A Simple Christmas Part 3

The academic environment was challenging, but the spirit of the cla.s.ses was more like that at evangelistic meetings because the professors taught with such pa.s.sion 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.smates, I wasn't a "somebody," and my fas.h.i.+on 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 cla.s.s 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-b.u.t.ter sandwich and share a can of soup. Then I'd go back to cla.s.s and then come home to start studying and trying to peddle some of my radio spots. Sundays were, of course, for church, but on Sat.u.r.days 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 ma.s.sive those jets became. They were an ominous sight with their one-of-a-kind wing-over-fuselage look and their ma.s.sive 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 embarra.s.sment 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 h.e.l.l" 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-b.u.t.ter-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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.sets would be approved for adoption. (Delusional!); (2) She planned on our kidnapping someone else's child 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.

G.o.d 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 a.s.sociation, 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 8 11-inch original doc.u.ment 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.smate 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.

While we had enough money to pay the rent, we knew that having a baby was going to mean other costs, like diapers. Disposable diapers were out of the question due to cost, so we were forced to use cloth diapers, which cost less since they could be reused. But was.h.i.+ng diapers would mean extra work if we had to make weekly trips to the coin-operated Laundromat as we had done all through our marriage. The house had a s.p.a.ce and hookup for a washer and dryer, and we knew that if we had those appliances, we could save not only money but also time. It would also be much safer for Janet than having to traipse off to the laundry with a newborn. Problem was, how would we ever afford a washer and a dryer?

That's when I decided to sell the guitars I told you about in chapter 2-a 1967 Gretsch Tennessean six-string electric guitar and a 1968 Fender Jazz Ba.s.s-plus a Gibson amplifier for the Gretsch and a Kustom ba.s.s amp for the Fender. Without really discussing it with Janet, because I knew she would sell one of her kidneys if it meant I could hang on to those guitars, I placed an ad in the local free shopper, a newspaper left on racks around town that contained mostly cla.s.sified ads. Soon after the paper hit the newsstands, a man and his son called and asked to come see the guitars. They were both musicians in their local Pentecostal church band and were looking for nicer instruments than they had. These were nice enough for George Harrison and Paul McCartney, so they were certainly adequate for a Texas church band!

They made an offer on the spot that was within twenty-five dollars of my asking price. I gulped and realized that I was about to sell things I valued more than any other material possessions I had ever owned. But then I thought about my bigger and more pressing responsibility as a husband and a father-to-be and said, "Okay, it's a deal." The man reached into his wallet and counted out the money in cash. I couldn't watch and had to turn away as the excited man and his twenty-something son loaded what had once been the apples of my eye into their car and drove off.

I had no second thoughts about my decision, but that night I realized that from that point onward my life would never be quite the same. Starting then, my commitment to my wife and child would come first, and my old priorities would slip away. It would be exactly twenty years before I owned a ba.s.s guitar again.

We bought the washer and dryer, and then as the due date drew closer, we tried to ready the part of the little bedroom that would be set aside for the "nursery." We found a used baby crib for ten dollars at a used furniture store and a used playpen for five dollars at a garage sale. We were getting ready!

These were the days before ultrasounds, so the only clue we had as to the gender of our baby was our doctor's speculation, and he was adamant that we were going to have a girl. He was a wonderful physician and was highly regarded in the field. He was semiretired and only worked at the seminary medical clinic as a sort of Christian mission because he knew that most of the seminary students were only a couple of meals away from starving. He attended one of the local Southern Baptist churches, and his caring for the students and their families was as much a gift as any medical practice, because he certainly wasn't making any money from us!

His name was Dr. David Pillow, and he reminded us of Marcus Welby, M.D., in both manner and looks. Dr. Pillow's gentle and rea.s.suring manner was just what we needed. He seemed especially sensitive to Janet's previous medical history and knew how anxious we were over every little ache and pain. In the interest of full disclosure, I was a much bigger handful than Janet. She seemed to regard this entire process as a mother would-an affirmation of her womanhood and instincts. I, on the other hand, was terrified that we would do something terribly wrong and always walked into the appointments for the prenatal checkups with a long list of questions. If we had been charged by the question, I would have needed to find some more guitars to sell!

I'll never forget the day that, in a moment of true candor and wisdom, Dr. Pillow interrupted one of my interrogations and said, "I need to remind you of something. Childbirth is not a disease. Your wife isn't sick. She is going to have a baby-not another tumor. She is simply doing what G.o.d created her with the capacity to do, and it's been done for thousands of years without doctors and hospitals and medical equipment. She will be fine and doesn't really even need me for this to work. I'm not there to make it happen, just to make sure that what she does naturally is as comfortable as possible."

I needed that. I probably really needed a slap on the face, but he was too nice for that.

The baby was due on December 11, 1976. Dr. Pillow told us that since this was our first child, it would probably arrive late. He guessed it might even arrive two weeks after the original date-on Christmas Day.

It was good to have a doctor who exuded confidence and certainty. So there we had it. We were going to have our little girl on Christmas Day-two weeks after she was due. We were prepared for that. And so was he. In fact, we were so confident that Dr. Pillow planned his annual deer hunt the week of Thanksgiving so he could be sure to be around for the birth.

Everyone was totally in sync with the plan. That is, everyone except the baby.

Janet and I planned to forego a Thanksgiving trip to Arkansas to spare Janet the long car ride. A friend from church called and offered us two tickets to the Dallas Cowboys football game on Thanksgiving Day. He knew that we had a few weeks before the baby came and it might be our last chance for an outing. Neither of us had ever been to a Dallas Cowboys game, even though we were both big fans, so how could we say no? I would take my wife, now eight months pregnant, to the Thanksgiving Day game. Dr. Pillow was deer hunting, and we still had two to four weeks before the baby would arrive.

The game was great, and though tired, Janet handled the experience well. She was probably an even bigger Dallas fan than I was, and I think if she had gone into labor in the stands, we still would have sat through the entire game.

We took things pretty easy on the Friday and Sat.u.r.day of Thanksgiving weekend, and of course we talked on the phone to our families and apologized for not being able to be home for the holiday.

Early Sunday morning, Janet woke me up and said she didn't feel well. She thought that maybe the ballgame had overdone it a bit. It was cold that day-twenty-two degrees, a record low for Fort Worth on November 28. Being the ever-vigilant dad-to-be, I asked Janet if she thought she was going into labor. She was adamant that it couldn't be that. First, it was two weeks before the original due date and Dr. Pillow had said the baby would probably be late, not early. Second, Dr. Pillow was still deer hunting, and how could she possibly have the baby with him off G.o.d-knows-where in the woods trying to shoot a deer?

By 7:00 A.M., her symptoms sounded a lot like labor to me, but she a.s.sured me that it was probably "false labor," and she didn't want to drive to the hospital only to look like an idiot and be sent home. We finally agreed to call the hospital, and after we described the symptoms, we were instructed to head to the hospital. Janet asked if Dr. Pillow would be there and was told that he wouldn't be available, but not to worry because someone was on call for him and would be in to check her out by the time we arrived. That didn't go over too well. A total stranger taking over for Marcus Welby?! And it probably wasn't going to be James Brolin, either. (If you understand the whole Marcus Welby/James Brolin reference, that just means you're as old as dirt like I am now!) On this bitterly cold day, I tried to warm up the car and convince a reluctant and expectant wife that we couldn't wait until Dr. Pillow came back from the deer hunt in a couple of days. We needed to go now.

The small Glenview Hospital (which is now a nursing home) was on the opposite side of Fort Worth but was a nice neighborhood-type hospital that Dr. Pillow liked. It was about a thirty-minute drive ordinarily, but on that Sunday morning, we made the trip in about twenty minutes. I only confess this now, as I feel certain that the statute of limitations on speeding violations in Texas has long since pa.s.sed.

We checked into the hospital a little after nine that morning, and at 3:04 P.M., November 28, 1976, we saw G.o.d's gift of hope to a young mother who a year before was fighting for her life. Now she was giving life in the form of a 5-pound, 15-ounce, 19-inch-long, redheaded baby boy. The doctor had guessed wrong not only about when the baby was coming but also about who it would be. That little girl he was so certain we would have was in fact a little boy whom we named John Mark. John means "G.o.d's beloved" or "G.o.d's gift" and Mark means "protector." He was surely G.o.d's beloved gift, and we hoped he would be a protector of the miracle that he was to us.

Our Christmas girl turned out to be a Thanksgiving boy, but this meant that less than four weeks later, we took our new son home to Arkansas at Christmas to see his grandparents, his uncles and aunts, and a lot of other people who just wanted to see this little guy who had surprised us all.

For the trip home, a friend of ours gave us a little red and white Santa hat for John Mark. It was as tiny as he was, but he looked priceless in his Christmas outfit. That year, instead of the usual presents under the tree for each other, Janet and I put John Mark in his little plastic baby carrier and placed him, wearing his Christmas cap, under the tree. We took his picture and decided that he was our gift to each other that year. Nothing else could have come close.

That was the only year that little Christmas hat fit on John Mark's ever-growing head, but every year when we put up our family Christmas tree, we don't top it with the typical star or angel. Not that there's anything wrong with those traditional tree toppers, but we top our tree with that little red Santa hat that did a lot more than simply crown the dome of our month-old baby boy on his first Christmas. It serves as a reminder of how out of the depths of despair and the shadow of death can spring hope and expectancy and, ultimately, affirmation. Affirmation that the past is truly behind us and G.o.d has decided to favor us with not only life sustained but life created.

The family tree has been decorated many times, but when Janet puts the little red cap on the top, something inside me stirs even now. I choke back a tear that only she might truly understand. That little cap is not just about our firstborn son but about the reminder that Christmas is about G.o.d doing the unexpected for the undeserving. He didn't give us a million dollars or send a star shooting through the sky. What happened to us happens millions of times every year around the world, and it was the simple gift that was the most significant. "Unto us a child is born." That sounds very familiar. It was the original Christmas message. It was a simple Christmas then, but on the Christmas of 1976, we understood just how precious and wonderful the gift of life truly was.

Stability.

So much had transpired between the Christmases of 1975 and 1976-first Janet's cancer and then the birth of our first child. But for the Christmas of 1977, we would have something very real to celebrate-the owners.h.i.+p of our first home.

My job with James Robison continued to bring increased responsibilities. His organization was growing rapidly through his television outreach as well as through large outdoor rallies and evangelistic meetings that he held in stadiums. My hours had been increased throughout the early part of 1977 even as I continued my cla.s.ses at Southwestern and tried to be a good dad and husband. Janet and I had made the deliberate decision that she would be a full-time mother, and we determined that we would make the necessary sacrifices in our personal lives so John Mark would not have to spend more time with strangers than with us. We lived frugally but always believed that if we acted responsibly and walked by faith, our path would be clear. This is in no way intended to disparage parents who choose to keep their children in day care while both of them work or single parents who have no choice but to leave their children in the care of another. It's just that we knew it was right for us, though we recognized that it would mean setting very rigid financial priorities to make it work.

Despite a modest income, we never wavered in our commitment to t.i.the-to give a minimum of 10 percent of our gross income to our church. We did this not only because it was a doctrine of our faith but, more important, because it signified that everything we had was truly the Lord's, and we believed that the mere giving of a dime from each dollar was more than reasonable given what He had blessed us with. Plus, we had experienced the generosity of many people who had supported us in our time of need during Janet's illness, and we knew that one of the things we could do in return was to give to others as others had given to us.

I had started at the Robison organization doing radio spots and later started buying media and doing whatever else they needed me to do, which sometimes included menial tasks like emptying the trash or moving boxes. That was fine by me-I needed the hours and the type and the volume of work didn't matter. Throughout the spring of 1977, I balanced work and school and family as best I could. Robison had an in-house advertising agency that did everything from concept to completion in all sorts of advertising-from radio and TV to billboard creation and placement and print. We had graphic artists on staff (this was in the old days before computers, when artists worked with brushes, pencils, X-acto knives, and acetate overlays). We had people who wrote copy, produced ads, and packaged them. In addition to the obvious in-house work where we handled all advertising and marketing for James Robison, we did work for outside clients ranging from megachurches to parachurch organizations that worked alongside churches with their support and service.

I wrote copy, voiced radio and TV spots, placed all forms of ads for events in all media, and did research that James could use for articles, television, etc. In May of 1977, Gordon Waller, who had launched and directed Focus Advertising Agency, announced that he was leaving to go back to his native Alabama. Much to my surprise, James asked me if I was interested in taking the job of directing Focus Advertising and taking on the t.i.tle of director of communications for the ministry. With this new job, I would travel with the crusade team to handle press announcements from the stage, and troubleshoot controversies that often arose from negative press during evangelistic meetings.

It was in so many ways the chance of a lifetime. I was just twenty-one years old, married with a not-yet-one-year-old child, and being asked to manage a staff of twelve people and a multimillion-dollar budget. I was the youngest person in the department, but I would oversee it. This was the job I had hoped to land since I was a teenager, but taking on a full-time job would mean leaving seminary.

One of my cherished professors at Southwestern was the late Dr. Oscar Thompson, a professor of evangelism. I asked to visit with him to seek his advice on whether to leave my studies and take this position or to spend the next year and a half completing my master's degree. I fully expected him to tell me that I needed to complete the degree first and not to let anything interrupt my studies.

I'll never forget the conversation. I told him what I had been offered but that it would be full time and would mean I would have to leave school. Dr. Thompson's response was surprising. He simply asked, "What did you come to seminary to train for?"

"A career in some type of Christian broadcasting," I replied.

"And what job are you being offered?" he asked, as if to say, "How plain does it have to get?" Then he smiled and waited for the obvious answer to sink in to me.

"I suppose if I've come to prepare for the very job I'm being offered, then maybe that's my answer," I managed to say.

His next piece of advice was cla.s.sic Oscar Thompson profundity: "Mike, it looks to me as if the Lord is laying this in your lap. You have nothing to lose. It's the job that most people twice your age who already have their degree would die for. Go and do it. If it doesn't work out, I a.s.sure you that this seminary will still be sitting on this hill, but that job may not wait for you."

I never expected a seminary professor to advise me to leave school, but he affirmed for my head what my heart was already telling me.

I took the job and became director of communications for James Robison and the manager of Focus Advertising Agency. By today's standards, my pay would put me under the poverty line, but in 1977, the thirteen-thousand-dollar annual salary was more money than I had ever imagined being able to make.

The offices for James Robison were in Hurst, Texas, a suburb of Fort Worth in the Mid-Cities area located between Fort Worth and Dallas. Janet and I had been living near the seminary, at the southwestern part of Fort Worth. In traffic, it could be a forty-five minute drive or longer, and now, since there was no reason for us to live near the seminary campus, we decided it made sense to move closer to where I'd be working. We started looking.

James was willing to take a chance on me and believed that I was worth the risk of taking an untested and unknown twenty-one-year-old and handing him a huge level of responsibility. In the mid-seventies, James Robison's ministry was growing not only in size but also in controversy. He was as plainspoken and eloquent as anyone on the scene, and his bold and unfiltered form of preaching never left the crowd in doubt of where he stood on any given issue. Some reporters dubbed him G.o.d's angry prophet because of his calls for repentance and his denouncement of the sins he believed were destroying the nation.

It was unfortunate that many people knew him only from the headlines and didn't have the opportunity that I had to spend time with him one on one in planes, cars, and quiet settings without the public present. In his private life, he was an intense and focused, highly compet.i.tive, and very driven individual who genuinely believed that biblical messages should be presented with urgency, and he said he truly felt pain whenever he saw the anguish and anxiety of others. What made me appreciate him was that beneath that sometimes raw, earthy, and even brusque exterior was one of the kindest and most compa.s.sionate people I have ever known.

Immediately after I was hired, I was called to James's office by the executive director of the organization, Clayton Spriggs, who would later become like a father to me. I couldn't imagine what I might have done-good or bad-that would warrant an urgent meeting with James. As soon as I arrived in his office, James said, "I need you to come with me."

We drove to a nice men's clothing store in Hurst, and as we got out of the car, he said, "If you're going to work for me, I want you to look nice and represent me well. Let's get you some decent clothes."

I still wore the factory-outlet polyester knit suit that I had bought for $12.50, and I'm sure I must have looked like the ultimate country hick, but it was all I had. I was worried that it would take most of my new paycheck to pay for the kind of clothes in this store, which was more upscale than any store I ever had shopped in.

James must have sensed my terror at the thought of being obligated to purchase one or more suits and the accessories to go with it, so he told me, "I'm going to get you outfitted with everything you need to look sharp, and it will be my gift to you because I believe in you."

Normally, I would have immediately asked if there were any closeouts or out-of-season merchandise that was deeply discounted, but James took control and picked out three very nice suits and then personally selected s.h.i.+rts and ties to match. I would have been overwhelmed had he bought me one suit to replace my factory-outlet special, but I was completely stunned that he was apparently replacing my wardrobe.

Through the years, others may have said unkind things about James Robison, but not in my presence. Like all of us, he was a human being with some flaws, but his heart was as pure and authentic as that of anyone I've known. I will forever count him as a mentor and friend, one who believed in me for no outwardly apparent reason.

As Janet and her newly and nattily dressed husband looked for a place to live, one of the people at the office told us about a new development that was being built in the Mid-Cities area. The developer had purchased large areas of land and created entire neighborhoods with semicustom starter homes in which, even though the floor plan in each home was basically the same, the buyer was able to pick out several of the components, such as the exterior style, brick, roof, paint trim color, interior colors, carpet, and some fixtures. Because an entire street of houses were built at one time, large crews could be kept constantly busy with no downtime or travel time between houses. My friend from work and his wife were in the process of buying one, and he encouraged me to look into it for us.

The thought of our buying a home-and a new one at that-seemed absurd to a couple who struggled to make rent payments, let alone mortgage payments. We decided that it wouldn't hurt or cost us anything to go to the development and look at one of the model homes and at least confront the fact that we couldn't possibly purchase a house.

The houses were 1,200 to 1,300 square feet, with three bedrooms, two baths, an enclosed garage, a nice family room with a fireplace, a lawn, a kitchen with all the appliances, including a dishwasher and refrigerator, and central heat and air-conditioning. Each home was landscaped and the lawn seeded for gra.s.s as part of the package.

The Texas economy was on fire at that time, and this developer had found the perfect niche market of mostly young, first-time home buyers. For a mere hundred-dollar deposit, a purchaser could hold one of the houses, apply for a loan that their own finance company would finance, and choose their floor plan, colors, and details.

We laugh about it now, but the $100 was a big deal to us then. What if we didn't get approved and lost our $100? That would be a real setback for us. The total purchase price was $28,500 and the payments would be $288 per month. That wasn't too much more than we'd have to pay in rent for anything decent in the Mid-Cities area, and we'd be doing something at age twenty-one that my parents hadn't been able to do until I was in high school-own the house we lived in. Janet was almost shaking as she wrote the check for the $100 and we made a deposit on a house. The difference between buying a home and renting one was like the difference between putting something in concrete and putting it in sand. It meant that we would be putting down roots and weren't just a couple of crazy kids getting married, but adults who were embarking upon the ultimate symbol of the American dream-owning a home.

We were able to watch as our house was built from the slab up. Neither of us had ever lived in a house that was brand new. It was a long way from the little duplex in Arkadelphia that we had rented just two years earlier for forty dollars a month.

The house was to be ready in early to mid-December, and we could move in then. We applied for the loan and were approved without any problems. Janet's mother gave us new bedroom furniture for Christmas that year, and we used the furniture we had had in our last home for one of the other bedrooms. We would have our master bedroom, John Mark would have a room, and we'd even have a spare guest room for when relatives or friends came. My dad drove to Fort Worth in his pickup truck and rented a U-Haul trailer so we could move what possessions we had to our new home. There is one advantage to not having much-it's much easier to move-and we quickly got everything moved into 7445 Tunbridge Drive in North Richland Hills, Texas, the address of our very first house.

Just in time for Christmas, we had something truly spectacular to celebrate. We were homeowners. We didn't have to ask a landlord if it was okay to trim hedges or put a nail in the wall to hang a picture. We didn't have to worry if the rent would unexpectedly go up when we were least prepared for it. We didn't have to argue over who was responsible for paying to fix a broken toilet or unclog a drain. True, now we had to pay for all of this routine maintenance, but we would be paying for it in our house, not someone else's. In short, instead of being controlled, we had control, and it felt great. Very grown up and stable.

Our first Christmas in our new house was as special as any we'd had. We threw a Christmas party and invited friends who oohed and aahed that we had such a fresh, new place to dwell. They knew where we had lived before, with chipping paint, splintery wood floors, old fixtures and appliances, and tiny rooms that were drafty cold in the winter unless you stood right by the gas s.p.a.ce heater and miserably hot in the summer unless you sat directly in front of the window air conditioner or one of the little electric fans we used to blow air from room to room.

The house on Tunbridge really wasn't that great by most people's standards today. It was structurally sound but obviously wasn't built with Italian marble or handcrafted woodwork, nor was it adorned with authentic Persian rugs or expensive works of art. But to us, it was a little slice of heaven for a young couple who had lived in some places that could best be described as little slices of h.e.l.l.

Plus, it was great to be able to give John Mark a place to live where we didn't have to worry that the c.o.c.kroaches were bigger than he was. We truly loved that little house, and to us at the time, it was huge.

In time for Christmas, Janet decorated the brick hearth around the fireplace and hung John Mark's Christmas stocking on the mantle. She found just the Christmas tree she wanted, and my parents gave us some lights and a few ornaments that were surplus from their own collection. And of course, at the top of our tree, we placed the little red cap that a year earlier had sat on John Mark's red head. The hat didn't fit his head anymore, but it fit just perfectly on the top of that tree.

While we always looked forward to going home to Arkansas for Christmas to be with our families, that was one year when it was really hard to pack the car and drive away from a place that we were so grateful to live in. And so grateful to own. We had a house. Our house. Most people will probably think it strange that we were so thrilled just to have a house, and we admit, it was a pretty simple house. But we were getting really used to being happy with simple things. And this house made Christmas really special-a special but simple Christmas!

Limitations.

As much as I love Christmas, it almost caused me to convert to Judaism. The religious part of the holiday is fine with me, so don't gasp and think I was ready to abandon my faith. The problem with Christmas had nothing to do with Jesus. In fact, that was the problem-Christmas wasn't about Jesus anymore. And it was this fact that had me wondering if maybe it was time to find another way altogether to observe the holiday.

One of the big differences between a Christmas in poverty and one in prosperity is that prosperity creates some real serious complications and complexities. The more material things we have, the more likely we are to be really stressed around Christmas, especially if we have kids. Granted, given the choice between prosperity and poverty, I would choose prosperity every time, but it's hard to have a simple Christmas when you have to worry not only about getting the right gift for your kid but also that you get him enough to keep him busy for a while.

Being a father is the greatest joy I've ever known, but it's also the scariest job I've ever had and by far the most challenging. Governing a state is a piece of cake compared to being a dad, and that's why, whenever a reporter asks me, "What do you regard as your most significant accomplishment?" I always answer the same way: "Being a dad."

I'm sure this answer surprises some reporters, who expect me to extol the impact of education reform in my state, or the health initiatives that brought national attention to Arkansas, or the rebuilding of our highways, or even running for president or writing books that have made it to the New York Times bestseller list. None of that. Raising three kids who turned out okay-that's the big deal. It was far tougher than all the other stuff.

Part of what makes fatherhood so difficult is Christmas. This is especially true when the little tykes are small and Dad is expected to perform the "manly" function of putting their toys together. And that's what almost drove me to Judaism.

I've always been mechanically challenged, and I realized it at an early age, when my jack-of-all-trades dad tried to teach me the rudiments of being a do-it-yourselfer.

Dorsey Huckabee was one of those people who could fix toilets or faucets, wire an appliance or light fixture, fix a car, build a room onto a house, or even build a go-cart from scratch. Now, sometimes his products were hardly "factory-looking," but they worked. Thank goodness, because had some of his attempts failed, my sister and I would have had the double embarra.s.sment of having something that not only looked like c.r.a.p but also didn't work.

My dad was a utilitarian-not an artist. His stuff worked, but he never would have won design awards and people didn't gush over the aesthetic "wow" factor of the stuff he made. For him, fixing or making things was about saving a buck, and we must have saved a bunch of them, because anything someone else offered to do professionally my father figured he could do on his own for free.

Even though he built or repaired a lot of stuff, he didn't have to deal with the ominous challenge of Christmas as much as I did. For one thing, the fact that we didn't have the money to afford a room full of gifts meant that there wasn't that much to put together in the first place, and in the fifties and sixties, most stuff came pretty much put together and required little a.s.sembly anyway. All a kid had to do was open the box and start playing with whatever was inside. Easy for the kid and a relief for the parents. Sometimes batteries had to be inserted, but even a kid could do that. Of course, it was always a real downer when the box said "batteries not included" and your parents had forgotten to get batteries and you had to sit there on Christmas morning with a dumb look on your face wondering what the toy would do or sound like until the day after Christmas when the stores were open and you could finally get batteries.

Even though my dad didn't have to put many toys together, he was still remarkably more adept and productive with his hands than his only son, who would generally just throw a part across the room if it didn't fit where it was supposed to.

One Christmas I wanted a go-cart. They were popular with kids, and I knew better than to ask for a '57 Chevy, so I figured this was the next best thing. At the age of seven, I didn't have any idea how much a go-cart might cost, nor did I care. It was my job to want things. It was my parents' responsibility to figure out how to get them. A gasoline-powered go-cart was just what I wanted.

There was no way my dad was going to spend a month's pay on a go-cart. Heck, he could make one! And that's just what he did. He took an engine from an old lawn mower, welded a frame from sc.r.a.p metal he got from the junkyard, found some little tires that probably had once belonged to a lawn tractor, and somehow cobbled together a go-cart. He was proud, and rightly so, of his creation and even more proud that he had managed to save enough money to impress a Saudi prince. I'm sure when I saw it, my face didn't convey the level of grat.i.tude that I should have expressed. I was, of course, hoping for one that looked like the ones in the Sears catalog, and this one didn't. Think Jed Clampett's truck on The Beverly Hillbillies compared to a Corvette, and you get the picture of how my dad's homemade go-cart compared to the one I had imaged in my mind over and over.

To his credit, the old man did build a functioning machine, and after I got over the initial shock of its crude appearance and the fact that its engine had once mowed the lawn of some nice family on the other side of town, I did have fun riding it around the neighborhood.

Maybe my father's sometimes rather less than superb flair for design was tempered by his desire to give his kids all he could with the resources he had. One thing is for sure-he was not one to go into debt for things he couldn't afford. It was his Depression-era mind-set that caused him to think this way. He believed that the bottom could fall out at any moment and we should prepare for the worst because it was probably going to happen. My dad was also one of those guys who believed that if such a calamity were to strike and it only affected one family, it would probably be ours. So we always lived as if an apocalypse was about to strike our house, storing ma.s.sive amounts of toilet paper and paper towels just in case. We might be turned into dust particles by a nuclear blast, but by gosh, there would be plenty of paper towels to wipe up the mess!

I know that my lack of proficiency with tools was a big disappointment to my dad. I think by the time I was lieutenant governor of Arkansas, he had finally made peace with the fact that I couldn't change the oil in my car without making a complete mess and that my one attempt to unclog a stopped drain resulted in a plumber having to be called to my house for an emergency visit to repair my "repair" and stop the resulting water that was gus.h.i.+ng in our kitchen. My efforts to avoid the cost of the plumber resulted in a $1,200 plumbing bill, a huge mess in the kitchen, and a wife who could have frozen the Gobi Desert with her stare. My father died just three months before I was sworn in as governor, and I really wished he could have lived long enough to see that, just so he might finally feel I had redeemed myself. He probably would have said at the swearing in, "Son, I'm proud you made governor, but I sure wish you could use a table saw."

Power tools and me? Not a good combination. It's like trying to get d.i.c.k Cheney and Osama bin Laden together to watch football and eat pizza. Never going to happen. I'm certain that part of my clumsiness with all things mechanical comes from the fact that I should have been left-handed, but my mother thought left-handedness would make it hard for me to be "normal" in a right-handed world, so she always put the pencil or crayon in my right hand and through her stern discipline and perseverance taught me to live right-handedly. At least somewhat. I bat, shoot a rifle or shotgun, and play putt-putt golf left-handed. I write, shoot a pistol, and eat with my right hand. When people ask if I'm left- or right-handed, I usually just say that I'm ambidextrous. When I broke a finger on my right hand playing Little League baseball as a child, I was forced to eat and write left-handed while my hand was in a cast. I was able to do both rather easily, and now I'm able to use a fork in either hand and my writing is equally illegible regardless of which hand I've used. In fact, my handwriting is so bad that I can't even read it myself and try to avoid writing as much as possible unless I need to sign something. My personal a.s.sistant during my tenure both as lieutenant governor and as governor, Dawn Cook, is the only human I know who can decode my penmans.h.i.+p. I would actually ask her to read things I had written to tell me what they said because I couldn't make them out.

For much of my childhood and adolescence, I felt guilty over my inability to work with simple tools, so I married someone who is pretty good at it. Janet is the "handywoman" in our house and has repaired our washer (put new timers and gears in it) and dryer (changed the heating element and timer) and done minor repairs around the house. She has also helped build houses in over forty states and many foreign countries through her work with Habitat for Humanity. Because she is so active with Habitat and has served on its international board for a number of years, people a.s.sume that I volunteer with her on the construction projects. Whenever anyone asks me about this, I always say the same thing-I would never spend the night in a house that I helped build!

So now that you understand just how "dexterity challenged" I am, you can better understand why, for me, what should be a heavenly holiday-Christmas-became the holiday from h.e.l.l.

By the time John Mark was born, the days of buying toys that didn't require any a.s.sembly were as gone as the days of 78 rpm records. From my earliest "dad days," I couldn't actually purchase an item, but rather ended up with a box of parts and an instruction manual that had been written in j.a.panese or Mandarin and poorly translated into broken English so that a mechanical engineer would have had a difficult time understanding it. The notion that "Mr. Thumbs" (aka me) would be able to put even supposedly simple things together was laughable, but my pride and ego compelled me to try.