Page 9 of A Baxter Family Christmas
Silent night... holy night... all is calm... all is bright.
Was that true? Were things ever really calm and bright?
Kendra stared out the window at the Christmas lights on the house across the street. Everyone was getting into the spirit early. Everyone but Moe.What’s wrong with us?The question wasn’t directed at anyone but herself. Somehow it had to be her fault. She was the one whose health issues had consumed their marriage these last few years.
Kendra turned to the tree again. Something about the haunting melody took her back. Four years back... to the time when the virus first struck. Kendra had been completely healthy, a nurse at the local hospital. She and Moe were happy and talking about having children when one evening she spiked a fever. Highest fever Kendra had ever had.
It took her doctor a week to realize she had acute endocarditis. A raging infection in her heart. By then, the illness had done permanent damage. So much that she was given only a few years to live.
Even now Kendra couldn’t believe she could go from being so well to so deathly sick in such a short time. After her doctor put her on the heart transplant list, Kendra struggled to comprehend what had happened.
Maybe it was her sickness, or the uncertainty of her future... but whatever the reason, her relationship with Moe became strained. He stopped calling her on his breaks and coming home for the occasional lunch. Her heart left her unable to work more than two days a week, and with the extra time on her hands, Kendra noticed more keenly the sad differences in her marriage.
Before she got the call about the available heart, Kendra was pretty sure things with Moe were over. They hadn’t talked about getting a divorce. After all, Kendra was fading. Her doctor wasn’t sure if she had six months to live, so splitting up wasn’t a question. They were too consumed with her death to talk about anything else. But still they fought about money and how she could eat better to buy herself more time, how she wouldn’t be sick if she had done a better job taking care of herself. Kendra actually figured death would be a welcome reprieve.
Then the call came.
A heart was available. It had belonged to a woman killed in a car accident. Kendra tried not to think about that part as Moe rushed her to the hospital. And two weeks later she left with a new heart.
The heart of Erin Baxter Hogan.
For a time after the transplant, Kendra and Moe got along better than ever. Life felt new and fresh and well again, and that spilled over into their free time. Moe even sent a letter to John Baxter, the father of Erin, to tell him how thankful they were for Erin’s heart, and how her death had mattered.
Not long after, John Baxter called and connected with Kendra and Moe, saying he hoped they could all meet someday. He talked about Erin and the Baxter family and every other line was something about his family’s faith or how he was sure his daughter was in heaven. That’s when Moe became adamant about not meeting them. He wanted nothing to do with their faith. Plus, he thought getting together would be too much for everyone. Kendra disagreed. She thought there could be great meaning in getting to know Erin’s family.
In recent weeks, whatever progress they’d made in their marriage had long since eroded. Kendra was alone much of the time.
The way she was alone tonight.
A different song filled the room now—“O Holy Night.”
Kendra used a stepladder and wove a string of white lights through the branches of the tree.O Holy Night... the stars are brightly shining. This is the night of our dear Savior’s birth.
The lights shone on their pretty tree tonight. But the birth of a Savior? Kendra pondered the possibility. Two thoughts had consumed her lately. First, the idea of meeting Erin’s family and thanking them. She could picture looking into their eyes and letting them know that Erin’s death was not in vain.
And second, the idea that there just might be a God, after all.
A God who came to earth as a baby that first Christmas morning.
The music kept Kendra company as she opened the box of ornaments. These were the antiques, the ornaments from her mother’s tree. For a long time she studied them, staring at them and letting them take her back in time. Kendra never knew her father, and her mother had died in a skiing accident when Kendra was nineteen. Ten years ago. These ornaments, a box of photos, and a handwritten journal were all Kendra had left of the woman.
Slowly, with reverence, Kendra began hanging the ornaments on the tree. Her mother would want her to meet Erin’s family.Leave nothing unsaid.That was her motto. And Kendra’s mother had lived it out. Every bit of love and wisdom she’d had for Kendra was written in the pages of a journal Kendra had known nothing about. Until she found it in her mother’s nightstand the week after her death.
Kendra had read it cover to cover several times since then. Apparently her mother had found faith in Jesus weeks before her death. Kendra and her mother had been planning to have coffee and talk about life that week—just after her skiing trip.
Instead Kendra had spent the week planning her mother’s funeral.
“My mother believed in God at the end,” she told Moe when they met. “She wanted us to believe, too.”
But Moe only smiled the way he might smile at a silly child. “Believe in a God who took your mother away from you? What sense is there in that?”
Moe was alive and real and his argument made sense. That is, until recently.
The difference was John Baxter.
Kendra had been talking to the man on the phone lately. Every week or so. John was kind and intelligent and thoughtful. Whenever he and Kendra talked he always shared something about God. Including the last time, when John asked if Kendra and Moe would like to join the Baxter family for Christmas Eve dinner.
Moe was completely opposed to the idea. But the more Kendra thought about it, the more intrigued she became. Christmas Eve dinner would give her the chance to thank everyone in Erin’s family. But even more it would let Kendra see the Baxter family’s faith firsthand. Was it really possible? That an entire family really believed in God and His ways?
