A Simple Christmas (13 page)

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 spacious 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 God would allow such an experience to befall us. “Here we are, trying to be decent people and living our lives by believing in
You
, God,” 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 hardships 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 classes 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 anticipation 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 God, 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 God'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.

7.

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 assistant 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 anticipation 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 cum 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-butter-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 more comfortable for walking back and forth to class. About halfway through the semester, the sole of one of these shoes separated from the rest of the shoe, and one of the guys in my Greek class made fun of me because he thought I was wearing them to be cool and to show my rebellious and independent streak. I laughed along with him, not wanting him to know that I wasn't wearing worn-out shoes to make some kind of statement. It was simply all I had.