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Authors: Mike Huckabee

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BOOK: A Simple Christmas
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As I opened the box, I was a bit intimidated by the fact that there were what seemed like about four hundred little plastic packets, each of which had a different size screw, nut, and washer, along with dozens of larger parts that, when put together, were supposed to form a tricycle. No two pieces had been attached or assembled in any way. I'm sure that various pieces of the little three-wheeled challenge had been fabricated in various manufacturing plants around the world, and now I had before me a collection of parts and a very pathetic excuse for a parts list and instruction manual that contained indecipherable instructions and a few pencil sketches to illustrate what the end result should look like.
The first challenge was simply trying to figure out which size screw was what and how they fit into the overall picture. They all looked alike to me, and the variations in size weren't distinguishable based on the pictures in the manual.
I would have been better able to figure out the Rubik's Cube while blindfolded. Concern began to give way to sheer panic—my son would wake up on Christmas morning and I would present him with a floor filled with various pieces of bright red tubular metal, some little wheels, and several large piles of hardware. I would announce, “Merry Christmas, son! Santa brought you a tricycle!”
I could imagine him looking at the entire floor covered with unconnected pieces and bursting into tears thinking that Santa's elves must have unionized and gone on strike. Then I would have to listen to his mother chide me for having ruined Christmas, not just for John Mark but for the entire planet. Somehow, I was sure she would blame me for ruining the spirit of the holiday through my laziness and pride.
I couldn't let this get to me! I labored on, attempting to find pieces of the puzzle that either would fit or could be forced to connect with one another.
The project that should have taken about an hour was consuming the entire night. Janet checked on me to ask how it was going, and of course, I lied like a snake and told her it was going just fine. She went to bed around midnight and I again lied and said I should be headed that way soon. That part wasn't as bad a lie—it was true that I
should
be headed that way, but what should be and what was were totally different things.
By four o'clock on Christmas morning, something remotely resembling a tricycle sat in the middle of the garage. And you know what? It turns out I didn't need all those screws, nuts, and washers after all, because I had a pile of them left over that I hadn't been able to fit.
I placed the trike under the tree just in time for John Mark to wake up and go into the family room, where the tree proudly stood with his little Christmas hat from his first Christmas topping it. There was that red, shiny tricycle in all its glory—well, most of its glory, since there were some parts missing.
For reasons that I still do not fully understand, that little tricycle always squeaked, and no amount of WD-40 could make it stop. I assured John Mark that it was just the equivalent of motor noise and that it would help us locate him if he was riding about the neighborhood.
Another thing that was a bit odd about the tricycle was that with each revolution of the back left wheel, the entire bike leaned slightly to the left. It was as if it were limping on a sore tire. Despite all of my creative communication skills, I couldn't find a way to euphemistically explain to John Mark why his tricycle had this very distinct disability. He seemed to accept that limitation, although I don't think his mother ever forgave me for having refused her assistance in building it in the first place. And I have wished for the past thirty years that I had asked for her help. In fact, what I probably should have done is said, “This tricycle assembly looks really easy and shouldn't take but a few minutes. I think I'll just let you go ahead and put it together and I'll get our Christmas music lined up on the cassette player for Christmas morning.”
I learned a lot from my dismal failure at seeking to be the “big-shot dad” by attempting to put that little tricycle together by myself. As Clint Eastwood said in
Magnum Force
, “A man's got to know his limitations.”
I learned some of mine on that long Christmas Eve night. Knowing our limitations and not trying to do things outside our capacity often means we have to break down our pride and admit we need help. I don't buy things that require assembly unless there is someone (wife, son, etc.) who has agreed in advance to put them together. I don't need to waste money on an item I can't figure out, and I don't have the time to go through the endless frustration of my utter ineptness at all things requiring manual dexterity.
I have come to learn that Christmas is about accepting more than just my limitations in the assembly of toys and appliances. It's about accepting that I'm incapable of putting my own life together and making all the pieces fit. It's about recognizing that God isn't asking me to impress Him with my skills at “building a perfect human being.” He didn't send His son to criticize my failures or laugh at my very miserable attempts at putting all the screws, nuts, and washers in my life in the right place. In fact, His son became a carpenter so he'd really have the hang of patiently building something from the rawest of materials.
There's nothing disgraceful about admitting the need for help. The real disgrace is being so filled with pride and ego that we don't reach out for the help that we so obviously need, and in the end we fail anyway.
My limitations in toy building may have almost made me convert to Judaism, but they also showed me that this is what Christmas is all about. We are not alone. God has already reached out to us before we even ask for Him. He can handle my limitations, and so should I.
Once I fully realized this, I understood that Christmas wasn't the problem. It was the answer. I was the problem. But I could fix this by finally accepting my limitations and remembering Christmas for what it really is. Simple. Powerful and profound, but simple.
10.
Transitions
Christmas is, in many ways, a milestone that marks various parts of our year. We will put things off “until after Christmas” or commit to get something done “before Christmas.” We speak of Christmas as a reference point in time, as in “We haven't seen them since last Christmas.” For many of us Christmas is the biggest and most anticipated holiday of the year, and it's thought of not just as a day but as an entire season. Christmas is also the time when you catch up with many people in your life—family, friends, neighbors—whom you might not have spoken to in a while. It's a time to reflect on life—what you're doing, what you've done, and what you hope to do.
It's also a time of transition—from one year to the next—so it shouldn't come as too big a surprise that some of the most significant transitions and turning points in my life have occurred around Christmas. Janet and I left Arkansas to move to Texas after her bout with spinal cancer right at Christmas, and we moved into our first house just a few weeks before Christmas. But since then we've experienced several more Christmas transitions that have greatly affected the course of our lives as a whole.
From the time I was in elementary school, I read the daily newspaper, watched TV news, and listened to news on the radio. I kept up with current events and the news of the day more than most adults I knew and certainly more than most of the kids my age. Politics and current events captivated me, and even though I couldn't for the life of me see how I would do it, I couldn't help but think that one day I would run for office. At one time, I thought about becoming a lawyer, but after landing a job at the local radio station when I was a teenager, I realized that the best way I could serve God was to work in broadcasting. I liked the work and was good at it, and I figured it might also be a good way to eventually launch a career in politics. At various times in my life, I would think about running for office, and then circumstances, such as my becoming a pastor, would kill that vision and render it seemingly impossible. Contrary to popular belief, my decision to move back to Arkansas was not so I could become a minister; I wanted to run for office.
For all the talk about how dumb politicians are and how they tend to follow instead of lead, the greatest examples of sheep following sheep are those in the media who will hear or read something from one of their colleagues and, without any attempt to find out if it's true, report it as fact.
If you followed the coverage of the 2008 Republican presidential primary, you would probably assume I was preaching in a little Baptist church in Arkansas until one glorious Sunday I up and decided to run for president. A pretty dramatic story, but a bogus one nonetheless. The true story wouldn't have been that hard to have discovered, and even when a few reporters asked me about it directly, they ignored the facts in order to maintain the image of me as a one-dimensional “religious” candidate who had no experience leading outside the church and no motive for going into politics except to advance my agenda. They ignored the fact that I had more executive experience actually running a government than any of the candidates in the race from either party except for Tommy Thompson, the former governor of Wisconsin, who left the race in August of 2007. Journalists barely mentioned my time as governor or the initiatives I had achieved in such areas as education, health care, the prison system, environment, taxes, and the economy, which had attracted national accolades.
What most people don't realize, thanks in large part to this one-sided coverage of my career, was that my decision to become a pastor was actually a detour from what I thought I would be doing. My career goal was in communications—radio, television, advertising, and writing, primarily with Christian organizations and ministries. And this is what I was doing in September 1980 when the congregation of the Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, invited me to speak in their pastorless church one Sunday and then asked me to serve as their interim pastor while they searched for someone to fill the post full time. I had recently created my own Christian communications company, Mike Huckabee and Associates, and so was able to work at the church and at my day job for a while. Janet and I had in fact made an offer on a home back in Hope and expected to move back there, since there was really no reason for us to stay in Texas anymore. It would also give me the opportunity to reestablish my residency in Arkansas, since I was starting to consider running for Congress in the Fourth Congressional District, which mostly comprises southern Arkansas.
I had thought that President Jimmy Carter was going to usher in a new kind of politics and lead the nation past what had been a tumultuous period—Watergate. But less than a year into his presidency, I realized that his policies were warmed-over classic big-government liberalism, and I grew increasingly restless about the direction of the nation. I had hoped that Ron ald Reagan would win the GOP nomination in 1976, and in 1980 when he announced his decision to run for the White House, I was truly encouraged. My own political views had grown more conservative over the years, bolstered by cassette tapes of speeches by Paul Weyrich and Howard Phillips and books by people like Phyllis Schlafly. I sensed that the country was disenchanted with the liberalism of the Democratic Party and that 1980 would be a watershed year for conservatives. I was barely old enough to run for Congress, but it seemed like the right time to start preparing for what I thought was going to be my first political race. I talked to some key leaders in the state GOP and even had conversations with some of the leading old-school Democratic leaders, just to get their take on the political landscape.
I was enjoying being an interim pastor but expected that to be a short-term gig that would end in a few months when the church secured a permanent pastor. But to my surprise, after nearly three months as the interim pastor at Immanuel, the church asked me if I wanted to take on the job permanently. After much prayer and consideration, Janet and I agreed to make the move to Pine Bluff permanent. We forfeited the deposit on our house in Hope, I shut down my small business and notified my clients that I would not be able to provide them services after the first of the year, and at the age of twenty-five, I became the pastor of some of the most wonderful people in the world. Because I had more experience in communications and advertising than in preaching, I had a steep learning curve and approached the job with a very nontraditional style. The pulpit duties were a point of comfort for me, but working with deacons, committees, and special-interest groups was all new. I will say that nothing better prepared me for a future political career quite like experiencing the politics of a local Baptist church!
In addition to my role as pastor, I helped the church develop a logo and a “branded strategy” for advertising, purchase ad space on bus benches, and launch a daily radio commentary on the local news/talk station called “Positive Alternatives.” The station, KOTN, was overwhelmingly the dominant station in that market, and at first the manager was very reluctant to sell airtime to a local church for the two-minute-a-day (morning and afternoon) drive-time spots that I wanted to do. I told him I was going to do a motivational and inspirational commentary that would appeal to everyone and promised that it wouldn't be “in your face” religious broadcasting. He agreed to take it on a trial basis, and it became one of the station's most popular features. The station manager, Buddy Deane, even became a dear friend of mine over the years despite his original doubts about putting a Baptist program on his station. In fact, when Buddy died years later, during my time as governor, I was asked to conduct his funeral service.
BOOK: A Simple Christmas
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