A Simple Christmas

by Mike Huckabee

  Somewhere along Cambridge Street, where our house sat at the end of the cul-de-sac, Janet and I decided that if God’s purpose and plan for our lives was to get comfortable, then we had indeed found success. But how could we truly claim that God’s purpose for us was to become comfortable? We agreed that we were on the planet to be light in the darkness and a preservative in a culture that was spoiling.

  It was our custom to have a Christmas open house for our church family each holiday season, and that year, as we welcomed the several hundred people—many of them dear friends—who dropped in throughout the day, it was difficult to hold back the deep emotions that were going through our minds. I must confess that the thought of leaving such a gracious circle of affirmation was painful. I would later compare the move from the church to politics to stepping out of a nice, warm, soothing hot tub and into a tank of hungry sharks!

  As we celebrated the Christmas of 1991, we were aware that no matter what, things would never be the same in our lives. We had no idea of just how different they would be for the next eighteen years. We waited until after Christmas to tell the kids about the decision, though they could tell that something major was in the air. We wanted to keep things as normal as possible for as long as possible, and I’m glad we did, because from that Christmas forward, there would be nothing normal whatsoever about our lives.

  On the last Sunday of 1991, I announced my intention to step down as pastor of the church effective the first week of February. I wanted to make sure there was an opportunity to tie up loose ends and make the transition as smooth as possible for the church, the staff, and the family. I did not say what had led me to this decision, as I didn’t want anyone to think I was using the pulpit to advance my bid for office.

  It was one of the most frightening risks Janet and I had taken in our marriage. When we were younger, it had been fairly easy to walk away from something—when there was so little to walk away from. When it was just the two of us and everything we owned could fit into a pickup truck and the backseat of a car, a move to a new town or a change to a new job wasn’t too daunting. Now there was a mortgage, three kids ranging in age from nine to fifteen, and the prospect of spending an entire year without an income in order to “apply” for a job that was already filled by someone who was prepared to spend several million dollars to keep it.

  In order to survive, we cashed in a life insurance policy and liquidated funds from an annuity, and I picked up freelance communications jobs so that we could keep food on the table and pay the bills. Miraculously, we were never late in payment on anything and we managed to survive, although there were many months when I wasn’t sure how this had been possible. To this day, I find it stunningly stupid when columnists and pundits suggest that I entered politics for the money. Their ignorance of the real journey is staggering.

  It was several years into my term as governor—several years after my initial run for office—before my income finally equaled what I had made as a pastor in Texarkana. Arkansas has the lowest salary for its governor of any state in the nation. I clearly didn’t do it for the money. It was only because I had the opportunity to write books during my term as governor that I was able to get my kids through college without having to borrow a fortune, and it wasn’t until my presidential campaign ended and I started working in television and radio again that my income increased to anything really substantial.

  Life inside the fishbowl of politics is unlike what most people can imagine. Every aspect of one’s life is open for inspection—tax returns, sources and amounts of income and expenditures, medical conditions, academic records, personal activities, and even friends and relationships. Most of the reporters who are indignant when there is the least attempt to keep some area of life private would never accept or tolerate what they demand of candidates and officeholders, and they would of course argue that they are simply holding us accountable since we are getting a taxpayer-funded paycheck. Fair enough, but their words and opinions will directly affect how people feel about those candidates and elected officials, and perhaps it might be nice to know how much money they have and where it comes from; what organizations they are members of; what relationships they have; what stocks they own; and what business relationships they have. I know that isn’t going to happen, and it probably shouldn’t, but the self-righteous I-have-a-right-to-demand-information attitude is often very difficult to tolerate knowing that most of the reporters who ask such questions would never answer them if the tables were turned.

  Each Christmas is a time to reflect back on the year behind and to look forward at what lies ahead. We looked back in a very emotional review of not just a year but a career and a comfortable life that was coming to an end. We were looking ahead at the most uncertain since we had had to face Janet’s cancer. There was no bridge behind us. We were walking the high wire with no net underneath us. There was a real risk of losing our house, our savings, and all that we owned. No one guaranteed us anything. But we were as much at peace with it all as if we had known the outcome was going to be better than imagined.

  We learned from that process to keep things really simple. It was truly starting all over. We were forced to decide what was important in life and what things were just excess inventory. When the dust settled, what mattered was faith, family, and freedom. We would end up losing many things over the next few years, such as our privacy, our financial security, and our nice evenings at home, but we still had what mattered most. Simple things. And we rediscovered them during a transition at Christmas. A simple Christmas.

  11.

  Faith

  My dad never finished high school. Neither did his father or his grandfather or any other male in my family before him. So the fact that I graduated from high school made me the Starship Enterprise of my family—I had gone where no man had gone before. Graduating from college was an even bigger achievement. That doesn’t mean my father was unintelligent, although it wasn’t until I was married and had kids that I came to realize that having an education doesn’t automatically make you smart.

  On the campaign trail, I often described my dad as the kind of guy who lifted heavy things and only knew hard work. In addition to his job as a fireman, he worked as a mechanic, running a little generator repair shop on his days off, so his hands were always rough and deeply embedded with motor residue, no matter how hard he scrubbed. When I was growing up, the only soap we had in our house was Lava soap, and I was in college before I found out that it isn’t supposed to hurt when you take a shower. So many refined ladies go to a spa these days and have an “exfoliation.” A bar of Lava soap will do the same thing—for a fraction of the cost!

  Mark Twain once said, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.” It’s that way for most of us, I suppose. We grow up thinking that we’ll be nothing like our father, that he “just doesn’t get it,” and then one day we look in the mirror as adults and are startled to see him staring at us. I’m so much like my father that sometimes, when I say or do something like him, my wife and kids will say, “There you go, Dorsey.” On a side note, you may be wondering about my father’s name. I’ve often wondered about it myself. His full name was “Dorsey Wiles Huckabee,” and the only explanation I’ve ever been able to come up with for why my grandparents named him that is that they must’ve wanted to toughen him up—like the dad in “A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash. I never knew exactly where the name came from, but I’m pretty sure my dad spent a good deal of his time with his fists balled up, taking on some punk who was giving him a hard time about his name.

  My dad had a great sense of humor, although I don’t think I realized that until I was grown. Kids never think their parents are really very funny or entertaining. Of course, my kids still don’t think I’m very funny or entertaining, but I’ve fixed that by cutting them out of any inheritance until they acknowledge the wonderf
ul world of humor that I’ve imparted to them. No laughs, no loot. I think that’s fair.

  Storytelling was a big part of our lives when I was little. We didn’t think of it as storytelling at the time, just as my father’s many recitations of his life and the lives of our relatives. I’m pretty sure that many of the stories were embellished and details were added or changed over time, but it was a part of our world and about the only real family history we had. It’s caused me to realize just how important oral traditions can be and the value of a family passing on the heirlooms of their heritage by way of stories.

  I wasn’t so conscious of such things as a child, but as I grew older, I realized that my dad lived with some regrets and even embarrassment about not finishing school and not having enough money to give us things others had. I eventually would realize that one of the reasons he pushed my sister and me to excel in all we did was that he wanted to make sure that we took advantage of all the opportunities we had. He encouraged us to play musical instruments, to try out for plays, to run for class office, and to play sports. He never forced any particular activity on us, but if we showed interest, both he and my mother would insist that we do our best. If I heard that phrase once, I heard it a million times. “Son, we don’t care what you do as long as you do your best.” A halfhearted effort, whether in a science project or a household chore, was never acceptable. All endeav ors had better be accomplished with a sense of expeditious excellence, although neither of my parents would have used those words. They were old school in that they believed we were to respect authority whether we wanted to or not. That meant teachers, police officers, anyone deemed our “elders,” or just about anyone else for that matter.

  Getting in trouble at school was never a good thing, but it became unbearable if my parents found out. If the teacher or principal said, “Do you want me to call your parents?” I suddenly became better behaved than Mother Teresa and Ma hatma Gandhi combined. On those occasions when they did find out, I never even tried to blame the teacher for being too harsh or perhaps mistaking me for the real offender in the class. I was guilty, the teacher was right, and I would go right back to school and apologize. Then they would speak the words I hated most: “You better not let me hear about this again.” Of course, I had no intention of my parents’ ever hearing about it again, though that wasn’t to say I wasn’t going to do the same thing again. I was prepared to keep secrets better than Dick Cheney and would have rather been waterboarded by the CIA than face my parents’ wrath for acting up at school.

  You might think that since I became a pastor, I grew up in a really religious household, but my dad never went to church. Ever. He didn’t want to talk about it, either. He didn’t mind that my mother would take my sister and me to Sunday school, as long as we didn’t bug him about going. He was not antire ligion and didn’t speak disparagingly of “church people,” but we knew not to bring up the subject. I was a teenager before I found out that the reason my dad was averse to all things church was because once, when he had attended some years earlier, someone had made fun of him for not having the “right clothes.” It hurt him deeply, and instead of just ignoring the utterly insensitive and unchristian attitude of the idiot who said it, he allowed that incident to drive him into a deep shell when it came to anything spiritual. I never knew who the wonderful “Christian” was who had uttered such an intemperate remark, but because of that haunting knowledge, I have forever been mindful of how hurtful or how helpful words can be.

  My mother was forced to be the spiritual leader of the family, and she was somewhat timid in faith, largely due to the lack of support she got from my dad in all religious matters. For the most part, we went to Sunday school and that was it. “Big church,” as we called it, was the morning worship service, and we would go occasionally, but I found it very intimidating because the preacher screamed and scared the daylights out of me. Plus, the music didn’t exactly make my motor turn, since it was old-fashioned, piano-banging Southern gospel, and I was really getting into the Beatles. Bob Harrington, a famous evangelist prominent in the sixties, said it best: “More people are following the Beatles than the Baptists, because the Beatles look like they are going somewhere and the Baptists look like they are sorry they’ve been!”

  I did go to the things that were targeted more toward kids, like vacation Bible school in the summers, church camp, and the children’s programs for Christmas. In fact, it was at vacation Bible school when I was ten years old that I became a believer. My sister had attended on Monday, but I had refused, saying that it was for girls and sissies. (Like father, like son!) My sister, always the great actor, said that at vacation Bible school, I could get all the cookies I could eat and all the Kool-Aid I could drink and the guys played baseball during the recess. Based on that description, I decided I would go the next day and quickly discovered my sister’s big lie. They didn’t let me eat more than two cookies or drink more than one small paper cup full of Kool-Aid. But that didn’t matter, because something else did happen that day that changed my life.

  It was August 24, 1965, my tenth birthday. So far my birthday and VBS had been very disappointing, and I wasn’t prepared for them to get any better. The pastor of the church, Clyde Johnson, came to our class and talked to us about “knowing Jesus.” I couldn’t really figure out what all that meant, but as he talked, I was so concentrated on what he was saying that I felt as if everyone else in the room had been dismissed and I was there alone. He told us that God knew everything there was to know about each of us. That both scared and excited me. It scared me to think that God knew not just my public words and actions but also my private thoughts. But it excited me to contemplate the idea that the Creator of the universe was actually aware of my existence and, more important, cared about me. I knew that most people in my little hometown didn’t know who I was, but the fact that God did was rather overwhelming. Pastor Johnson asked us to raise our hands if we wanted to pray and ask Jesus to come into our hearts. I felt certain that if I lifted my hand, he would call me out and I would be put on the spot and likely humiliated. So I didn’t raise my hand, but I snuck in by keeping my hand down but my heart up and prayed the prayer anyway. And though no one else heard me, God did, and I was overwhelmed with a sense of His presence. It wasn’t just my physical birthday that day, but my spiritual one as well. In many ways, it was like Christmas, because I received the ultimate gift from God, and I learned that Christmas was all about God’s coming to us—not our coming to Him.

  The church I attended during my childhood was the Garrett Memorial Baptist Church in Hope, Arkansas. It was a small Missionary Baptist church, which is different from Southern Baptist mainly in denominational structure and the fact that Missionary Baptists tend to be stricter and frown upon everything from dancing to “mixed bathing” (this meant boys and girls couldn’t swim together or shower in the same stall, which really would have been scandalous) to “modern music.” They lightened up somewhat on the music in later years, but their basic formula was “Get saved, go to church while you live, and go to heaven when you die.” There wasn’t much discussion about my faith transforming my daily life in terms of my actions or attitudes toward things except for the external activities like going to church, giving tithes, and singing hymns.

  During my early teen years, the church hired a youth director who was supposed to create programs that catered to the youth and kept us interested in church. We actually got to play guitars, sing music that sounded closer to what we listened to on the radio, and talk about things that actually mattered to us, like dating, war, drugs, and career choices. This made me willing to go to “big church,” so I started going to the Sunday night services because that’s when the youth activities were held.

  When I was fifteen, I was selected to represent Arkansas at the Hugh O’Brian Youth Foundation Space Seminar at Cape Kennedy, Florida. One student from each of the fifty states and ten from foreign countries were invited to spend a little over a week at no expense at Cape Kennedy
to train with astronauts, learn about the space program, and become “Space Ambassadors.” While there, I was stunned to find out that most of the other students lacked even a basic belief in God and that most of them were at the top of their class and among the brightest in their state. I came back from that event with a new awareness of what a small world I had lived in and within a week had dedicated my life to Christian service.

  I told my parents about my decision, and the next week, none other than my own father came to church for the first time I could ever remember. He said, “If my son is going to do church work, I guess I had better at least go myself.” And with that began a new chapter for him and for the rest of the family.

  Whatever had kept him out of church before was forgotten, and now nothing could keep him away. He had a hard time understanding the King James Version of the Bible, but my sister, mother, and I bought him a Living Bible, which is a modern-language version that reads more like a daily newspaper in simple, easy-to-understand language.

  For the first time in my life, my parents sat together in church, and soon church became the center of their social lives as well as their spiritual lives. It was so strange to see my father going to church that on Sunday mornings I sometimes wondered, “Who is this guy hurrying around the house telling us to get ready so we won’t be late to church?”

  Over the next few years, I saw my father’s spiritual life grow. Slowly but steadily, he came to learn what it means to “follow Jesus,” and while those of his generation were generally not overly vocal about such personal things as faith, he became very expressive about his faith. He didn’t talk about it too much or buttonhole people on the street, but his actions changed and truly reflected service and sacrifice. Without grudging, he gave with increasing generosity to the church and to special needs he knew about. He was the first to volunteer to mow the lawn of a family whose head of household was ill or to help someone who had to move furniture or to sit with a sick person at the hospital to relieve an exhausted family member.