on the eve of christmas eve

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Dikkon Eberhart

[This post was originally published several years ago, one year after the event occurred.  Since then, I have posted it annually as close to Christmas Eve as my posting schedule allowed.   This year, Salem Media desired it as part of a Crosswalk.com article I did called "The Meaning of Hallelujah," which you can find under the Crosswalk Articles tab at the top of my website.]


 
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah

Don’t skim your eye down the words.  Go back and say the words.  Say them with measured solemnity, four syllables to each word.  Sixteen syllables all together. 

You are praising the Lord.  This is the Gloria in excelsis Deo that you are pronouncing. 
 


It was late morning on the eve of Christmas Eve.  I called my wife at the church.  Since she and I came to Christ six years before, she had been our pastor’s secretary.  I was checking in, concerned about errands I needed to finish while I was out on the road.  We spoke briefly about the errands. 

Then I asked her when she planned to come home from the church.  Uncharacteristically, she did not know.  Usually, she knows.  Usually, she knows because she knows what tasks she must finish.  Usually, she responds with a time—an hour, two hours. 

But this time, she was vague.  It was odd of her—my wife is not a vague person, about time or about anything else.  “I don’t know,” is what she said, and she said it with a puzzled intonation, as though she wondered why she did not know and yet she said it anyway.  I was puzzled, too, when I hung up. 

I thought perhaps I should call her back, to ask if she were all right.  I thought perhaps I should question her tone of puzzlement, which suggested she did not feel in charge of her time that afternoon.  But I did not call her back.  I had errands to do. 

Here’s what I learned later.  After I hung up, an hour or two passed at the church.  My wife was alone.  She finished tasks.  There is always a task to finish on a secretary’s desk.  But, puzzlingly, she did not formulate a plan for the finishing of her tasks and for her getting home.  Then the church’s door opened and a man entered whom my wife had never seen.  The man introduced himself and asked if the pastor were in.  The pastor was not in.  

The man seemed puzzled by the circumstance that the pastor was not in at the church.  “But God told me I must come to see him now.”  

“Well, would you like me to make an appointment for you, for later?”

“But God told me I must come to see him now.” 

After all—this is how my wife reported the conversation to me—after all, the man was puzzled himself.  He had done what God had told him to do.  Now, it was the pastor’s turn. 

The pastor had left the church not long before, with several plans in his mind.  He had not been certain which of the plans he would undertake.  He would let my wife know which plan he would undertake, he said, when he knew himself. 

My wife dialed the phone.  The pastor answered.   

“There’s a man here,” she said, and she gave his name.  “He says he needs to see you.”

“Oh.” 

“I wasn’t certain about your plan.” 

“Well, I haven’t selected the plan yet.  I don’t know why.  Right now, I’m eating lunch.”  The pastor thought for a moment.  “Can he wait ten minutes?”

My wife looked at the man.  “Can you wait ten minutes?”

“Yes.”

She turned back to the phone.  “He can wait.”

“See you in ten.”

In ten minutes, the pastor arrived at the church.  He and the man went into the pastor’s office.  Two hours later, the man accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord, and his name was written in Glory. 


Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
 

Late that same night, on the eve of Christmas Eve, my wife and I relaxed on our couch.  Our house was aromatic with baking gift breads.  Our Christmas tree was lit with white bulbs, wax candles burned among our mantel display of spruce boughs and red balls, and twinkling candles were alight in our windows so that, as my mother told me when I was a child, if the Christ Child should need a place to lie down, He would know by our candles that He would be welcome here. 

My wife had explained to me the odd events of that afternoon—the man puzzled why the pastor should not be at his office when God had indicated that he would be, my wife puzzled about her inability to manage a time to return to our house so that she was available just at the right moment to make that telephone call to our pastor, our pastor puzzled that he had not selected among his plans for the afternoon so that he was, at the necessary time for the man, just eating lunch. 

My wife lay back on the couch and put her feet in my lap.  In silence, I stroked her feet.  The wine was red in my glass, and white in my wife’s.  We listened to Susan Boyle sing Hallelujah. The words of poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen filled the room.   

We are busy people, she and I, with several jobs between us—retirees who still work hard, and I had a new book coming out, a memoir recounting my life as the son of a poet father—a father whose poetry molded my relationship with our Father. 

Relaxing on our couch, weary after days and days of heavy work for both of us, nearing the completion of our Advent anticipation of a miracle—humbly trying to experience our anticipation with patience—the beauty of the season and of the Christ lights overthrew me. 

I wept. 

My wife looked her question, but gently: this was her emotional husband. 

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

I wept for Cohen’s spare, elegiac poetry.  I wept for Boyle’s easy voice.  I wept for the still, calm beauty of our decorated home.  I wept for giving gift bread to our friends, bread which my wife had created.  But mostly I wept that, on the eve of Christmas Eve, the Lord Himself had used my wife and our pastor for His own purpose, which was to bring another soul to salvation—that godly using, which had puzzled each of them, as their planning of their day was set aside.     


Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah.
 
 
 
 
 
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