A Simple Christmas Part 2

My aunt Louise was married to Jack Casey, and they lived in Texas, where he was from. He scared the living daylights out of me because he was a giant of a man-probably six foot six in a day when tall men were maybe five foot ten. He was tall and big and a stern disciplinarian. My parents were pretty strict too, but they weren't so tall that they had to literally duck to go through a door, like he did, so they weren't as intimidating. Because Uncle Jack and Aunt Louise's three kids were closest in age to my sister and me, we probably played with them most and were closest to them even though we saw them only at Christmas and sometimes Easter. As fierce and imposing as Uncle Jack was, Aunt Louise was soft-spoken, even tempered, and ever so calm. When Janet and I married and later lived in Fort Worth, we were able to see the Caseys more often, and I was amazed by how tame Uncle Jack was. Maybe as a child I thought he was the giant from "Jack and the Beanstalk" or the guy who David had to take down with a sling, but it turned out he was the "gentle giant" after all.

My aunt Elsie and her husband Alvin presented the most interesting of family connections. She was my mother's sister, but her husband was Alvin Huckabee, my dad's cousin. His dad and my grandfather were brothers. It gets worse-his mother and my grandmother were sisters. Unravel the string in all this and no one actually married a sister or even a cousin, but it was about as close as a bloodline could get without dipping into a very shallow gene pool. In the old days, when people in my grandparents' day were "courting," there was usually only one horse-driven wagon per family. When one of the males went to see a female, the siblings rode along and could choose someone from the same farm to date if they wanted-quite a limited selection! There were no cell phones then, and most of my relatives didn't own cars until the 1930s or later, so we ended up with some close calls on genetic separation. That meant that my cousin Sandy Carl and his sister Cindy are my first, double second, and third cousins. Make fun of me if you want to, but if I ever need someone to donate a kidney to me, just think of the possibilities of a genetic match!

There was also my aunt Emilie and her husband Leon, whom we liked because he was a cop and would put handcuffs on us so we could see what they felt like (not too pleasant, actually). Given the notorious stories of our ancestors, I suppose there was some part of us that figured we needed to get used to the feel just in case we repeated history!

The youngest of the Elder offspring was Uncle Junior. He was actually William Thomas Elder Jr., which sounded more distinguished, but I wasn't aware that he had a name other than "Junior" until I was in high school. He had served briefly in the Marine Corps and had played drums in the high-school band but never graduated.

Since my mother was the oldest, after she finished high school, she went straight to work to help provide for the family. This was especially important at that time because her father was dying and leaving them with more needs and fewer resources. Three of my aunts, Louise, Elsie, and Emilie, were able to do what my mother wanted but never got to do-go to college. Louise and Elsie were both schoolteachers, and Emilie worked in a law office.

Christmas on the Huckabee side of the family was much less complicated. My dad had only one sister, and she was fifteen years younger than him. My paternal grandparents lived directly across the street from us, so we saw them every day. My great-grandfather was Lucious Huckabee-a name I'd never heard before, nor have I ever heard it since, considering probably no one ever thought to name their kid after him. He was most charitably described as a "rascal." That was just a nicer way of saying that he was a woman-chasing, heavy-drinking, hard-living, and hot-tempered old man who had succeeded in alienating himself from all of his children during the course of his lifetime. That didn't seem to affect his health, however, as he lived to be more than a hundred years old. I tried to hide this story from my children out of fear that they might a.s.sume that the path to longevity is drinking, fighting, cussing, smoking, and abandoning one's family responsibilities. I met him on several occasions, but my memories of him are limited and not especially fond. My grandfather never spoke of him-ever. He and my grandfather had it out when my grandfather was a young man, and as soon as my grandfather was old enough, he ran away, joined the navy, and served on a destroyer during World War I. After he came home from the navy, he went to work at the Hope Brick Works, where he worked until his retirement. His was a simple life-he worked eighty hours a week (at least six days a week) and due to stomach ulcers ate only green pea soup and saltines. I mean, literally, that's what he ate every day, except at breakfast, when he ate Grape-Nuts cereal. He worked in a hot and sweaty environment, baking bricks and doing a lot of heavy lifting and hard "he-man" work. He always smelled like a combination of green pea soup and Absorbine Jr., a rub-on potion that was supposed to ease the soreness in his overused muscles. The only other medicine he believed in was a combination of WD-40 and Dr. Tichenor's. Dr. Tichenor's was an "old school" all-purpose elixir that was actually nothing but alcohol and strong peppermint oil, but my grandfather swore by both. He used the WD-40 on his elbows and knees as a "joint lubricant" and believed that it was much better than any other painkiller on the market.

Because so many of the Huckabees were estranged from my great-grandfather, and my grandfather and grandmother only had two kids, Christmas on that side of the family was much easier. A few gifts to open with a small gathering of the immediate family was about all there was to the Huckabee Christmas.

As the years went by, families grew and scattered, life became more complicated, and the older relatives died off, the annual Christmas gatherings of the Elder family ended. At the time, I was glad because it meant fewer broken toys and tobacco-puffing adults filling up a house telling the same old, tired stories about their childhood that everyone had heard a million times. But now I realize that had it not been for those evenings of storytelling and embellis.h.i.+ng the tales of our ancestors, we would have had no real connection to who we were, where we had come from, and what made us the way we were. I'm sure that somewhere there are sociologists and anthropologists who might find deeper meaning in all of those stories and the people behind them. Those stories helped me understand a vital truth about who I was. As the prophet Isaiah said, "Look to the rock from which you were hewn; to the quarry from which you were dug." As my dad warned, there are things in that family tree I didn't need (or want) to see, and I have always hoped that others wouldn't see them either, but there are more things I'm happy to see, and in recent years, I've found myself looking for them more and more. Life then was not complicated by Xboxes, laptops, iPhones, or security checks at airports. In fact, there was no airport issue for me then, because I never imagined that I'd ever get to fly on a plane, much less live on one, which is more or less what I do now.

Back then we traveled by car, except for my Uncle Garvin, who came by bus. As the little house got increasingly crowded and the noise level increased, there was no irritation or sense of disruption, but rather a sense that this was what Christmas was all about. We weren't distracted by video games, the Internet, or high-def TV. Besides, the stories from our family were a lot more entertaining than anything on TV, especially back then, and instead of three channels, we had dozens of relatives to choose from who were more than happy to regale us with tales of yesteryear.

Life was pretty simple. It was just about family, mostly. And the family Christmas. Then, life was simple. The family wasn't, but Christmas was. Christmas might have seemed like a ha.s.sle back then-with the loud relatives, destructive cousins, and constant cigarette smoke, but looking back on it, I appreciate how genuine it was. Sure, my family may have been a bit complicated, but the Christmas was always simple.

Traditions.

Why do we do what we do at Christmas? Why do we do the same things the same way at the same time and with the same people? From the food we eat to the decorations we hang on the tree to the way we exchange gifts to the ritual of having one of the children in the family read the Christmas story from Luke 2, traditions are as much a part of what makes Christmas special as the meaning behind it. Those traditions give us comfort and familiarity and a sense of well-being. Traditions don't have to be fancy or costly-they just have to be consistent. We keep them because we need them to rea.s.sure us that, no matter how crazy our lives become and how many things change, there are some things that will stay the same, and those are the things that anchor us to who we are. The older I get, the more I cherish traditions, especially at Christmas.

I will spend more nights in a hotel this year than I will at home. Far more. Somewhere between 200 and 250 nights this year I will sleep in a hotel room and live like a vagabond-living out of a suitcase, dining on takeout, and hopping from airplane to airplane. I will, for the most part, stay in one of the Marriott brands for a reason that probably only makes sense to fellow frequent travelers. I choose Marriott because it's predictable, or, put another way, familiar.

When a person spends so much of his time changing cities, hotels, and locations on an almost nightly basis, it's a comfort to not have to totally reorient to the little things every day. I think I would be a great consultant to airlines and hotel chains because I could explain to them how to do a better job of keeping repeat customers! I don't care about beautiful lobbies and elaborate water features in the atrium-I want to be able to pull my bags into the room at the end of an exhausting day and have such a sense of familiarity that I don't feel disconnected from my routine.

I know that the room layout in a Courtyard by Marriott hotel is pretty much the same in Los Angeles as it is in Des Moines and Charlotte. I know how the clocks and TVs work; I know how many pillows I will have, what the shampoo and soap will be packaged in, and how the thermostat works. I know what kind of shower the room will have and what the towels will feel like. Same for the other Marriott brands, where there is an overall consistency from town to town, hotel to hotel, and room to room.

When I can't be home to enjoy the comfort and familiarity of my home and my family (my wife and three dogs), the least I can ask for is not having to waste any time relearning the nuances of a hotel in which I will only be staying a few hours. It's not nice artwork on the walls or elaborate fixtures that matter to me, but good Internet connections, quiet rooms, and people authorized to fix a problem on-site if it arises.

Essentially, it's creating a "tradition." We get comfort and a sense of calm from things happening the same way each time. It is the sociological equivalent of navigation points on our psychological GPS systems that tell us that, as long as at least some things stay constant in our lives, we are okay and things are on track.

This is especially important at Christmas, when we take the time to reconnect with people and reflect on our lives. Though we may have changed jobs, moved, had a health crisis, or experienced the death of a family member in the past year, Christmas traditions give us security and peace of mind. One of my close Catholic friends once explained to me why he loved and appreciated the very predictable and routine Catholic liturgy. He told me that no matter where in the world he was, he could go to a Catholic church and have the exact same service that he would have had at home. It was comforting to him that, in the midst of total turmoil and turbulence in the world, there was one place where the traditions gave him a deep sense of whole-ness and tranquility. That made sense and helped me appreciate the attraction for many Catholics who take comfort in the fact that their church will be stable and constant. Since I come from the free-church model of evangelical theology, the constant in my church experience was the doctrine and the adherence to more rigid interpretations of the Bible. The church we attend is very nontraditional. The wors.h.i.+p and music are contemporary-the polar opposite of the form of wors.h.i.+p we had when we were younger. But even this modern church has traditions, or ways of doing things that are predictable and therefore comforting.

I've taken several trips across the state of Arkansas, from the northwest corner to the southeast corner, traveling solely by way of my Ba.s.sCat ba.s.s boat. Navigating the Arkansas River for 308 miles is a wonderful experience and allows me to experience the sheer splendor of my state's beauty like no other method. But I know that I have to pay very careful attention to the red and green navigation markers in the navigable channel or risk running aground in shallows or hitting rock jetties under the surface. When we have no navigation markers to guide us, we can run aground.

Christmas traditions are a part of what keeps us "in the channel." I feel sorry for people who have no real Christmas traditions and wonder if they sometimes feel as though the holiday is just another hectic, confusing, and stressful time of year, rather than a peaceful and serene season.

Growing up, our family had traditions that provided a source of certainty in an otherwise uncertain world. From my earliest memories, I can remember the Sat.u.r.day expedition that my dad and I would take a couple of weeks before Christmas for the annual Christmas tree hunt. We would go to my uncle's farm and traipse through the woods looking for a small cedar tree that we'd cut down, drag back to my dad's pickup truck, and haul home to be mounted in a bucket (that was its base) and decorated. The excursion meant I had to put on my little rubber boots to keep my feet warm and dry as we walked for a long time through pastures, fields, and forests until we found our Christmas tree. As I look at the photos from those days, it appears that our trees would make the Charlie Brown Christmas tree seem fit for the White House! But we were always proud to have it, and because we got it at my uncle's farm, it was free. I was always amazed that people went to Christmas tree lots and bought trees. I wanted to put my head out the truck window and scream, "People, there are trees in the woods!"

Most of the trees we had were cedar. I knew that the cedar branches could really irritate my arms when I had to handle the tree, but I was in my twenties when I found out that I was actually allergic to cedar trees! That's why my skin itched and my throat was scratchy and my nose was runny-Christmas was killing me.

While the "men" were out doing the "manly" task of chopping down one of G.o.d's trees, the "womenfolk" (mother and sister) stayed at home doing what they always did on that day-make divinity candy, chocolate chip cookies, and roasted pecans. The pecans were from our own two highly productive pecan trees, and the recipe to roast them is one I still use every year. It's one of the few recipes from my mother's mental library that I actually learned, and it turns out I'm not the only one who thinks those are the best roasted pecans ever. Every year when I make them, I'm told they are the best. (Of course, usually the people who tell me that are those who work for me and therefore aren't about to tell me that my pecans are garbage, but they are good.) Too bad I didn't learn the cookie or divinity recipe.

Once we had the scrawny little tree, which seemed big to me at the time, all set up, it was time to decorate. We had the same gla.s.s ornaments that had been carefully tucked away in boxes and stored in the attic from the year before. Seeing them each year gave me such a sense of comfort. Those delicate and colorful little b.a.l.l.s of gla.s.s had survived another year, and so had we. The "girls" put the ornaments on, but first my dad wired up the lights. This meant rolling the string of lights out on the floor and testing the bulbs and replacing the ones that hadn't survived their year in storage. The most vivid Christmas memory my sister and I have is probably one of my dad, who one year accidently stuck his finger into an empty light socket and felt the full impact of 110 volts of electricity. He was momentarily frozen in a cartoonlike pose, eyes bugged out, uttering a profanity (I will spare you) that, due to the electricity, just dragged out for several seconds. Had it killed him, we probably wouldn't have found it so funny, but it didn't kill him. It nearly killed us, though, as we almost died with laughter listening to his electrically charged and elongated expression of a word that was a synonym for feces. I will use the more appropriate subst.i.tute but try to ill.u.s.trate the sound in writing: "Shooooooooooooooooooooooooot!" Okay, you had to be there, but believe me when I tell you it was worth the price of that month's electric bill.

In addition to the trip to the woods for the tree and the decorations, Christmas was filled with other familiar traditions that I fondly recall and a few that I just recall, without so much fondness.

The Hope Fire Department hosted a Christmas dinner for the firemen and their families each year. The fire trucks were moved outside of the station, and the entire interior was turned into a large dining hall with long tables set up for the big dinner, which included all the typical turkey and dressing, vegetables, and desserts imaginable. The big moment of the night was near the end, when Santa Claus himself came and gave every kid a great big peppermint candy cane. We also got to tell him what we wanted for Christmas, even though by that time I had already sent a letter to the North Pole and was somewhat disappointed that he didn't remember all that stuff I had listed. But this also gave me hope that he had forgotten what a little monster I had been throughout the year and that maybe he would cut me some slack and give me something better than the lump of coal I'd been threatened with. After Santa came with the candy, he headed back to the North Pole (it's a long trip from Arkansas, and he had a lot of toys left to make anyway). Then came the part that, as kids, we looked forward to even more than Santa-we got to take a ride around town on one of the big fire trucks and even got to ring the bell and blow the siren. I can only imagine the blistering press treatment a fire department would receive today if it loaded a bunch of kids onto a city-owned truck and drove them around town shattering the peace and quiet of the night with sirens and clanging bells. Not to mention the liability the department would incur for having those kids in the truck in the first place. Of course, those didn't even include the risks we took by repeatedly sliding down the big bra.s.s fire poles that connected the upstairs sleeping quarters to the area where the trucks were. One other thing happened at that firemen's supper that made it even more exciting-the firemen opened up the soft-drink machine and instead of making us pay ten cents for a c.o.ke as usual, they would give them to us for free! How good could it get?

Back then Christmas traditions weren't limited to places of employment. In those days, schoolteachers didn't know what the ACLU was and would have laughed them out of town if they had dared suggest we stop singing Christmas carols, telling the Christmas story, or having a Christmas party in school. Every Christmas at Brookwood Elementary, which I attended through the sixth grade, each student in our cla.s.s put their name in a bowl and then we all drew names to see who we would get a gift for. One of the kids in our cla.s.s was a Jehovah's Witness, and since they don't observe Christmas celebrations, he was always excused from this drawing and didn't come to school on the day of the party. In today's world, his parents would have sued the bricks off the school, and we never would have had the Christmas party. None of us thought of it as a big deal that our cla.s.smate didn't partic.i.p.ate and frankly respected the fact that he took his faith so seriously.

The teacher put limits on how much we could spend for each gift-never more than a dollar in the years I attended-so that everyone got an equally good gift. Of course, we always got the teacher something as well, but I don't recall what I ever got any of my teachers since my mother handled that-I just wanted to make sure that the gift I gave a cla.s.smate didn't make him cry because he thought it was c.r.a.ppy. And, of course, I hoped that the gift I received didn't make me cry because I thought it was c.r.a.ppy.

The only thing more exciting than being able to goof around all day in school on the last day before Christmas break was knowing that we'd have two weeks out of school. It meant that Uncle Garvin would be coming for a visit and that we'd have more time to sneak open our presents during the day and play with them while our parents were still at work. Christmas vacation, here we come!

Of course, home, work, and school weren't the only places we had Christmas traditions. If there ever was a place where things stayed the same, it was church. They really couldn't afford to change anything about Christmas, which was fine by me. There was always a Christmas pageant where all the kids in Sunday school would sing a carol or two at a special service. It was one way of making sure all the parents showed up for church at least once a year, because they'd come to watch their kids sing even though they might not come and hear the preacher scream.

Preachers at my little Baptist church in those days tended to do a lot of screaming, which literally scared the h.e.l.l out of me and also did a good job of keeping me wide awake. It didn't work for everyone, though. Because I couldn't understand all the sermon material, I would usually occupy my time by observing two men in our church. One was an older gentleman who loved church because apparently it was the best sleep he got all week. I think the preacher had to scream just to be heard over the sound of his snoring. (I would use names here, but there are families of these guys who are still around, and even though I don't think I could get sued for slander, why take the risk?) The other man said "Amen!" really loudly to basically everything the preacher said. I figured that was the stuff that was really good, since it evoked such a strong, outward, verbal affirmation from the man my sister and I affectionately called Mr. Amen. We would count the number of amens in a service, and it was about as accurate a way to judge the quality of the sermon as Siskel and Ebert's thumbs were to gauge the quality of a movie. I remember one nineteen-amen sermon, which set the record for amens in one service. Average amens were about twelve per Sunday.

Christmas church was different from regular Sunday church. The preacher didn't scream as much but instead read from either Luke 2 or the first couple of chapters of Matthew to tell the story that we already knew pretty well anyway. I kind of felt sorry for the preacher at Christmas because you could tell he was trying to make the story interesting so we'd respond more like Mr. Amen than like Mr. Rip Van Winkle. I also think he didn't scream because the whole sermon was about the "baby Jesus" and screaming at a baby just seemed a bit over the top.

For the church Christmas pageant, the kids gathered up bathrobes and broom handles from home and used them to dress up like the shepherds and the wise men. Later I found out that the real wise men in the story were rich big shots, while the shepherds were poor and smelled like their sheep. But in our pageants, they all looked and smelled pretty much the same. Whichever older girl in our church could sit still the longest got to be Mary. She had to pretty much sit in the same spot through the entire pageant and look at the plastic doll in her arms and soak in all the songs that the rest of us were paraded in by age groups to sing. The littlest kids came in first, followed by the kids from each age group until we got to the "big kids" in the sixth grade. They were the oldest ones who had to do the pageant thing. Once past the sixth grade, the teenagers, who didn't think singing "Silent Night" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" was cool anymore, pretty much rebelled, so they got to watch like the adults. But there is one truly remarkable thing about those pageants-they packed people in. People who wouldn't have shown up at the church if it had caught fire came to see their own children or their nieces and nephews line up and sing Christmas songs. It was really fun to watch and see which kids would panic when they saw all the people in the audience. They would cry, and their parents would have to come to the front of the church and rescue them. Then there were the kids who loved every minute of it and sang at the top of their lungs and drowned everyone else out. One kid in particular was actually louder than the preacher was when he screamed. And then there was always at least one kid who felt obligated to empty his nose with one of his fingers while performing. All of this to show our love and respect for the birth of the Messiah!

For me, Christmas represented consistency. In a world of uncertainty and confusion, at least one thing held true-Christmas would be celebrated pretty much the same way each year. And of course the whole "birth of Jesus in Bethlehem's manger" story never changed, but it never seemed to bother us that we knew the whole thing from start to finish by heart. We wanted to hear it again-without changes or edits.

Through the years, my traditions have changed as I've aged, moved, and lost and added members of the family, but new practices became traditions as well. After my sister and I grew up, got married, and had our own children, we still usually went to our parents' house on Christmas Eve to open our gifts and celebrate. When we were little we celebrated most of our Christmases on Christmas Eve night because Dad had to work at the fire station on Christmas morning. The fire station is one of those places that doesn't get to close down for the holiday, and in fact, there was almost always a big fire at Christmas because people put up Christmas lights improperly or put a dried-out Christmas tree too close to a fire. We liked this tradition because it meant we got our presents the night before most of our friends did. Our parents told us that Santa made a special trip and came early to our house, and we actually believed it. I think it's one of the reasons that I didn't grow up thinking we were as poor as it turned out we were-I figured if we were important enough to warrant a special early visit from Santa, we must be a pretty big deal around Hope, Arkansas!

One of the toughest adjustments to make after Janet and I married was how to celebrate Christmas. It's difficult for every married couple; how do you combine the traditions of one family with the traditions of another? It might be easier to get Israel and the Palestinians to the peace table than to resolve some of the challenges of merging two very different family rituals into one harmonious Christmas experience.

Since my family traditions were the only ones I knew, I was pretty certain that they were the "right ones." The thought of doing Christmas differently was obviously blasphemous. If G.o.d had wanted us to have ambrosia instead of chocolate pie and crispy chocolate chip cookies as dessert, he would have written that somewhere in the Bible. The only reason explicit instructions about the chocolate pie and chocolate chip cookies were not in the Holy Writ was because everyone already knew that was the official Christmas dessert.

I did my best to hide my irritation that at Janet's house they couldn't start the Christmas dinner without ambrosia. I actually recall someone actually saying, "We can't have Christmas without the ambrosia." The heck we couldn't! I could have a lifetime of Christmases without it. I couldn't even spell it and didn't really know what it was, and when I finally learned I cared even less. As of this writing, I have been married almost thirty-six years, and I am proud to say that I have never once touched that ambrosia. I'm sure it tastes wonderful, and if it were Easter or Mother's Day, I might try it. But I have my principles!

Have you ever pondered that our traditions take on a heightened sense of certainty and become a part of the "right and wrong" way of the holiday? We tend to think that any of the activities that don't follow the script of what we're used to are not just different but wrong. Morally wrong!

I'm certain that Mary and Joseph missed having some familiar things around them the night Jesus was born. There was nothing to give them a sense of place or comfort. They were about as far removed from familiar things as they could be. Of course, they created the most important Christmas tradition themselves that night, since they were actually creating Christmas. They weren't thinking about pie or cookies, and they sure weren't thinking about ambrosia! That all sounds silly and childish when you think about what Christmas is really about, but I don't think it actually is. We establish traditions to give us connections to our past and a sense of security about the uncertainties of our future.

After both of my parents died, the idea of getting together on Christmas Eve the same old way seemed too much a painful reminder that they weren't there. So Janet and I started doing something totally different. We would attend our church's Christmas Eve service, and then my sister's family and ours would go out to eat Chinese food before gathering at our house for a brief time to observe Christmas. Now what on earth does Chinese food have to do with Christmas? Not a thing, but my dad loved Chinese food, and maybe it was our way of saying that the holiday is both a "sweet and sour" memory of the good times and the fact that our parents aren't with us anymore. Now, having Chinese food on Christmas Eve after our church's special service is as much a tradition as it once was to cut down a cedar tree, make divinity, roast pecans, and watch our dad cuss when he put his finger into the empty light sockets.

Most of our traditions aren't elaborate ones. They don't have to be. They're special because they happen every year, not because they are expensive or complicated. And they make for a very wonderful but a very simple Christmas.

Crisis.

My wife Janet and I thought that 1975 was going to be such a good year, but instead it was a series of crises that escalated into the most trying days of our young marriage.

Janet and I were married on May 25, 1974, when we were both just eighteen years old. At the time, I was studying theology and communications at Ouachita Baptist University and had determined that if I loaded up my cla.s.s schedule each semester and took cla.s.ses in the summer and in January during the "J Term," I could earn my four-year degree in two years and three months. That would save a lot of money, which was important, since I was paying for college from my earnings from working at KVRC Radio in Arkadelphia and as a part-time weekend pastor at a tiny little church in town.

We couldn't afford for both of us to be in school at the same time, so after we married, Janet suspended her education after her freshman year and went to work in a local dental office as a dental a.s.sistant. The job paid about sixty dollars a week, but between the two of us, we were able to make our forty-dollar-a-month rent payments for the little three-room duplex we occupied and eat very modestly and creatively. Whenever we cooked meat or vegetables, we took the leftovers and added them to an ever-filling Tupperware container that we kept in the freezer. When it got full of leftover hamburger meat, beans, corn, chunks of ham, onion, or whatever else hadn't been consumed, we'd thaw it, put it in a large pot, add tomato sauce, and eat what we affectionately called garbage soup. It was actually quite good and different each time we had it, and it definitely helped cut down on grocery bills. Another of our budget-stretching techniques was to take stale bread crumbs and mix them with milk to make a stuffing that we'd place in pieces of bologna and bake-we called that stuffed Arkansas round steak. To really dress it up, we'd bake it with melted cheese on top.

Life for Janet and me was simple but good. We were young, healthy, and invincible, and we had the entire world ahead of us. So we thought.

In February of 1975, Janet came home from work with pain in her back. We a.s.sumed it was the result of her standing on her feet all day, hovering over dental patients next to Dr. James Gla.s.s and Dr. Robin Gla.s.s, a married pair of dentists who practiced together in Arkadelphia. At her height, maybe it was the standing and bending over that was causing it, but what started out as just back soreness escalated into rather acute pain. Certain positions, even sitting, made it worse, and the normal home remedies like heat packs and aspirin weren't helping.

A visit to a local physician ended with a diagnosis of back strain and a prescription for some muscle relaxers, mild pain medication, and bed rest. The medicine was barely affordable, but the bed rest would have meant no work and no pay, and that combination wasn't a great option for us. We needed the money from both of our incomes to pay for Janet's medicine and our rent. Several weeks of rest when possible and medicine didn't yield any relief.

Some friends from our church recommended chiropractic treatments, so we decided to try them out. The chiropractor we went to was a wonderful man who gave it his best shot but told us after about six weeks of regular treatments that he didn't think he was helping and recommended seeing an orthopedic specialist instead. I appreciated his efforts, but, more important, his honesty. I have used chiropractors for various ailments through the years with great success, but my confidence in them actually started with the one who admitted that he couldn't help Janet instead of continuing to take our money just because he could have.

Our family physician in Arkadelphia suggested hospitalization and traction. It was not an expense we were prepared for, but fortunately we had taken out a health-insurance policy when we married because my dad insisted on it. The policy cost $17.34 a month, which was a lot of money to us then, but it turned out to be a G.o.dsend. After a week in the local hospital with no measurable improvement, Janet was referred to an orthopedic surgeon in Little Rock, about seventy-five miles from Arkadelphia. I still remember his confident, almost c.o.c.ky att.i.tude as he walked in and announced that Janet had a "textbook case" of a ruptured disc in her lower spine. "Textbook," he said. No ifs, ands, or buts, this was a ruptured disc, and it might improve on its own with extended rest or Janet might have to have surgery to repair it. Neither of the options was very appealing given that both meant more money going out of our pockets and no more coming in. I think it was during this time that I acquired my basic understanding of economics (one that I would later wish the federal government understood): When you have fewer dollars coming in, it's not possible to increase the dollars going out.

At least the doctor wasn't in too big a hurry to do surgery. Janet's pain had increased and was at times unbearable. She has a high pain threshold (unlike me, who is highly allergic to any pain and asks to be premedicated with heavy narcotics before a teeth cleaning!), and yet there were times when it was apparent that the intensity of her pain was debilitating to the point of tears. Every time she sat down or stood up was an agonizing struggle. We knew that this couldn't go on indefinitely.

By August of 1975, the orthopedic surgeon wanted to put Janet in a Little Rock hospital and try another round of traction, therapy, and medication with the understanding that if that didn't result in any improvement, surgery and disc repair would be the next course of action. Another week in an even more expensive hospital in Little Rock yielded nothing but medical bills and more lost income. The doctor told us that he would schedule surgery for her in late September. "Textbook stuff," he a.s.sured us.

Surgery was set for the third week of September. I was trying to juggle cla.s.ses during what was my final semester at school, my work schedule, and getting to and from Little Rock every day to make sure Janet was okay. The day before the surgery, the doctor had scheduled a myelogram, an X-ray that involved injecting dye into the spinal area and then viewing the damaged disc to determine exactly where the incision should be.

As I sat alone in the waiting room of the radiology ward, I noticed that the test was taking longer than they had led me to believe. After a while, a nurse appeared and asked me to follow her to a small "consultation room" down the hall. Even though I was barely twenty years old, I knew that wasn't a sign that the doctor was about to give me good news. After what seemed like an eternity, the doctor finally appeared, and when he walked in, I almost didn't recognize him. His face was as white as his lab coat, and his normal proud and rather c.o.c.ky att.i.tude had been replaced by a very humble spirit. He seemed to be fumbling for words before he said, "I've canceled your wife's surgery for tomorrow. The myelogram revealed that it's not a disc after all." (So much for that textbook.) "Your wife has a tumor, and it's located within the ca.n.a.l of her spine and I can't operate in there. I have called in a neurosurgeon who will come and visit with you and explain what the options are."

With that, he left, and I sat there alone trying to soak in what he had just told me.

Cancer.

That's a word that twenty-year-old healthy women (or their twenty-year-old husbands) aren't supposed to be faced with, but here I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my wife had it.

Within a few hours, Dr. Thomas Fletcher, a Little Rock neurosurgeon, walked into Janet's room at Doctors Hospital. His gentle and soft-spoken manner was comforting and rea.s.suring, but his words cut right to our hearts. The tumor was embedded within the spinal ca.n.a.l and was possibly inoperable. If this was the case, there wouldn't be any treatment to cure Janet, just efforts to make the remaining days of her short life as comfortable as possible. If the tumor had not spread or could be reached, then we needed to be prepared for the likelihood that, in removing it, there would be a severing of or severe damage to the spinal cord and Janet would be paralyzed from just above the waist down for the rest of her life. Those were the two scenarios that Dr. Fletcher prepared us for, and neither gave us much hope. There in the quiet fourth-floor hospital room, it seemed that our future had been dashed on the rocks of reality.

If there was a silver lining in this cloud, my tear-filled eyes couldn't see it. I did my best to outwardly show confidence and optimism, primarily to keep Janet from giving up and also to further the facade that my faith was unshaken and firm in the face of such unexpected news.

Dr. Fletcher told us that with our approval he would schedule surgery in the next few days and would do what he could, but at the same time, he told us to understand that while we would hope for the best, he could not promise us a good outcome. He had diagnosed the tumor as a rare type of cancer that tended to reappear in other areas of the spine if there was reoccurrence. Later we came to understand that in some forms of cancer, if there is no reoccurrence after five years, the patient is considered cured, but with others a ten-year period has to pa.s.s before the patient is considered clear. Janet had the ten-year version.

The surgery was scheduled for September 29, 1975. Janet and I had been married for one year, four months, and four days. I was on schedule to complete my BA degree in December, and because of the accelerated pace at which I had worked on my degree, the fall semester of 1975 turned out to be my lightest of all. In fact, I only had to complete eight academic hours to fulfill my degree requirements, and six of those were for a cla.s.s that I was taking on Tuesday and Thursday nights, so that meant that by sheer Providence, I would have more free time than usual to take care of my sick young wife.

Of course, just when you don't think things can get worse, they usually do. While I was in the hospital room visiting Janet, someone broke into my car in broad daylight in the hospital parking lot and stole a CB radio and a little briefcase that contained a Bible, some college textbooks, and some cla.s.s notes from a theology course I was taking. While I could see the irony in the thief opening the briefcase and finding a Bible and cla.s.s notes for a course in biblical studies, the thought that a thief who was probably wealthier than me at that moment would break into my car just about did me in. I truly wondered if G.o.d had moved and left no forwarding address. If He was answering my prayers, He was doing it on a different frequency than the one I was monitoring, and I had to wonder about the why of it all.

Janet had had to leave her job weeks earlier due to the back problems, and we had been forced to make do without her income. On top of that, the church where I worked part time was so small and so broke that, in the very midst of Janet's health crisis, they had had to stop paying me for six weeks because they had run out of money.

In addition to my two jobs, and my new job taking care of Janet, I wrote a weekly column for a Baptist newspaper published in Arkansas. I had been doing this since my junior year of high school, and within the circle of churches affiliated with the Baptist Missionary a.s.sociation of Arkansas (a much smaller denomination than Southern Baptists), I had earned some name recognition. As word spread of the situation with Janet, I received some stunning correspondence from people who pointedly told me that the calamities we were experiencing were surely "G.o.d's punishment" for some untold evil one or both of us had committed. How anyone could be both that stupid and that cold-hearted in the name of Jesus escapes me even now.

But just as some used the brokenness of our lives and spirits like crushed gravel to walk upon, others were incredibly compa.s.sionate, and we were overwhelmed with the kindnesses of both our dear friends and total strangers.

In addition to the nasty notes of condemnation, the mail brought notes of encouragement, often with small amounts of money inside from a Sunday-school cla.s.s in some church we'd never heard of or from some dear, sweet family who had been through something similar and were now offering their encouragement to us. Most of the gifts we received were between five and twenty-five dollars, but at a time when our income had disappeared and our expenses had increased dramatically, we had just enough to make it. My college roommate, Rick Caldwell, was especially instrumental in helping. His dad, a wealthy oil and gas distributor and cattle rancher, helped pay some of the medical bills that our insurance didn't cover and even got some of his friends to join him. It was humbling to have so many people show their kindness to us, but it changed our perspective on the way we lived. Through the years, Janet and I have quietly but regularly given gifts large and small to people we learned were facing a crisis. In some cases, they were people we knew, but in other cases, they were total strangers we'd read about or met as we went about our daily routines.

The surgery was scheduled for 7:00 A.M., and we had been told that it could last eight hours or more, so we were prepared for a long wait. Janet's mother, Pat, drove up from Hope to be there. She brought some knitting to work on to keep her mind occupied for what we a.s.sumed would be a very long, tedious, and exhausting day. Dr. Fletcher had explained that his likely course of action was to make the incision in the lower back around lumbar vertebrae five and six, use a surgical microscope to see how embedded the tumor was inside the spinal ca.n.a.l, and then attempt to remove it by sc.r.a.ping it away from the spinal cord. The degree to which it had attached itself to the spinal cord would determine the permanent damage that would be done to save her life or would indicate that the tumor was inoperable, in which case it was only a matter of time before her body could no longer fight off the aggressive invader.

At about 9:30 in the morning, I was standing in the hall near the surgical waiting room talking with a visitor who had dropped by to offer prayers and encouragement when I thought I saw Dr. Fletcher walking toward me down the long hallway. As he got closer, I noticed that not only was it definitely Dr. Fletcher, but he wasn't wearing his surgical scrubs and had already changed into a suit and tie as if heading to his office. The fact that we had not received any indication of the progress of the surgery nor had any update from a nurse or other hospital personnel added to the size of the lump in my throat as he approached and asked to visit privately with Janet's mother and me. The only thing I could think was that either Janet hadn't made it through the surgery or that Dr. Fletcher had opened her up, looked at the situation, and simply closed her back up. I tried to brace myself for horrible news. The worried look on my mother-in-law's face quickly gave way to tears as she too realized the news that she was likely about to hear.

Dr. Fletcher then calmly and gently told us that when he had gotten to the tumor, expecting it to be firmly attached or wrapped in the spinal cord, he had started the extraction and it had simply dislodged. He said he was surprised, but he had been able to remove the four- or five-inch elongated tumor that had grown inside the bony structure of her spine. I'll never forget him saying, "I think you guys had a lot of people praying for her . . . and me."

He was right.

The next few hours were tense and seemed to last forever. While the tumor had dislodged and been removed, only time would tell if there had been any permanent damage to the spinal cord and with it, a lifetime of paralysis. After Janet was brought out of the ICU and into her room, we waited and watched to see if there was movement in her legs-that would be the sign that she had not experienced irreversible damage. She was heavily sedated, and we were told that it would be a while before the anesthetic wore off enough for her to regain movement. It was almost 4:00 P.M. when the stillness of the room was interrupted by the sudden movement of her feet under the covers. Everyone in the room wept with joy at a simple but very rea.s.suring movement that ordinarily we would have taken for granted. We wouldn't take anything for granted after that.

As relieved as we were that the worst seemed to be over, the postoperative period brought its own challenges. Due to the nature of the tumor, Dr. Fletcher advised that Janet undergo six weeks of intense radiation therapy to eradicate any cancer cells that the surgery might have missed. Other than the normal downside to radiation (especially in 1975, when some of the procedures were primitive by today's standards), we were warned that the location of the radiation in the lower part of her back and pelvis would likely mean that the inevitable damage done to her ovaries would make having children impossible. This was devastating news, naturally, but in the past few months, we had learned to live with what we had now, not what we hoped might happen in the future. Without the radiation we knew there might not be a future.

After a week in the hospital recovering, Janet was ready to come home to our little duplex in Arkadelphia. It consisted of two rooms, a living room and a tiny bedroom, plus a small kitchen and a bathroom that was so small that there was barely room to stand sideways between the tub and the sink and toilet. I rented a hospital bed from a local medical supply store and set it up in the living room. It pretty much took up the entire room, but it was a necessary inconvenience for the next several weeks, since Janet would have limited mobility and would need a bar over the bed to be able to lift herself so she could have her sheets changed or move the bedpan. She had to be brought back home in an ambulance because she wasn't able to walk yet. We had a couple of weeks at home for her to start the recovery process before she would start the radiation therapy.

I piled pillows, blankets, and an old camping mattress in the backseat of the car so she could lie down for the drive to and from Little Rock each day once the radiation got under way. This meant leaving the apartment around five fifteen each morning for the seventy-five-mile trip each way. We would arrive a little after seven o'clock, and she would have her treatment. The actual radiation lasted only about four minutes each day, but the preparation took about forty-five minutes. Shortly after eight o'clock, we'd be on our way back to Arkadelphia. I'd help her out of the car, partially carry her to the house, and get her settled back in the hospital bed, and then it would be time for me to head off to work or to cla.s.s. I'd check in through the day before returning home to make dinner and help her get to sleep, and then I'd study until I fell asleep and the next morning's alarm went off at four thirty for us to get up and do it all again.

Five days a week for six straight weeks we made the trip. By the time we had finished, Janet had regained the ability to walk una.s.sisted, which in itself was progress. It was early December when the radiation treatments ended and so did my course requirements for my degree. For months, we had planned on moving to Fort Worth, Texas, following my graduation so I could enroll at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, where I hoped to further prepare for what I thought was a future in some form of Christian broadcasting, either radio or television or both. We had feared that all of those plans might have to be delayed, but Janet seemed strong enough to make the move, and frankly, we decided that it was just as easy to be broke and struggling through school in Fort Worth as to be broke and not even going to school in Arkansas. I applied, was accepted, and then received notice that we had been accepted for seminary-owned housing in Fort Worth. The letter said that we'd be living in a two-bedroom house near the campus and the rent would be seventy-five dollars a month. Since our little duplex was forty dollars a month, we were thinking that a two-bedroom house that cost almost twice as much must be some nice place.

My dad helped us move, which wasn't too difficult since we were able to put everything we owned in our car and a small U-Haul trailer, which my dad pulled behind his truck. The move to Fort Worth would be a new beginning and an opportunity to close what had been an instructive but painful chapter in our lives. We would be moving just about a week before Christmas, so this would be the first Christmas since Janet's cancer, and for both of us it was the farthest we'd ever lived from our families. To us, Fort Worth was the "big city," since the biggest place we'd ever lived had been Arkadelphia with about ten thousand people in the entire town.

We carefully followed the instructions and map to get to our new house, which we imagined would have two decent-sized bedrooms with closets, hopefully two bathrooms, a living room, and a kitchen, with maybe a porch and a street with trees and a sidewalk. In our minds, we must have been thinking Leave It to Beaver meets Mayberry.

When we pulled in to the address, we couldn't help it. We both literally started laughing out loud. We had to, because crying wouldn't have helped and at this stage of our lives, we didn't care what kind of house we lived in as long as we were living. So we laughed when we saw that our "two-bedroom" house on Warren Street behind the seminary campus was sitting just off the single-lane, dead-end street and directly in front of the Katy Railroad tracks, which were at best forty yards from the back door. And the back door was really close to the front door, since the entire house couldn't have occupied more than five hundred square feet. The "two bedrooms" were more the size of one with a hastily placed wall stuck in the middle to create another. There was one bathroom, which made the one in our old house look like a palace! The "living room" was barely an entryway to the kitchen, which was about the size of a Pullman kitchen. The floors were made of concrete covered with very cheap linoleum that was coming up in several places. One of our friends came to see us shortly after we moved in and proclaimed it "the Winnebago." That would have been an insult to Winnebago, because even a medium-sized Winnebago is more s.p.a.cious and far more welcoming than our new "house." If the little rectangular house had had wheels, it would have truly looked like a Winnebago with a slightly pitched roof. But it was home and the rent was cheap, and I could walk or ride a bicycle to campus each day.

That year had been a challenge to our finances, our families, our friends, and our faith. There were times when I questioned why G.o.d would allow such an experience to befall us. "Here we are, trying to be decent people and living our lives by believing in You, G.o.d," I would pray. "Why is this happening to us?" It seemed like the answer was "Why not you? Are you too good to experience the hards.h.i.+ps that the rest of the world has to live through?"

In time, the answers would get clearer. When I served as a pastor in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, a few years later, I often entered the hospital room of a family who had received a similar little visit down the hall from a doctor who had uttered the same word I had heard a few years earlier-cancer. I could honestly say to them, "I do know how you feel," and it mattered that I was not just talking about something abstract but speaking from the perspective of having been confronted with all the fears one has when getting that diagnosis. This happened almost every week of my time as a pastor.

We settled in to our little "Winnebago," and I prepared to start cla.s.ses in January while diligently looking for a way to make enough money to pay our rent and my tuition.

By then it was only a few days before Christmas-our first one as "refugees from Arkansas." We had decided to go back to Hope for Christmas Day, even though the trip would be tough on Janet.

The year had been one that had tested us to our core. We had faced down death and disability and survived. I had often prayed that we would experience a sudden and dramatic "miracle" and fully expected on several occasions to walk into the hospital and hear that she had been instantly and supernaturally healed to the complete surprise of the doctors. That never happened. Had it happened, we would have loved it. I could already hear in my mind the powerful testimony we could give about faith and the miracle on the other end of the experience. But it would have been a story that was so grand and so out of the ordinary that most people couldn't have related to it. If the listeners facing cancer didn't have the same outcome, such a testimony likely would have discouraged them into believing that something was wrong with them.

We learned more from taking the long trail instead of the shortcut and more often than not found that having experienced it, we had credibility to bring encouragement to others who had as many valleys as mountaintops.

The Christmas of 1975 was perhaps our simplest ever. Neither of us had money to buy anything for the other that year, but neither of us wanted any "thing" anyway. That year, we celebrated something far greater than a gift that could be wrapped and placed under the tree. Christmas often was the antic.i.p.ation of what we were going to eat or what gifts we would receive or what kind of Christmas lights we would see. Something was dramatically different about this Christmas. We had made it to Christmas, and life and hope were all that we wanted. The lights were just as bright and the Christmas food was just as good, but it was the first Christmas ever that no gift at all could have equaled the one we cherished most. We celebrated life itself, and it was a pretty good reminder of what really matters in life. No one openly talked about death or cancer, but the expressions and subtle comments my family members made that day proved that everyone realized that, but for the grace of G.o.d, Janet might not have been with us that Christmas. I honestly don't remember a thing either of us received that year in the way of gifts, but nothing would have overshadowed the gift we truly cherished-her being alive.

That Christmas we learned that G.o.d's greatest gift to us is not to remove us from crisis, but to walk through crisis with us. He does not do us a favor by taking us out of all the trials and tribulations of life, but strengthens us by giving us the grace to get through them and emerge on the other side having realized that what we thought we couldn't endure we in fact just did. How often do we ask for the gift of escape from a problem and instead it seems to escalate? When we want Christmas to represent the easy path and the glittery gifts, we fail to understand that the real message of the Messiah is that the first Christmas was the opposite of easy. It was more about long stretches of darkness and loneliness, instead of the stunning stars that were eventually seen in the night sky. Before the angels sang and the shepherds saw stars, a scared couple fumbled their way around a strange town and endured pain and humiliation. True faith is forged in the furnace, not the showroom.

It might have been our simplest Christmas ever. We had nothing but family, our traditions, and each other. But as it turned out, those simple things were the best things, and we will always remember 1975 because we celebrated the simplest but most precious gift of all-the gift of life.

Hope.

By the end of the year, Janet and I were glad to get 1975 behind us. A year of progressively worse struggles and downward spirals had left us to believe that we would surely have a better Christmas the next year. We weren't disappointed!

When we got back to Fort Worth after the brief Christmas visit to our families in Hope, it was like starting all over again. We lived in a new place in a new town, and I was starting graduate school in a new environment. Janet was getting stronger and healthier each day, and soon we would both start looking for new jobs.

We had learned during the previous year just how insignificant material things really are in the hierarchy of values. When you aren't sure if you're going to be alive in a few months, having "things" suddenly doesn't seem so important. Janet and I had started our marriage with pretty much nothing, and before we had even reached our second anniversary, we had reduced that by quite a bit! But after the crisis we had just been through, we didn't seem to mind not having a lot of "stuff." Having next to nothing can be a blessing in that it lets you fully appreciate what little you do have, and more important, it makes you grateful that you still have the one thing that does matter-life itself.

Janet found a job as a dental a.s.sistant for a dentist whose office was very near our house and the seminary. It was a perfect job for her, and while the pay wasn't great, it was adequate, and the dentist, Dr. Harold Cohen, was very good to her. He had been an army dentist for several years before going into private practice, and in many ways he still had the military mind-set of how to run things. Janet loved working for him, and although the money was critical for us, her ability to work again was a true blessing in that it affirmed just how alive she was. In a strange way, coming so close to death really brings you closer to life. Those who have stood in the shadow of death quickly learn to appreciate the simple things that remind them, "You are alive." You realize that a job is more than employment; it's a sign of hope and optimism that you are going to be around a while and that there is a future being planned with you in it.

I had come to Fort Worth with the antic.i.p.ation of working for a Christian ministry that had planned on hiring me, but by the time I arrived, the finances of the organization were strained and it was unable to offer me a job. That forced me to hit the streets looking for something-anything-so we could survive. I had completed my training and clinical work to be an EMT and applied at several ambulance services and emergency rooms, but either they weren't hiring or I didn't have enough experience to work in the "big city." I applied for every job I could find, including working on freight docks and waiting tables in restaurants, and was constantly turned away with the worst excuse ever-"You're overqualified." Yes, I was a college graduate who had completed a four-year degree in just over two years and graduated magna c.u.m laude, and yes, I didn't really want to wait tables or ask customers, "Would you like fries or a baked potato?" as a career, but that didn't mean I wasn't willing to work hard. Looking for a job can be humbling. Mustering the courage to ask for the interview and just being told no makes a person feel like a leper. I can fully understand how easy it would be for a person to get utterly frustrated and simply quit looking for a job because the wounds of the process are so painful and the process can be so demeaning. I finally realized that I was trying to get someone to hire me for something I was not likely to do long term because it was clearly not my career goal. Why would someone hire me to wait tables, load freight, or stabilize a victim of a car wreck when it was apparent that I didn't really plan on doing that for the rest of my life?

But there was something I had done since I was fourteen years old and still enjoyed very much-radio. The likelihood I would be hired to be a DJ or a sportscaster in a major market was about zero, but I could freelance and write, produce, and do voice spots. And so I set out to find possible clients. I had some contacts with some megachurches and large Christian organizations and offered to do some spots at no cost that they could then buy if they liked them and wanted to use them. Fortunately for me, they did like them and did pay for them and even recommended me to some other organizations. I was picking up enough work, and between Janet and me, we could cover our rent. Just barely, but we could do it.

If you are thinking these were our worst days, think again. In so many ways, they were our best. We had escaped a galloping terror just months earlier, and if there's one good thing about hitting bottom it's that you know that there's nowhere to go but up. Having been there, you know what it feels like; it's much easier to believe that things are going to get better and that you can handle anything life throws at you.

To save money, Janet and I ate peanut-b.u.t.ter-and-jelly sandwiches and canned soup virtually every day. It was cheap and there was no waste. We varied the flavor of the soup to give ourselves some variety, and grocery shopping was easy. Every Tuesday, a little taco stand not far from our house sold tacos for twenty-five cents each, and we'd splurge and spend fifty cents to treat ourselves to a dinner "out." We can laugh about it now, but that was a big treat for us then.

For my new job, I bought a suit at a factory outlet for $12.50. It was a blue polyester knit suit with patterns on the pocket. I can only pray that no one finds photos of me wearing that hideous thing, but I needed at least one suit for the occasions on which I was invited to speak in a church or do something "important." I had a pair of black dress shoes that I wore with the suit, and for everyday wear, I had an old pair of brown casual shoes with rubber soles that were mo