BIRTHDAY

Twenty-nine years ago today and almost to the hour, I was privileged to witness the arrival of Jacob Douglas Christie into the world.  That year in Harrison, Arkansas it was indeed ‘a cold winter’s night that was so deep,’ one of the snowiest and coldest Decembers in Arkansas that I can remember.  Jacob’s first ride in an automobile was in a Jeep CJ8 with the four-wheel drive locked in as we headed back to the parsonage at Cotter on the bluffs of the White River a couple of days later.

That December I found myself on the bottom side of a steep learning curve.  I don’t think I had ever even held a baby outside a baptism, much less changed a diaper or made a two a.m. feeding or tried to jam an impossibly tiny body into one of those cute little sleeper things with the feet and the ass flap.

But I think the greatest lesson had little to do with my crash course in baby-raising.  It had to do with the coincidence of Jacob’s birth with Christmas in 1983 as I struggled to assemble some thoughts for Christmas morning homily a few days later.

I couldn't get the birthing room at the Boone County Hospital out of my mind.  Pam was bone-tired – it was a long and sometimes difficult labor.  I was scared – I had done my best at the helpful husband routine, but even Mr. Rogers can’t stem the pain of contractions and childbirth.  I was standing on foreign soil, wide-eyed and gape-mouthed, seeing and feeling things brand new to me, clueless about what to do next.

Yet the others attending Jacob’s arrival were not nearly as carried away.  One of the two nurses held her stomach tightly and swore she had acquired food poisoning from the turkey at the ward Christmas party the previous evening.  The other nurse complained bitterly that she had to work the third-shift and so-close to Christmas in spite of numerous requests to management for some well-deserved time off for the Holidays.  The doctor slumped half-asleep against the wall perhaps overindulged a bit in Christmas cheer.  It was as if, to them, nothing unusual or out of the ordinary was happening. 

The most astonishing event of my life was no big deal.  The miraculous hidden within the commonplace.  The extraordinary masquerading as the mundane.  Probably not much different from the first Christmas.

Who could have seen what was really going on right under their noses?  An annoyed motel clerk?  A crew of farmhands in their greasy John Deere caps and manure-grimed Ropers?  A young father anxious for the life and health of his child-bride and already beginning to worry about how this new mouth was to be fed?  Clueless each one that they and their world has just been unalterably changed.

And redeemed.

And thus we remain – the mostly numb, but occasionally amazed, Company of the Clueless, somnambulant even with the Excelsis in Deo on our lips.

So Happy Birthday, Jacob.  And Happy Birthday, Jesus.  And may we all be alert to the Holy lurking right under our noses.