Matthew 1:21
“And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS:
for he shall save his people from their sins.”
Aleksander Wozniac – most of his family and friends called the nine year old boy Alek – had climbed onto the kitchen counter so many times before – get a toe onto the bookshelf that holds Mommy’s cookbooks; balance the hips over the front edge of the counter, so he could lever himself up; kick (ever so lightly) against the lower cabinets; and swing one knee over. As he was scaling the kitchen cabinets once again, his father yelled, “Alek, get down! If you want a cookie ask me or Mommy for it. At least use the step-stool!”
When Poppa yelled, Alek snatched another cut-out cookie, a coconut-covered Christmas tree, from the can where his mother hid them and popped it into his mouth. He didn’t bite down. He just held the tree’s trunk carefully between his lips so he could use both hands to quickly close the can and climb down. When his feet slammed down onto the floor a little harder than he planned, the part of the tree hanging outside his mouth broke off.
“Awww!” he groaned without losing any of the sweet bite still in his mouth. Alek bent over, grabbed up the three biggest pieces of cookie off the floor and stuffed them in with the rest of the delicious tree trunk. With cheeks bulging, he got the broom out of the closet to sweep up the remaining crumbs and coconut. By now Poppa was by his side.
“Look at the mess, Alek! And look, every time you climb on the counter you kick the bottom cabinet. Look at the marks. Why should you give me a paint job! Use the step stool!” Poppa opened the upper cabinet and stretched high to the can of cookies. “I’m going to have a cookie, too – hmmm – a snowman, and maybe a bell, and a glass of milk. How about you, Alek? You want one more cookie? And you want some milk with it?” Poppa got out two plates for their cookies and two small glasses for some cold milk.
“I’m sorry, Poppa. I’ll use the step stool next time.” Alek emptied the dustpan of crumbs into the garbage and then searched through the cookie can until he found a yellow chicken.
Poppa said, “Maybe there will be no next time. When Mommy sees how many cookies we eat, I think she will find a new hiding place.”
“We can’t help it, right, Poppa? These cookies’re too good!”
“Yes, too good. So Mommy only makes them once a year for Christmas. So you don’t get tired of them, and I don’t get too fat.” Poppa chuckled while he bit off his snowman’s head and middle section in one bite.
This little scene between Poppa and Aleksander was just the sort of scene that happened again and again between the father and his beloved only child. Gregorz – Gregorz was Poppa’s real name – Gregorz and Aleksander Wozniac were very dear to each other. They seemed to understand each other even though little Alek had always been a handful – hard to handle, you might say. Let me explain.
Alek would get these great ideas that would end up with a trip to the emergency room at the hospital. The whole neighborhood knew that no three boys together could tackle Russell Miller, but Alek had the great idea to tackle him alone by grabbing Russell around the knees. It cost Alek a broken tooth and four stitches (and Russell stilled scored a touchdown). The great idea to carve a part from a model airplane so it fit onto a model car ended with a sliced finger and six more stitches. It seemed like a great idea to try to get his kite out of the tree until it cost him six weeks with a cast on his broken arm. One time Mommy grabbed him around the ankles as he was climbing out the upstairs window to rescue a kitten on the roof. Who knows how that was going to end up! After Mommy’s fifth or sixth time in the emergency room with Alek she joked that soon, the doctors will know him so well they will send him a yearly Christmas card.
Sure Gregorz Wozniac and his wife Paulina knew their boy was sometimes out of control. They tried everything to discipline their son – yelling at him, making him sit in the corner, and refusing him dessert. Sometimes they even gave the boy a swat on the hand or the butt. The more out of control Alek became, the more his parents would speak in Polish, “Alek, you’re acting like a glupi,” (“like a fool”) “Wybaw nas, Boh, the boy is dziki,” (“Save us, Lord, from this wild thing!”) or when Alek was really in trouble, “You’re going to get one on your zadzie, Alek.” (Zadzie is the Polish word for “butt.”)
When Gregorz caught his son crossing the boundaries of safety, manners, and good sense, he would first say, “Now you’re going to get one on your zadzie,” and then he would pray to the Lord for wisdom how to handle his naughty boy. He would say, “Oh, Lord, Father of all people, You are the greatest Father of all. Please tell me, how do I teach my Aleksander?” The Lord told the worried Poppa to look into his son’s eyes – while he gave him one on the zadzie, that is.
Alek’s eyes were wide, glowing, and soft. They weren’t mean or evil. They were stubborn, but they weren’t rebellious. Alek never avoided Poppa’s stare, even when he had been naughty; and his eyes always looked hurt after his mother or father scolded him. They were the eyes of a boy who wanted to figure this out – how can a boy be good?
Did Gregorz hear the Lord correctly? He began to doubt it when Aleksander started getting in a lot of trouble at school. First Alek punched his classmate in the gut. He claimed the boy kept cutting in front of him in the lunch line. Then in the middle of a game of checkers with a friend he knocked over the board on purpose. The friend, said Alek, wasn’t following the rules. Teachers started sending home reports of how Alek had misbehaved. They said Alek was distracted. He was always looking out the windows. He was always out of his seat. He would carry on conversations with his classmates while his teacher was talking. He would shout answers without raising his hand. His grades were good, but, to his teachers, he was sometimes a pain in the zadzie, you might say. The principal of the school suggested that Alek should be taken to a doctor. Maybe some pills could calm him down.
Only two weeks ago, during lunch, a gerbil got loose in the classroom. In an effort to capture the little rodent, Alek flipped over both a girl’s lunch tray and the girl. He got the gerbil, but what a mess! Because of the gerbil incident, Gregorz had to go to school for a meeting with the principal. As Gregorz and Alek walked home afterwards, the Poppa held his son’s hand and once again, this time silently, asked the Lord what to do about his naughty son. Long talks, time outs, and giving him one on the zadzie didn’t seem to be bringing any peace and quiet to Aleksander’s life or his parents’ lives or his teachers’. Gregorz was worried. That’s when the Lord spoke to him again. The Lord said, “He’s not too hard for me to handle.”
And that just about brings us up to date on the busy mind and life of Aleksander Wozniac. We can now return to the scene in the kitchen.
As Poppa and Alek sat at the kitchen table finishing their cookies and milk, Alek began to ask his father about the church service earlier that day. “Poppa, I liked Pastor’s sermon today, but there’s a part I don’t understand. Why did Jesus have to die for our sin.”
Poppa was so proud his son had questions about the Word of God. He often did. Poppa replied, “Pastor said Christmas is not just a birthday party for Jesus. He said it is about God giving us his Son, the greatest present of all, so we can be forgiven of our sins.”
Alek was not satisfied. He repeated, “But did Jesus have to die? Pastor said so.”
Poppa said, “You know, Alek, you have a busy mind for a little boy.” Alek kept looking at Poppa with eyes like he was hungry for something, only he wasn’t hungry for another cookie. He was hungry to understand more about Jesus. Poppa tried his best to answer a hard question. “Son, love and forgiveness cost a lot. For me it means I take care of you and Mommy. It’s why I go to your school and talk to your teachers; it’s why I pray for you so much and talk to you and even play with you. For God love meant that he would give his Son for the sins of the world. He didn’t give part of his Son or half of his Son. He gave his Son from birth all the way to death.”
“Thank you, Poppa,” Alek said. He still wasn’t sure he understood, but his brain hurt a little after talking about such difficult ideas, so he changed the subject. His Christmas vacation had started, so he had no school the next day, a Monday. “Poppa, since I have no school tomorrow, do you think I can go to the bridge with you?”
Poppa answered with a twinkle in his eye and glory in his tone, “Of course you will come to work. And tomorrow, Aleksander Wozniac, you will push the lever!”
The lever! Poppa meant the big red lever that raised and lowered the town’s mechanical bridge. This was like the best Christmas present any boy could want. To push the lever!
You see, Alek believed his father was a mighty man. Sure, all kids imagine their fathers are the stronger than any of their friends’ fathers. We don’t blame them, but Alek had a special reason for thinking Poppa was the strongest of them all. Poppa might be kind of short and skinny, but he was a bridge master.
A bridge master had his own office with windows on three sides in a building called the bridge house above the town’s railroad bridge. The office windows were at the same level as the windows of the passenger trains that clanked through town many times a day. From his office in the bridge house, with a single lever, a bridge master put the enormous grinding, screeching gears and axels in motion that raised the bridge when big boats traveling on the river wanted to pass under it. He used the same lever to lower the bridge so long trains filled with hundreds of passengers could use the bridge to pass over the river. Alek was so proud of Poppa.
Poppa interrupted Alek’s thoughts about the glorious lever, “Alek, go to bed. If you are going to work with me tomorrow, you need a good sleep.”
The next morning, father and son, Gregorz and Aleksander Wozniac decided to walk the three miles to the bridge because it was a sunny winter morning, warm enough for walking without hats and mittens. Alek sometimes ran ahead until Poppa yelled for him to wait, and sometimes they walked holding hands and talked. They did not suspect their special day at the bridge would turn out so differently than they planned and change their lives forever.
As they walked Alek quizzed Poppa twenty times about the train schedule, “Three trains in the morning and three after lunch; six trains in all, right Poppa? Poppa, do you know how many boats will come, so we will have to raise the bridge?”
“Not sure, son. Some days there are a lot of boats. Some days there are very few. Sometimes we won’t even have to put up the bridge between trains.”
“But we always have to make sure the bridge is down when the train comes.”
“Right.”
“Or the train can trash and go into the river.”
“Yes.”
“Are there a lot of people on the trains?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Can they get hurt if the bridge is not down?”
“Alek, you know the answers to all these questions. The bridge must be down. That is the most important thing. Many people can die if the bridge is not down for the train.” Poppa remembered that his son was only asking because he was so excited and serious about pulling on the big red lever. Poppa also took the safety of the passengers on the trains very seriously, but when he heard the strict tone of his own voice, he realized he might scare his naturally worried son. He added, “Don’t worry, son, we will make sure the bridge is down.”
After walking a while in silence, Alek asked, “Poppa, do bridge masters ever forget to put down the bridge?”
Poppa now knew the tone of his earlier answer had indeed worried his son. He assured him yet again, this time in a softer tone “I said not to worry, Alek; the bridge master always remembers to put down the bridge for the trains.”
When father and son got to the bridge they were twenty minutes early for Poppa’s turn to work. One of the other bridge masters was on duty, so after they said hello, Poppa decided to show Alek how the bridge worked. “If you are going to make the bridge go up and down today, you should learn more how it works, yes?” he said.
Alek imagined telling his classmates at school, after Christmas vacation, all about the workings of the massive bridge. Their mouths would hang open with jealousy.
Alek found out it was especially complicated to make the bridge go up. There was a big engine to start, pressure gauges to watch, pipes to fill, valves to turn, and circuits to connect. It took powerful machinery to raise such a massive bridge. Poppa explained how the enormous slabs of concrete attached to the two sides of the bridge helped balance the bridge on its strong hinge so the engine and gears would not have to work so hard to raise the bridge.
Alek learned that lowering the bridge was quite different than raising the bridge. The big engine was not needed to lower it. The bridge master only had to release a pressure valve by pulling down the big red lever on the wall of the bridge house, and the bridge would slowly come down by its own weight. Lowering the bridge only made the noises of the gears and axels screeching in reverse as the bridge settled down into position for a train.
“Come with me, Alek. I want to show you something.” Poppa led Alek out of the bridge house and down a set of steel steps to the level of the train tracks. They crossed the tracks together and Poppa showed Alek a trap door on the bridge floor made out of steel. When Poppa flopped open the trap door, the rusty hinges squealed loudly, and as Poppa let the door fall there was a thunderous noise as steel crashed against steel. Poppa pointed inside the dimly lit hole. “What do you think of that?”
Alek peered into the hatch. Through the small trap door was the biggest collection of machinery Alek ever imagined. Here was something like an underground room with enormous, grease-covered wheels, massive rusty gears as tall as a man, heavy chains with each link the size of a loaf of bread, and all the gears and chains and axels connected to a great, complicated engine and something that looked like the wheels of a locomotive. “Poppa, look at the teeth on those gears! It’s like a train in a hole!”
“Ho! A train in a hole! That’s a good one, son! That engine is what makes the bridge go up, and all the big gears and chains make it so the engine can lift the bridge and make it so the bridge comes down smooth and safe.”
Alek, in awe of the great gears, spied a ladder leading down into the machinery room. “Poppa, can we go down the ladder?”
Poppa answered like an army sergeant, “Oh, no, Alek, no. Do you hear me? No. It is not safe down there for a boy. You just look and see how big the gears and chains are. That’s all.” Poppa didn’t want any grand ideas to sprout inside Alek’s head of venturing into the machinery of the bridge. Poppa had learned over the years, if he really wanted to warn Alek not to do something, to become extremely stern. It might seem to most people like Gregorz was too sharp with his son, but Aleksander had become toughened to it.
Alek said, “If I go down there, I get one on the zadzie, right, Poppa?”
Poppa replied, “Wrong. You don’t go down there! Enough!”
Alek grinned. “It’s the greatest thing I ever saw!”
Alek saw one more thing – a red lever, like the lever in the bridge house that made the bridge go up and down. It was down inside the machinery hole, three steps down the ladder. “What’s that red lever for, Poppa?”
“It does the same job as the one in the bridge house. But no one uses it. That lever is only for an emergency. No one uses it. It’s not safe to be in the machine room when the bridge is going up or down.”
“What kind of emergency, Poppa?”
“I don’t know. I said, no one ever uses that lever. I guess it would be for the special kind of emergency we never thought would happen.” All of Alek’s questions made Gregorz wonder if it was a good idea to show his son the machinery room. He said, “That’s enough for now.”
“Yes, Poppa! I am so happy you showed all this to me!”
Poppa closed the trap door with another thunderous bang. He and Alek crossed the tracks again to the steps leading up to the bridge house. It was 7:30 in the morning, time for the other bridge master to go home and for Gregorz to start work. Alek reminded his father, “Remember, the first train comes at 7:50, Poppa”
“That’s right, son, so we just wait. The bridge is down so the train can pass. If a boat comes now, we do not raise the bridge until after the train passes. A boat must wait now.” Poppa explained, “It only takes about three minutes for the bridge to go up, and 30 seconds for it to come down. But we always make sure the bridge is down a half hour before a train comes. The trains can come early and we don’t want to take any chances. We have to make sure we are ready.”
As Gregorz and Alek began their work, Alek went over and over in his mind all the things he had learned and seen that day, the working of the lever, the starting of the engine, the timing of the trains and boats. It was really fun when the 7:50 train came by right on time. The train slowed a little to pass on the bridge, and Alek could see the passengers through the window, sleeping, reading the paper, brushing a daughter’s hair, or talking with a friend. But Alek had seen the passing trains many times before. What he was really anxious for was to push up the lever that made the bridge rise for a boat. Sorry to say, no boats even came to the bridge before the 8:55 train, so they didn’t have to raise the bridge. Alek was getting bored.
Then about 9:15 Alek saw a boat come around the bend of the river. He shouted, “Poppa! Poppa! A boat. It’s really big! I think we have to raise the bridge!”
“Ah, you are right!” At just that time Poppa heard a radio message from the boat. The captain was asking for permission to pass under the bridge, and Poppa told him, yes. “Well, Alek, here we go. You are going to get your wish to raise the bridge.” Poppa began to open and close some valves. He turned a key on the big panel under the front window of the office, and Alek could hear the big engine under the bridge start to putter and then roar to life. Poppa turned another valve and began to watch a dial on the panel. “OK, Alek, go over and put your hand on the lever. Remember, don’t push it up until I tell you to. I have to wait for the pressure in the pipes. It will take just a moment.”
Alek grabbed the cold, hard iron of the red lever. He felt so important just to put his hand on the heavy controller. He was feeling the muscles in his hand, arm, and shoulders tense in anticipation of his important job. He put his second hand on the lever. “Not yet,” warned Poppa. A few more seconds went by. Poppa said, “Slow and steady. OK, push up the lever.”
Alek had watched his Poppa push up the lever before, and he could do it just the same way. But the lever did not go up easily. Poppa said, “C’mon. Push up on it. You can do it.” Alek pushed harder, and the lever began to move. As it did he felt vibrations coming through it, the engine started to strain under a load, and the gears and chains begin to screech. He watched in amazement as just outside the window of the bridge house, the bridge actually started to move higher and higher. He couldn’t believe it. He was raising the bridge!
The whole process took three minutes. The bridge reached its highest and stayed there. Poppa waved to the boat captain that it was time to pass under the bridge. Alek couldn’t help himself. He ran from the bridge house onto the stairs where he could easily wave to the captain of the boat. “Thanks, Buddy,” shouted the captain as he waved back, “Have a merry Christmas!”
“You, too, captain!” replied Alek.
Aleksander Wozniac had raised the bridge. He never felt so important. Alek ran back inside the bridge house and asked his Poppa, “Do we put the bridge down now? That was awesome!” Alek had his hand already on the red lever.
“Easy does it, Alek! Remember, you don’t use that lever until I tell you to. The next train is at –
“10:05.” Alek interrupted. “In forty-five minutes.”
Poppa was impressed with his son’s clock skills. “Good. We wait for fifteen minutes to see if another boat comes. Then we lower the bridge. We don’t make the bridge go up and down extra.” Before long, Alek got to pull down the red lever. He almost had to hang from it with all his weight to get the lever to come down. Then he listened to the bridge in all its grinding and screeching glory and watched it sink lower and lower until it settled in place, ready for the next train.
Shortly after they had lowered the bridge a boat came around the bend. Alek asked Poppa, “Should we raise the bridge for this boat?”
Poppa told him, no, even though the captain of the boat radioed and asked to pass under the bridge. Poppa told the boat captain he would have to wait for half an hour until the next train passed. The captain of the boat was patient and respectful about having to wait. He and Poppa exchanged happy Christmas wishes to each other and knew each other by their first names.
As soon as the train passed, Poppa and Alek repeated the process of earlier and up went the bridge again. Alek was more used to the strength needed to push the lever this time and all the loud noises that accompanied the rising bridge, and he did a better job, he thought. Poppa told him so, too. If anything, this second chance to raise the bridge was even more fun than the earlier one. After the boat passed, the next train was not due until 1:05, almost three hours later. Alek asked, “What do we do, now, Poppa? We don’t put the bridge down, yet, right?”
“That’s right. We will leave the bridge up for more than two hours,” replied Poppa. “You take that fishing pole behind the door and go up the river a little and catch a big fish for dinner. I have to do some paper work, and then I will come to you for lunch before we lower the bridge, OK? Havin’ a good day?”
As Alek ran out the door, fishing pole in hand, he yelled over his shoulder, “This is the best day ever, Poppa! Thanks for bringing me to work!” He was down the steps in a moment and running up the river trail.
The next two hours seemed like the perfect Christmas vacation. Alek didn’t catch any fish, but he got a couple nibbles. Two boats passed and he got to shout “Merry Christmas!” The sun was out, so it was warm enough to sit on a log and eat lunch with Poppa even though it was December. The galumpkis and potato pancakes Mommy packed for lunch were still warm in their containers, and the hot cocoa Mommy sent was sweet. Poppa even shared an extra one of his Christmas cookies with his son.
Poppa closed the thermos after lunch and said, “OK, Alek, in about ten minutes we lower the bridge for the 1:05 train. Want to come up with me now or do you want me to call you?”
Alek replied, “I’ll stay here, Poppa. I got a nibble earlier. Maybe I’ll catch that fish.”
“I’ll call you,” said Poppa, and he made his way along the river trail back to the bridge house, climbed the steps, and disappeared inside. Alek saw him enter the bridge house, but the sun shining on the windows made them like mirrors, so it was impossible to see Poppa inside. Just the same, Alek knew he was there. He knew Poppa would call.
As he fished, Alek became lost in his thoughts about Jesus – why he had to first become a baby, only to grow up and die on the cross. It was quiet. Not even a fish would dare to nibble on his bait. The river flowed silently. The sun warmed Alek’s back. Then Alek heard something that sounded far away. It was the faint sound of a whistle. A few seconds later he heard it again. “It sounds like a train,” he muttered to himself.
Alek cut through some brush to the train tracks. He stood in the center of the tracks and looked in the direction of the whistle sound, and sure enough, he saw a dark speck far away on the straightaway before the bridge. He saw the smoke and heat waves rising up from the locomotive. The 1:05 train was very early. And the bridge was up. The bridge was up! The train would crash into the river! Alek knew he had to act quickly.
He began running toward the bridge house along the train tracks, shouting, “Poppa! Poppa! The 1:05! The train is early! The train is early!” Alek still couldn’t see inside the bridge house because the sun was shining on the windows. He tripped on a railroad tie and fell with a thud. He cut his lip but he was up in a second. “Poppa! Poppa! A train!” Alek’s mind was racing. He couldn’t see his father. The train was coming. It was an emergency. It was a special emergency.
The truth is that Poppa could have seen Alek and the coming train if he had only looked. His eyes were down on his papers, and he couldn’t hear the train whistle because he was distracted by a phone call from his boss. Inside the bridge house he could not hear, yet, his son’s cries. He sat with his back to the window. Then a loud noise woke him up to fact that something was very wrong. He heard the thunder-like metal crash of the trap door to the machinery room down near the tracks. His first thought was, “Aleksander!” He quickly excused himself from the phone call and hung up the phone. Now that it was quiet in the bridge house, he heard another sound, too – the train whistle. He looked up the tracks and clearly saw the approaching train, only a minute away. Then he looked down near the tracks and saw his son lying on his belly reaching down into the machinery hatch. A thousand thoughts went through his mind in a second. Alek, what are you doing? Train, why are you so early? A half a minute, that’s what it takes to make the bridge come down. More than four hundred passengers – we will have the bridge down in time. We have to get the bridge down.
Before he had a chance to yell to his son, he saw the unthinkable. With one hand already on the lever to lower the bridge, he watched through the window as Alek slid over the edge of the hole and fall into the machinery. “Alek!” he shouted and stepped outside the office onto the stairs down to the tracks. “Alek!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “Alek!” Then he was back inside the office, looking at the train, looking at the red lever. His son had fallen among the bridge machinery. If he lowered the bridge he could hurt Alek. If he didn’t lower the bridge more than four hundred people might die in a train wreck. There wasn’t time to run to his son.
Again he was outside the office at the top of the stairs. “Alek!” he shouted. He heard the train whistle. The train was nearer, and the whistle was very clear now. “Alek!” Then he heard his son.
It turns out that Alek had gone to the hatch with a good idea. He knew the early train was a special emergency, so he thought he would lift the trap door and use the red lever inside the hatch to lower the bridge for the coming train. It would be faster than running to the bridge house and up the stairs. The important lever was a little ways down the ladder into the machinery room. Since Poppa had told Alek never to go down the ladder, he thought he could just reach to the lever and push it down without actually climbing on the ladder. It was harder than he thought. He hung up side down in the opening to the machine room with one hand on a ladder rung and the other hand reaching for the red lever. It was then that Poppa saw him slip into the hatchway. Alek fell a long way, down past the lever, down past the entire ladder. He was on his back. He was badly hurt. He could see light coming in through the open hatchway above him, but he could not move. He didn’t know where he was exactly. He was lying among the gears and chains. Then he heard his father calling from the bridge house stairs, “Alek! Alek!”
We have already said more than enough times that Alek has a busy mind. Somehow, at the bottom of that machine room, lying among the massive, greasy, cold gears of the bridge, so many things went through the bright little boy’s mind in the smallest fraction of time. Surprisingly, as if a knock on the head could help him think, Alek understood what he had been trying so hard to understand since his pastor’s sermon of the day before. When you love someone you do something. Love gives. God gave Jesus. Now it was Alek’s chance to give. He inhaled a full breath of air into his lungs even though it hurt so much to do it. He shouted as loud as he could, “Poppa!”
Poppa was nearly hysterical about the son he could no longer see, but he was still unwilling to leave the red lever in the bridge house by more than a few steps. He heard the whistle of the coming train. But he also heard the faint cry of his son calling out to him. He responded in a panic, “Alek!” and focused his hearing like a laser on the hole into which Alek had fallen.
Alek did it again. One more deep breath. One more shout to his Poppa. “Push the lever! Now!” Alek was out of breath. With the remaining air in his lungs, he could only mutter quietly, so that his father could not hear him say it, “Save the people.”
Poppa heard Alek’s shout, “Push the lever,” and he prayed the shortest prayer a man can pray when he is in utter agony, “Ahhh! Jesus!” He ran inside the bridge house. He put his hand on the lever. He hated the lever. He took his hand off. He couldn’t live with himself if put into motion the gears and chains of the great machinery that would kill his son. But he couldn’t live with himself either, if hundreds of passengers on the train died in the river. He pounded the wall. There was no time. He put his hand on the lever and hated himself. He let go again and hated himself more. The train whistle was close. He looked up the tracks and the train was close enough now, so he could see the engineer inside the locomotive. He put his hand on the lever. Thirty seconds to lower the bridge. Four hundred passengers, he thought, and his hand squeezed the lever. Alek! – he thought, and it was like the lever had become a detestable thing. He could read the number on the locomotive in crisp white on the blue steel. Like a man being cut in two, Gregorz Wozniac screamed as his two hands pulled down on the red lever. He heard the metallic grinding and screeching of the gears and chains as the bridge slowly lowered into position. In less than half a minute it came level with the rest of the ground only a moment before the train arrived. The train would pass safely. As the little boy Aleksander Wozniac wished, the people were saved. Knowing he could not go to his son until after the train had completely passed by, Gregorz stood with his hands pressed against the glass of his office and sobbed the most painful, deepest weeping a father ever wept on the face of this earth. The passengers of the train rattled by a little slower than usually, but few of them noticed the tormented and grieving man in the bridge house. None of them realized what a sacrifice he had made so they could live.
We will not delay in telling you the end of the story. It is Christmas time, after all, and it is not a day to frighten you. Even before the train passed, Poppa had calmed himself just enough to call the fire department. As soon as the last car of the train went clanking by, Poppa jumped across the tracks and climbed down the ladder into the machinery of the bridge to rescue his son. Aleksander Wozniac was alive.
As we have said, Alek was badly hurt in his fall. When Gregorz put them in motion, the turning machinery of the bridge that had to come down crushed little Alek. Because of his injuries, the little Wozniac family lost their Christmas that year in prayers for Alek, long nights waiting at the hospital, and anxious talks with doctors. In time, Alek began to heal. Eventually, he was even able to walk again though he would need the help of one crutch to do so, maybe for the rest of his life. Mommy’s prediction came true – the doctors in the emergency room really did put their hero Alek on their list of people to send a Christmas card every year. In addition, for some reason, after that important day at the bridge, Alek never got in trouble at school any more. Yes, he still had a very busy in his mind. But he probably he calmed down quite a bit after his fall, and maybe the teachers became a little more patient with him.
One sunny December day, when Alek had grown to the age of twelve, he and Poppa were wandering around the little park in the center of town, Poppa with his Bible and Alek with his crutch. They wanted to witness to people about Jesus and approached a woman on a park bench who was holding a frisky boy between two and three years old. First they had trouble witnessing to the woman because her son demanded so much of her attention, but then the woman said she thought Poppa looked familiar. She had only recently moved to town from many miles away, so she first couldn’t understand why she recognized Poppa. As they talked, she began to realize that she was on the train the day it almost crashed into the river. As the train passed the bridge house that day, she had looked through the windows at Poppa there weeping over what he had done to his son. They had passed within a few feet of each other. The woman said she remembered it so well because she never saw a man so sad, so broken, in all her life. Poppa explained to her the whole story, and as he did, she was the one who began to sob. She told how the day Gregorz Wozniac lowered the bridge, she was pregnant with the child now seated in her lap. Because the bridge master had been willing to sacrifice his son, her frisky little boy had been born. She said, “I didn’t want your son to be hurt. I am so sorry.”
Poppa couldn’t speak, except to whisper again and again, while she spoke, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”
Alek asked her, “Do you see that God loves you and your little boy? Would you like to pray with us now to surrender your life to Jesus?”
There was only one answer to give. “Yes,” she said.
The three of them held hands, the child on his mother’s lap. That dear woman asked Jesus to save her soul and help her to be a good mother to her son. When they were done praying Alek asked her, “Would you like to come to church with us this Sunday?”
She said, “I would.”
Now as tears streamed down his face, too, Gregorz Wozniak could only repeat, “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” The tears weren’t like those he shed in the bridge house. This day, he never praised the Lord with so much joy in his life.
