sang a duet while Mrs. Shaw played the piano. A gal named Amy played the flute, and also played a piano solo. They capped it off with a dramatic reading of "'Twas the Night Before Jesus Came," a sobering twist on the old classic. So, we did it up right on Christmas Eve. Prestonwood's got nothing on us. :)
Kendall brought the message this morning, and did a great job with Romans 12:1-2. It's the first time I think I've ever heard anyone use the phrase "boo-yeah" in a sermon. We had Christmas dinner yesterday with them, and it was great...turkey and dressing, sweet potatoes--even a "test" batch of Pakistani yams, which weren't orange but tasted pretty good with brown sugar, butter, and marshmallows on 'em--and several more "comfort foods."
After church today, we went out to the dunes again for a cookout fellowship. This time, we stayed a bit closer to the road so regular cars could get to the site. Sort of. Everyone was impressed that we made it in our Camry. I'll admit that it was a bit touch-and-go a couple of times, but driving in sand is easier than the muddin' I used to do in high school (OK, maybe some in college too). When we first arrived at the cookout site, there were about thirty Arabs on four-wheelers zipping around us on the dunes. It was pretty neat. The men were thinking that they'd like to take one for a spin, and the women were thinking about all the people they knew who'd broken their neck on one. The four-wheelers finally moved on, and we set about building a fire, climbing up/sliding down the dunes, and just generally fellowshipping. We discovered that frozen shawarmas, wrapped in tinfoil and heated over a fire, taste pretty good. By the time we finished eating, it was dark, and Zach and I pulled out our instruments and led some Christmas and praise songs. We may end up getting drafted into one of their worship teams, some of which could use the help.
On the way home, our son said that this was a nice place to live, but he would be glad when we got back to our home in America. I have to agree with him...Qatar is a great place, and we're making some great friends, but I still miss Texas!
Oh, yeah...and we still don't have our boxes. Or our car. :P
If you want to know which parts of Christmas are worth keeping, and which ones are commercialized candy, just ask me. I can tell you.
See, in Qatar, they don't allow Jesus Christ in public. They're Muslims, and evangelizing a Muslim is illegal. So, any Christmas decorations you see have, by legal requirement, little if anything to do with Jesus. Come to Qatar, and you will see a sleigh and eight tiny reindeer (actually, they're humongous, hanging in the middle of City Center mall, but you get the idea). You will see brightly-wrapped boxes with bows. You will see artificial Christmas trees, bells, colorful lights, and banners inviting you to various Christmas parties. You'll see children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile. And on every street corner you hear...the mosque, announcing another call to prayer.
When it comes to Christmas in Qatar, Jesus is conspicuous by His absence. Don't let this happen to your Christmas!
Among the first orders of business in Qatar, according to my son, was to visit the sand dunes and the beach. We set Friday the 12th as the day to take care of one or the other of those visits. I spent the week trying to settle on the details, but Friday came and I still had no plan.
We serve a loving God, though, and He took good care of us. After church we were invited to Fuddrucker's for lunch, where we were invited to a dune-driving desert dinner deal with several families. After lunch, we ran by the house, changed into sand-friendly attire, scavenged together some drinks and snacks, and caravanned south to Sea Line Resort. We didn't actually go into the resort; we parked our car there, hopped into a 4WD mini-SUV with another family, and drove a few km south across the sand dunes to their favorite campfire spot: a 10-meter-high dune overlooking the beach on one side and the rest of the dunes on the other. We slid down the dunes on snowboards and heavy plastic sheets, played on the beach, cooked over the fire (had to bring all the firewood with us!), sang a few songs, and had great fellowship. Many of those present were Germans, so I was able to dust off my [limited and rusty] German just a bit. My boy had a ball, of course. They try to do that once a month during the pleasant months of the year (October through March or April, generally), so we'll have to make that a regular outing.
Listen to the western media and politicians talk about terrorists, and one common explanation you will hear regarding the terrorists' hatred for America is that they detest our freedoms and/or our money. This explanation has a grain of truth to it, but it dodges the point.
Certainly, Islamic terrorists cannot abide our religious freedom; Mohammed's Medina writings prescribe the sword for winning people to Islam. Other than that, though, terrorists have little problem with freedom and/or money in general. Several Arab states, after all, are some of the wealthiest in the world, and enjoy quite a bit of personal freedom, even when compared to the U.S. We like to think we're "free," but try doing anything of consequence without explicit government permission and you quickly realize that your "freedom" is tightly controlled by the government (in fact, our "Bill of Rights" has effectively been neutered by the courts--but that's another subject). No, the terrorists aren't worried about our freedoms or our money.
They're worried about our culture.
Islam still holds that the traditional family is the sacred, God-ordained, foundational building block of society. It holds that God not only exists, but should be worshipped freely, publicly, at all levels of society and government. Prayer is not only allowed, but encouraged, even required in many places. Much of the Muslim way of life mirrors what we call "Judeo-Christian" morals and values.
When a Muslim looks at America, what do they see? A country where human life is less important than "choice," where God-haters run the judicial system, legalizing everything from pornography to homosexual "marriage," forbidding prayer in schools, removing God's law from public display. A country where the entertainment industry produces pornography for prime-time viewing, and distributes godless filth over every medum imaginable, from broadcast TV to satellite to the internet. A country where religious conservatives are forced to fight against their own culture, with extremely limited success. In short, they see a culture that mocks God and tears families apart, ruining countless lives in the process.
Muslim extremists are, in large part, simply trying to protect their culture and their families from "the great satan." Many of their methods to date have been misdirected at best, evil and ungodly at worst. But what if, instead of destroying the Twin Towers, they had destroyed the "entertainment" industry in America, or the abortion industry, or the leftist judiciary? Certainly, we would have been indignant--after all, that's our fight, and we want to fight it in our own way--but the majority of Americans would have quietly breathed a collective sigh of relief...and then gone back to their Gameboys.
I do not suggest that, if all the anti-God, anti-family forces in America were magically eliminated, that the terrorists would stop hating America. After all, they still hate religious freedom, and they still hate Israel. But I maintain that both would be easier for them to swallow in the absence of the cultural destruction that America currently exports. We need to be more honest with ourselves about the state of our culture, and we need to be more aggressive about righting the wrongs. Liberty is not license. Liberty involves responsibility, and a right regard for God. Liberty involves fighting against licentiousness--sometimes with more than just words. When necessary, Jesus turned over tables, threw things, and did some yelling. He expected his disciples to defend themselves with swords against physical attacks. He was a man of peace, but he was not a pacifist.
While our men and women in uniform are in harm's way fighting evil abroad, perhaps we need to be in harm's way to fight evil at home. Think about it.
Travelling with a five-year-old is always an adventure. He wasn't sure about boarding either airplane; at Easterwood, he wanted to go back home, and in Houston, he was afraid it would be too loud. After two successful flights, though, he was downright excited about getting on the next one. As we were watching airplanes take off, while waiting to leave for Doha, he told another family that we were going to Qatar. "There are big sand dunes there."
The fairest of the Magees, along with Matthew Hattaway, delivered us to Easterwood on Saturday. The women did an admirable job of keeping themselves together, which was a good thing, because Matthew and I were the only men around--and I'm pretty sure Matt has more experience with rowdy brothers than crying women. Although, come to think of it, he does shave his legs, so there's a certain potential for empathy. For some reason, Continental at Easterwood couldn't check our bags through to London, so we had to do the luggage shuffle in Houston. Not too big a deal, other than having to cheerfully ignore the sign on the intra-terminal train that said, "No luggage carts allowed."
Sunday we stayed at the Cranleigh, where I'd stayed before. Same good service, another nice room, same great breakfast, but with one change: the weather. It's cold in London these days, most of the heat is supplied by radiators, and most of the radiators are on timer-driven systems that only pump hot water at certain times of the day. I'm sure it saves energy, but the net result is a hotel room that's cold most of the time. For warmth, we were almost reduced to huddling around the wall-mounted electric trouser press. I guess I'm not used to someone else (other than perhaps my wife) being in charge of the temperature of my living quarters (yet another good reason to stay out of prison, eh?). We had supper and good fellowship with BJ and his family, who may be moving to Bahrain sometime soon.
My bride didn't sleep well, partly due to jet lag and partly due to the upstairs neighbors who came in at some wee hour and talked on into the wee'er hours. The creaking floors overhead roused me a bit, but I'm a pretty good sleeper--much to her chagrin. Finished reading "Skipping Christmas", so now I'll have to read it to my family. And yes, Kathy, it's hysterical--I think I'll buy a Frosty for our villa in Doha.