It is now time to sit back and relax…for a few minutes anyway. sigh

Christmas Eve is the time of celebration with the children of Bykota House.  This year we started around 5 PM with some courtyard games and then we all shared a meal together.  After a quick clean up, we gathered inside for the rest of the festivities.

We started with announcing that we were going to use the evening to introduce our new focus.  The focus for the year 2009 is learning from the Lord to have true JOY.  The path to true JOY is putting J-esus first, O-thers second, and Y-ourself last.  JOY!  So in keeping with our new pattern, we began with a time of prayer of thanksgiving and a time to focus on Jesus with a time of Christmas carols led by Anne Tan on the guitar.  Anne returns to Singapore very soon and we will miss her help as intern.

Then to focus on Others we then asked who it was that worked so hard to make our lives easier and possible every day?  The staff!  One by one a Bykota kid chose a gift to pass to a staff member with verbal thanks and appeciation for their service.  It was very touching to see the children take to this task so enthusiastically and the thanks was very heartfelt.

After this was finished, it was time for the children to pass out their gifts to each other.  For our second year the children drew names to buy gifts for each other.  They were all given a $4 limit and a trip to a local Cambodian market.  After returning home, the gifts were wrapped by the children also.  For the gift exchange, the gift giver personally presented the gift to the recipient and we watched them open the gift and then thanks for the gift was given.  This again was a very good experience!  For many of the children this second gift exchange was their second trip ever to the big market, the second time to focus on someone else’s pleasure and to make a purchase of their own choosing.  All very good life lessons and the most important lesson was that it is better to give than to receive.  Mark and I feel this lesson is so needed in Cambodia.  There is such a beggar/victim mentality here.  We want the Bykota Kids to be raised whole and healthy and to be strong individuals.

We then passed out gifts that had been received from America…one from the home church of John and Kerri Evans in Little Rock, Arkansas and the second from our very own Grandma Marthalee in Carthage, Missouri.  This sweet woman whom none of the children have ever met raises little bits of funds here and there all year long and then goes shopping armed with a shopping list and a big heart.  The gifts are send via Fed Ex with the help of a sponsor in Oklahoma…thank you Mr. Phil!

The night was simply amazing!  The children were blessed in like manner to the Holy Infant with 3 gifts…but I don’t think gold, frankincense, or myrrh would have been enjoyed nearly as much as these tokens of love and care.

This morning Mark and I celebrated a quite smaller and quieter Christmas in our apartment with our seven children and this afternoon we are all resting.  We have enjoyed calls from two of our children in the States and hope to speak to a third this evening.  We do miss friends and family that we are away from but the real reason for the season has been enjoyed on this side of the ocean.

We pray that this blog posting finds your family enjoying the same pleasant after glow and that the coming year is full of JOY for you and yours also.

Breathing in, Breathing out,

Rhonda