Object of Charity

Throughout my life I have been the blessed object of charity, well beyond my deserving or anyone’s imagination. It begins with the early memory of me as a five-year-old kid at our church/school picnic. My uncle gave me a quarter. That amount was huge, enough for five ice cream cones or a hamburger, a cone, a candy bar, a strawberry soda pop and then another cone.

When I was in high school preparing to teach in the church I received a most unusual gift. A bride from my home church had gone through the ritual of that time to pass around the bride’s shoe and the guests would put in coins as a special gift for her. She decided not to keep it but to send it to me to help with my tuition.

When I was in college I did not have the money even for a bus ticket from Concordia Chicago to Texas at Christmas time. So on December 23rd I was busy as a bar tender at a Christmas party at the Oak Park Club. When I got to my dorm after midnight there was a check from another uncle for $100.00, a full term’s tuition at that time!

My first assignment after college graduation was as principal of St. Paul’s Lutheran in Tracy California. At Christmas the parents of my students gave me the cash to spend Christmas with my fiancé teaching in Michigan. When we returned a year later as a new couple the pantry shower held for us caused our kitchen to overflow with goodies. This was followed by chicken for the fryer, tomatoes to can and an occasional six-pack to enjoy.

The gifts kept coming. One night at my next parish in Glendale, California we went to a dinner at the end of which a big television was rolled into the room. It was our first TV ever.

From there we went to Hong Kong where colleagues and parents of students even out of their poverty were most generous with gifts of many kinds, including, for example, two freshly laid eggs a grateful mother sent from her meager little operation in gratitude for the education her children were receiving. Just before we boarded a flight to the USA to take to a hospital my wife who was suffering from a cerebral aneurysm, my 12-year-old son came running into the house. “Dad, the woman at that little shack of a store at the end of our street heard that Mom was sick. Here, she sent an orange for Mom and a bottle of beer for you!”

When a long recuperation period for my wife was demanded, the generosity we experienced more than matched our anxieties. The faculty wives of Concordia Chicago baby-sat a couple of times a week. Mabel Warnke who had visited us in Hong Kong provided a refrigerator and meals twice a week. When the editor of the church’s periodical realized I did not have an overcoat he literally took his off his back and placed it on my shoulders.

It goes on to great lengths which overwhelms me (and might bore the reader): “The green fees are on me”; Gift cards like “dinner for two at the steak house”; “I’ll host a meal at Ghaddi’s in the Peninsula”; “Just take those hearing aids. I have been looking for someone who could use them”; Next month Jane and I take off for 3 weeks in China, all First Class and all paid for by friends, old and new!

Probably most amazing of all is that when I get all these undeserved gifts the donors have never made me feel like “an object of charity”. I have never felt like an object, but always like a person who reflects in gratitude, wonder and praise to the Giver and the givers of all these good and perfect gifts.