Christmas finally came for Melissa

some good news!

Photo of a sweet brown baby in a manger who you’re about to hear about.

Something beautiful happened last Wednesday, before Trump fired the chair of the joint chiefs of staff for being Black and after our VP met with the head of the Nazi party in Germany instead of its democratically elected leader, and 1,000 other horrible things in between.

You wouldn’t know about it, because it wasn’t on the news. But it was a huge bolus of joy and justice for hundreds of us.

Melissa, a dear friend of our church, was granted asylum! She has her green card in hand!

We all have too much to read these days, so I’ll keep this short. But after my signoff I’ve included a bit of the Christmas Eve sermon I preached in 2020 that will tell you more about Melissa, in case you want to marinate in some feels.

TL:DR: Melissa and her children were matched with our church by an immigrant rights org we love in May 2025. She and her 9-year-old had fled gang violence in Honduras, taking a long and perilous overland journey, while she was pregnant with her other daughter. She arrived to extended family in Texas, but had to flee again due to violence in that home. She followed a friend to the Bay Area, a friend who then disappeared.

We were supposed to support Melissa in finding housing and learning how to navigate local resources (school registration, food banks, health care, public trans) for about 6 months. Because of the unique circumstances (pandemic, another baby that was a surprise to everyone including Melissa, and so much more), we walked with them for nearly 3 years.

Melissa’s story qualified her to apply for asylum, and so she did at the beginning of the Biden administration with support from our congregation. She knew it was a risk. Outing herself in this way rather than just disappearing from view was a devil’s bargain. On decision day, she’d either get deported back to a place where there was a bounty on her head, or she would get to stay, free and visible, with labor protections and many other rights.

Then she waited. And waited. She waited 4 long years and was finally assigned a court date: February 19. Four weeks into Trump Season 2.

An asylum hearing is pretty much a crapshoot in many ways, depending on which judge you are assigned. And while judges are supposed to be consistent and impartial, well…they’re also human. And likely under a lot of pressure from the new regime. And frankly, even under Biden things were not great for immigrants. Some of us at church were nervous, and murmured “Maybe she just shouldn’t show up?” I pushed back, gently. “This is Melissa’s decision. This is what she wants.”

So instead, we showed up for her. I am still shaky on my pins from surgery and couldn’t be there myself. But it was OK. Better than OK. 18 folks from my church, and a number of folks from other churches, showed up at the courthouse early. They prayed with her before her hearing. They packed the court, sitting straight and sturdy and filling all the benches. Presente! A sea of people, many of whom did not look like Melissa.

Here are some of our church folks with Melissa before the hearing:

And here’s Melissa that afternoon, standing up for the rights of others at a remembrance/march for the anniversary of the Japanese-American internment during WWII. Showing up, being seen, no longer in the shadows. Presente!

I know you know this, loves: That showing up *really* matters. It can make an enormous difference in one, or many, lives. Especially if you don’t look like the people under attack, don’t share their particular vulnerabilities.

You might think (because I talk about justice and right action a lot) that it is easy for me to do hard things. Like taking in an abandoned post-operative Haitian foster child when I had no training and no warning and was overwhelmed with my bio kids and job and health. Or walking with an immigrant family for 2.5 years instead of 6 months. It’s not easy for me. But it’s oh-so-good for me. It’s kept my heart going and growing.

So: next time you get asked to do something that is inconvenient, uncomfortable, or downright hard–please consider saying YES. Say yes even though you don’t quite know how to do it, or what it will demand of you: that you open your heart, or open your home, or open your wallet (and keep opening it). Show the rest of us how it’s done even though you feel so uncertain. Your courage and commitment will beget more courage and commitment.

4+ years ago, December 2020, Melissa stood in as mother Mary for our COVID-era prerecorded Christmas Eve Service. Her baby Mateo was Jesus, naturally.

We filmed the two of them by drone in the burned-out carcass of the south wing of our church. She tends to her baby in a wrecked place. What a metaphor for the times we are living through. A little on the nose, yeah? You can watch the video here, at 1:43:16.

At the end, Melissa/Mary passes a lit candle to a church member in another frame, and then another, and then another, until the candle finally arrives back at her and Jesus, now in the sanctuary.

Mary & Jesus in the Sanctuary.

Melissa finally has sanctuary herself. Christmas has come for her at last. (What is she going

to do next? She just finished getting trained and credentialed to run a home day care!).

Praise God. And merry Christmas, which can come more than once a year, as it turns out.

Christlove,
Molly

From my Xmas Eve 2020 sermon:

I have permission to tell this story. In fact, the person it is about wants it told, because, as she said to me, “it glorifies God.”

Melissa came here from Honduras, fleeing violence both in the streets and inside her own home. Her tweenage daughter was with her, and another daughter was born when she reached Texas, but life with her so-called family in Texas was just as brutal as the one she had left behind, and she fled again, this time to California. Here she found a factory job, and someone to watch the children for half her pay, but when the virus arrived the factory closed without warning, and she the factory owners withheld her last paycheck. That was in March.

Friendless, with the churches and other ways of connecting with the immigrant community closed, she muddled through until our accompaniment team was matched with her in May. We instantly fell in love with her and her clever, sweet girls. We did our best to help her find a way back to self-sufficiency in these untenable times, when a new terrible and wonderful thing happened. One day late in June, she called 911 in great pain. An ambulance took her away from her daughters, left behind in the overcrowded apartment where they were staying, until our Andrea took them home to stay with her.

Writhing in pain, Melissa didn’t know how to tell the EMTs what was wrong with her. But it became clear soon enough. She was in labor. She was giving birth, or in Spanish, “dar a luz,” giving to light. And that’s how Edison Mateo came into the world, the biggest surprise of her life. At first, Melissa despaired. She had contracted COVID from her housemates, and here she was, in quarantine, now with a newborn as well as her other children to support, far from home, in a global pandemic, worse off than when she began. She watched others leaving the motel on gurneys. She couldn’t go back, and she didn’t know how to go forward.

One night in the motel, she had a terrifying waking nightmare of man who wanted to take the baby and hurt her, so real she couldn’t shake it for days, and couldn’t sleep.

She told me about the man on the last day of their quarantine, as I was driving her to the home of church members to shelter. We detoured to our sanctuary, and we held the baby aloft to the heavens, and we asked God to bless and protect him and his mother in the name of Jesus, who once had been so vulnerable to death himself.

From that day, Melissa said, her fear left her and has never returned. Nor has the man of her daymare. The baby grew strong and healthy, and turned out to be the sweetest, most uncomplaining child you’ve ever met, a star child who started laughing a full month before any other baby I’ve ever known, a vector of joy to all who see him. A reason to go on. And this, she says fiercely, THIS is how God comes. This is how God reminds me that I am not alone, and that no matter what happens, no matter how hard things seem, God will provide, and God will glorify even what seems like a disaster.

There is likely a rational explanation for everything that has happened to Melissa. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a miracle.

Hearing this story might make us say, How dare we complain about our lives in the face of such suffering? My pain is nothing to that. And yet our pain grants us entry into another’s pain. One day when Melissa was on a Zoom with me and my dear, motherly friend Lupita in Mexico, Lupita said “El dolor es el misterio que nos une a Dios.” Sadness is the mystery that unites us to God.

Do you dare to have a vulnerable Christmas, a Christmas unburied by the weight of expectations, a raw, real first-Christmas Christmas? A Christmas in which our pain and our grief and our loss unite us with God and each other, and through some mysterious alchemy become poignant, soul-stabbing joy?

Follow Mary and the child into the shadowed, the cold, the exposed, the unknown, the mystery, the giving to the light. Be not afraid. When you find her there, join her in praising God no matter what may come, and invite her into warmth and safety. Then sing a song of soul-stabbing joy.