Everett’s Last Christmas Carol

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites.

00:00:26
Speaker 2: James L. Johnson.

00:00:28
Speaker 1: He’s a long time pastor, and he and his wife, Linda, have served together in Washington and California, among other places. They have nine kids and live in Rogers, Minnesota. Pastor Jim finds peculiar friends wherever he goes, wherever he lives, wherever he travels, in one form or another. This is the story about one of those friends. Here’s Jim Johnson and the story of Everett Model.

00:00:56
Speaker 3: Everett was a peculiar man in our town. Smiling, awkward, and heavy-footed. He spoke with a back-throat lisp. But he didn’t talk much, not to most people. But Everett would talk to me. “I got the Lord in my life,” Everett told me not so long after he started coming to our church in a small town in northern Minnesota. He cried when he said it. Every time he said it, I think Everett cried. “Jesus is in my heart,” he would say. It was twenty-five years ago. This Christmas, we sang our last Christmas Carol together. I couldn’t always understand his words, but I could always understand this much: Everett Model, the peculiar old man who mowed four lins a day with a broken-down more for five dollars a yard, needed community. He needed to work, and he wanted you to know that he was a Christian. Everybody knew whoever it was in the northwestern, frozen-cold Minnesota burg where we used to live with one thousand, five hundred and twenty-seven citizens and two grocery stores: a Coast to Coast and a Hardware Hank. It couldn’t help but notice the Everetts of the world. He was about sixty years old back then, but looked a little older. And he was, as we used to say it, a little slow, although it doesn’t seem nice to say it that way now. Ever, since his divorce years ago to a private but functional owner of Mary’s Corner Closet, the thrift store, Everett had made his home in a low-rent senior home, a rest home, as we used to call it, a six-room, gray-shaked house with two gables, aging but well-kept. “The Johnson Rest Home,” said the sign on the side. Because of Everett’s quirky personality, and his awkward way of talking, and his seemingly wor singing health, he moved from one rest home to another, one town to the next, until his diabetic condition forced the move to Midway Nursing Home in the oldest part of our town. Staying at Midway said a lot in itself. The seniors with a little better means who needed help, they stayed in the newer Municipal Home by the highway. The Municipal was definitely a step up, attached to the regional hospital and a growing health clinic. The Municipal was clean and new and bore the look of modern healthcare. Everett did not live at the Municipal Home. He lived at the Midway. The Midway Home was well-green. It was the original hospital in our town, a rectangular building with three floors. The Midway was built in the nineteen twenties and saved from raising because it was, as we used to say, “too good to go to waste.” Painted in that verdant guacamole color, it brought smiles to first-time visitors to our town, but it served fine Foreverett and about twenty other also-rans of life. Back then, three males a day in a regular turnover of nursing assistants who made about eight dollars an hour and worked hard at it. The Midway Home was for people who grew up in the country and worked on homestead farms or taught in two-room schoolhouses. Those folks, like my folks, didn’t feel necessarily that it was a step down to live in Midway. It was a step up for them, and as a pastor of a local mainline church, I held services there every Sunday afternoon and would visit people like Everett. Everett at first lived just two blocks from our parsonage on Second Street, so I saw him often, but honestly tried to avoid him. My next-door neighbor, Steve, was the first to befriend him. Steve couldn’t help himself. Everett asked if he could mow his lawn one day, and Steve was easy. He was a new Christian with a tender heart, and he could not say no. Everett pushed his lawnmower the two blocks from the restroom to our lots near the corner by the Dairy Queen on Second Street, and I have to admit, yes, I did think it looked odd to see in a hunched and aging man mowing the lawn of a young, burly maintenance man. But Steve was undeterred. Steve said, “Everybody needs to have a purpose.” “What’s life without a job?” Well, I couldn’t disagree with that, so I paid Everett five dollars to mow my lawn.

00:05:42
Speaker 2: Too.

00:05:44
Speaker 3: The lines weren’t always straight. He cut into my tree roots. He started mowing too early in the day, and his ancient Toro lawnmower coughed up clouds of blue smoke. But Linda and I hired him five dollars just to be nice once a week, at least. Whenever it came to mow my grass, he would often crank up the Toro at seven o’clock in the morning, waking up our three little girls. “Everett,” I’d say, after I had him stop the mower, “you can’t really start until eight o’clock.” “Okay, sorry,” he would say. “I didn’t know.” Sometimes my neighbor, Steve, grew frustrated because Everett would mow over his new dogwood bushes. “Ever, you gotta watch we were mowing.”

00:06:29
Speaker 2: Steve would say.

00:06:31
Speaker 3: Ever would shrug, and Steve would hire him the next week as a new Christian and a kind but burly maintenance man. Steve had a heart for the zeros of this world, and I was working on that too. Yes, Everett smoked too much, and yes, he was odd, and yes, Everett’s reputation preceded him, but Everett was family to us. He was, anyway, a child of God and a man who needed five dollars, and we agreed to help.

00:07:00
Speaker 2: And you’re listening to James L.

00:07:02
Speaker 1: Johnson, a long time pastor, telling the story of this well, peculiar friend.

00:07:08
Speaker 2: And we all have peculiar friends. Maybe you’re peculiar. I think I’m pretty peculiar myself.

00:07:12
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to the story of Everett Model. When we come back, more of Jim Johnson’s story, and of course, Everett’s story. Here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories.

00:07:35
Speaker 2: Every day on this show, we’re bringing.

00:07:37
Speaker 1: inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we continue here on Our American Stories, listening to a listener’s story. Let’s continue with Jim and Everett’s unlikely friendship.

00:08:19
Speaker 3: God sent Everett to our church. I think ever since I was a child, God gave me a heart for the “nobodies” of the world. I knew it from my boyhood in Bloomington, Minnesota. Jay, a neighbor kid with a Kool-Aid mustache and a heiny haircut, moved across the street because the Lord wanted to teach me something. My neighborhood on Stephens Avenue had sixteen houses, all in the lower middle class blue collar range, and the kids became my friends and teachers. They were bullies and brains, athletes and poets, musicians and scrappers, and gossips and jocks, and the twenty children of the block on Stephens Avenue. We had the world in a nutshells, so Stephens Avenue became my training ground for character. Everyone counts. God made them all, Jesus loved them, and I was supposed to love them too. Granted, you had to love and stay pretty far away from some people at the same time, but you can learn to do that. It’s judgment and discretion and elbow room all at the same time. But if you’re a true Christian, you better learn to be nice, which brings me back to Everett Model. The old man came to our small town church for two basic reasons. One, we preached the Bible every Sunday, and Everett believed the Bible. And two, you could wear flannel and boots and big bell buckles in our services if you wanted to, and nobody cared. We were the down-to-earth crowd. Not so many bankers or lawyers or dentists in our church. We do the regular folks. We captured the market on regular at Calvary Church, the plain, everyday people who invested their lives in road construction and milk plants, small grain farms and auto repair. Even so, people still looked twice whenever it waddled into our church. He spent his career doing small jobs and farmhand work, the lower rung of the agricultural ladder in the Midwest. But he came to our church every Sunday, and so he was our family, with one hundred and ten people watching him. It was entertainment in theology all at the same time. Everett hobbled up to the third pew on the left every Wednesday night and every Sunday morning, sitting by the inside aisle, usually by himself. The room was a course drifted in like a cloud. As always, Everett was strange. Mary had to divorce him because, well, we didn’t want to say, and he was forced to leave a previous care center because he can’t get along with people. He was stubborn, he was weird, he was poor, he was Everett. I suppose some of the rumors were true, but I chose to believe about ten percent of them, and I still do to this day.

00:11:08
Speaker 2: With people.

00:11:09
Speaker 3: “Take it with a grain of salt,” as my mother used to say. And in a world filled with sin and sinners, and flannel and jeans, and rest homes and small towns and big cities, and good children and the naughty and the nice who don’t always live like they should, well, I suppose you have to give people a second chance. I guess there are a lot of things to overlook and of which to be forgiven. The Angel said to Joseph, and Matthew one, twenty and twenty-one, that, “What is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit, and Mary will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” I guess Jesus died.

00:11:55
Speaker 2: For people.

00:11:57
Speaker 3: Like Everett, too, had used a man named Bob in a neighboring town to lead Everett to Jesus Christ. One year. Bob, the truck driver, formerly the town bully, had become a believer in Christ and had become a pretty good role model too in our neighboring town. And as such, truck driver Bob knew what it was like to be alienated and estranged. So Bob brought him to his church in Macintosh and taught Everett that Jesus was God’s Son, that Christ died in across to pay the price for our sin, that Jesus had risen from the dead and wanted to enter into our lives and forgive our sin and create us anew. Our small town church in Foston preached pretty much the same message of salvation. I’m thinking of that verse, “For you was born a savior who is Christ, the Lord.” Everett liked that, and he wanted to be a part of our church. So I made friends with him because I was a pastor, and because I had a heart for the “zeros” of this world, because I was a “zero” probably too. We’re supposed to take care of people like Everett, aren’t we? But it went further for me than just being Lutheran clergy. Everett, to me, represented the least of these people, as Jesus said, like the poor man Lazarus and Luke seventeen. Everett was only asking for crumbs.

00:13:19
Speaker 2: Off the table.

00:13:20
Speaker 3: Who are we to say no for? Aren’t we all as poor as Lazarus and Everett himself? The congregation embraced him. After a few months. We mostly came to love him, almost all of us, I should say. He came every Sunday, rain or shine, snow or sleet, and he stayed after for snack time and ate enormous amounts of food at our monthly pot, lugged dinners, and never brought a dish. Of course, pretty sure we wouldn’t have tried his dishes anyway. But we came to accept and love Everett just the same.

00:13:55
Speaker 2: Like most of us.

00:13:56
Speaker 3: Everett had his good traits and his bad traits. He always, he sat on the right side, second row, next to the aisle. One day a visitor came early and, not knowing, sat down with his wife and took Everett’s spot. My lawn-mowing friend walked down the aisle, looked up to see his pew taken, and he didn’t know what to do. I mean, while all one hundred of us were watching, piano playing in the background, two minutes before the service started and with the church mostly packed, Everett hesitated. He looked, he turned, he stopped. He deliberated before quickly walking back to the folding chair section in the rear. But before he came forward all the way from the back, we all watched him. “What was Ever going to do with those two people sitting in his usual seat?” He tapped the unsuspecting men on the shoulder. He bent down and asked the visitor if he could have his hymnal. We could hear Everett ask it semi-intelligibly, “Can I have that hymn book?” With an annoying shrug, the men reached over, grabbed the hymn book, handed it to Everett, and that was that. Everett took the book and walked back to the folding chairs in the rear, fully content. Tell you what, no one ever sat in Everett’s spot next time. When you’re a little awkward, you need a little time, and you need a good friend. And my maintenance chief friend, Steve, was just the guy. Steve was kind enough to ask him to help him serve as an usher with him, forever. That was a huge job and a great compliment: carrying brass plates with money offerings, checks, a few coins. That was a new horizon forever. It was perhaps the first time anyone had ever asked him to serve. And Steve, in flannel and jeans and cowboy boots, would stand next to Everett in his lime-green leisure suit, which I’m sure he bought out Mary’s Corner Closet, the thrift store, while I prayed for the offering. The three of us standing there, front and center, and everyone else watching, and with Everett—his health beginning to fail, his hands clasped in front of him—would lean and list and stagger and catch his footing just about to fall. You know, I’m telling you, a few of the caring women—none of the observant children of the church—and all but two of the men closed their eyes during those prayers. Everybody was watching. They were sure, Ever, it was going to fall. “Don’t let this happen! Give him a brace!” But Steve would hang on, steady as can be. Provides stability. And Everett never did fall down up there. But there was a new level of alertness during my brief opening offering prayers. But Everett would smile. “You say, ‘I’m an usher now’,” he would tell me. “We were watching him crow.” The other amusing part of being in a church service with Everett was Prairie quest time. Our small-town church uses a family-friendly prayer request method. Just after the Apostles’ Creed and before the special music, we ask if there are any special prayer requests, as we say it, and people raise their hands and offer their requests. “Pray for my Aunt Kathy’s having a baby.” “Pray for Norvil’s knee surgery,” they would say. “Pray for travel mercies.” We would use that phrase. But Ever, it was personal and long—real long.

00:17:26
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to James Johnson, a long time pastor. And by the way, we do these stories from churches, from synagogues, from mosques. We do them because so many Americans in this country take their faith and spiritual walk seriously, and we don’t back away from those things, and we don’t proselytize here, as you well know.

00:17:45
Speaker 2: But to avoid these stories, to not tell them, would be a lie.

00:17:48
Speaker 1: And that’s why we bring them to you. When we come back, more with this remarkable friendship here on Our American Stories. And we continue here on Our American Stories.

00:18:12
Speaker 2: James L.

00:18:13
Speaker 1: Johnson, telling the story of his friendship with Everett Model.

00:18:18
Speaker 2: Let’s return to the story.

00:18:20
Speaker 3: Everett raised his hand for Prairie quest time every single time. “Yes, it’s Everett, do you have a Prairie request?” We knew what was coming, and yep. Everett would start talking and start praying, and start asking and start crying, and on and on he would go. His requests were always personal and mostly non-intelligible. They were primarily unending, and like some of my sermons, Everett’s requests marched on and on. “Pray for Bob and Bill and my brother, Clarence, who needs to know the Lord,” he would say. “Or, we were pretty sure,” he said. “And for Pastor Tom and Don Fritz and stifled cries for all the people who didn’t know.” “Pray first, Steve and Barb and Pastor Jim and Linda and the children and the people.” And after about three minutes, you had to cut in and interrupt, and I would say, “Thank you, Ever. Anybody else?” I’ll never forget, though, Everett’s final Christmas wish. It was the day that I sang my last Christmas Carol with him, twenty-five years ago, this December, on that Sunday night. Casey didn’t know. In northern Minnesota, the snow comes almost every early November, right after a hunting season starts, and it rarely melts before March, so every Christmas is white. Our church had this annual tradition of Christmas caroling two weeks before Christmas. A man in a neighboring town owned a large sleigh and cared for a team of four Belgian horses—beautiful animals—and every year we would ask him to cart our church around town on the sleigh with those horses. And Sunday nights in December were slow nights in our town, and a church group on a sleigh could jingle and jangle through the city with the pleasure of the entire town. We could take the back roads to family homes and senior residences and park in the front yard. We also, we figured, could pull our sleigh one street off Main Street and park it right in front of the Midway Home. “That’s where Everett was living at the end.” “Let’s go sing Foreverett!” I said. Everybody wanted