G
gideons300
Guest
In the late sixties, i was a flower child and did a lot of experimenting with drugs but something was pulling me to find the "meaning to life" and my search eventually led my wife and I to go to a campus church. That Christmas, in 1970, we had an angel tree where you picked names to help with Christmas for a poor family provided by a social services agency.
We drew the name of a 19 year old black girl and her three year old son, who lived in the ghetto near downtown. The husband had left her, she was a Christian and had nothing.
We had an idea, planted by God of course, We decided we would hand make all our presents for family and friends and use the money to buy a nice Christmas for the young mother.
We never had a better Christmas. Making all the presents, lots of laughter, and yes, we were still smoking pot. It allowed us to spend all that we had for presents for the name we had been given.
Christmas Eve came and we were to deliver the presents at 6 p.m. Stoned all day, wrapping presents, and then late in the afternoon we had all the presents wrapped and loaded, but could not find the address on the slip of paper we got off the angel tree. We tore the house apart as our desperation built. We called our pastor but he said he had no record and the social services agency was closed on Christmas Eve. Of course, we were beyond despair at that point and the one last place we could look was in the trash we had taken out that morning.
Now understand, we were stoned, we rented from a "cool" deputy sheriff and lived way out in the country. There was no trash pick-up. There was the "burn pile" on his family homestead.....40 years of burned trash over a 150' x 150' area, broken glass bottles, rusted out tin cans, melted plastic, black ash. We headed to the back of the property to go thru our trash bags as our last resort and here came our landlord on his tractor from the back of the property. He had just burned the pile, as he did once a month or so. Our hearts sank.
We came around the bend to see the smoke still wisping from the charred ashes, and our hopes and dreams were charred with them.
I stopped in my tracks, staired in hopelessness and disbelief, and began to cry. But my wife, bless her heart, kept walking.... walking.... right out into the middle of the ash heap and smoldering burned trash. She then stopped in the middle, looked up to Heaven and with tears streaming down her face, she cried out "God, if you are real, give us that name!" With that, to my astonishment, she flung herself facefirst onto the pile, Her hand reached out and grabbed the first tthing it came to, and she picked it up and looked at it.
(Darn, crying again. I cannot even type the story without crying and it has been told over 100 times over the last 38 years.)
There, in her hand was a slip of charred paper singed and burned down to one area that was still unburt paper, and on that small 2" x 2" area was a name and address, the name of a sweet little Christian mother who was trusting God to bring her child a Christmas.
Needless to say, we got saved in that one miricle laden moment, and we have never looked back. Our alter call was on a pile of charred rubbish. I have loved this scripture ever since:
"The eyes of the Lord search to and from across the whole earth, looking to those by which He can show Himself strong."
May God be forever praised. Mercy is an amazing thing.
We drew the name of a 19 year old black girl and her three year old son, who lived in the ghetto near downtown. The husband had left her, she was a Christian and had nothing.
We had an idea, planted by God of course, We decided we would hand make all our presents for family and friends and use the money to buy a nice Christmas for the young mother.
We never had a better Christmas. Making all the presents, lots of laughter, and yes, we were still smoking pot. It allowed us to spend all that we had for presents for the name we had been given.
Christmas Eve came and we were to deliver the presents at 6 p.m. Stoned all day, wrapping presents, and then late in the afternoon we had all the presents wrapped and loaded, but could not find the address on the slip of paper we got off the angel tree. We tore the house apart as our desperation built. We called our pastor but he said he had no record and the social services agency was closed on Christmas Eve. Of course, we were beyond despair at that point and the one last place we could look was in the trash we had taken out that morning.
Now understand, we were stoned, we rented from a "cool" deputy sheriff and lived way out in the country. There was no trash pick-up. There was the "burn pile" on his family homestead.....40 years of burned trash over a 150' x 150' area, broken glass bottles, rusted out tin cans, melted plastic, black ash. We headed to the back of the property to go thru our trash bags as our last resort and here came our landlord on his tractor from the back of the property. He had just burned the pile, as he did once a month or so. Our hearts sank.
We came around the bend to see the smoke still wisping from the charred ashes, and our hopes and dreams were charred with them.
I stopped in my tracks, staired in hopelessness and disbelief, and began to cry. But my wife, bless her heart, kept walking.... walking.... right out into the middle of the ash heap and smoldering burned trash. She then stopped in the middle, looked up to Heaven and with tears streaming down her face, she cried out "God, if you are real, give us that name!" With that, to my astonishment, she flung herself facefirst onto the pile, Her hand reached out and grabbed the first tthing it came to, and she picked it up and looked at it.
(Darn, crying again. I cannot even type the story without crying and it has been told over 100 times over the last 38 years.)
There, in her hand was a slip of charred paper singed and burned down to one area that was still unburt paper, and on that small 2" x 2" area was a name and address, the name of a sweet little Christian mother who was trusting God to bring her child a Christmas.
Needless to say, we got saved in that one miricle laden moment, and we have never looked back. Our alter call was on a pile of charred rubbish. I have loved this scripture ever since:
"The eyes of the Lord search to and from across the whole earth, looking to those by which He can show Himself strong."
May God be forever praised. Mercy is an amazing thing.
