God Bless Us Everyone

I imagine most people have watched some form of a Christmas Carol in their life. My favorite version is the Muppet’s Christmas Carol. It is an annual holiday tradition. We had watched the old VHS tape till it started getting off track and fuzzy so a couple years ago we picked up the movie on DVD.

On the off chance that you have never heard of the Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, here is a short synopsis.

*****Spoiler Alert*****
Not sure I’m actually required to do that, over 100 years has come and gone since this classic was written, which I believe is well past the statute of limitations on spoilers, but consider yourself warned.

There is a rich man named Scrooge. He hates everyone and most everyone either hates or pities him. He loves money. He has a clerk working for him named Bob Cratchit that has a sick young boy named “Tiny” Tim.

More than anything Scrooge hates Christmas, thinks it’s a waste of time and money. Then one Christmas Eve he is startled by a familiar face. It is his old partner Jacob Marley (in the Muppet version there are two), unfortunately his partner happened to be long dead. This specter warned him of the 3 spirits that would visit him that night.

Through the night he is shown his past, present, and future by the 3 spirits of Christmas. He sees Bob Cratchit’s poor home full of love, and the hope in the sickly young Tiny Tim. Then he sees the empty chair and the pain and loss in the Crachit house, and finally his own lonely death.

He awakes Christmas morning over joyed to find that he has time to make a difference, and buys the Christmas Goose for the Cratchit family as he begins righting many wrongs. It is a truly moving story.

I’ve been thinking about it because I am truly blessed but don’t always realize it. Sometimes it takes something bigger than me to show me just how blessed I am.

Recently I met a family that was in need. They were asking if the church could help them, and quite frankly I don’t have access to church funds, but I did have some money in my wallet from a wedding I had done a couple months ago. They are nearly homeless, trying to get into some apartments that work with the government assistance programs. They started coming to church, and their daughter came to my youth program. My wife picked her up and found she hadn’t eaten since breakfast. My wife asked if she was hungry and was told, “I try not to think about it so I’m not so hungry.” We got pizza for everyone and made it into a party. My wife also asked if she was looking forward to Christmas, but she isn’t. How can she be when they won’t have anything for Christmas? No decorations, no presents, no visits to family, just staying in a low cost week to week motel, with maybe one meal a day till school starts back in a couple of weeks when she’ll be able to eat breakfast and lunch at school.

My wife wants to give them Christmas and we’ll be able to do that, but honestly I want to do so much more.

I know I don’t have the huge reader base SCL has. Heck I’ve really sucked at writing updated and doing all the things that I’m supposed to do to build a solid base, but I want to help this family and I can’t do it all by myself. I’m not really good at asking for money, but I know if I get others to help we can make a bigger difference.

Thanks to everyone that helped in the donations. I’ve taken the donate button down so I could wrap up the donations and help this family out. I’ll be posting a follow up post.