My most memorable Christmas~A Story from Cordell Baker

                       

                                                    My most memorable Christmas

I lay in a hospital bed in Wenatchee. On the bed beside me lay our four month old daughter, while my wife and four-year-old daughter stood beside the bed. There we opened our Christmas gifts and ate the special Christmas dinner the hospital provided. That is I ate what could be sucked through a straw that went through the gap in my front lower tooth line. My jaws were wired shut, so all my food was either liquid or blended.

Doesn't sound like a happy Christmas does it? But when you've been through what I had been through and see what I had seen, it probably was one of the happiest days of my life.

Thirteen days earlier I had been run over by a tractor while doing seasonal work in an orchard in Bridgeport. After laying on the frozen ground for forty-five minutes while the men searched for an ambulance ( the closest one 45 miles away), I was transported on an old army stretcher in the police paddy wagon to the hospital in Brewster. Seeing the extent of my injuries, the medical people at Brewster sent me on to the hospital in Wenatchee.

When it was all sorted out the diagnosis included fractures to the left foot, left femur, ribs, nose, skull and three fractures of the lower jaw. My right eye was popped out of its socket and so swelled it felt like a tennis ball. The head injuries were life-threatening. Recovery would involve several surgeries. I would spend five weeks in the hospital, fourteen months on crutches and a year on a cane. Forty-five years later, as I write these lines, I still feel the effects daily.

But in the hospital we began to see the hand of God, graciously supplying every need and opening strong and lasting friendships which would bless our lives for years to come.

We were so young and utterly without this world's goods. I was pastor of a little mission church which paid us $40 per month. We gave the $40 back to the church to make payments on the parsonage. Another church gave us $90 per month. I made up the remainder of our needs by seasonal work in the orchards. Looking at it from the human side thirteen days earlier, that Christmas looked mighty grim. Then we begin to see how God works.

A few days into my hospitalization, the cards and letters begin to arrive, most of them with checks and money orders in them. They came from all over the world, from people we knew and many from folks we've never heard of. Soon it was like a flood. The nurses literally brought my mail and by the bucketful. Then they would stand by with awe as we open the letters and extracted the checks dozens of them. We never lacked! God supplied all our needs and more through his loving children from all over the world.

After a few days of waiting (the hardest part of it all) to see that they head injuries were no longer life-threatening, the surgeries and healing begin. Though at times very painful, every day was a challenge and a new milestone in healing. Is it any wonder then, that that Christmas, as pitiful and out of the ordinary it may seem turned out to be one of my most memorable Christmases. Mary, the mother of our Lord, in her inspired magnificent, expressed my sentiments exactly when she said "He...has done to me great things... and his mercy is on them that fear him." (Luke 1:49-50)