There’s an old, old story.
You know the one.
The one about
the prophet who goes to a faraway land,
hungry and tired.
And God tells him to look for a woman with sticks,
and ask her for something to eat.
The woman appears,
sticks and all,
but this woman, she is at the end of it.
Exhausted, empty, endurance run out.
There will soon be no more oil, no more flour, no more life . . .
and this stranger — this strange man — this prophet
shows up and asks for the last of what she has.
“Make it for me,” he says.
Make that last loaf for me.
“If you do, there will be enough.
Enough for you.
Enough for your son.
Enough for us all.”
And she does it.
She trusts this strange man’s words.
She bakes the bread,
she gives it away,
and from that point until the end of the drought
that has nearly killed her,
her jug is never empty, her canister is always full.
We have a story like this in our family,
and my husband has asked me to tell it.
I’m not sure I’m up to the task,
but I’ll put fingers to keyboard and see what comes up on the screen.
Dick with Joy, 2 days old, December 4th, 1969. His uncle’s funeral was just days later.
It was the year our 2nd daughter was born that it happened.
And she was born on his birthday,
this brother to my mother-in-law,
this uncle to my husband.
A roofer by trade,
a good and kind man by habit,
he and his wife had raised four children,
and then followed their hearts to the beach.
They bought a beautiful mobile home,
perched on a cliff near the sea,
moved their youngest son and her father
in with them, and began to enjoy the good life.
Except no one told them the gas lines lay on fill dirt.
No one told them the earth might settle wrong.
No one told them an explosion would take his life
and change an entire family system in less than a week’s time.
Five years later, insurance settled,
and the widow, our aunt,
walked into my husband’s investment office,
slapped the less-than-sufficient check
down on his desk and said,
“I’m trusting you to make sure this is enough, okay?”
My husband was relatively new to the investing business back then,
learning all the time,
getting good at picking companies well.
But this?
It felt overwhelming.
This was all she had,
all she would live on for the rest of her life . . .
and she had given it to his care.
And so he prayed over that check.
And he asked for wisdom and grace and courage.
And he began to make choices,
careful choices,
good choices,
consistent choices.
She would come back every year or so and say,
“You know, one of my kids (or my dad or my friend — she was
that kind of person) is needing some help. I want to take a little
more out than I usually do, okay?”
And my husband would sigh inside,
wondering how long he could keep building something
when she kept unbuilding it.
One of many bridal showers from that era,
many of them held in that aunt’s home in Pasadena before their move to the beach.
(Can you find me? The young girls on the left are now parents to grownup kids.
Heck, the babe-in-arms has a daughter heading off to college soon.
Yeah. . . time marches on.)
He kept a close eye on this account —
it was far from the biggest one he ever managed,
but it was special.
Turned out, it was more than that —
it was remarkable.
For nearly 25 years,
he kept investing that money.
For nearly 25 years,
she kept giving it away.
And when she died . . .
when she died,
the amount in that fund —
after all the living
and all the giving —
on that day, that barely-sufficient fund was 15% higher
than it was on the day they began.
I don’t have any idea how many loaves of bread
that widow was able to make from the
day Elijah gave her that promise.
All I know is this:
for the three and a half years of the deadly drought,
there was enough to save their lives.
I do not begin to understand percentages, either.
All I know is this:
Over those almost 25 years,
our aunt took out three times the original amount,
and when she died, it was all.still.there.
The jar stayed full;
the canister never emptied.
Thanks be to God.
Joining this with Jennifer and Emily
