We live by what we give
I hurried into the local department store to grab some last minute Christmas gifts. There I saw a little boy about 5 holding a doll. I watched him say to a woman:” Are you sure I don’t have enough money?” She replied a bit impatiently:”You know that you don’t have enough money for it.” The woman then went away.
After a bit I asked the boy who the doll was for. He said: “It is the doll my sister wanted so badly for Christmas. She just knew that Santa would bring it.” I told him that maybe Santa was going to bring it. He said: “No, Santa can’t go where my sister is…” He looked at me with the saddest eyes and said: “She has gone to be with Jesus. My daddy says that Momma is gonging to have to go with her.” Then the boy looked at me again and said: “I told my daddy to tell Momma not to go yet. I told him to tell her to wait till I got back from the store.”
I asked the little boy: “Shall we count that money one more time?” He grew excited and said: “Yes, I just know it has to be enough.” So I slipped some money in with his and we began to count it.
Of course it was plenty for the doll. He softly said: “Thank you Jesus for giving me enough money.”
I could not keep from thinking about the little boy as I finished my shopping in a totally different spirit than when I had started. And I kept remembering a story I had seen in the newspaper several days earlier about a drunk driver hitting a car and killing a little girl and the mother was in a serious condition. The family was deciding on whether to remove the life support.
Two days later I read in the paper where the family had disconnected the life support. I could not help myself and I went out and bought some white roses and took them to a funeral home where the young woman was. And there she was holding the beautiful doll, and the picture of the little boy in the store.
I left there in tears, my life changed forever. The love that little boy had for his little sister and his mother was overwhelming. “We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.”