New Year's in Abuja!

After a challenging Christmas, New Year’s was EXCELLENT! One would think after discovering that birthday parties, weddings, and choir concerts all are really church services, I shouldn’t have been surprised to figure out that New Year’s celebrations here are also church services, but I was! I was also a little skeptical. However, as with everything here, I just went with the flow and was pleasantly surprised!

I welcomed in 2009 at Living Faith Church in Nyanya. This church was by far the hugest church that I’ve been to in Nigeria. It had quite a few similarities to the church I attended in San Antonio. One similarity that I was really excited about was seeing the words to the worship songs projected on a screen! It makes it so much easier to learn songs when one can see printed words…especially when some of the songs are in different tribal languages!

After some spirited worship, we were led in a time of prayer and reflection about the previous year. I found myself remembering back to some points throughout the past year where I was really struggling: trying to survive grad school classes, feeling completely inadequate teaching AP Chemistry, wondering if I was ever going to get everything ready to go to Nigeria, freaking out the first night of being here in Jalingo. I was completely overwhelmed by how faithful God had been to me throughout all of these situations.

We heard a great sermon and then right before midnight we all (probably a couple thousand people) all lit candles and welcomed in the New Year! It was so powerful! The next 10 minutes or so were spent in prayer regarding the upcoming year. It’s such a different approach than is typically taken in the US, but it was really meaningful. Now, it has been a family tradition to go to the church around New Year’s Eve and do a mini-version of this, thanking God for the past year and praying for the upcoming year. My brother and I have almost always loathed and complained about this wondering why we can’t be like “normal families”. Granted, candle light with thousands of other people in a corporate worship experience is a little more dramatic, but this experience has enabled me to appreciate this “weird family thing” in a new way. It only took 26 years.