Christmas Eve Rescue
Christmas Eve at our house has always been the big celebration.
That’s when we open presents. That’s when the big dinner happens. The house stays loud and full longer than it probably should, and by the end of the night everyone is tired in that good way that comes after a full day with family.
That night we finally made it to bed around midnight.
It didn’t last long.
A knock came at the door.
When I opened it, two teenagers were standing there—a boy and a girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen. The boy was clearly drunk. The girl looked a little more sober, but she was cold, tired, and shaken.
They said they had been walking for hours through the desert.
It had snowed recently, and the dirt roads were thick with mud. The girl told me she worked as a driver for a non-emergency medical transport service and had dropped off a client earlier that night. On the way back they slid off the road and got stuck in a ditch somewhere out in the desert.
Standing there in the doorway, it didn’t take long to piece together a little more of the story.
The drunk guy beside her was her boyfriend—and he had been the one driving the car when it went into the ditch.
I asked where the vehicle was.
She couldn’t tell me.
She just pointed in a general direction out into the darkness.
So I grabbed my keys, put them in my truck, and we went looking.
We drove around for hours.
Mud roads. Snow patches. Darkness everywhere except for the reach of the headlights. Every once in a while she would say something like, “It might be down this road,” or “I think it’s somewhere over that way.”
Eventually, sometime in the early morning hours, we found it.
The car was nose-down in a muddy ditch.
I walked up to it and shined a light through the window.
That’s when I saw someone in the back seat.
Another teenager.
He was passed out drunk on top of a pile of empty liquor bottles.
When I turned back toward the girl and asked who that was, she said quietly, “That’s my little brother.”
The temperature was down in the single digits.
The car had run out of gas hours earlier, and he had been sitting there without heat the entire time.
It took some effort to wake him up.
I grabbed some blankets from the back of my truck and wrapped him up, then jumped the car and poured some gas into the tank so we could at least get the engine running and the heater going.
At that point the plan was simple: pull the car out of the ditch.
I handed a chain to the boyfriend—the same drunk guy who had walked to my house—and told him to crawl under the car and hook it up while I positioned my truck.
I should have checked what he attached it to.
Once he told me he was good, I started pulling.
Then I heard a loud pop.
The rear spring ripped loose and the shock came flying toward the back of my truck.
That’s when I knew this car wasn’t going anywhere the easy way.
I told them the vehicle wasn’t driveable and that I would just give them a ride somewhere safe.
They argued.
The girl insisted she couldn’t leave the vehicle. It was clearly a company car, marked with the business name, and she was convinced she would lose her job if it was abandoned.
By this point it was around three in the morning.
So I reluctantly agreed to try again.
I grabbed a shovel out of the back of my truck and started digging mud away from the tires. Then I crawled under the car myself and hooked the chain to something more solid on the frame.
This time the pull worked.
The car slowly climbed out of the ditch.
But the damage was obvious. When the spring tore loose earlier, it had ripped the rear bumper halfway off.
I told them again the car shouldn’t be driven.
They insisted.
So I made a deal with them.
I would follow them to the main road so that if something went wrong again, at least they wouldn’t be stranded in the middle of nowhere.
I poured the rest of the gas I had into their tank and made one rule: the girl had to drive.
The boyfriend had already proven he shouldn’t be behind the wheel.
She agreed.
I checked on her brother in the back seat one more time to make sure he was awake and wrapped up in blankets.
Then we set off toward the highway.
When we finally reached the main road and they were somewhere visible, I peeled off and headed home.
By the time I walked back into the house, it was Christmas morning.
I was covered head to toe in mud.
All I wanted at that point was a shower and a few hours of sleep.
Christmas Eve had quietly turned into Christmas Day somewhere out in the desert.
And like a lot of things in ministry, it wasn’t planned.
Scripture
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”
— Hebrews 13:2
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