The December I Was 14

It was December 1990, exactly 30 years ago. I had just turned 14.

It was cold that December in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A cold Christmas in Africa was new to me, after spending my childhood in the west African tropics. But Addis is almost 8000 feet above sea level, and the temperatures go down into the 40’s at night.

Our house was drafty, if you could call it a house. It was actually an apartment that had been created from a school dormitory, so it wasn’t exactly homey. The hallway was long and wide and sterile, tiled floor and high ceilings, and the hallway seemed to make up the bulk of the house. Huge rolling barn doors separated us from the apartments on either side. The living room was attached to that hallway, and the one source of heat came from the fireplace. Everything else was cold–the floor, the concrete walls, my bedroom, my heart.  

It did not feel like home, but not just because of the chilly air. My family had arrived in Addis just three months previously, shell shocked by the alternate reality we had been thrown into. Early in 1990, we had been finishing our furlough in California, confident in our plans to return to Liberia. The sunsets over the Atlantic Ocean were home to us, where we were known, where we belonged. But as the months of 1990 creeped by, we watched and listened in horror as increasing amounts of destruction reigned over the country we loved. Civil war enveloped Liberia; our little house by the lagoon was looted; many friends left; some friends died. 

Our mission organization scrambled to find new locations for their Liberia staff. First we were headed to Niger, then that fell through. Ethiopia was where we landed. There was no high school for me in Ethiopia; the MK school only went through 8th grade. So my parents purchased correspondence materials for me to use for the start of my freshman year.

The winter of 1990 found me lonely, grieving. I was stuck in the elementary school library all day, trying to teach myself French and Algebra, alone. A couple of months of this had me begging my parents to let me go to boarding school in Kenya with the other high schoolers. So they had agreed–I would go in January.

We found an old dusty Christmas tree in a closet somewhere. It was really just a broomstick painted green, with holes drilled in it for artificial branches. We made the best of it, as we always did. We decorated the table and had friends over for dinner and made a gingerbread house. My mom had brought a set of little white ceramic ornaments which I spent hours painting. I am not an artsy person. I just had nothing else to do.

I had imagined 1990 much differently than the way it turned out. In December I was supposed to have started high school with my friends in my idyllic childhood home. Instead I found myself lonely in a foreign land, and getting ready to leave my family and go off by myself to yet another new place. My sense of belonging had been torn away, my grounding in a place and a home had been lost. As much as I wanted to go to boarding school, I was also terrified. I was grieving a tsunami of loss, and it was only the first wave. 

It was, most certainly, the most difficult year of my 14 years. Yet it was also the first year when faith began moving from abstract to substance. I had never really been faced with sorrow or hardship until that year, and as I grew up from childhood, my faith did too. Mourning what I had lost and scared of what was coming, I have a very clear memory in that December of often singing to myself, I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice to worship you.

When God dramatically delivered the Israelites from the Philistines, the prophet Samuel “took a stone and named it Ebenezer, saying, ‘Thus far the Lord has helped us.’” 1990 was perhaps the first Ebenezer in my life, the first time when I could look back at say, “So far, God has helped me.” Thirty years since that difficult year, and here I am, in another December, at the end of a year that feels eerily similar to that one–loss, upheaval, disappointment, grief. Yet during that 30 years there have been many, many Ebenezer stones. The monument of God’s faithfulness in my life is substantial and steadfast. As 2020 closes, I add another stone.

Thus far has the Lord helped me.