Chicken Soup for the Soul Christmas (2 page)

Not familiar with the value of instruments, I called my husband to do a quick search on eBay to find out what they were going for. No way could I afford to make a financial mistake and end up with another white elephant to store in my shed. It was crowded enough in there as it was.

“Why are you calling me on your cell phone? We are out of minutes, so this call is expensive,” Rick complained.

“Just look, please.”

A sigh. Over the phone, I could hear his fingers running over the keyboard, then silence. “There aren't any listed.” Odd. It seemed to me that someone should have at least one saxophone for sale.

“Are you sure about this?” I asked, while adding up our minutes and multiplying each by one dollar.

“Not one.”

Trying to save money, I closed the call without saying good-bye. Now I worried. For twenty dollars, I now owned a shiny saxophone that might not sell at all. What did I know about musical instruments anyway? The only thing I could play was the radio. On my way out of the house, an elderly man stopped me and asked if I would sell him the sax. He would pay me twenty dollars more than what I paid. I would not only get my twenty dollars back, but also make twenty dollars on it within minutes of my purchase. It sounded good to me, and I viewed it as God's unexpected provision, a Christmas blessing.

The man and I stepped outside to find a dry spot under the overhang of the house and struck our deal. He opened his worn wallet and shuffled through the one-dollar bills searching for larger bills. With shaking fingers, he pulled out one crisp twenty and then another and handed them
to me. Then he pulled the sax in its case from my arms.

I chuckled, leaping over rain puddles on the way back to my car, thinking about how pleased my husband would be with me that I had turned a profit so quickly. With temperatures quickly falling, there weren't any other sales, so I returned home a bit richer than when I had left.

“Look at you!” Rick said proudly as I handed him the cash.

Then I sat at the computer, went to the eBay home page, and typed in the brand of saxophone I had owned for less than five minutes. To my horror, three exact matches came up—and they were all selling for over five hundred dollars with days left on the auctions. “Rick!” I yelled, pointing at the screen. “Look!”

My dear husband wrinkled his nose and said, “Oh.”

“You said there weren't any saxophones listed!” I became weak. I was losing consciousness.

“Hmmm, that's weird. When I looked, there weren't any listed.”

Suddenly, I realized what he had done. Rick hadn't gone to the eBay home page. He had gone to my seller's page, and, of course, I didn't have a sax listed. I had an enamel coffee pot with no bids, a sunbonnet girl quilt with no bids, and a primitive cabinet, also without a bid. I had sold the sax cheap. God wanted to bless me abundantly, and I had blown it! It was as if someone had snatched money right out of my pocket, and I had just let it happen.

Frantic, my first instinct was to drive around town, try to find the man who bought the sax, and offer him sixty dollars to let me buy it back. He would get his forty dollars back and make twenty on it, just as I had done. It sounded reasonable to me, but with the wind now reaching forty miles an hour and sleet large enough to cause tree limbs to fall, I figured I better stay home. But I did put the saxophone auctions on my watch page and groaned loudly with every bid. At the end of one auction, with a final bid of nearly a thousand dollars, I shrieked, “That coulda
been
me
!”

With Christmas a few days away, I couldn't shake the negative frame of mind I allowed myself to sink into. Running my fingers through my hair, I lamented over working so hard for every penny I earned. Couldn't I just catch a break one time? I was at my job for at least ten hours a day, teaching and then tutoring both before and after school. On weekends, I was so worn out that I spent the whole time sleeping. Even with my husband's overtime, our monthly budget was stretched to the max. The extra cash would have been such a luxury. My blessing had been stolen.

But it was done, over. No turning back the day for a do-over. Yet, I just couldn't let it go. Late at night, I sat by the lighted Christmas tree feeling quite angry with myself for harboring ill feelings. My brain kept replaying over and over that moment of selling the sax. My therapy was supposed to relieve tension, not create it. I felt envious and filled with greed. God was revealing a side of me that I had no idea was there, but this situation sure shined a spotlight on it.

I opened the Bible to Galatians 6:9 (NIV): “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Next I turned in my concordance to the verses on praising God and made note cards of ten verses. Each time I thought about the sax, I lifted my arms upward and praised God, thanking him, and quoting scripture. “Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thess. 5:18 NIV). It was amazing how the turmoil fled, leaving behind pure happiness. It set me totally free, and once more my life became enjoyable. I also let my husband off the hook, and his life became enjoyable once again, too.

Our family had a blessed Christmas. We attended church together, had a big feast, and everyone found what they wished for under the tree. But my son's gift to me took the prize for the holiday. Inside the box was forty dollars worth of one-dollar bills—the perfect denomination for garage sales. A few months later, this gift came in handy when garage sales were aplenty once again due to good weather.

One morning, at one such sale, I spied my sax buyer hunched over a box, going through old sheet music! A twinge of regret hit me, so I pretended I didn't see him. But he recognized me and called out, “Hello there! Have you found any treasures today?”

“No,” I heaved out the word heavily, then sang inside my spirit,
Praise him, praise him, Jesus our precious redeemer. . . .

As I turned to walk away, he grabbed hold of my arm. “I want you to know that because of your spontaneous generosity, I found my old passion and took up the sax again. Being retired, I now volunteer my time to teach kids how to play it.” He wiggled his fingers over the throat of an invisible sax. It was then that I noticed his frailty, his worn clothes, and his old shoes.

My perspective totally shifted. I thought he had taken my blessing, when in fact he was my blessing. God's provision is for all of us. And I was blessed to have found it twice in the most unusual place. I call that a double blessing.

Robin Lee Shope

A Closed Highway Opened Hearts

T
he everyday kindness of the
back roads more than make up for the
acts of greed in the headlines.

Charles Kuralt

Several years ago, our family of five began its annual Christmas trek to Grandma's house. As we traveled from Wisconsin to Indiana on Christmas Eve day, the weather became increasingly worse. Heavy snow continued to fall, and high winds, which swept across the flat farmlands, whipped up the snow and dumped it into drifts across the highway, slowing traffic to a crawl. All movement came to a complete halt near an off-ramp when we encountered snowplows parked sideways across the road to block the highway. Their bundled-up operators, who stood beside the plows in the road, slogged to our car to inform us, “The highway's closed. This is as far as you can go.”

“But what can we do?” we asked.

They replied, “There is a small church just down the road. They have opened its doors to stranded travelers.” Creeping carefully down the off-ramp, we caught sight of a white wooden building with a spire that became our inn for Christmas Eve night.

We entered the church and discovered a couple of hundred fellow travelers who had taken shelter. The refugees ran the gamut in age from babies to old folks, representing all humanity. Even a few dogs huddled next to their masters. The church's young pastor evidently started a calling chain among his parishioners, asking for their help. They responded quickly by braving the bitter cold and deep snow to bring us blankets, pillows, cookies, and cakes. Then a contingent stayed on to turn the fellowship hall into an impromptu restaurant by preparing hot chili, cocoa, and coffee for their disconsolate guests.

We sat around in small groups, disappointed that our anticipated plans with our loved ones had been ruined. As there were no cell phones in those days, there was a continuous long line of people impatiently waiting to use the church's wall phone to alert relatives to their safety, to tell them where they were, and that they would not be getting home for Christmas.

Our daughter Deb brought her guitar with her. She took it out of its case and, while sitting on the gym floor, began to softly sing Christmas carols. Soon, a small group gathered around to join their voices with hers. They were to become “our group” for the rest of the time. Deb played quietly far into the night, as people began to seek out pews, hallways, or floors on which to sleep. The young minister and his wife stayed at the church with us all night. When Christmas morning dawned, he led our rumpled, dispossessed group in our own private worship service.

As the sun announced the arrival of the new day, a different batch of church members left their own Christmas preparations and plodded through the snow, bringing pancake mix, juice, and eggs to make us breakfast. romDavMany of the dispirited visitors' thoughts traveled to the destination their bodies could not reach, and they envisioned blazing Christmas trees surrounded by piles of unopened presents. Since our new acquaintances replaced the families we could not be with, we spent the morning comparing stories. When noontime found us still snowbound, a second crew arrived to fix lunch. A mechanic left his warm home and family to work outside in the zero weather, jumping cars that had frozen overnight. A filling station owner interrupted his Christmas celebration to open his station so we could have gas in our tanks in case the roads became passable.

Late in the afternoon, word arrived that one lane of a road had been cleared, so our family decided to try completing the journey to Indianapolis. After a harrowing six-hour drive on slippery roads, we arrived at our grandparents' home late Christmas night. Although it was not the holiday we had planned, we all knew it was one we would remember when all the other ones were forgotten. We received a gift that could not fit under a tree, wrapped in the caring compassion of those church members. They put aside their own comfort and traditions to welcome us at their “inn,” not just with food, but with cheer and loving concern. We witnessed the true spirit of Christmas, of giving instead of receiving, by a congregation who set their own celebrations and enjoyment aside to care for strangers in their tiny town of Morocco, Indiana.

Martha Ajango

Reprinted by permission of Off the Mark and Mark Parisi © 2007 Mark Parisi.

In Touch with My Inner Elf

It was three weeks before Christmas, and my life looked pretty bleak. I was cold. I was broke. And I was worried.

My small film production company was on its deathbed.

My business partner left for Berlin to visit her lover.

Everyone was shopping and leaving for the holidays. But I had big plans, too. No, I wasn't traveling back to New York or visiting my parents in Florida. I was going to stay in Nashville, go to my office every day, stare at the phone that never rang, and feel tremendously sorry for myself. I mean, did I really have any other choice?

One morning, I was pacing in front of my desk, scanning through the newspaper, and right in front of my face was a help-wanted ad. UPS needed Santa's helpers to sit in the little jump seat next to the driver. When the driver made a delivery stop, the Santa's helper would deliver a package. This appealed to me. It seemed like an interesting job. It wouldn't be overwhelming. It would be Zen-like, nice and simple. When there were no more packages, and the back of the truck was empty, the workday would be over. It would be a gig that was totally different from my usual job. I wouldn't have to be creative. I wouldn't have to deal with crazy clients. I wouldn't have to fulfill a million responsibilities. All I had to do was lift a maximum of sixty-five pounds, run up to someone's front door, and deliver Christmas packages to people who would be smiling and anticipating my arrival with joy. Plus, I'd make $9.50 an hour.