A week or two before Christmas 2016, a man in his mid-to-late thirties stopped by the office of the church where I was working at the time. He had several Walmart bags full of princess dolls, Disney coloring books, other toys for young girls. By some clerical error, a church in Granite City, IL (about thirty minutes away) had donated them to him even though he didn’t have daughters of the right age to enjoy them. He wanted to hand them over to our church’s own Christmas toy drive, which he had somehow heard about.
I thanked the man and we talked for a few minutes afterwards. Feeling the need, I imagine, to explain why he was the recipient of toy drive donations in the first place, he told me that he had been laid off eleven months earlier by the U.S. Steel plant in Granite City. The year had been very difficult, he said, “but God makes a way for you to get through it.” Then he smiled and left.