God's Peculiar Light

I live and love in God's peculiar light.

Michelangelo

It was a Christmas of light and hope. All week long, I lived and loved in God's peculiar light.

Christmas Eve. I was at my childhood home, waiting for two of my college-aged brothers (I have three) to get home. One was rushing home from a catering job he had worked. The other? Where was Sam? We needed to hurry and pile in the car and take off for our grandmother's house, where we were to spend Christmas morning with family. Soon Sam pulled up. He came through the door calling my name.

Come and see, he said, grinning and breathless.

We walked together to his car, where Sam opened the back door to reveal box after box of shoes. Bag after bag of socks. I gasped.

It's for your shoe drive, he said simply.

But Sam had already given five pairs of shoes for my Shoes for Orphan Souls campaign. He did it to help reach my goal of 250 pairs of shoes by Valentine's Day, which is a lofty goal in my tiny, economically-depressed community.

Sam! You shouldn't have done this. You've already done more than enough! I told him.

I didn't, he replied.

Turns out they were from Tony, a man who works at the small hardware store with my brother. Sam explained that Mr. Tony doesn't have a car... doesn't have much, really... but is the happiest, most cheerful man Sam's ever met. He lives alone and makes his house payment, gas bill and buys food, my brother explained. But sometimes Tony doesn't have the money to keep his water on. You'd never know it, though. According to Tony, he's blessed beyond measure.

So how did he buy all these shoes? I asked. Mr. Tony, it turns out, won a raffle he entered at the hardware store a few weeks ago. His prize was a $100 gift card to WalMart. As Mr. Tony was getting dressed Christmas Eve morning, he pulled a pair of socks from his drawer and remembered a long-ago Christmas. He told my brother that he recalled, as a child, getting a new pair of shoes and socks for Christmas. It was all my mother could afford, Tony told him. She'd saved a dollar to buy each of us something that year. I got brand new shoes. I loved those shoes.

So Tony knew what he would do. He walked to the hardware store on Christmas Eve and gave my brother that entire gift card, instructing him to hurry to WalMart and buy all the socks and shoes he could.

I cried. And as Sam and I transferred the shoes and socks into my car, we decided: we had to do something wonderful for Mr. Tony. Right then. Before we left for Christmas at our grandmother's.

We didn't have much. Sam makes hourly wages at the hardware store and I've been out of work since early November. What could we do for Mr. Tony? We were still trying to decide when my other brother burst through the front door with an enormous cardboard box. Help me, Smitty! he yelled. Sam winked at me then reclined back in our father's armchair and yawned loudly. The box, then, was dumped in his lap. (Brothers.) Sam groaned. The box was weighed down with leftover gourmet food from that catering job: turkey, beef tenderloin, salads, dips, breads, candies, sweets and a sweet potato pie. There's no room in the fridge, Sam told our brother. Then he looked at me. We grinned at each other.

We took the box, along with a tin of homemade fudge, to Mr. Tony's. His house was rundown. Shabby. We knocked on the door but Mr. Tony didn't answer. Fearing dogs and cats would tear into the box, we eased open his front door and put the food just inside. The house was well-kept, but cold and dark. A lonely couch and a space heater sat against one wall. That was it. No TV, no lamps, no tables or pictures or Christmas tree or strands of lights or presents or anything. Just a couch and a rickety heater.

And he gave his Christmas to us for the orphans, I said. The three of us looked at each other. Then quietly, Sam backed out of the drive and turned on Christmas music. In the backseat, I tried to blink away tears.

We live and love in God's peculiar light.

Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;

you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

... And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,

then your light will rise in the darkness,

and your night will become like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you always;

he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land.

-Isaiah 58:9, 10