Nothing to Give?
Nothing to Give?
When I was growing up on a farm in Maryland, Christmas began the day after Thanksgiving and ran nonstop through December 25. There were parties and plays, dances and dates, decorating, baking, and shopping.
Especially shopping.
My sister and I would traipse through stores by the hour searching for the perfect gift for everyone on our lists. One Christmas I looked for days before I found an Angora sweater for Jay—light peach, size 36, with embroidery at the neck. For Mother, the ideal gift may have been a special dress. For Dad, a horse bridle with silver trim. It was exhausting, but what fun to see their faces on Christmas Eve when we opened presents.
Then came the 1967 swimming accident that left me paralyzed. I spent Christmas that year in a Baltimore rehab center. What a contrast. There I was, a seventeen-year-old girl brimming with mental energy—longing to celebrate Christmas in the same frantic, event-filled way the Earecksons always celebrated. Yet I couldn’t even move from my bed without help.
One of the things that depressed me most that year was my inability to go out and shop for my friends and family. I felt I had nothing to give as Christmas drew nearer.
I cried with an inner rage, blaming God for my predicament. But a friend who visited daily with me in the hospital read a familiar verse out of the Bible: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son …”
Those words from John 3:16 hit me as never before.
God’s best gift to humankind, the one that proved forever just how much He cared for each of us, was a gift of Himself. His only Son. Likewise, I realized that my best gift to Him and those I loved was … me.
The next day when it came time for occupational therapy—an experience I had previously dreaded—I asked a therapist to bring me one of the plaster candy dishes like some of the other patients had been decorating. Next, I asked for a paintbrush and some red and green paint.
Gripping the brush awkwardly in my teeth, I began to daub at the oakleaf-shaped dish. Few brushmarks landed where I aimed them. I slopped green where I really wanted red. But it was the best I could do.
When the dishes were finished and glazed, I had them wrapped and gave them as presents to my family and friends. They weren’t store-bought gifts, or very pretty, but they were my best. Gifts of myself.
When life is reduced to its essence, those are the gifts that are treasured and remembered.