Christmas Supplement

Church ladies teach poor children about God’s love

By Jim Welter (Special to The Criterion)

It was a rite of spring for our family. Each Memorial Day, all seven of us would walk from our farm to a little country cemetery called Eagle Creek to decorate the grave of our infant sister, Jeanette, who had died years before.

One year, when we visited the cemetery, the gate was locked. That was no obstacle for my tomboy sister, Fran, who would sometimes climb over the fence even when the gate was open!

There was a little white church beside the cemetery just across a gravel drive from Jeanette’s grave.

As a child, I was sure that it was the “church in the wildwood” mentioned in a song my mother sometimes sang.

“See that white church over there?” Fran said to me one day. “They’re the ones that bring us presents at Christmas.”

Mom raised seven of us on a farm just two miles from that church and cemetery. Mom was all alone. There was no electricity on the farm, no running water, no telephone or nearby neighbors.

But, during those years, we could always count on the ladies from the Eagle Creek Church remembering us at Christmas.

From our hiding place, we would hear the ladies tell Mom, “We just brought a few things for the children.”

And we knew that Santa would come that year!

How could those ladies have known that their “few things” were our Christmas celebration?

And how could we have known that, one day, both Mom and Fran would lie beside Jeanette in the country cemetery—just across the gravel drive—from that little white church?

Each Sunday evening, the good people at the Eagle Creek Church gather to give praise and sing some of the old gospel songs that my mother knew so well.

I was invited to their gathering one Sunday to share some reflections from my first book titled When Winter Comes.

What a blessing it was for me to stand before that group and say “thank you” for the kindness they showed to us all those years ago.

Thank you, ladies! Thank you for touching our lives. Thank you for lifting our spirits. Thank you for helping us to carry our burden. Thank you for being Emmanuel—God with us!

(Jim Welter is a member of St. Barnabas Parish in Indianapolis. His books are available at Catholic bookstores in the Indianapolis area and on the Internet at www.ascendingview.com.) †