Rich family in church, the
I'll never forget Easter 1946. I was 14, my little sister Ocy
12, and my older sister Darlene 16. We lived at home with our mother, and the
four of us knew what it was like to do without many things. My dad had died five
years before, leaving Mom with seven school kids to raise and no money. By 1946,
my older sisters were married, and my brothers had left home.
A month before Easter, the pastor of our church announced that
a special Easter offering would be taken to help a poor family. He asked
everyone to save and give sacrificially. When we got home, we talked about what
we could do. We decided to buy 50 pounds of potatoes and live on them for a
month. This would allow us to save $20 of our grocery money for the offering.
Then we thought that if we kept our electric lights turned out as much as
possible and didn't listen to the radio, we'd save money on that month's
electric bill. Darlene got as many house and yard cleaning jobs as possible, and
both of us baby sat for everyone we could. For 15 cents, we could buy enough
cotton loops to make three potholders to sell for $1. We made $20 on potholders.
That month was one of the best of our lives. Every day we
counted the money to see how much we had saved. At night we'd sit in the dark
and talk about how the poor family was going to enjoy having the money the
church would give them. We had about 80 people in our church, so we figured that
whatever amount of money we had to give, the offering would surely be 20 times
that much. After all, every Sunday the pastor had reminded everyone to save for
the sacrificial offering.
The day before Easter, Ocy and I walked to the grocery store
and got the manager to give us three crisp $20 bills and one $10 bill for all
our change. We ran all the way home to show Mom and Darlene. We had never had so
much money before. That night we were so excited we could hardly sleep. We
didn't care that we wouldn't have new clothes for Easter; we had $70 for the
sacrificial offering. We could hardly wait to get to church! On Sunday morning,
rain was pouring. We didn't own an umbrella, and the church was over a mile from
our home, but it didn't seem to matter how wet we got. Darlene had cardboard in
her shoes to fill the holes. The cardboard came apart, and her feet got wet, but
we sat in church proudly, despite how we looked. I heard some teenagers talking
about the Smith girls having on their old dresses. I looked at them in their new
clothes, and I felt so rich.
When the sacrificial offering was taken, we were sitting on
the second row from the front. Mom put in the $10 bill, and each of us girls put
in a $20. As we walked home after church, we sang all the way. At lunch, Mom had
a surprise for us. She had bought a dozen eggs, and we had boiled Easter eggs
with our fried potatoes!
Late that afternoon the minister drove up in his car. Mom went
to the door, talked with him for a moment, and then came back with an envelope
in her hand. We asked what it was, but she didn't say a word. She opened the
envelope and out fell a bunch of money. There were three crisp $20 bills, one
$10 bill, and seventeen $1 bills. Mom put the money back in the envelope. We
didn't talk, but instead, just sat and stared at the floor. We had gone from
feeling like millionaires to feeling like poor white trash.
We kids had had such a happy life that we felt sorry for
anyone who didn't have our mom and dad for parents and a house full of brothers
and sisters and other kids visiting constantly. We thought it was fun to share
silverware and see whether we got the fork or the spoon that night. We had two
knives which we passed around to whoever needed them. I knew we didn't have a
lot of things that other people had, but I'd never thought we were poor. That
Easter Day I found out we were poor. The minister had brought us the money for
the poor family, so we must be poor.
I didn't like being poor. I looked at my dress and worn-out
shoes and felt so ashamed that I didn't want to go back to church. Everyone
there probably already knew we were poor! I thought about school. I was in the
ninth grade and at the top of my class of over 100 students. I wondered if the
kids at school knew we were poor. I decided I could quit school since I had
finished the eighth grade. That was all the law required at that time.
We sat in silence for a long time. Then it got dark, and we
went to bed. All that week, we girls went to school and came home, and no one
talked much. Finally on Saturday, Mom asked us what we wanted to do with the
money. What did poor people do with money? We didn't know. We'd never known we
were poor.
We didn't want to go to church on Sunday, but Mom said we had
to. Although it was a sunny day, we didn't talk on the way. Mom started to sing,
but no one joined in and she only sang one verse. At church we had a missionary
speaker. He talked about how churches in Africa made buildings out of sun-dried
bricks, but they need money to buy roofs. He said $100 would put a roof on a
church. The minister said, "Can't we all sacrifice to help these poor people?"
We looked at each other and smiled for the first time in a
week. Mom reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope. She passed it to
Darlene. Darlene gave it to me, and I handed it to Ocy. Ocy put it in the
offering plate. When the offering was counted, the minister announced that it
was a little over $100. The missionary was excited. He hadn't expected such a
large offering from our small church. He said, "You must have some rich people
in this church."
Suddenly it struck us! We had given $87 of that "little over
$100." We were the rich family in the church! Hadn't the missionary said so?
Deep down, I knew that we were actually a rich family.
Author unknown
