We’ve somehow stumbled most of the way through 2013 and into Advent. The Christmas tree is up and lit; we’re thinking about all the gift shopping we haven’t done and holiday plans we haven’t made, and it’s weird to think of this coming Christmas as likely the last we’ll spend in the U.S. for some years. Of course, it’ll more certainly be a big first too, our first Christmas with a little boy to open up (and chew on) his presents on the big day.

That first-and-last-at-the-same-time strangeness sums up a lot of what it is to be a missionary, at least before you move to the field.

What are the most basic questions you ask to get to know somebody? The obvious: Where are you from? What do you do? Well – we live between Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. With my mom. But we’ve put over 7,000 miles on our car in the last three months, traveling to 12 states, attending worship services at 12 different churches. In that time, two and a half weeks in a row under the same roof is our record. Where do we live? And what do we do? Well, we’re missionaries to Berlin, but we haven’t gotten there yet, which means our job is telling people what we’re going to do in the hope that they’ll want to help us do it. What we do is answer the question what do you do?

You’d think that culture shock is something that happens when you move to another country, or even when you move back from one. But we became foreigners the second we were approved as missionaries (again, in both of our cases). We don’t do a job that “contributes to society” (at least not to America’s); we don’t really live anywhere we stay. We live on the hospitality of those who belong in the places where we stay.

Think of these things when you meditate on Advent and Christmas this year. What the Bible teaches amounts to this: that God Himself, infinitely intimately acquainted with every corner of creation, became a foreigner. He entered a household and a nation and a species by nature estranged from Him. The great words of Mary, the words that perhaps define faith as beautifully as the Bible does it – “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word” – are in context an invitation, an extension of hospitality.

I think we are learning something of what it is to look for people to receive you. Lord willing, what we learn in this way will make us people who receive, and whose hospitality testifies to our certainty that the God Who became a foreigner loves foreigners.

-Ben