Author Unknown
As
Jenny walked down the street she felt like an old woman though only 32. Her
cares were extra weight that made her body heavy. Her husband had been gone a
month now, trying to find work with the construction crews along the road. He had been a sheep man but hard times and an
early winter had been unkind to them.
They had watched their sheep die one by one in the harsh climate until
the flock was gone. With those sheep went their dreams.
"I
think I can earn enough to meet the mortgage payments so we can at least keep
the farm," Jenny's husband had said. Then he had left, leaving her and 5
children to make their way. She hadn't
heard from him since.
The bell over the door jingled with
a merry sound as she walked into Peterson's Store. It was Christmas itself
inside with a heavy smell of gingerbread and pine in the air. Children were
clustered around the table in the center of the country store. This table which
went unnoticed in the corner the rest of the year - covered with farm tools and
sacks of flour - was now the center of interest for the town just a few weeks
before Christmas; for then just once a year the store carried toys. Dolls with
painted faces and painted hair, and maybe for some little girl, a doll with
real hair that curled around her face.
Tinkertoys and blocks and pocketknife for boys. Jenny listened to the children’s
"Oohs" and Ahs" and watched them shine with excitement as they
stood before the table. And she caught a familiar face among them, too. Her own
9-year-old Tad was there wondering what he would get for Christmas, just as
excited and hopeful as the rest of them.
She had to turn her head and blink back
tears to keep from crying. There was simply no money for Christmas this year -
not enough for a .25 cent doll, not enough to buy sugar for honey candy. There
was not enough money for the mortgage payment and her husband was - well, she
didn't know where. She traded the eggs she had for some flour to make bread and
headed home. She was sure that no one on the face of the earth was more
miserable than she. "Oh, Heavenly Father, what have I ever done wrong that
you would reject me so?" she asked on her way home. She wondered if her
faith had always been misplaced. It looked as if all her best efforts in life
had come to nothing.
Christmas Eve brought a blizzard to
the town where Jenny lived. Inside their home, she did her best to help the
children feel a sense of the season. But she could hardly bear it when Tad came
running in with his sock to hang by the fireplace and the little ones followed
along. "I don't think Santa can find us in this weather," she said,
looking at five empty socks along the fireplace.
"Santa can do anything,"
Tad had assured her, and then he trotted off to bed and went to sleep with that
same Christmas shine.
Jenny sat before the socks late into
the night wondering what to do and where her family would go when they lost the
farm. She tried to pray but decided maybe God was just too busy to bother with
her. She fell asleep on the couch in the front of the five empty socks.
Suddenly, a noise awoke her. How
long she'd been asleep, she didn't know. Someone was inside her home. She
picked up a log to arm herself against the intruder. It was then that she heard
the sweetest sound she'd ever know.
"Jenny?" said her husband. "Oh, Jenny. I'm sorry. I would
have done anything to get here sooner. But to get here at all, I had to catch a
ride with a trucker and then walk the last eight miles from the turnoff to town."
"I haven't heard from you for
so long," Jenny said as she rushed to him.
"We don't have mail service
along the road," he said. "Did you think you were alone, that I'd
ever leave you alone?"
Jenny thought about that as he put a
small toy in each stocking. And for Tad, a new pocket knife. But for Jenny the Christmas gift was not
small. It was the message that repeated
itself over and over in her head, "Did you think I'd ever leave you
alone?" It seemed to be a message,
not just from her husband, but from the Lord Himself:
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