Hope

A FEW DECEMBERS BACK, JUST A FEW DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS. I was in my car, idling in a long line of vehicles that seemed to be waiting through light change after light change without moving an inch. I was just a ten minute walk from my house. There was snow on the ground and sitting there in my idling truck, it looked like I might be an hour driving home. Had there been a way to park, I’d have left my vehicle and hiked the rest of the way.

Like Holiday Seasons sometimes do to you, I was filled with a heaviness. All the Jingle Bell songs and twinkling lights just clashed with my feelings of sadness and aloneness. I was sitting behind the wheel indulging, wallowing in those feelings, when I looked over to my left and there was a little bent over old lady using a walker. She just pulled me right in and I almost forgot about the traffic, watching her move her walker a few inches and then take many tiny steps to catch up to it again. And then I noticed something that just about broke my heart open. She had piled boughs of soft spruce upon her walker. I then realized that she’d walked down a long hill in the snow to the tree lot at a gas station down the street. All to buy those boughs of spruce. I hoped somebody had just given them to her. I would have. No way could you sell that sweet soul branches of a tree that were hers already. She had come out in the cold, navigating the crusty, snowy sidewalk so that she could buy those fragrant branches and then go home to decorate for Jesus’ birthday. The way you feel reading this is how I felt. I was about to cry.

Just then I saw a whole other part of the story. So far ahead of her that I hadn’t even seen him before, was her old dog friend, his leash pulled taut as he pulled her walker toward that incline, as much of it as he could take on anyway. He looked about as old in dog years as she was in human ones. And she was surely in her nineties. This will sound made up, but I swear that it’s not. She had tied a pair of stuffed toy reindeer antlers onto her pooch and it was just almost too much. No wonder traffic was slowed to a stop. Probably every person in front of and behind me was looking over with tears in their eyes, humbled beyond belief that we had not been able to find joy in our hearts that season, yet that dear old woman was so filled with love and wonder that no snowfall or steep hill or long hike could stop her from taking her old pooch down to the tree lot so they could decorate their house with soft fresh branches of spruce.

That woman and her dog made my Christmas that year. I have told many friends about her. A few weeks ago I told a friend over coffee about her because I had started to write this story about her. He looked up and met my eyes and said, “I know exactly who that was. I remember her and her old dog. I haven’t seen them in a few years.” We just sat there quiet for a time. She had left at least two of us telling her story. That is a wondrous life lived, the one which causes people to feel their hearts swell, causing us to smile at her lovely bright memory glowing forever in our minds.

I wish blessings, happiness and peace for you and yours. Merry Christmas 💖

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