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Why Helping Others Is the Perfect Holiday Gift
Eight days before Christmas 1995, I said goodbye to my family as I entered a training center for volunteers bound for countries all over the world. In my group, there were 12 young men. 4 of our group didn’t speak any English and 8 spoke little Spanish. We were scheduled to send the next three months living, learning, laughing, crying, and serving together.
Two days before Christmas, we decided on a simple gift exchange with a maximum price limit of $5. While snow fell outside, the twelve of us sat together in a meeting room exchanging rolls of film, small notepads, lint rollers, the odd assortment of candy, and broken expressions of gratitude in languages we barely spoke.
We were all committed to spending the next two years of our lives serving others in countries some of us still couldn’t find easily on a map. For some, the days leading up to and following Christmas were hard. It was the first time most of us had been away from our parents for an extended period of time as most of us were barely nineteen years old.
The following year, I had been in Guatemala for almost ten months. Christmas in Guatemala back then was less about extravagant gifts and more about the time spent with family and friends; the way Christmas should be. We had the privilege of sharing short messages of joy and hope with people on their…
