From the Love of Jesus - A Christmas Story

It’s amazing the amount of hope that a couple of Christmas gifts can bring.

~~~~~~~

He had only been 9 for a few weeks when he heard the news that they were moving again. It didn’t faze him much. They moved quite a bit after his dad had left them on their own. His mom had little resources and no safety net. Practically everyone they knew was just as poor as them, since GM had nearly crippled the entire city by closing most of the plants. The boy’s mom, a mother of six, had been a housewife all her life. She dropped out of high school to get married, and now that she was over fifty without even a standard diploma to put on a resume, getting a job to support her family would be a tricky feat. Returning to the city was the only way they could hope to afford to survive as they figured out what to do next.

There was one major problem: they didn’t have a place to stay. A family member owned a small, run-down office building in the city, and they were told they could stay in the moldy basement that housed their inventory and broken equipment. It wasn’t exactly livable, but it would cost next to nothing. And the boy’s mom assured him that it was only going to be for a few weeks.

They put up plywood for walls and sectioned off three “rooms” to live in, partitioned away from the scrap metal and mice that filled the musty cellar. Six people crammed into that minute jerry-built living space.

The boy and his mom shared a tiny, windowless room with a concrete floor covered in spare bits of carpet. The ironing board doubled as a dinner table. He didn’t have a bed, so they taped together some cardboard boxes leftover from inventory shipments and place a feather blanket from Goodwill inside as a makeshift mattress. He painted the outside of it with off-brand watercolor paint in attempts to make it look like the race car bed he saw in the Sunday paper advertisements. His mom slept on a cot in the corner of the room, while his sister and her husband and two kids lived in the other two rooms that doubled as storage and a living room.

Few people knew they lived there. To avoid detection and the dreaded CPS, they had to sneak out early in the morning before the office staff arrived, and sneak back in after school. They had to stay silent during the day, and weren’t allowed to go upstairs during work hours. Unfortunately for the children, that’s where the bathroom was. Let’s just say it’s a good thing their pants were washable, because they didn’t always make it in time. And they were probably the only kids on the planet who hated snow days.

The office was in the city school district. But to his mom, that wasn’t really an option. Some cousins lived in the suburbs and offered to let them share their mailing address so the kids would be able to go to the suburb schools instead.

School officials were quick to be suspicious about the boy’s home life, and he was often brought into the office for interrogation. His evasive answers were practiced ahead of time, and never gave them anything substantial, so he was always let go.

He didn’t like lying, but he heard of the terrors that his siblings had faced in the city schools, so he just pretended that he was a spy. Besides, it was only going to be for a few weeks.

But a few weeks turned into a month. Which turned into a few months. Before he knew it, a whole semester had gone by and Christmas was approaching. The day before break, he realized that for the first time in his life, he wasn’t excited about it. If his family couldn’t even afford to live in a real place, how could they have Christmas?

Only one gift topped his list that year: a Real Power Tool Shop. His dad loved woodworking when he was alive, and the boy just knew that if he ever had his own tool shop, he’d probably learn to be just as good. He asked for it half-heartedly, knowing that there was no way it’d happen. He almost didn’t even write it down. $50 was a lot of money, and he didn’t want his mom feeling bad that she couldn’t get it, so he quickly added a couple of toys that he knew were at the dollar store, because at least she could afford those.

Unlike the rest of the world, his family opened presents on Christmas Eve. With the office closed, they could roam around freely upstairs, escaping the mold and dust that made them all cough and sneeze so much. When his mom called everyone into the conference room for gifts, he dragged his feet every step of the way. Slowly rounding the corner into the room, he noticed the usual rows of chairs had been shoved aside, and what he saw in their place made his heart stop and his jaw get rug burns as it crashed to the floor.

The room was completely full of presents. Wall to wall. Big ones, small ones. Presents for all six of them. And there were giant boxes and bags that held even more presents. He tried to count his own gifts, but kept losing track. And the more he looked, the more he found. It was as if picking up one gift made another appear. He couldn’t believe his eyes nor his fingers. And he couldn’t stop shaking, shouting, and hopping. Neither could anyone else. He had so many questions! Who bought them? How did they get there? Where were they from? He searched the labels of his own gifts for clues, but each of his gift tags simply stated,

“To Michael. From the Love of Jesus.”

~~~~~~~

I can’t tell you how many tears I’ve shed while writing this. The people at Panera must think me a basketcase.

There are many seasons and events in my life that I’ve never shared publicly. This is one of them. Until today, only a handful of people know this happened. It will come as a surprise to most of you.

My old friends at Flushing have no idea that I wasn’t even supposed to be there for part of the time we were classmates. We did move to Flushing eventually, but it took us awhile to get there.

That dark time spent living in the basement of an office building in Flint, hiding from CPS, giving false whereabouts to the schools... it’s not really a shining moment for us. Not something we’re proud of. If we only knew then what we know now. But we didn’t. And for all we did know, we were stuck.

So why share it? Because I want you to know just how much of an impact a few Christmas gifts can make on a kid.

If you ask any of us to name an event that spurred the biggest positive change in the trajectory of our family story, all six of us that were crammed into that basement will probably tell you that it was that Christmas.

To this day, I still could tell you nearly every gift I received. I could tell you the order I unwrapped them in. I might even be able to tell you what color the wrapping paper was. But I could never put into words everything that those gifts brought us. I still don’t know where all those gifts came from. Or who gave them all.

They were just simple gifts. Toys, games, books, clothes, candy. But they were so much more than that. Because that night, I went to bed with something that I hadn’t had in a long time.

Hope.

Hope that the way things were, wasn't how it was always going to be. Hope that we weren’t going to be stuck in that dingy basement forever. Hope that good could still come even when life was so off course from where we wanted it to be.
My mom labeled those gifts oh so brilliantly, because even though they were just gifts, each one played a part that night in pointing us back to the kind of hope that comes from only one place:

From the Love of Jesus (Which she STILL writes on all our Christmas gifts)

~~~~~~~

A few nights ago, my niece and her five-year-old son joined me in delivering hundreds of gifts to families in my park. In all, eighteen families received gifts or assistance from people they have never even met. Over the hours it took us to deliver, Tammie and I were met with dozens of hugs, a couple of tears, and even a batch of fresh, authentic tamales still hot from the oven.

In the middle of our stint being Santa’s helpers, we talked about that Christmas in the office, and how much of a highlight it still remains for us. We remarked that in some way, we were joining a crew of other people (some of you who are reading this, even) who just did the same thing for the families in my park that someone did for us so very long ago.

So in a way, this story is a very long thank you letter.

A thank you to the people who helped our family that year in the basement of the office.

And a thank you to those of you who helped by giving your time and your resources to provide gifts, money, coats, food, and car seats to a slew of people you’ve never even met. I’m in awe of you and of God at work in you. THANK YOU. 

Over fifty kids in my neighborhood went to bed this Christmas Eve with empty trees. Each with a different story. Each facing different circumstances. And each still unsure of what they'd find in the morning. And they woke up to find presents filling their living rooms wall-to-wall. All because of you, my friends.

I’m sure that many of them asked the same questions we asked. Who did this? Where did these come from? And even if they might not know the answer now, they will one day. And their parents sure do:

From the Love of Jesus

Merry Christmas, friends.

(By the way…I got my Real Power Tool Set that year. It was wrapped in plain red wrapping paper. And it was the very last gift I opened. I'm pretty sure I cried. I know Mom did.)