Our family has started decorating for Christmas. The boxes have come down, the lights are out, and on cue White Christmas is playing in my head. Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye have been part of my Christmas since I was a boy. I love Irving Berlin. I love every song in that movie.
The song also takes me back to when I was in the musical White Christmas in 2023. We ran it in the summer, which meant singing about snow in Oklahoma in July. It felt like a little bit of a dream. I had an absolute blast.
But to understand why that show mattered so much, you have to know why I quit performing in the first place.
I walked away from the stage for almost 25 years. Performing wasn’t a gift to God. It was a gift to my ego. I was surrounded by people who operated the same way, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like who I was.
When I finally came back, my church’s performing arts team lived by a phrase: Soli Deo Gloria, glory to God alone. You saw it lived out in the people. I was in a Christmas show with them, then Beauty and the Beast, then another Christmas show. White Christmas was my fourth.
At callbacks, I knew the show was going to be very good. I’ve rarely been around that much talent in one room. I joked with the directors that I was praying for them, because their choices would not be easy.
I got cast in bit parts. A soldier here, a little something there. And I was cast as the understudy for the General.
There’s a moment in life when you realize you’re no longer the young guy. I was 44. The man playing the General was in his late 60s or early 70s, a real grandpa. I was old enough to technically have a grandchild, but not really old enough to be a grandpa. And yet there I was, learning the old man’s lines.
It should have been humbling. It was mostly fun.
I got one understudy run. No audience, just the cast, but I got to play the whole show. Somewhere in there, the General leaned over and asked me, joking, “Are you sure you don’t want me to get sick so you can have a run?”
Absolutely not. Do not do that to me. You are the General. I am your understudy, and I’m totally okay with my role.
The 20-something version of me would have wanted the run. The man I’d become just wanted to be part of something good.
The General was joking, but he wouldn’t have offered if he didn’t believe I could do it. He thought enough of me to trust me with his part. That meant more to me than the run ever could have.
C.S. Lewis has a scene in The Great Divorce where a painter, a ghost visiting from the grey town, asks whether he’ll get to meet the famous painters. The Spirit tells him fame doesn’t work that way there. “The glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors. But the light’s the thing.”
That’s what I found when I came back to the stage.
Christmas fills me with gratitude, for another one together and for the people I got to share a stage with.
I’m not the lead. I don’t need to be. I know my role, and I’m totally okay with it.
