keep the faith**

"In September 1960, I woke up one morning with six hungry babies and just 75 cents in my pocket. Their father was gone..The boys ranged from three months to seven years; their sister was two. Their Dad had never been much more than a presence they feared. Whenever they heard his tires crunch on
the gravel driveway they would scramble to hide under their beds.
He did manage to leave $15 a week to buy groceries. Now that he had decided to leave, there would be no more beatings, but no food either.


If there was a welfare system in effect in southern Indiana at that
time, I certainly knew nothing about it. I scrubbed the kids until they looked
brand new and then put on my best homemade dress. loaded them into
the rusty old 51 Chevy and drove off to find a job. The seven of us went to every factory, store and restaurant in our small town. No luck.

The kids stayed crammed into the car and tried to be quiet while I tried to convince whomever would listen that I was willing to learn or do anything. I had to have a job. Still no luck. The last place we went to, just a few miles out of town, was an old Root Beer Barrel drive-in that had been converted to a truck stop. It was called the Big Wheel. An old lady named Granny owned the place and she peeked out of the window from time to time at all those
kids. She needed someone on the graveyard shift, 11 at night until seven in the morning. She paid 65 cents an hour and I could start that night.

I raced home and called the teenager down the street that baby-sat
for people. I bargained with her to come and sleep on my sofa for a dollar a night. She could arrive with her pajamas on and the kids would already be
asleep. This seemed like a good arrangement to her, so we made a
deal. That night when the little ones and I knelt to say our prayers, we all thanked God for finding Mommy a job. And so I started at the Big Wheel.


When I got home in the mornings I woke the baby-sitter up and sent
her home with one dollar of my tip money--fully half of what I averaged every night. As the weeks went by, heating bills added a strain to my meager wage. The tires on the old Chevy had the consistency of penny balloons and
began to leak. I had to fill them with air on the way to work and again every morning before I could go home. One bleak fall morning, I dragged
myself to the car to go home and found four tires in the back seat. New
tires! There was no note, no nothing, just those beautiful brand new
tires. Had angels taken up residence in Indiana? I wondered.

I made a deal with the local service station. In exchange for his mounting the new tires, I would clean up his office. I remember it took me a lot longer to scrub his floor than it did for him to do the tires. I was now working six nights instead of five and it still wasn't enough. Christmas was coming and I knew there would be no money for toys for the kids. I found a can of red paint and started repairing and painting some old toys. Then hid them in the basement
so there would be something for Santa to deliver on Christmas morning.
clothes were a worry too. I was sewing patches on top of patches on
the boys pants and soon they would be too far gone to repair.

On Christmas Eve the usual customers were drinking coffee in the Big Wheel. These were the truckers, Les, Frank, and Jim, and a state trooper named Joe. A few musicians were hanging around after a gig at the Legion and were dropping nickels in the pinball machine. The regulars all just sat around and talked through the wee hours of the morning and then left to get home
before the sun came up. When it was time for me to go home at seven o'clock on Christmas morning I hurried to the car. I was hoping the kids wouldn't wake up before I managed to get home and get the presents from the basement and place them under the tree. (We had cut down a small cedar tree by the side of the road down by the dump.)

It was still dark and I couldn't see much, but there appeared to be some dark shadows in the car-or was that just a trick of the night? Something certainly looked different, but it was hard to tell what. When I reached the car I peered warily into one of the side windows. Then my jaw dropped in amazement. My old battered Chevy was filled full to the top with boxes of all shapes and sizes.

I quickly opened the driver's side door, crumbled inside and kneeled in the front facing the back seat. Reaching back, I pulled off the lid of the top box. Inside was whole case of little blue jeans, sizes 2-10! I looked inside another box: It was full of shirts to go with the jeans. Then I peeked inside some of the other boxes. There was candy and nuts and bananas and bags of groceries. There was an enormous ham for baking, and canned vegetables and potatoes. There was pudding and Jell-O and cookies, pie filling and flour. There was hole bag of laundry supplies and cleaning items.And there were five toy trucks and one beautiful little doll..

As I drove back through empty streets as the sun slowly rose on the most amazing Christmas Day of my life, I was sobbing with gratitude. And I will never forget the joy on the faces of my little ones that precious morning.
....Yes, there were angels in Indiana that long-ago December..

And they all hung out at the Big Wheel truck stop....



THE POWER OF PRAYER. God still sits on

the throne, the devil is a

liar. You maybe going through a tough

time right now but God is

getting ready to bless you in a way

that only He can. Keep the faith.

 

Wow, Awesome story!
Yeah, G-d is good!

And yes, the devil's a liar.

But that was nice of you to share ! (disagree with santa tho..)

 

Such a sweet story. Too bad you don't find those kind of people these days.

 

What! bad things are happening? I didn't know we are living in an imperfect world. I thought this world was heaven where there is no pain or suffering...

Creation>FALL>Redemption

 

Your sarcasm doesn't come off quite as good, jesusdiedforu

 

thats a really beautiful story..... a bit disappointing that you gave God the credit for it though.... All those beautiful gestures were made by PEOPLE... kind, thoughtful generous people.... maybe they believed in god and maybe they didnt.... but bestowing such kindness on you was their decision...sad you never gave them the credit they deserved as humans..

 

all good things flow from GOd's throne.

He uses people all the time to spread His love around. He's the one who gives us every breath, therefore He is the one who makes it possible for people to do these random acts of kindness, whether they believe in God or not is irrelevant.

btw you make it sound like this was my experience....perhaps i should have started by saying this sotry was sent to me in an email.

 

Why would it to you or the majority of people in the Christian forum.

 

I was gonna say, you don't look like someone who's had seven kids and all that stuff.

Anyways, I was just wondering what it is that makes you think that god is responsible? Is it just blind faith or something else?

 

Is that dirrected towards me? Because I am not understanding what you are trying to say. Please explain

 

No, towards Seahorse. I was wondering, when you think of all this stuff, these hard times, stories of kind people doing for others what they were unable to do for themselves, what is it that makes you think it's god? When I hear that, I think "wow, what great people," and you (or at least Seahorse) seem to think more towards "wow, it's great that god did that." Why is it god instead of great people?

 

In the midst of the chaos, confusion, hopelessness, fear and selfishness, there is a glimmer of hope in all of us that holds on for dear life to what is good.
Just because i posted this story you assume I don't credit people for the good things they do? People can be wonderful! Just that i know where goodness comes from. It's not by good works that we are saved, though. It's only by God's grace. God answers prayers in alot of ways, but i have found that mostlt he answers prayer through people. He's awesome for that.

[size=+1]Luke 2:14[/size]​

​

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men.​

​

 

Preaching, eh?

Almost thou persuadest me...





Ok, not really.

 

I think you misunderstood.

Point was: They prayed, they got.

Whenever you pray, if it's in G-d's will, you'll get.

like the Bible says.

G-d uses people

 

OK, there we go.

 

Don't you think it's incredible that more didn't die in both tragedies, though? That's kind of how I look at it... It isn't that those who are dead aren't of value... I just think it's a miracle that the numbers weren't higher.

Esp. with the WTC... How many dead did they estimate, at first? About ten thousand...? Tragedies can't be avoided in life... To expect such a thing would definitely cause me to be miserable, because there's no feasable way to make perfection a reality... *shrugs*

 

i wasnt preaching, it was part of the email story. I copied and pasted it.

 

Can we not just appreciate the beauty of this story?

 

I would appreciate more if not for the delusional beliefs of the author.

 

lol..

I've gotten this email and about a million more like it in my inbox. Guess that's what I get for telling people I am not christian.

I'm telling ya, the WORST thing for an atheist to do is to tell the people you work with that you aren't christian, you'll inevitably get bombarded with whacky stories (most of which are nothing but cutesy-wootsey BS fables) from every church-goer in the building. Makes me wonder what those people would think if I started spamming them with stories from Satanism...it's so devious I just may do it!