Always give without remembering and always receive without forgetting.
~Brian Tracy
I stared at the empty parking space where our car had been. It had been such a good day, too. For the first time in several years, we’d actually had a little extra in our budget for Christmas, and we had spent the morning shopping for each other. We left the Christmas-crazed shopping mall with a packed car and decided to stop at a handy fast-food spot for a quick taco.
Twenty minutes later we were standing in stunned disbelief looking at the oil-splotched patch of pavement where our loot-filled old Subaru should have been waiting.
For me, it was like my heart was a giant balloon, and someone had just poked it with a pin. I could feel myself deflating and the world around me turning grey. Like the scene in the movie when the Grinch’s heart grows three sizes… but in reverse. Deflated, defeated, depressed. Suddenly everything, including Christmas, sucked.
Suddenly, I noticed how much my feet ached.
Not only had our entire gift budget been in the back of that car, but also a thousand dollars worth of groceries for our church’s holiday breakfast, which I was supposed to be cooking the next morning. They had given me the cash to pay for all the food.
The moment passed, the rain continued to fall, and people kept coming and going around us, but my mind remained in an endless loop of, “What am I going to do…what am I going to do?”
My wife went back into the restaurant to call the police, while I made the call I’d been dreading. Pastor Doug answered, and hearing the tone of my voice, immediately asked what was wrong. I told him about the stolen car, the lost gifts, and worst of all, the loss of a thousand dollars worth of groceries and gear for the big breakfast.
Doug asked if he could pray with me, which he did. He asked me how much I’d spent on all the stuff in the car, and I told him. Finally, he asked me where I was, promising to be there shortly to pick us up and take us home.
I went back inside, and sat, staring grimly out the rain-splattered window, feeling my heart shrinking three sizes, as my wife valiantly fought tears in the seat beside me. The police came, took our report, and left. I drowned my sorrows in another taco. Forty-five minutes later, I saw my pastor’s familiar white pickup truck swing into the parking lot, followed by a car I didn’t recognize.
Doug and one of our church elders came in and plopped down in the seat across from us. Sighing and shaking his head, Doug threw an arm around me and assured me that everything was going to be okay. I felt terrible. Everyone had trusted me with this event, and I had blown it.
Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope, which he passed across the table to me.
“I called a couple of the guys,” he said with a smile, “and they called a couple of guys. You feel like doing some more shopping?”
I opened the envelope and found a thick stash of cash, more than I needed to cover the stolen food. I realized there was an extra thousand dollars in that envelope, for us.
“Doug,” I said, my voice quavering, “I can’t…”
“Yes, you can,” he interrupted. “This is what family does. We bless each other when things are good and we let ourselves be blessed when bad things happen.”
Then he tossed me the keys to the car that our elder had followed him in, telling me that we could borrow it until we got ours back or got a new one.
I was shocked and overwhelmed. I could feel the tears welling in my eyes as I thanked him.
Only a moment before, everything had been hopeless, dark and cold, and then, just like that, the clouds parted and the sun was shining again.
Late that night, when I finally collapsed, exhausted, into bed, I reflected on how it wasn’t only gifts and food that had been stolen, but also our joy. Through the kindness of our church family, that was only a temporary loss.
I was reminded, just when I needed reminding the most, of Dr. Seuss’s Grinch and his own discovery that “Christmas, in fact, doesn’t come from a store. Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.”
It’s something that cannot be stolen, no matter how big your Grinch is.
~Perry P. Perkins
