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.