My father spent one Christmas Eve at a bar.

I didn’t know that till years after his death and I was home for Christmas break. I learned it from Mr. K, who was doing some interior house painting for my mom. I stuck my head into the room to say hi.

“You know, your dad was one of the few people who didn’t give up on me,” Mr. K—call me Roy, now—said a bit wistfully. “Did you know that he sat with me in a bar one Christmas Eve so I wouldn’t go home drunk? I was ready to call it quits, but your dad didn’t let me. He really loved the Lord.”

That I knew. But I didn’t know the bar story, even though I remembered that Christmas Eve. My sibs and I complained about my father’s absence and about waiting forever to begin our Christmas Eve traditions. I also remember that the phone rang a lot, and after every call, my mom assured us that Daddy would be home soon. So be patient. Oh, of course, we were’nt.

Grace and truth walked into that bar oh so many years ago when my father was both to Roy. The truth was clear: You don’t sit in a bar and get drunk on Christmas Eve. The grace evident in cup after cup of coffee poured, every phone call after phone call to my mom so she was in the loop and every hug after hug he gave to his not quite so grace-filled daughters who pounced on him the moment he came home.

How many of us might have been Roy, sitting in a bar—maybe not on Christmas Eve—but still in need of the grace and truth that walked into the world that first Christmas.

The truth was (and still is) clear: humans needed to be saved from their sin. Grace, cloaked in human form as it was, may not have been as obvious nestled among the hay and animals had it not been for excited shepherds who came looking for the Savior that had been born. Some thirty years later, John the Baptist recognized grace and truth in human form and proclaimed, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).

In the lyrical language of Philippians 2:6-11, it’s easy for me to miss just how far down, down, down Jesus stooped to be born in the likeness of men. Instead of grasping his equality with God, he picked up a towel and basin and washed dusty feet. Instead of rejecting the cup of suffering, Jesus submitted to the Father’s will, “to the point of death, even death on a cross” (2:8), because that was what he was born to do as the One full of grace and truth.

I have never sat in a bar on Christmas Eve. The pious part of me wants to say, “and I never will.” But with my father’s legacy, I hear a smiling grace and truth say, “Oh, you never know the places you’ll go with us.”