The Best Christmas Gifts Ever...

Best Christmas gifts ever:

Rossmoyne steel and aluminum toy fire truck almost two feet long and intricately detailed.  I kept it for forty years. 

Benjamin .22 cal pellet rifle.  I wish I still had it. 

7-speed English-made touring bicycle – glad it’s gone. 

Working miniature steam engine. 

All the food.  All the anticipation. 

Then there was the graduation-present car that I never got when I was eighteen.  In 1964 I only wanted a ’57 Ford.  The kid down the block got a new GTO.  I understood.  We didn’t have the resources but it was still bitter. 

It never occurred to me that I could arrange my life for a higher income.  I wasn’t brought up that way.  My mind did not recognize or travel that path.  I had no hope because I didn’t know that hope could exist.  Poor folks have poor ways, they say. 

Now I’m a little better, and I really, really want to hold on to that insight when I see the lives of my poor friends. Can they be given hope, some kind of hope?  Isn’t that a kind of faith, a carrying of our minds beyond what we know? 

I’m adamant.  That’s what Jesus was about.