I realize this Note from Pastor J R is longer than most, but because of the season I wanted to share this wonderful story. I hope you will be moved by it as much as I was when I read it.
Harriet Richie, a writer from Anderson, South Carolina, wrote a story about something that happened to her and her family late one night. They had been to a Christmas Eve service that ended at midnight. After worship, her husband announced that he was hungry and wanted breakfast. Of course, it was almost 1 a.m. on Christmas morning, so none of the usual places they might have gone were open. They made their way to the interstate where an all-night truck stop was still open.
A few big diesels rumbled outside. Inside a few truckers sat at the counter. A jukebox played country music. On the front window was a string of colored blinking lights. The place smelled like bacon grease and stale coffee. A one-armed man behind the counter nodded the family toward a booth.
Soon a waitress named Rita sauntered over, handed them their menus and asked what they wanted to drink. Harriet looked around. She felt a little bit like a snob and out of place. Her family had just come from a beautiful Christmas Eve service. And soon they would be heading to their lovely home for the night. She thought one day they would look back with a laugh and say to each other, “Remember that Christmas we ate breakfast at that truck stop? That awful music and those tacky lights?”
She was staring out the window when an old Volkswagen van drove up. A young man with a beard and baggy jeans got out, walked around and opened the door for a young woman holding a baby. They hurried inside and took a booth near the back.
After Rita, the waitress, took their order, the baby began to cry, and neither of the young parents could quiet him. Finally, Rita set down her coffee pot and held out her arms for the baby. “Hon, just sit there and drink your coffee. Let me see what I can do.”
It was evident that Rita had done this before. She began walking around the place showing the baby to first one of the truckers and then another. One began whistling a Christmas tune and make silly faces. Quickly the baby stopped crying and began cooing. Rita showed the baby the blinking lights on the jukebox. She brought the baby over to Harriet’s table. “Just look at this little darlin’,” she said. “Mine are so big and grown they don’t need me no more.”
The one-armed fellow behind the counter brought a fresh pot of coffee, and, as he refilled their mugs, Harriet felt tears in her eyes. Her husband wanted to know what was wrong. “Nothing,” she said, “just Christmas.” Reaching in her purse for a Kleenex and a quarter, she said to her own kids, “Go see if you can find a Christmas song on the jukebox.”
When they were gone, Harriet quietly said almost to herself, “He would have come here, wouldn’t he?” “Who?” her husband asked. “Jesus. If Jesus were born here tonight and the choices were our neighborhood, the church or this truck stop, it would be right here, wouldn’t it?”
Her husband didn’t answer right away, but looked around the place, at the people there. Finally he said, “I suppose either here or a homeless shelter.”
“That’s what bothers me,” Harriet said. “When we first got here I felt sorry for these people because they probably aren’t going home to nice neighborhoods where the houses have candles in the windows and wreaths on the doors. And listening to that awful music, I thought, I’ll bet nobody here has even heard of Handel. Now I think that more than any place I know, this is where Christmas is. But I’m not sure I belong.”
If you strip the story down to what really happened that night so long ago, you discover that God’s value system and economy are very different from ours. Bringing the Savior into the world in a poor country town, to an illiterate, unwed, teenage mother, and proclaiming the birth to lowly shepherds would not have been the auspicious rollout modern marketers would have designed, but it is precisely what God would do.
Maybe it’s only in recognizing our own poverty and need that we can really be open to the change Christmas can still bring to the world, our world.
As Harriett walked with her family to the car, her husband leaned over and said, “You know I heard something earlier at church. They said what the angels sang that first Christmas was, ‘Behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people.’ Maybe they meant us, too.”
I invite you to join us for two opportunities on this Fourth Sunday of Advent and Christmas Eve, when we will be bringing “good tidings of great joy.” The first one is at 10 AM, for our regular Sunday morning worship; and the second is at 5 PM for our Christmas Eve “Lights & Lessons: Carols and Communion” Services.
We hope to see you! But if not, please know that we at Covenant Community Church wish you a happy, blessed, safe and Merry Christmas!
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