Christmas Miracles (2 page)

W
henever anyone asks Pastor A.T. Vermedahl about his favorite Christmas or a special Christmas happening, he always tells the same simple, direct, and miraculous story.

He was recently out of the seminary in Chicago 1959, and he found himself the shepherd of a poor congregation in a small Wyoming parish, whose elderly pastor had died of a sudden heart attack in October.

“I had arrived about a month before Christmas, just a kid in my mid-twenties, lonely for my family back in Milwaukee, homesick for a city with a main street that stretched out longer than four or five blocks,” he recalled. “I really thought that I must be being punished by God for some sin beyond my awareness to have been sent out to this wide spot in a dusty road.”

Pastor Vermedahl is embarrassed today by how spoiled and self-centered he was during his first days with the congregation.

“I am afraid that I must have appeared very condescending to the farmers and ranchers who sat quietly, reverently, humbly before me,” he said. “But I guess they had decided to be patient with the smart-aleck city punk preacher.”

With Christmas fast approaching, Pastor Verme-dahl attempted to stir up enthusiasm among the choir director and the dozen or so members of the choir to attempt a seasonal oratorio such as Handel's
Messiah.

“Or if that was beyond their range and reach— which, of course, I presumed it was—how about creating an original cantata?” I challenged the choir director, Mrs. Olive Martindale, the sixty-eight-year-old wife of a retired high school English teacher. “Or perhaps she could at the very least arrange a medley of religious and secular carols and hymns?”

Mrs. Martindale began to tremble and tears came to her eyes. He knew that he had intimidated her, but Pastor Vermedahl barely found it within his good graces to apologize and to tell her that whatever she came up with would be fine.

Two nights before Christmas Eve, it was Pastor Vermedahl who had tears in his eyes after listening to choir practice. But his tears were precipitated by frustration. The grand Christmas mass he had imagined was not about to happen here.

“Mrs. Martindale had done her best to arrange a bright and colorful medley of Christmas music,” he recalled, “but there was so little talent among her vocalists that it seemed as though they were mourning the fall of western civilization, rather than celebrating the birth of a messiah.”

Later that night in his study, Pastor Vermedahl telephoned his parents back in Milwaukee to wish them a merry Christmas.

“I was much more frank with my parents than I should have been,” he said, “but, alas, I had the impatience and audacity of the young. Before I had graduated from the seminary, I had envisioned myself as the pastor of a large congregation in a major city, not as the caretaker of a struggling little community of ranchers and rustics. I found myself shouting into the mouthpiece of the telephone, ‘I keep asking why I was sent to this godforsaken place!' ”

The words were no sooner out of his mouth when he glanced up to see the shocked face of the church secretary, Mrs. Lankford, standing in the doorway of his study with the newly mimeographed copies of the church bulletin in her trembling hands.

“Pastor Vermedahl,” her voice was barely a whisper, “we don't think God has forsaken us here in our little town. We very much feel that God is with us.”

With those words, she hastily set the bulletins down on the table by his desk, reached for her coat from the rack, and walked briskly from his study.

Pastor Vermedahl said a quick good-bye to his parents, clicked down the receiver, and ran after Mrs. Lankford, trying his best to apologize, to explain that he was only using a figure of speech.

“And, of course, ‘godforsaken' is a figure of speech,” Pastor Vermedahl sighed at his recollection of the awkward moment. “It just happens to be a very derogatory figure of speech.”

When he stepped up into the pulpit on Christmas Eve, Pastor Vermedahl felt extremely uncomfortable. He had no idea how many people Mrs. Lankford may have informed that their new, young pastor considered their little community to be godforsaken.

As if to compensate for his monumental thoughtlessness, he read with great enthusiasm the Bible passages from Luke that tell the ageless story of that first Christmas Eve, emphasizing with special feeling the verses that speak of the angels on high announcing the birth of Jesus to the lowly shepherds tending their flocks outside of Bethlehem.

“At that very moment,” he recalled, “the door opened in the back and a beautiful young woman in a white gown walked down the aisle directly to the front of the church where the choir stood decked out in their red and green robes, waiting to sing their next selection.

“Although I had never seen the lovely woman with the reddish-blond hair before, I assumed that Mrs. Martindale had recruited a guest choir member. If this one could sing half as good as she looked, I thought to myself, she would vastly improve the quality of the choir. Since her snow-white gown appeared in sharp contrast to the other members' red and green robes, it was obvious that she was to be a special soloist on Christmas Eve.

“Without saying a word to Mrs. Martindale, who appeared rather astonished by her sudden appearance,” Pastor Vermedahl continued, “the woman turned to face the congregation and began in a rich contralto voice to sing ‘He Shall Feed His Flock Like a Shepherd' from Handel's oratorio,
Messiah.
Never had I heard it sung with such majesty, such richness, such command of phrasing, such appropriate emphasis. And she had no accompanying orchestra. The lovely woman standing before us in her almost dazzling white gown, singing a cappella, provided us with an interpretation of the work that was completely magical, enchanting, unworldly.”

When she had completed the selection from Handel's masterpiece, the woman stepped down from the choir loft and walked back up the aisle.

“As every one of us in the church that Christmas Eve watched the beautiful stranger's graceful exit,” Pastor Vermedahl said, “she walked back out the same door through which she had entered only ten or twelve minutes before. And she was gone.

“The four men who ushered that evening were standing at the two back doors—and they swore to a man that she simply disappeared into the cold December night. There were no vehicles of any kind in the parking lot that could have been hers. All trucks, jeeps, cars, and pickups were accounted for by the members of the congregation of the church still seated within.”

Before the Christmas Eve service was completed that evening, the members of Pastor Vermedahl's little church congregation were whispering that they had been visited by an angel.

“And these many years later, I have no better explanation,” he conceded. “I truly believe that we were visited by an angel of the Lord that Christmas Eve. No one in that region ever saw that beautiful woman in the white gown again—and they were certainly looking for her. Perhaps an angel was sent to us that Christmas Eve to demonstrate to everyone present— and maybe especially to a spoiled big city kid preacher—that there are no places in the universe that are ‘godforsaken.' I happily continued to serve that congregation for another fifteen years.”

T
he year was 1955, and Bob Kolb, now a retired dentist from New Hampshire, remembered that it was his second consecutive Christmas away from home—and that particular Christmas Eve wasn't shaping up to be a very good one at all.

“I was sitting on a U.S. Navy ship, the USS
Piedmont
AD17
. We were anchored in Subic Bay in the Philippine Islands,” Bob recalled. “The temperature was in the nineties, and the ship was steel without air conditioning in the medical/dental sickbay where I worked. I was hot, despondent, and generally depressed. I just didn't want to be there.”

The previous January 7, Bob had married his sweetheart, Jan, and on October 24, he had become the father of a beautiful baby girl whom he had never seen. He had no idea when he finally would lay eyes on her.

“I desperately wanted to see my wife, Jan,” he said. “This was our first Christmas as a married couple, and here I was, many thousands of miles away from her, feeling worthless, defeated, and very sorry for myself.”

Bob recalled that Jan was a marvelous correspondent. “She actually wrote a long and newsy letter to me every single day that I was away,” he said. “And of course the letters since the baby's birth were filled with pictures and stories of this ‘wonder child' that was ours. How I wanted to see my little daughter, June, and wrap my arms around her and my wife. But it was not to be this Christmas.”

To make the men's pain of separation from their loved ones at Christmas even worse, a postal glitch had caused the USS
Piedmont
's mail to be sent to its previous port. “So here I was in a distant land without one semblance of the things that I had previously associated with Christmas. There was no mail, no wife, no infant daughter—and a ship whose decks got so hot from the sun that even Santa's reindeer would burn their hooves if they attempted a landing.

The day their daughter was born, Bob Kolb's ship had been in the harbor of Keelung, Formosa, but he didn't receive word of her birth until a few days later. By the time that the wondrous telegram announcing her birth arrived from the Navy Department, the USS
Piedmont
was in the South China Sea heading towards Hong Kong to support the freedom efforts of the Nationalist Chinese government in their conflict with the Chinese Communist regime.

As they steamed along the coast of China, Bob recalled that they were often overflown by elements of the Chinese air force. Since one of the functions of their ship was ammunition supply, the crew often speculated on the crisis that would be caused if they were attacked by the planes overhead. An explosion of the munitions the ship carried would be horrible.

“But no attack occurred,” he said, “and I arrived in Hong Kong harbor with one thought in mind—to get on the telephone and call Jan, who was staying with her parents in Philadelphia until I returned.”

Bob explained that making an overseas telephone call in those days was so very different from today. It was not possible simply to dial a number. The call had to be arranged.

“The first step was to apply for liberty from my ship during the working hours of the telephone company,” he said. “The second step was to go to the telephone company headquarters in downtown Hong Kong to plan the call. The call was segmented, and each leg had to be arranged individually. Initially, the call went to Tokyo, then connected to Wake or Midway Island, then to Honolulu, and finally to Seattle where it was tied into the continental United States system. Several hours later, the phone finally rang in Philadelphia, and I was talking to Jan.”

Bob qualified that “talking” was hardly the correct term, because the quality of the transmission was so poor and the background noise level so high that normal conversation was impossible. The long-awaited telephone connection with his wife lasted for only a few minutes, and Bob was able to understand only two brief sentences: “
She has red hair . . . I love you.”

“But it was Jan's voice that said those words,” Bob remembered, “and I knew that she and my baby daughter were well. Such contact was so much more reassuring than a letter where you know they were well when the letter was sent—but you can only hope that everything is still fine by the time you read about it.”

Bob said that the cost of that single phone call was $64 in Hong Kong dollars, and he still has the receipt to prove it.

After the USS
Piedmont
left Hong Kong, it headed for the Philippines where it was scheduled to do repairs and maintenance on some destroyers that awaited its support.

“It was early afternoon on Christmas Eve and my work in the medical/dental sickbay was over for the day,” Bob said. “Because the Philippine temperatures in a steel ship became unbearable in the afternoon, we worked from 4:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., with an hour breakfast/lunch break from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m.”