Dear friends in our supporting churches:

We wait. For the bus, for the doctor, for our teenagers, for the Messiah. It’s usually a long wait.

During the wars that marked our first years of living in Central America, the wait was to survive the violence and make it to that heady day when peace would finally come. Yet when peace did come, it turned out to be a Faustian bargain. Ideologically-based conflict dissolved into the organized crime, free trade, youth gangs and environmental destruction of today’s Central America. Ask most people in this region what they’re waiting for now, and you’re likely to hear their dream of somehow getting to the United States, Canada, or Europe. They’ve given up waiting on the future, at least their future here, and instead wait on a visa or a migrant smuggler to solve their problems.

And even that dream can quickly turn to ashes. Every week two or three unmarked U.S. government jets land in Tegucigalpa and disgorge their cargo of deportees. Without shoelaces or belts, they stumble down the stairs back into the bright sunlight of the tropics, their dreams in disarray. For some, like Nieves Girón, a 43-year old Honduran peasant, the dreams turn into tragedy. Girón sold his small farm plot outside Tegucigalpa in order to pay a migrant smuggler, and then left his wife and five children with relatives. He set off on a month-long journey through Mexico, where he was robbed twice and ended up begging for food, before finally crossing the border in the middle of the night into Arizona, where he had the address of an uncle who might help him get a job. Yet Girón, unschooled in the art of avoiding the Border Patrol, was grabbed his first day in the U.S. After six weeks in detention he was flown home, his first time in an airplane. Paul interviewed him as he sat in a reception center for deportees in the airport, just before he set off to find his family.

Picture Girón arriving home. It must have been bittersweet. Unaware of his fate, his wife and children were certain to be happy to learn he was still alive. Yet they’d been waiting for a money order to buy food, not their penniless–and now landless–husband and father.

It’s into this world that God sends Jesus.

Those are easy words to write. They are difficult to flesh out. And be suspicious of anyone, like us, who writes them with a full stomach. More important, what’s the incarnation mean for the poor, for Nieves Girón and his family, for those who wait–with empty stomachs–for the one who comes "to cheer our spirits by thy justice here"?

There is no easy answer to write here, no wise words about how if you’ll only send more money to our favorite mission projects that all those migrants and refugees and marginalized slouching toward Bethlehem today in hope of a miracle will find what they need. Sorry. Easy answers are hard to find, though we keep looking for them. Many come to this region for the first time bursting with enthusiasm for a quick fix to the region’s poverty. Ignoring historical and political forces that resist and even prevent change, they argue that poverty will disappear if only we plant this tree or cultivate this bean or build our houses in this way. While we need those new ideas, for sometimes they chip away at hopelessness and change reality for a few, ultimately we are faced with either despair–let’s watch cable TV and forget about the smell of poverty outside our door–or with the only real way to flesh out hope: a simple decision to accompany the poor, to wait beside them. Don’t just do something, wait there.

There are strategic places to wait. The airport reception center for deportees is run by church folks. With a cup of coffee and a tamale for the returned migrants, they speak a word of welcome, of solidarity. They refer folks to groups doing job training and education, but few migrants will pursue those less than spectacular options.

What’s important at this moment of arrival is that the church is there. The church is present, just as the church accompanies migrants on the way north. Forty-eight church-run migrant shelters now exist the length of Mexico, offering migrants a place to sleep, eat, and pray, safe from the lawless gangs and police forces that prey on the migrants. Like the medieval pilgrimage points that sheltered people on their way to the tombs of saints, they form a chain of hospitality running through a hostile world. The centers are neither in favor of nor against migration, but instead recognize the fact that millions of people are on the move and respond by offering not solutions, but presence.

We were tempted to write "mere presence." Indeed, it can seem so slim an offering. Yet perhaps it’s the best we have as people who wait, once again, for the Messiah to be born.

This is not to belittle advocacy, those activists who, for example, work to change immigration policies in the North or construct more just economies in the South, or who want to help God "cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly" (Mary’s words, not ours). Such ministries are essential. Yet while we’re working for a new world, people are suffering in the old one we’re stuck with for a while longer.

Perhaps the most personally challenging class for students in the seminary where we work is not the one on the Old Testament or the Pauline epistles. It’s one called "pastoral accompaniment," and focuses on how we wait, offering who we are rather than what we have, with those who are excluded or marginalized from the society around them. Students find it a difficult class, but also say it’s the one that most sets the tone for their ministries in the real world.

If we take the story of Mary and Joseph and the donkey seriously, we glimpse the surprise that comes at the end of the story. When we wait with the poor, accompanying them on their myriad journeys across the hemisphere or across town, we just may be privileged to be there when Christ appears. Looking for him amid the season’s decorations at the Mall will lead us only to a cheap Christmas. Waiting for him with those who wait for food, for healing, for liberation, will inevitably lead us to the manger scene where the word of life becomes flesh. At the end of all our waiting, there will indeed be hope.

Happy waiting. Happy Advent.

Paul Jeffrey and Lyda Pierce
Missionaries in Central America