I am excited! My family has picked our family to bless this Christmas!! Every year for Christmas, we pick one or more families to bless in a really big way! You don’t know how much fun you can have with money until you give it away to make someone else’s life better!
And . . . this seems like a good time to tell my favorite Christmas story!!! Pop some popcorn, grab a mug of cocoa and gather round!
Once upon a time (in the mid 1980’s), I lived in the house below with my Mom and brother. The house was pretty rough. Money was tight. We weren’t allowed to have friends over – Mom was afraid that someone would report the condition of the house and we would get kicked out. The house didn’t have central heat, only one wood burner in the dining room. The plumbing froze in the winter and we melted snow in a pot on the stove to have water. The house would have been condemned if the wrong person came out. We would have been out of a home.
So here we were. My little Mommy (seriously she’s small, under 5 feet tall), and her two little kids (my brother and I were around 8 & 9 I think). We lived in this old house on a dirt road out in the country with no neighbors in sight.
We were at home one night in the dark and two cars pulled up in front of the house. They parked on the road. They didn’t pull in the driveway. We weren’t expecting anyone. Friends parked in the driveway. No one ever parked on the road in front of our house.
My little Mommy told my brother and I to go upstairs. We went to the stairway and peeked. The strangers from the car knocked on the door. My little Mommy opened the door just a crack and pointed the end of her shotgun out at the people, asking who they were. And they were . . . *drumroll* . . . from the CHURCH!!
Someone had told the church about our situation. They had collected toys and groceries for our family! Two cars worth of stuff!! I remember watching as the people just kept bringing stuff in to our home 🙂 I remember my Mom apologizing for threatening the nice church people with a gun 🙂 And thanking them for their kind generosity! Bags and bags of groceries. Someone had hand-made me an Amish doll with a little wooden bench and desk!
The generosity is something I try to reciprocate every year with something bigger than normal! And my little Mommy pointing a gun at the nice church people is something I remember to laugh about every year!!!
Tonight I am thankful for being blessed all those years ago by strangers that we hadn’t met! And I am even more thankful to be able to bless people now that I am all grown up!!
Momma's Silver Lining 