Way Below the Angels by Harline Craig;

Author:Harline, Craig;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eerdmans
Published: 2014-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

It was the best Christmas I’d ever had. Maybe the best I’d ever have. But when I finally flew back home from my mission, and people asked me as they always asked newly returned missionaries to tell a Christmas story, it didn’t turn out so well. Because even though people said Tell us a Christmas story from your mission, what they were really saying was Tell us a conversion story that happened at Christmas, Conversion Motif 1m or so, which included the usual finding of the convert at the last door on the last street on the last hour of the day, but added the seasonal touch of some holly and ivy and good cheer, all of which made everyone listening feel even better than they did when listening to an ordinary conversion story. Make us feel even better than usual! was what people were really saying when asking for a missionary Christmas story.

The reason I knew this was that the one time I tried to tell my Christmas story I got a lot of blank and confused looks. Oh, my story was a conversion story all right, but not the sort that the clamoring crowd was expecting. It didn’t have a baptism, and I couldn’t come close to getting across what I’d seen in the landscape, and of course I left out the most personal bits that really gave the story its meaning — and bowdlerized like that, even I had to admit it sounded like a dumb boring story. The smiles of anticipation that accompanied the start of my story, the knowing looks of knowing for sure what was coming, just kept fading and looking more and more puzzled as I went along, and then at the end totally screwed up into absolute confusion. That was it? No baptismally white Christmas (you wore all white at baptisms) but only a landscapey white one? Just a pie in a chicken coop for some people you never saw who never came back to church and who might never have actually seen the pie and who come to think of it might not even have lived there? And just a crumbling tower ruin with no magic investigator in it? What kind of a Christmas story was that? What kind of missionary (eyebrows furrowing) were you? Next story from someone else! I never told it again.

But the story always meant everything to me. Seeing gray old Belgium in a new way got all tied up with seeing myself and people around me in new ways too. All the things that’d bugged me about Belgium started either not bugging me or became interesting and perfectly acceptable, started being not necessarily the wrong way to do things but just another and potentially interesting way, including the bad-­tasting witloof and the gray and the whiny motorcycles and the sometimes closed-­mouthed people.

I started understanding that people shook hands like they were offering a dead fish because they didn’t want to come across as aggressive.

I started liking

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