I Helped a Family I’ve Never Met for Christmas This Year
And it feels better than any gift I’ll receive
I have a confession to share — I’ve had a really difficult time getting into the Christmas spirit this year.
My family is and has been a fractured mess for quite some time.
One family member doesn’t speak to another who doesn’t speak to another, and on and on, it goes.
The years and years of destructive behavior and unhealthy family patterns have finally reared their ugly heads. You could say it’s like the Royal Rumble in the WWE, but at least the wrestlers show up for that.
Grudges, dissension, and ill feelings have replaced love, forgiveness, and acceptance, so it’s only natural to feel gloom when it seems like every other family figured out how to put their swords away and get along during the holidays.
When I was a kid, Christmas was magical. I had no idea at the time, but my parents were in debt over their eyeballs. They couldn’t afford the gifts they bought us without using credit cards, and frankly, buying them was a terrible financial decision.
Knowing that now makes that time even more special to me. They sure made a ton of mistakes as parents, but I’ll forever be grateful to them for going above and beyond for my brothers and me to have a special Christmas each year. Those memories are the few joyful memories of my childhood.
We would wake up before the sun rose in jubilant anticipation of what Santa brought us. Each of us had a pile of gifts waiting to be ransacked at speeds only rivaled by NASCAR drivers.
Full of impatience and sugar-high from our hot chocolate, we would wake up our parents to ensure we didn’t break the one rule of Christmas morning: no opening gifts until Mom and Dad were there to watch.
I give my parents all the credit in the world — they did Christmas right, so the current state of our family all of these years later makes it even harder to digest.
However, our family chaos was also the impetus and inspiration for my wife and me to help a struggling family experience the same joy I had on Christmas as a child.
Every kid should have gifts to open on Christmas morning, and we wanted to be a small part in helping make that a reality for one family this year.
In previous years, when we lived in Texas, we anonymously helped supply gifts for the Genesis Woman’s Shelter. I remember feeling happy to do that, but it felt very impersonal, and we were looking to make a tangible impact.
Considering the broken state of our family, we knew there was no better way to bring joy into this Christmas season than to help another family that really needed it.
We just needed to find the right one.
My search for the right family started with a prayer during my morning walk. I simply asked God to lead my wife and me to a family in need that we could help.
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. — Matthew 7:7
Hollywood couldn’t have written a better script for what happened next.
The next day, my wife sent me a text while she was at work.
She had no idea of the prayer I said the previous day.
I found a family to help for Christmas!!!!!!! I’ll tell you about them. It’s a girl that works for us. Her son, he’s a cop, and they are STRUGGLING. She was just venting to me about it, and I was like, “ok you have no idea what you just opened.”
When she got home from work that day, she told me the story of how everything had transpired to lead us to this family. She was sitting at her desk, playing on the internet, and landing in Quora's Awesome Moments section.
She came across a picture of a Kansas State Trooper kissing his daughter goodbye before he left for work. The story had to be expanded to read the entire piece, but even before she clicked “More,” she was apprehensive because she didn’t want to be redirected if the story had a sad ending.
It didn’t, and the story moved her enough to post her first comment on Quora, where she posted “Back the Blue.” — Something she never did, but for some reason, policemen were in her consciousness that day.
As the day moved on, she thought about how we had not found a Christmas family to donate to — and it was bumming her out.
She reached out to a co-worker who lived out of state in a non-affluent area, thinking she might be familiar with a family or her church would know of a family who could benefit from the assistance.
She called her and started telling her how much fun it was for us when we bought gifts for the Genesis Women’s Shelter a few years ago, and before she was able to explain why she had called, her co-worker interrupted her and said she didn’t have any money to donate. My wife tried to interject to tell her that she did not want her to donate anything, but she continued on:
My son is a policeman and only makes $18 dollars an hour. He had to tend to a crime scene last month where my daughter’s boyfriend of 6 years, soon-to-be son-in-law, was accidentally shot and killed by his friend. My son was very close with both of the men — the one who accidentally shot the other man and the man who died. This destroyed my son, who had to see all of this yet remain professional and detached.
That came on the heels of a wreck that killed two teens that my son also knew very well from youth ministry — the two young teens were killed in the automobile accident two days before his friend was shot — he was one of the officers who were called to the crash site. He is struggling from that — but not just that — he was injured on duty and not able to work his normal shifts, and he is supposed to get paid for being out with the injury but has not received anything. His stove went out, and we had to buy him a new one, and we are just hurting for money — he told his kids that Christmas was not going to be much this year.
My wife could hear her sobbing and feel her tears coming through the phone.
“Stop,” my wife said. “That is not why I called.”
My wife knew instantly this was the family for us when her co-worker finished speaking.
The events from the day aligned — from my wife posting for the first time on Quora in reference to the picture of a police officer to the conversation with her co-worker whose son is a police officer and ironically financially struggling with four young kids, all under the age of 10.
She explained to her that we were looking to sponsor a family this Christmas, and we wanted to help her son’s family. After explaining this, she told my wife about what they would want — $40–50 total. My wife laughed and said — “No, we’ll be spending a lot more than that.”
My wife has always been good at spending money. 🤣😂🤣
I’ve always heard that it is better to give than to receive. For most of my life, I was more focused on the receiving end than giving. It’s amazing how a simple prayer on my morning walk led us to a needy family this Christmas season. When my wife got home from work, I told her about the prayer I said the previous morning, and she started to cry.
When the dust settled, we were honored to provide this family with gifts for their four kids and cover their mortgage for December.
While my Christmas Day this year won’t be what I wished or hoped for from a family standpoint, I’ll be thinking about those kids tearing into their presents like my brothers and I did over thirty years ago.
I’m full of gratitude that we were able to help this family. To be able to help this family, especially a police officer who risks his life daily to protect his community, is better than any gift we’ll receive this year.
I just hope that thirty years from now, their family, unlike mine, will share the same amount of joy and love as it will this Christmas.
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