A Simple Christmas (14 page)

I started seminary as a twenty-year-old. The average age of the other students in my classes was thirty, as seminary tended to attract older students who had started a career of one kind only to decide later to pursue a theology degree and do full-time Christian ministry or mission work. As best I could tell, I was the youngest student in any of my classes. Most of the “younger” guys were at least twenty-two or twenty-three, and many were in their forties or even fifties. I looked like a kid compared to them.

Southwestern was at the time the largest Christian seminary in the world, with over 4,000 students on campus. It touted itself as the largest institution in history that provided full-time training for Christian ministry. That meant most of the classes were large, with as many as 110 students packed into a single lecture hall. I was way too timid to try to make myself stand out. I felt like such a small and insignificant part of what was going on there, but I also felt incredibly privileged just to be there.

The academic environment was challenging, but the spirit of the classes was more like that at evangelistic meetings because the professors taught with such passion and fire, not simply reading the yellowed pages of lecture notes prepared a generation earlier. To this day, I recall the glisten in the eyes of Dr. William Tolar as he extolled the power of archaeology in helping to validate the veracity of the Bible; the flame in the voice of Dr. Roy Fish as he urged us to find a way to translate faith into a transferable gift to others through evangelism; and the enthusiasm of Dr. Thomas Urrey (known as “Hurry Urrey” because of the speed at which he expected his students to master the intricacies of the Koine Greek language of the New Testament), who took a dead language (Koine Greek is no longer a spoken language) and brought it to life with his enthusiasm about its precision to give us clarity in the scripture. Even in church history class Dr. William Estep had me on the edge of my seat as he told the narratives.

I looked forward to every day at school, even though I always felt a bit like a fish out of water. I was so much younger than my classmates, I wasn't a “somebody,” and my fashion choices were more warehouse than Wall Street, but being provided a daily dose of hope and optimism helped me overlook these details. The daily chapel services were packed, and each day, my heart was stirred with messages of challenge to “change the world.” It hardly seemed like a twenty-year-old wearing shoes with big holes in them was in a position to change a light-bulb, much less the world, but numerous cells of vision were implanted into my spiritual and intellectual consciousness each day, and now that those days of facing Janet's cancer seemed further away than ever, the future seemed a journey worth taking.

Janet and I had pretty much established our routine by now. During the week, I walked or rode a bicycle to class and she drove to the dental office for work. At lunch, we would both make the short trip to the Winnebago-sized house, where we would have a peanut-butter sandwich and share a can of soup. Then I'd go back to class and then come home to start studying and trying to peddle some of my radio spots. Sundays were, of course, for church, but on Saturdays we tried to dedicate at least half a day to exploring Fort Worth by driving through a section of the city and getting acquainted with it. On one Saturday, we drove to the far western side of the city to the gates of Carswell Air Force Base, which at the time was one of our nation's major bases in the Strategic Air Command. Since we were both from small towns, one of the things that captivated us was the inspiring and majestic sight of the ever-present B-52 bombers flying in and out of Carswell twenty-four hours a day. The closer one got to the base, the more massive those jets became. They were an ominous sight with their one-of-a-kind wing-over-fuselage look and their massive engines ready to fly them literally around the world and back with a nuclear bomb aboard, prepared to face any threat that came their way.

We still laugh with embarrassment when we tell our friends about the day we drove right up to the gates of Carswell and, when the sharply dressed sentinel snapped at us and asked what we wanted, told him, “We just wanted to look around and see the planes.” Judging from the stunned look on his face, he must have thought we were bozos. “Sir,” he said, “this is a SAC base. No visitors are allowed on these premises.”

Hey, we didn't know. We figured they'd love to have us come and look around and be proud of what our tax dollars were supporting. But I guess they figured we could be equally proud watching from
outside
the gates.

Janet's physical condition continued to improve as she regained strength, stamina, and her ability to walk and move without the limitations that the “year from hell” had presented. We had nothing but the used and borrowed furniture that occupied our little “two-bedroom” house, but we had each other and were enjoying life.

We became good friends with several other couples from our church, a few of whom were also in seminary and just as poor as we were. Our friends Jerry and Glenda Woods lived just blocks from us in seminary housing, and to save gas, we would take turns driving to the Hulen Street Baptist Church, where we all attended. Jerry and Glenda were from Tennessee, so they “spoke Southern,” and neither of them had come from wealthy or storied families, so we had much in common. Jerry was preparing to be a pastor, and I was still hoping to work in some form of Christian broadcasting. We had a lot in common, but one big difference between us was that they had a young son. Since we knew that, due to Janet's radiation, we weren't likely to ever be able to have children of our own, we delighted in their two-year-old, Jeremy. We enjoyed watching him grow and sharing milestones in his development. He was a well-behaved and content child, and Janet would usually sit in the backseat with Glenda and they would play with Jeremy, who sat in a car seat between them. Jerry and I would sit in the front and discuss the issues of the day and how we would handle them if someone would just put us in charge.

I could tell that Janet enjoyed those trips playing and talking with the baby, and there were times I sensed how tough it must be wondering what it would be like to have the children cancer and radiation had stolen from her. If she was distraught over it, she never let on, and we never spoke about it; it was a part of our lives we simply had to accept. On Good Friday of 1976, I made my way home for lunch as I did every day. Janet had arrived before me and already had the peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich ready and the soup all warmed up. But on the table was an Easter basket, which I thought a bit strange since we were both adults and hardly planned on going on an Easter egg hunt. She had the most apprehensive look on her face but urged me to look in the basket. She had put the typical plastic grass in the bottom and a few plastic eggs, one of which was marked with my name on it. Not one to wait on opening things, I naturally picked it up and opened it. A note inside the egg said, “By next Easter, we'll need the basket for our own little baby's first Easter.” That seemed strange. What baby? We couldn't have one, we had been told, so this note could mean only one of three things: (1) Janet wanted to adopt a baby and figured that an impoverished couple who worked and went to school and had no tangible assets would be approved for adoption. (Delusional!); (2) She planned on our kidnapping someone else's child à la the movie
Raising Arizona
and needed psychiatric help immediately; (3) The doctors had been wrong.

At that moment, I was afraid to say something really stupid and get excited that she was actually pregnant only to find out she was talking about getting a puppy. Then she would get depressed and angry because I “didn't really want the puppy” or she thought Iwas“unhappy in the marriage because we couldn't have kids.”

I asked the questions slowly and deliberately. Are you pregnant? How do you know? Have you been to a doctor to know this? Which one? Are you sure?

She had been having some strange feelings and some nausea and thinking that it was a holdover from the radiation, so she had decided to ask a doctor about it. The seminary had a clinic on campus, and a family-health physician would come over a couple of days a week to see students. She had gone there and after describing the symptoms was administered a pregnancy test. It was positive. She explained that something must be wrong as pregnancy wasn't possible. Another test said the same thing. A few phone calls between doctors in Fort Worth and Little Rock seemed to have everyone arriving at the same conclusion.

The good news—she
was
pregnant. This alone was pretty much a miracle because we had given up the hope of ever having a child of our own.

The bad news—while the pregnancy was indeed surprising, there was immediate concern that Janet might not be able to carry the child to term, and there was an even greater likelihood that, if she could carry the child to term, the baby would be at risk for birth defects due to the radiation.

The news brought hope tempered by reality, but for me the mere fact that Janet was pregnant was all that mattered. I was ecstatic. At that moment, I wasn't thinking about how we would possibly survive the cost of a birth, taking care of a baby, and losing one of the two paltry incomes we had. But somehow I knew the human race had survived with couples who had less than we did and far more obstacles in front of them. Even that couple in Bethlehem so long ago faced tougher odds than we did, so I knew that we could worry about our troubles later. We had received one miracle; now we would just have to start praying for a few more.

My exuberance over the thought of a baby was hard to contain. It was April, and the baby wasn't due until December, which meant that her pregnancy was in the earliest stages, and the doctors warned us that the first three months were critical to make sure that the development was normal and that Janet didn't miscarry. For that reason, we decided that we would wait a few months to tell our families so they wouldn't get their hopes up and wouldn't have to worry about us as much. Of course, keeping this to ourselves was difficult because news like that is tailor made to shout, not hide. But we kept mum.

As we started thinking about the many changes headed our way, we had to start getting very practical. The “Winnebago” by the train tracks barely accommodated us, and we knew we needed to think about moving into a bigger place. We also needed to figure out how we were going to afford another family member.

God watches after little kids and idiots, so I guess he did double duty to watch out for the little kid that Janet was carrying and the idiots who were about to become parents. During one of my radio-spot-recording gigs, it turned out that Gordon Waller, who produced spots for James Robison's Evangelistic Association, was in the studio I was using and heard the spots. He learned that I was a seminary student and asked me if I would like to audition to do spots for the Robison organization. The person they currently used lived somewhere on the East Coast, and the organization thought it would be better to use someone who lived locally and could record on short notice. Keep in mind that this was before the days of MP3 files and the Internet. In fact, it was even before most businesses had fax machines. (And I'm not talking about the modern fax machine but its predecessor, in which an 8½ × 11-inch original document was placed on a round tube and then a telephone handset was set into a cradle and a call placed to another identical machine. At the other end, a tissue-thin thermograph paper would have the grainiest of images burned into it after three to six minutes.)

The opportunity to be the voice of the James Robison Crusade radio spots was a huge deal for me, and a month after I did the first one I was asked to work at their headquarters every day after class doing spots, buying ads, writing things for the organization, and doing any other duties for the in-house advertising agency that worked on their crusades, television show, and magazine. It was high cotton for a kid like me to work at a place like this, and it meant a steady and much larger income. We weren't rich by any means, but we had enough to make it.

By Father's Day of that year, Janet was in the third month of her pregnancy, and we knew that we were going to have to break the news to our family and friends before Janet started showing. We were of course giddy with excitement to get back to Hope that weekend and tell both her mother, Pat, and my parents. Her mother's initial reaction was more worry than excitement. It took a while for her to quit thinking about the year behind us and start thinking about the year in front of us. She of course was happy over the announcement, but her joy was tempered by her anxiety that it might put too much stress on her daughter, who had been through a tough year.

For my parents, it would be the first grandchild, and there was some concern about Janet's health, but mostly they were visibly excited. Of course, my parents the pragmatists were instantly concerned about how on earth we could possibly afford a child. I'm not sure my response, “The Lord will provide,” was quite what they wanted to hear. I think they were hoping for a big salary increase on my part. The Lord's version would have to suffice for now.

Janet and I found another house to rent not far from the seminary, but this one was privately owned by a former seminary student who rented it out. The rent was ninety dollars a month, but the house was a real two-bedroom house and even had a fenced-in backyard. It wasn't great, but it was just what we would need. The move wasn't that difficult since it was only a few blocks and we didn't have a lot of stuff—a kitchen table with four chairs that my dad had gotten secondhand from people who had abandoned them in an apartment, bedroom furniture that had been salvaged from my parents' house, and an old couch that my parents were going to get rid of when they got a new one. Janet's mother gave us a wooden rocking chair and we later bought a hide-a-bed sofa on sale at a furniture dealer in Fort Worth that we would use if parents or friends came to stay to help with the baby. Our next-door neighbor, Mark Baber, was a fellow seminary student who had been a classmate of mine at Ouachita, and the two of us went in together to buy a used lawn mower for ten dollars so that we could take turns using it to mow our lawns. On the other side of us lived two couples—one married, one not—who we were pretty sure were drug dealers, seeing as they actually kept a chair on their rooftop where one of them sat most of the night, we presumed to guard their stash. All I know is that we got along with them just fine and never worried about security because one of them was keeping watch all night. They also provided occasional entertainment of the soap opera kind when the unmarried female would get angry at her live-in boyfriend and throw all of his stuff in the front yard. The episodes were fully enriched with lively dialogue and mystery but always ended just like a TV show, with things getting resolved, an emotional reunion, and all the stuff going back into the house.