Surprise Ending
by Irene B. Harrell
I turned up the fur collar of my coat against a
near-freezing wind as I stepped from our warm station wagon into the
bare dirt of a front yard on the outskirts o town. Our adult Sunday
school class had chosen the address from a Salvation Army list in the
evening paper and my husband and I had driven out to meet the family.
The idea was to find out their immediate needs so that we could
provide a Merry Christmas for them, and then, more important, to work
with them throughout the year to try to make a real difference, a
Christian difference, in their lives.
We ha asked God to guide us to the right family,
but now it looked as though the house we had chosen was going to be
empty. No smoke came from the chimney and in the front door there was
ony a hole where a knob and a lock might have been, once. But when we
knocked, the rag of curtain at the window moved and a small face
peered out. A minute passed and then the door was opened by a boy
about eight years old.
"Hello, " I said. "Is your mother
home?"
"Mama's not home," he announced gravely. "She's
Workin."
"Well, uh--is any grownup here with you?" He shook
his head.
"Let's step in for a minute," my husband
suggested. "The house will get cold with the door standing open." The
boy moved shyly back and we entered the tiny room.
I'll never forget what we saw. There was a bed,
sagging to the floor, the mattress was oozing stuffing. No sheets, no
blankets. A Bible lay beside a small chest of drawers in the corner.
The stove used for heat was icy cold.
The boy who had let us in now stood protectively
between two smaller children, a boy and a girl. Her oversized slacks
were held together by a safety pin. All three youngsters were
barefoot.
And there was a baby. He was lying on what had
once been an upholstered chair. He was wearing a remnant of an
undershirt and a diaper that hadn't been changed for a long time.
I thought of my own warmly dressed children and my baby in her
lovely birch crib with its clean whit sheets and I started to cry.
I'd never really seen poverty before.
That afternoon we went back with blanets, shoes,
diapers, food and clothes. Again the mother was not there.
The next day we finally found the mother at home.
Her name was Virginia and the children, in order of age, were Arthur
Lee, Violet, Danny, and the baby, David Ray. Virginia was a tiny
woman. She answered our questions quietly and was not offended that
we had come to help.
What did she need most? A refrigerator so the
baby's milk wouldn't sour.
The class found a refridgerator, a bed, a crib,
several chairs, sheets, more blankets. On Christmas, there were toys
for the children and clothes and food for everyone. The wood stove
was replaced by an oil heater that would not go out while the mother
was away. The class pledged the money to pay the oil bills for the
coming year. The family's immediate physical needs had been
relatively easy to satisfy. But what about the Christian
difference.
Every week or two my husband and I would go see
Virginia and her family. Sometimes we'd carry hand-me-downs, or
groceries, or books, sometimes we'd go empty handed, just to visit.
But she always gave us the same warm greeting. I remember the pride
with which she invited me to sit down. She hadn't been able to
exercise that kind of curtesy before--when she had no
chairs.
Frequently, our four older children went along
with us on these visits, and occasionally we took the baby. I had to
explain to Virginia about our baby. German measles during my
pregnancy had left little Marguerite deaf . When I told Virginia that
the doctors said nothing could be done about it, I could see that she
was deeply affected.
On our next visit she greeted us with shining
eyes. "Oh Mrs. Harrell, " she said, " I believe God is going to make
your baby hear! Don't you feel it too? Can't she already hear a lot
better than she could? I've been praying so hard ever since you told
me. I know she's going to hear!"
I just smiled at Virginia. She didn't know as
much about science as I did. I couldn't expect her to understand that
nerve deafness was not curable. Of course I had prayed for my child;
but my prayers had been ones of thankfulness for her, not prayers for
healing. I took the doctor's words as final.
Marguerite was almost a year old when we first
noticed the change in her. For a while we couldn't believe it
ourselves, but at last we became convinced that she really was
hearing certain loud sounds. When we took her back to the hearing
clinic for testing, there was no doubt about it. Our daughter, whose
nerve deafness had been pronounced complete and incurable, had begun
to hear! In four short months her diagnosis hd changed from
"profoundly deaf" to "moderately to severely hard of
hearing".
The doctors were amazed, but Virginia wasn't even
surprised. "God did it, Mrs. Harrell. Didn't I ask him for an icebox
and a good stove, and didn't he give them to me? There's nothing He
can't do, if we just ask him."
I stared at her, trying to understand faith like
this.
"Mrs. Harrell, " she said, "I'm going to keep on
praying for the baby."
"Yes!" I whispered, "Please keep praying.
Don't ever stop."
It worked, you see, our Christmas project. It even
accomplished the "Christian difference." Of course, the difference
was in our lives, not Virginia's. But then we'd asked God to guide us
to the poor, and he generally knows where they are.
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