At this time of year, not everyone is focused on getting Christmas cards in the mail or finding all of the ingredients for Grandma's stuffing recipe. Maybe you can relate to Hank's story:
My name is Hank, and I'm from Massachusetts. My home is busy--I have 5 kids--but I always find a little time to write in my journal.
Christmas was usually a happy time at our house. However, three years ago--in the summer of '61, during great political unrest-- my life changed. I was working in my office at home when my wife came running to me from another room, engulfed in flames (she had been working with a candle, and her clothes caught fire). I grabbed a small rug to put them out. That didn't work, neither did grabbing her in my arms and trying to smother them. Not a day goes by that I don't look at my scars and remember that I couldn't save her. She died the next day.
As I look back in my journal, there are no Christmas entries for that year, and there was no joy in my heart. Even the following year of '62, as my own kids wished me a Merry Christmas, I could not respond to them.
The third year after Fanny's death I got word--near Christmas of '63-- that Chuck, my oldest child and an army lieutenant, had been shot in the war and was paralyzed. Though I didn't expect him to live, he pulled through. I could not bring myself to write in my journal that Christmas. I felt like my soul had been placed in a box and put on a shelf.
I don't know what it was--it could have been that the war was over-- but by the Christmas of '64, I realized that, while I had been cocooned in human tragedy and grief, God had not been sleeping, and He was not dead. I actually heard the bells that Christmas, and wrote a poem about them. If you look at all of the original seven verses, you can see more of my life woven through it. Most people only know five of them. But you know my poem as the carol, "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day". You see, my full name is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and that's my song.
(Based on "The Story Behind 'I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day'" by Tom Stewart, Dec. 20, 2001.
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