Plenty

Five pounds. That's all the coal we had to heat our little house in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Barely enough to get us through one night, let alone the entire Christmas holiday. The temperature had dropped and the weatherman said a big snowstorm was on the way. I wrung my hands and tried to stay calm. I didn't know how my four-year-old son, Shawn, and I would get through it.

"Read to me," Shawn said that night of December 23, 1978. He grabbed his children's Bible and opened to the story of the prophet Elijah visiting the poor widow. The widow is down to her last bit of oil and flour, fearful that she won't be able to feed herself and her son, let alone her visitor. "Fear not," Elijah says. He asks her to bake him a cake. "The jar of meal shall not be spent and the jug of oil shall not run dry," he reassures her.

Like the widow, I was trying to raise a son on my own and we never seemed to have enough. I pictured the nearly empty bag of coal.

Shawn pointed to the illustration in the book. "The widow didn't look, Mom," he said.

I saw what he meant. The picture showed her reaching for the oil and flour without checking to see how much was in the jar and the jug. She trusted in God's provision, I thought, and there was enough. That's what I needed to do. Trust.

That night before going to bed I deliberately turned my head away as I reached inside the dwindling bag of coal and pulled out three lumps for the fire. Then I crawled under the blankets, asking for God's warmth and protection.

The next morning there were snowdrifts three feet deep outside our door and the thermometer read three degrees below zero. But the house was warm and toasty. Once again I reached into the bag without looking and put three more lumps onto the fire. We stayed inside all day, baking cookies, making ornaments for the tree, singing carols. From time to time I would stoke the fire, always making sure never to look and see how much coal was left.

Christmas Day the sky was finally clear and the house was still toasty. Around noon a neighbor dropped by. "We saw so much smoke coming out of your chimney last night," he said, "you must have gone through a lot of coal." Then he gave me a most welcome Christmas gift, a big bag of coal—to add to the few lumps that I still somehow had.