The wind blew hard through the walls and windows of the ramshackle hut. It appeared the little heater was going full blast, but it was hard to tell, the cold far too deep for an inside place. Especially a place where small children lived. The hut was owned by a person of resources in the community. He had a number of dilapidated structures that he rented to people, charging too much for too little. The northern prairie village we lived in was isolated, no grocery store, just two bars and a post office. It was not an easy place to be without a car and three small children needing food, clothing, shelter and care. They all looked gaunt, hungry, hollow-eyed and on the edge.
It was the little baby that tugged most deeply at my heart. Her bottom was so red and she was whimpering as if she did not have the strength to cry. The cupboards were bare. Everything the mother had was going to pay rent for a place that afforded almost no shelter. Her husband had worked in the fields in the summer, but that work dried up and he had left to look for work, finding a job in a place far away. She had no car, no money, and so they were stuck, a family divided by circumstance with no hope of being together.
We couldn’t fix the hut, make it more durable, more insulated, more heated. Even in the summer it was substandard housing, but in the winter it was simply dangerous. Dad did not take me with to talk to the landlord, but he did welcome my help gathering supplies from our home so that there would be food and other supplies for this family. But we had no diapers.
Suddenly, I thought of mom’s hand embroidered dish towels. They were soft and beautiful. Each week I ironed them, pulling them out wrinkled and fresh from the laundry. I was around 7 when mom gave me responsibility for ironing the hand-embroidered dish towels. It was work I loved, partly because it gave me my own corner in the cellar, partly because it gave me a sense of accomplishment to transform the wrinkled pile into smooth, neatly folded stacks of blessing. They would be perfect diapers I told my dad, pulling one out to show him. He touched the towel gently, “your mom worked really hard to make these,” as he put them in the box.
Soon the ramshackle hut was empty. In all the years I walked past on my way to school, I never saw anyone else living there. The mother and her children were given train tickets to the place where her husband found work that included a living wage and place for them to live.
It was not until much later when I was learning how to embroider that I understood what I had given away. Love in every stitch, colors of joy, blended with my mother’s impeccable eye for beauty. I asked her if she minded that I gave her beautiful things away to strangers. “Oh no,” she said, “it was an honor…as if you gave them to the baby Jesus…because every child born is God’s beloved.”
They knew the story by heart of the baby born long ago and a family with nowhere to lay their heads and prepare for the birth. They spent their lives making room for those without shelter, building stables safe and secure, teaching us what it looks like to live as if we are all in this together.
We live in one body called the earth. When one of us suffers we all suffer, when one of us rejoices we all rejoice. Acquainted with suffering, it was never what they passed on…they chose joy when it came to passing things on… making the world more beautiful and the earth more livable for all of us. Most of their work was invisible, but I see more and more of it with every breath I take.
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This week our contributor is Pastor Beth Benson of the First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ.
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